by Daryl Banner
The panic releases from his eyes.
The power of a name.
“John,” he says.
I gasp. He speaks. He speaks and he sounds the same. John’s voice. I’m trembling. Have I done it right?
“John,” I agree. “John. Hi. M-My name is Winter.”
“Winter,” he repeats, as if feeling the name on his tongue. “W … Winter.” He looks away, his gaze drifting to the left, then to the right. “Where am I?”
I want to hear him say my name a thousand times. “The Whispers. Harvesting Grounds. Or—sorry—the Haunted Waste. It has many names, no one can decide what to call it.” I reach for his hand. Touching it, his gaze snaps back to me, startled. “You’re safe. I’m going to take you to … to the, um …” What was it called? Oh, right. “The Refinery. You’ll meet some friendly faces there.”
“Refinery?” His voice is small, trapped, quivery. This helpless version of John … I’d never thought I’d see such fragility in my strong, brooding John. How strange that it took his dying to unlock it. “Th-That sounds horrible.”
“It’s … They … You’ll get fixed up a bit. Though, to be honest, you look really well as is.” I smile gently.
His left ear falls off.
“You said your name’s Winter?” he asks, oblivious to the body part he just lost. “Like … Like the season?”
“Yes.” I’m speaking tragically to the ear. “Though, hopefully not as cold.”
“And I’m John?” he mutters, as if to make sure … and the right side of his face slowly begins to sag. Oh no.
“The one and only.” Should I reach up and press his face back on? Should I ignore it and pretend not to notice?
“Okay,” he says, taking it all in. He peers down at his hands as if suddenly discovering them. “My hands … My hands aren’t working.” He shrugs, his arms hanging limp. He shrugs again, this time with a grunt. “They were just working a moment ago. Why aren’t my hands—?”
“It’s quite alright,” I assure him, stealthily swiping up his fallen ear and hoping he doesn’t notice. “That’s what the Refinery’s for. To get your body, uh … working.”
“Yes,” he seems to agree, though his face now appears twisted into a permanent grimace, what with half of it falling off. To avoid any further decay, I lift him hurriedly to his feet, only to discover that nearly all his clothing has fallen away. He’s completely naked except for a scrap of fabric hanging conveniently at his waist, which were once long ago a pair of pants. His lazy eyes staring out at the world, confused, the ghost-grey one and the brown, he doesn’t seem to notice.
“One foot in front of the other,” I encourage him.
Still staring curiously at the sky, he only shuffles, his legs not moving properly. Not wasting a second’s time, I put his arm over my shoulder and help him across the Haunted Waste. His right foot seems to work, but his left just drags along. It’s a good thing we Undead don’t regard weight the way Humans do; John basically weighs nothing to me. Either that, or we’re incredibly strong, despite how ridiculously brittle we can be at times. I still haven’t quite figured out all the mysteries of the obviously conflicting and paradoxical physics of our kind and, quite frankly, I plan never to.
“The sky is completely grey,” he complains, his voice lilting worriedly. “Is it about to rain?”
“No, no,” I assure him. “To us, the sky is always … Well, our kind can’t really see the—”
He loses his grip on my shoulder and tumbles to the ground with a sickly grunt. After a moment of hands and legs and awkward mumbles, I end up taking John’s body in my arms like he’s my damsel in distress, and when I’ve lifted him off the earth, I’m struck suddenly by the dark, heavy memory of carrying him halfway across the world. Of course, when I’d carried him then, he was dead. The John in my arms is not dead, but not quite alive either. Something in between, I guess. Just like me.
There is something about carrying him in my arms that roots me immediately. I feel a surge of pleasure, even despite the morbid circumstance. With John pressed into my body again, in my arms, I’m swelling inside with a love I’ve been waiting for so long to feel again. This man in my arms, I’ve crossed a world for. This man in my arms, he’s the only man I ever want to love, dead or alive.
