Dying, for Kim, was not a pleasant experience.

  First, all the old people around her had frozen. Well, to be truthful, the younger people had frozen too, but she was more aware of the wrinkles on the frozen “senior” faces.

  Her curly hair now stood straight. She blinked. That was her first blink since grabbing her uncle’s shoulder, and it had taken a few thousand microseconds to complete.

  Yes, time had slowed down. Which was bad—she got to feel every sharp tingling and tangling of her pain receptors. Her heart had stopped beating because of the electrical jolt. Here she was, surrounded by old people, about to die young.

  Thanks Uncle Gord, she wanted to say. It was sad that her last meal had been a McChicken.

  It surprised Kim how many thoughts she was having in such a short period. Did dead people still think?

  A bass thud echoed like one giant heartbeat. The look of shock on the singer’s face was frozen. Maybe he was picturing the insurance it would take to clean this all up.

  Her heart thudded once.

  And then everything faded to black. Her uncle was gone. The band and the roaring, ancient crowd were gone. The outdoor stadium, too. She no longer felt One Dimple’s hand.

  She was in the silent dark for a long enough time that she assumed this must be death. And then, a moment later, a magical, perfect chord played in the distance. She didn’t recognize it, but knew it was very close to A minor. It somehow was holding the universe together.

  Stars popped into existence. She stood on nothing, her hair continuing to stick straight up. The chord strummed again. Was she on the way to heaven? She hadn’t really thought too much about the afterlife, other than hoping her dad was somewhere in it, but this could very well be the end. She had enough time to form two words, “What the—“

  The stars vanished, and she fell.

  A part of her brain reminded her that heaven was supposed to be upwards. Which meant she was going…

  Kim’s feet hit a hard surface. Her legs collapsed, and she slammed her left shoulder into the ground. Her years of karate had taught her reflexively to launch upwards so she was on her feet again before taking a breath.

  She was standing in a star-in-a-circle symbol on the stone floor; the lines glowing brightly. At first, she thought it might be the Star of David, but remembered that star looked more like two triangles. This was something different and quite bright. Perhaps the paint was reflective. A stone table sat along one wall of the room, with torches flickering in the four corners. To her right was a large medieval-looking door composed of thick planks.

  Am I in a hospital? Kim wondered. She must have blacked out and been brought here on a stretcher. But why dump her on the floor? And who brought her? She crossed her arms because it was frigid in the room, which frighteningly reminded her of the one time she’d been inside a meat locker. The Blonde Meatlocker Ex-Boyfriend had thought it would be a fun place to make out. Kim didn’t feel romantic at all around frozen cow carcasses. And that’s how he became an ex-boyfriend.

  To get a bit more heat, she patted her thighs, which is when she discovered her pants were thicker! She glanced down to see bristly potato-sack like clothing. Breeches! She plucked the word out of an ancient fashion thesaurus. There were no pockets, which meant her phone was gone. The dread was existential. Even her hoodie was gone. She instead was wearing a thick tunic over a brown leather shirt with half sleeves. The leather looked as if it had been hardened.

  “Nooo!” Uncle Gord’s voice echoed. He seemed to yell from another room. “Kimmmm!” His voice was now somewhere in front of her, but he was not visible.”Watch out!”

  The warning made her stand up straighter. Uncle Gord began shimmering briefly in the air several feet away above another glowing star symbol, his hand reaching toward her. A thin shadow appeared behind him above the other star symbol: the guy with the mohawk. Then, before either of them could become fully solid, they vanished.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  Kim looked left, right, squinting in the torch-lit darkness. “Uncle Gord?” she said. “Uncle Gord!”

  “Who are you?” A male asked from behind Kim. “And why do you have numbers floating above your head? And what’s a Class One Warrior? And a diva—“

  Her karate instincts kicked in, and she spun and kicked the man in the head. It was in defence of her defence, a perfect roundhouse. Made even more powerful by a hit of adrenaline.

  The young man hadn’t even had time to lift his arm to block the blow. He collapsed to the floor with a shocked look. Then he stared up, blinking slowly. His face, which was growing a red mark on his cheek, was familiar. She lowered her leg and stared down. Did she know him? He wore dark clothes that were much more billowy than hers, including a pair of medieval pantaloons.

  He put a hand to his cheek. “What was that for?” he asked.

