The force of the car bomb is so great, it propels the steering column
right through my chest.  The steering wheel rips my jaw clean off.
The fire wall crushes my knees, shrapnel shreds my thighs and abdomen.
I assume there is a sound; it must be shaking the whole city.  But all
I'm feeling is a terrible pressure - I wouldn't even call it pain.
Pressure, first on my chest, then all over my body.  After what seems
like many minutes, but is probably less than a second, I lose
consciousness.

Consciousness slowly returns; I'm back in bed.

That was actually one of my quicker deaths.  Some of them are fairly
long and drawn out.  I remember a particularly unpleasent one during a
hot New Orleans night when I bled to death in an ally with a knife in
my neck.  That one had real, genuine pain.  The knife came in from the
side real hard.  It nicked my spinal cord, rendering me so much jello.
I fell on my face, breaking my nose and biting through my tongue.  The
jerk didn't even pull the knife out, which meant that I lasted four or
five hours before everything finally went black.

The most interesting death was finding myself on a 6th century battle
field with a sword in my gut.  I wish I had paid closer attention to
in history class; I have no idea where I was or who the combatants
were.  But watching a war being fought with no guns is quite a sight.
Only about a third of the people looked like soldiers, with ragged
uniforms and swords.  The rest looked like peasents fighting with
knives, broken glass, even sharpened sticks and bones.  There was no
sense of nobility in this fight.  Utter chaos reined.  I'm not even
sure anybody knew who was fighting for whom.  I certainly couldn't
tell during the 10 minutes I had to watch.  That was the only time I
ever wished for a longer death.

My strangest death was being an aborted fetus.

In all, I've died 86 times.  Only 263 to go.

You see, I'm the one that planted the 2099 World Fair bomb that killed
349 people in the Israel pavillion.  I was supposed to die with them,
but most of the people in the atrium survived.  And there were several
witnesses who saw me put the lunch box beside the central support
column.

Astral projection technology turns out to be ideal for transmitting
conscious minds into the bodies of people anywhere, at any time.  I'm
told by the Federal Corrections administrator that my lineup will take
about a month and a half to get through.  Then I'll be a free man.
Sort-of.  Since I told the police everything I knew about the P.L.A.
after the first three deaths, I'm sure to die a 350th time within days
of being released.

I feel myself rising up out of bed again and flying through a blur of
time and space.  Number 87 is coming up, and I'm not looking forward
to it.  The inside of a South African interrogation room slowly comes
into focus.