John stares at me, legs dangling, arms dangling. He lifts one blunt brow. “You’re strong,” he observes. I can almost hear humor in his voice. Humor.
I smile lamely. “You will be, too.”
The Haunted Waste whispers cruel things at our backs as we depart. The wind hangs on my limbs, dancing around my legs, but I hold John firmly in my arms and carry him toward the Dead Wood, a wall of barren, dying trees that surround my hometown of—
I stop at the mouth of the woods. My eyes grow and my jaw might literally fall off. What once was a spread of dying trees is now a webbed, overgrown thicket of green. I literally can’t believe the sight my eyes are lending me. Even the soil at the foot of the Haunted Waste where the trees abruptly end bears brave, healthy sprouts of grass.
Trapped here by my own astonishment, I’m forced to wonder once again a most pressing question: how the hell long was I waiting for John to Rise from the earth??
“Something wrong?” he asks.
“No.” I continue my stroll into the woods, undaunted.
Just before entering, my foot kicks into something. With a glance downward, I see a giant, detached spider leg. Promptly paying no mind to said dead appendage, I step over the vile thing and carry on. The illusory shadows of trees gently brush over us, the subtle streaks of silver light tickling our hair, and I enjoy my embrace of John’s body. I peer through the web of trees, wondering if a sun has dared to show its face to me after all this time of being dead. But alas, the sky is still a permanent turmoil of greyness, and the shadows and the light I think I see are just another of this world’s ample illusions.
Like life, like death.
As I cross through the forest—and being thankful as ever that the way to Trenton is a simple straight-shot down the path, as these woods have become otherwise entirely unrecognizable—I realize that my innocent footfalls are not killing the grass as they used to. Anything natural—like water or, say, tulips—is usually repelled or killed utterly by the presence of an Undead. Even touching a piece of fruit would cause it to rot instantly.
Perhaps Earth has, at long last, decided to embrace the Risen Dead. The mere thought lifts my spirits at once.
Smiling, I dare a glance at John. He’s looking around curiously as if he were just a baby taking in the sights of the world for the first time. I know it’s him. It’s the man I love. But I also see the First Life vanished from his eyes, and I have to wonder, is John really in there … or has he gone away forever?
“What’s that?” he asks curiously.
I look ahead. What I see before me does not inspire a jolt of happiness. The gates of Trenton are opened and bent inward as if bashed by some giant’s fist, hanging desperately off their hinges. As I slowly pass through the gates, I find the streets littered with paper, with broken glass, with filth. Tiny sprouts and weeds poke through the shattered cement and stone roads. Thick vines crawl up the faces of buildings like great green serpents, and the broken windows of nearby storefronts give the buildings an eerie disposition, as if they each have eyes, and they are all dead … dead eyes staring me cold in the face.
I resist a sudden, stupid urge to call out for someone. Something tells me there isn’t a soul here at all and hasn’t been for quite some time. My only tiny comfort is how amazing it feels to hold the love of my unlife in my arms.
“Is this your hometown?” he asks.
“Used to be.” I don’t know anything anymore. I don’t know a single damn thing.
“Which one’s your house?”
“None of them.” It’s nearly impossible to step another foot into this nightmare. My hometown, Trenton, now a home only to the howls of winds. A home to nothing. Overgrown by nature, consumed
as though the green fingers of the planet are slowly pulling the town down into its earthy, sodden mouth. A ring of purple flowers grows on a fallen lamppost like crumbs on a chin.
I have to be sure there’s nothing left.
I force myself to make way down the main drag that leads to the Square where the pink building called the Refinery squats patiently. Nothing that makes sound or breath finds us, save the wind. When I lay my eyes on the Refinery, I find it not so pink anymore. Boarded up, silent as a tomb, the building stares back at me with the same dead eyes as the others.
Pushing through its creaky door, a ghastly curtain of dust and death brushes past our faces. When I move into the room, I find the exam table missing, the table upon which I was laid when it was my first day and I required a fixing up. The cabinets are all open and empty. It’s like someone scavenged the place of all valuables. Even the enormous machine that Marigold would use to create fake flesh is gone. It’s like she … It’s like they all …
“Moved out,” I finish under stolen breath.