  “You surprised me,” she replied.

  “And so you kicked me in the head?”

  She decided not to argue either for or against her response. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Damon,” he answered. Damon continued to rub his cheek, then moved on to his jaw and finally shook his head as if he were checking for loose teeth. “So that’s what being kicked in the head feels like. Uh, is it okay if I stand up?”

  She took a step back and assumed a defensive stance. “Sure. Go ahead.”

  He used the table to pull himself to his feet, then held both hands up to show he was harmless.

  “Are you a paramedic or something?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m in second year arts.”

  “Oh. Me, too.” She was going to ask him what his major was, but this didn’t seem like the right time to have a normal conversation. “My name is Kim. What are you doing here? And why do you look so familiar?”

  “You were standing beside me at the concert.”

  She stared long and hard at him. The torchlight was dim, but his most noticeable facial feature was visible. “One Dimple!” she said aloud.

  “What?” He put a hand to his cheek.

  “Uh, nothing. You were the guy with the flannel shirt buttoned up to your neck.”

  “That’s me.” He pointed at his billowy outfit. He’d clearly changed out of the flannel. But he still had the metal studded band on his arm. “And I reached out and grabbed your hand. I’m sorry. There wasn’t time to ask permission. I did it because I thought you were in distress when your dad jumped at Lips.”

  “That was my uncle,” she explained. “My dad’s dead.” She hadn’t meant for that last sentence to pop out.

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” Damon replied. “My dad’s dead, too. I know that sounds weird, uh, like I’m making it up to find something in common with you, but he’s really dead. Anyway, that’s a long story involving socks.” He glanced above her head and then looked her in the eyes.”This place is weird. Anyway, when I reached out to you, I got a shock. A literal one. And I was suddenly here.”

  And at that moment, as if it were an afterthought, there was a buzzing behind Damon. Another star pattern on the floor glowed brightly. Above it shimmered a shape that took form, and a man fell to the floor.

  He popped right back up, as if he were accustomed to falling to the floor. Kim recognized his muscles; that is, he was clearly the guy who’d torn off his shirt at the concert. He now had on a black leather vest, with no shirt beneath it. His pants were red leather. The same Def Leppard bandana held his hair back.

  “Hey,” he said. “Did any of you get a shock and then go through space and time to arrive here? I’m Shayne, by the way.”

  “Hi Shayne,” both she and Damon said in unison. She didn’t say, ‘You owe me a Coke’. Instead, she tried to ignore the fact that a man had appeared in front of her. It had to be a magician’s trick. He could not have materialized out of nothing. This wasn’t Star Trek Wars, or whatever that show was called.

  “I got a shock, too.” She glanced at her hand, expecting to see black marks where the electricity had entered. There were no signs of it. Then she took another look around the room. There was still a stone table and four torches in holders attached to each wall and a massive medieval door. “Are we backstage? It’s the only thing that makes sense. We were knocked out, and they have a weird torch-lit backstage, and the Metal on Metal Mayhem organizers don’t want to call the doctors because they’ll get sued, and…” She looked down at her clothes and raised a fist. “Who changed me into this outfit?”

  Damon took a valiant step backwards. “I have no idea.”

  “It happened in that spacetime thing,” Shayne said.

  “You seem remarkably calm about this,” Kim replied. “These are all very odd things to happen.”

  “Everything is familiar to me.” He scratched his arm as he spoke. It was an impressively muscled arm. “I was part of a micro-dosing experiment a few years ago.” Shayne patted his chest and then his leather pants as if to see if they were real. “It was legal. I swear. From UBC. They said I was on the placebo, but nothing has been the same since: it’s all déjà vu, you know, like that Iron Maiden song. It feels like I’ve mentioned it before. Do you know it?”

  “It has a great hook,” Damon said.

  “Cool taste in music, dude,” Shayne replied. “Uh, you are both real, right?”

  “Yes,” Damon and Kim said at the same time again, which Kim found disconcerting.

  “If you weren’t real, you’d still say that,” Shayne said. “I wonder why I was sent to be with you kids. Maybe as your protector.”

  “Protector?” Kim said. “How about we find the authorities?”

  A deep female voice came from a few feet to Kim’s left. “The authorities, if you could reach them, would listen carefully to your story … and then they’ll not so carefully use a dull ax to cut off all three of your heads.”