Survival guide

Johnathan tried to follow Shana's game; however, she was pushing him to meet people too fast; he didn't like that. He had been supposedly dead since a few hours ago and didn't even have the time to digest it; instead, for some reason, he was forced into an accelerated public relations tour. Shana didn't seem to care about John's obvious discomfort and kept her tour going.

"Right now we only have twenty patients in the home; most of them are really old, thankfully." That was a weird comment, but John did think about it.

"As you just learned, you can pass through people and objects, but not walls, and you also cannot pass through doors, which means if you get into a room and it gets locked, you will be trapped. Don't worry; some times that is good."

"Why is being trapped good?" John asked.

There were a lot of insinuations in Shana's explanations.

"Because sometimes something horrible comes around and you have to know how to be safe; getting locked up means you are safe," answered Shana.

They kept walking until the end of the hallway. John was starting to be annoyed by all this scaremongering. He was about to give Shana a piece of his mind, but was lost for words when he saw into the room Shana guided him to. The room was occupied by an old man sitting on a sofa; his facial expression was absent, his sight lost into nothingness. He was a black man with a fairly intact hairline, but all white, matched by a white beard of a few weeks. By this old man's side stood a ghost girl. She was young when she died, maybe eighteen, not too tall, maybe one meter sixty-five. Since John saw the dead in black and white, her skin looked as white as milk, signaling that she was a white woman. Her eyes were as white as pearls, and she had pitch black, straight, long hair that went down her shoulder to waist length. Her straight, perfectly sized nose, her perfect eyebrows, and her full lips made her a beauty in her own category; even with John's ghost vision, she was by far the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

The girl looked at John with a disgusted face; she knew that look he was giving her, a mix of awe and lust. In her opinion, not even in death, men stopped being men. Her beauty was her curse. A curse so strong that it caused her death before time.

"She is Elizabeth, one of the oldest survivors in here; be respectful to her; she might be the reason you survive long enough to see a way out of this."

Judging by her expression, John wasn't in good grace with Elizabeth. Trying not to look into her beautiful face anymore, John forced himself to look at the old man, and then he realized that Elizabeth's index finger was touching the old man's hand.

"She is touching him?" John asked, surprised.

"Not really," answered Shana. "She is making some contact with him, but it is complicated. I will explain to you later, lets go."

Shana tried to move John away from Elizabeth's contemptuous gaze; they moved to the next room. There was an old woman in there; she was moving her hands like she was weaving something while talking to herself; the signs of dementia were obvious; her white hair had been cut short; she was wearing a white gown with a flowery design; sometimes her mumbling made her dentures fall out of place, and she had to accommodate them with her hand. By the side of the old lady was a man, probably in his late forties. He was sitting on the floor with his face between his legs while his right-hand index finger was touching the old lady.

"Hello Willy" Greeted Shana.

The man lifted his head up and looked at them. His face looked like he was about to cry from sadness and was suffering from constipation at the same time; he was skinny, like he died of hunger; his eyes were deep into his orbits; his nose was long and pointy; there was a really scarce mustache on his upper lip; and his hair was black and messy, and he was fully dressed in a black robe.

"Hi, Shana" Willy's voice sounded like what you would expect from his face, like the voice of a kid who was crying a few minutes ago.

"Willy, this is the new guy, Johnathan, and Johnathan, this is crying Willy, the oldest survivor here; by our calculations, he has been trapped here for forty years at least."

Willy lifted his left hand and waved at John, giving him a creepy sensation. If he weren't dead, he would probably have goosebumps.

"You keep talking about danger, survival and does and don'ts. Get to the point; I'm getting tired of this," John recriminated.

"Fair enough," agreed Shana. "You saw that I don't avoid passing through the living; it is not because I am rude; there is a reason for it. When one of us interacts in some way with the living, we seem to absorb something from them. It is just for a second, just for the moment that our skin perfectly aligns with theirs. Now, try to put your hand through the woman Willy is touching."