John leans his head against my arm, as if snuggling. I squint down at him, meeting his eyes, and he grins. With half his face sagging, the effect is not cute. “It’s dark in here,” he complains.
He’s pretending to be alive. Already, hardly minutes out of the grave and he’s already a Pretender. “Our eyes don’t regard light in the same way the Living’s do. You’ll never fear the darkness again,” I say, feeling prolific. Then I spot a cockroach scuttling toward my feet and lose all composure, screaming, just as it slips through a crack in the floorboards.
We’re out of the Refinery the next second, and I’m powerwalking down the main drag, determined to get out of Trenton as fast as possible. I officially have the creeps. My first roommate was a cockroach and I’d grown quite comfortable around them. I’m not certain what’s changed except for the fact that this ghost town version of Trenton is scaring me, cockroach or no. With a broken John hanging in my arms, I opt not to run; I can’t promise he won’t accidentally lose a foot or a finger or a face.
“Going already?” he asks.
“Most decidedly.” We reach the gates. We pass the gates. We’re pushing through the vibrant green forest now and nothing can touch us, not even the wind.
“Oh.” He peers past my arm, watching as Trenton vanishes in the distance behind us, I presume. “Where was everyone else?”
I don’t answer his question and just keep putting one foot in front of the other. I have no idea where I’m going. A strange, uncomfortable panic has settled into my chest and I’m struggling not to cry—which is stupid, because I literally have no tears and, as an Undead, am physically incapable. Still, regardless of knowing this, I feel very, very capable of tears. Very, very capable of panic.
Somewhere in me, deep beneath the rot and the immortality and the whatever, there still lives a Human girl who once was named Claire Westbrook … a girl who hated everything and everyone.
Where are all my friends? Why is Trenton completely abandoned? For some reason I can’t seem to think of where else everyone might be. I worry humorlessly that maybe I’ve lost all memory of my own Second Life. Maybe I need another Waking Dream to remember the horrors I experienced in Garden that day.
I’d give anything to forget it. I’d give just about anything to pretend it never happened and to go back to the way things were before …
“How old are you?”
The question catches me by surprise. I discover that my thoughts have brought my hurried pace down to a crawl. “I was nineteen when I died.”
“You’re dead too,” he says, as if to remind himself.
“Yes. We all are. Everyone is, almost.”
“Okay. And … And I was once alive, too?”
Oh, the questions. These are not the questions I was hoping to answer so soon. I wanted to be able to take him to the Refinery just as I was taken there, to be made back up into a person, to feel whole again. I didn’t realize it at the time, despite how snarky and self-loathing I was on my first day, but the process I was put through welcomed me into this world. Helena and her blunt words, her guidance, despite my rude way of thanking her. Marigold and her cheery work on mending my body and the icecap irises she gave me. It was all part of a … post-life grieving process, a necessary comfort. I took it all for granted.
Still, somehow, John seems positively unfazed by his lack of welcome. He’s perfectly happy, one might say. Downright chipper, even.
“Yes,” I finally answer. “You were … You were very, very alive.”
“How old am I?”
I remember that moment long ago in my house when he first told me how old he was. I was surprised and he was amused. “Twenty-two.”
“And I had a life, too?”
“Yes.” I’m really not ready to answer these questions. I need Helena to take over. I need Marigold to swoop in and perform her duties, but deep in my unbeating heart, I worry whether any of them still exist. I feel like the whole world’s gone on an all-expenses-paid vacation and we were left behind.
“Why don’t I remember any of it?”
“You will someday.” And with it, you’ll remember me. You’ll remember what we had … and you’ll wonder why I didn’t say anything when our eyes first met in this totally-lame-so-far Second Life of yours. “It’s called a Waking Dream and when you have it, you’ll remember everything.”
“That sounds scary.” He stares ahead without another word for a while, watching as we pass through the green and the shadow and the silence.
The world is entirely unrecognizable. When we break from the embrace of trees, a clearing of grass stretches to the horizon, punctuated here and there by gentle, round boulders pushing out of the earth, and a sturdy tree every now and then. We cross the green wavy expanse. I’m startled once or twice by a bug fluttering past my face. A bug. In the distance I swear I can hear the tweeting of birds, the cawing of crows …
“Where are we going?”
“Garden,” I say and realize at once, but I have no idea which direction it is. I feel like an eternity has passed. I could be heading in the exact opposite direction for all I know. We could be walking for days.
“The sky’s still grey,” he says again, like I didn’t hear him the first time. “Think we should find some cover before it rains?”
“The sky is always grey. You need to get used to grey.” The sea of grass whispers whenever the wind blows, all the blades singing songs to me in a language that I figure only lost spirits can understand. It’s like I never left the Harvesting Grounds; the whispers have followed me somehow.
“Your hair is very pretty.”
I try not to answer, focused on the nothingness ahead of us and worrying over where we’re headed or who will help us, then finally give in and say, “Thanks.”
“Do you have a special guy in your life?”
Is he serious? I suddenly find myself laughing. The rush of breath from the grass in the wind sounds like ocean waves that carry my laughter through the fields, flittering and diffused into all the nature around us. “Depends,” I finally answer. Maybe I’m losing my mind.
“Depends on what?”
“Depends on whether or not he remembers,” I say with a tinge of humor in my voice.
He smiles into my arm, his eyes locked on my face; I can tell even while not looking. “Might be because you’re the only person I’ve met, but … a man would have to be out of his mind to forget a woman like you.”
“Out of his mind,” I agree, flippantly brushing off the compliment he’s trying to pay me. “Or dead.”
“Or dead,” he agrees, then laughs, finding that way too funny. John, smiling and laughing and flirting. This is not the John I knew. This is someone else entirely, someone, perhaps, who was locked up deep within John’s tough exterior, within his years upon years of defense mechanisms and suspicion and caution that he’d built up during his harsh and unforgiving First Life. I wonder if, in a way, I’m meeting the real John for the
first time … a John whose inhibitions are gone, a John whose walls are beyond broken down; they’re nonexistent.
Time passes and we’re in the thick of a forest again—a forest bursting to life, full of leaves that tickle each other overhead and knobbed roots that break in and out of the forest floor, threatening to trip me as I walk. The patches of tall weeds and flowers that stand proudly in the path do not shy away as we approach. This world is so strange.
Then I hear giggles. For a second I think they’re John’s until I hear them once again and spin my head around, staring into the woods. Far away, a child’s giggles. Two children, I pick out. The sound of two children playing.
“Do you—?”
I hush John, then squint into the trees, though I see no sign of movement. The giggles are far away, evidence of them reaching me only in tiny bursts of sound that echo off the swaying, creaking branches. I wonder for a moment if I’m hallucinating. Then I hear them again.
I break off, hurrying in the direction of the laughter. Children laughing. Could Megan be one of them? Could the twins, Robin or Rake, be among the gigglers? I stop several times to listen, judging whether I’m headed in the right direction or not, then break once again into a sprint through the thick, rustling trees. The giggles seem too young to be any of them—they sound like a child’s giggle, a toddler’s giggle, a baby’s laughter, even. I can’t tell, desperate as I am to reach the sound, wherever it may be.
Then quite suddenly I happen on a tiny clearing. Two little girls are there, both in blue and white dresses with knotted messes of brown hair, and they stare up at me the instant I appear, their laughter ceased.
“Hello,” I try, gentle as ever.
“Hi!” exclaims John, the happiest person on Earth.
The girls take one look at him, then issue a collective glass-shattering scream. The shrill sound of their voices tears through the woods and shatters every ounce of peace this world knows before they bolt.