John tried, but he could not do it. The woman felt like the wall; there was no feeling of touch, but there was also no pressure or strength behind his pushing.

"I cant phase through her, but I can't touch her either," John said, confused.

"Professor Martin said you can't phase through because her energy has been claimed by Willy, you can't push or interact with nothing because you don't have enough mass; you don't have a physical body; he says that ghosts are like residual energy from the living that is so weak we can't influence the physical world. I don't know where he got all that, but at least he got some explanation." Shana looked at the walls.

"The funny thing is this only happens here; as far as we know, not everyone turns into a ghost, but people that do are usually bound to a place or something related to them in life. Ramon is a good example, he was a truck driver; died in his truck, and the truck got sold out shortly after his death. His soul was bound to his truck and he traveled with it for years across Europe."

"That's right," Ramon interrupted Shana. He had been close around since the beginning.

"I learned many things while traveling; there were other ghosts all around the world, not too many, but enough to find one now and then. Out of this place, with time, ghosts stop being bound to the world and vanish into nothingness, but here we don't. We keep existing until we mutate or get eaten by the Munchers."

"Munchers?" Asked John.

"When a ghost spends too much time here, it mutates into... some kind of ghostly monster; after a while, they start eating other ghosts and deform even further; we call them Munchers; unfortunately, you will see them sooner or later." Answered Shana.

"Then..." John looked at Willy.

"If you interact with the living, they keep you stable; the older the person, the better." Shana explained again.

"The professor said that it is because old people are closer to the dead than the living, so it is easier for us to interact with them and steal a little bit of that energy thing he talks about" Ramon added.

"Now try to touch Willy." John did as instructed, and his hand went through Willy.

"You see? Some of the same rules apply to the Munchers, they can't eat you if you are taking energy from a living person. That is one way to survive their attacks; the other way is to be locked in some room. Like us, they can't pass through the walls and doors. But be careful, if one of the workers opens the door during the attack, the munchers will get in and eat you."

Shana's words and explanations were making John more doubtful and confused; all of this seemed like the plot of a bad horror movie.

"So, let me get this straight: I'm dead, trapped in a nursing home full of ghosts that try to survive the attacks of other mutant ghosts by touching on the living, and I'm going to be trapped here forever."

"Pretty much, yes." Ramon confirmed.

John looked around a bit incredulous, looked at Shana and Ramon; they were there, waiting for him to react. Then he looked at the old woman; she was still waving her invisible thread and mumbling. Willy stopped paying attention to them and went back to having his head between his legs while sitting on the floor; however, he never stopped touching the old lady. After a few seconds of silence, John started walking.

"I want to be alone for a moment"

"One more thing." Shana stopped him.

"The Munchers come out at night. We don't know where they hide during the day, but they don't like light, natural or artificial. It doesn't kill them or hurt them for as long as we know; they just don't like it. One of them got trapped in a room once and stood there for almost two days, making horribly loud noises. When a nurse opened the door, that thing just crawled out and disappeared into that wall." Shana pointed at the wall at the end of the hallway.

"If the lights start to flick and you hear weird noises from the walls after ten o'clock, that might be bad. If the Munchers come and you still don't know how to attach yourself to the living, try to get locked in somewhere. Your best choice is to go to Elizabeth's room and pray she lets you in. She can make the people she is attached to move and close the doors."

Johnathan went away. He walked by the hallway and looked around. There were a few ghosts and old people moving around. Most of the ghosts looked bored and just stood there; they didn't even paid much attention to John. The living kept on with their lives, oblivious to everything happening around them. John stood at the entrance of the Green Pines nursing home, looking out. The sun was hiding on the horizon, and the darkness of the night was starting to reduce the outside visibility. John tried once more to open the door; he couldn't touch the handle. Sooner or later, he had to accept that he was dead. This was his new reality.