The Beautiful Dead

by Banner, Daryl

  I stare unblinkingly at him. That’s it? That’s my briefing? Questions, he asks? Where the hell do I begin …

  “Actually, we’re behind schedule,” he decides. “You need to go now. The mist is already restless. Make your way through the north Trenton gate, take two left paths, you’ll be among the Harvesting Grounds in no time. Take care, mine-lady, and remember, Helena will be waiting for you at the Refinery upon your return. Good night!”

  And with that, the cheery woman is already at the door ready to usher me out.

  “Wait,” I say, panicked.

  He looks up at me, brows raised. “Yes?”

  I want to ask him about his conversation with the Judge, but I can’t. I want to ask him why the Deathless are hunting me … if … they’re hunting me. I want to ask what the Judge meant by calling me the missing progeny. What’s the missing progeny? Who am I? What am I?

  “Out with it,” he sings sweetly. “Your Raise awaits!”

  “Nothing,” I finally say, defeated. I can’t even confess a simple eavesdrop. “Nothing at all.”

  And so the cheery woman draws me back from where I’d come in, down a hall and out a door. That’s all I get for a briefing. That’s all the prep I’m allowed, courtesy of the self-admitted not-very-good Mayor.

  In a few more rushed minutes, the north Trenton gate yawns before me. I haven’t yet left the city on my own, but I guess now is as good a time as any. Bracing myself for whatever’s to come, I march through the tall iron gates and head down the only path before me. At each fork in the road, I choose left, just as I was told.

  The further I go, the less I want to.

  The haze of dead trees I’m cutting through becomes scarcer, each tree spaced further apart, until at last the dead woods give way to the murky fields that feel so unexplainably familiar to me, considering I’ve only been here once before. Crossing the vast, dirty lowland, I look around for the so-called mist or cue or whatever I’m supposed to be looking for. Listening for the cue in the mist, isn’t that what the Mayor told me?

  I spin in circles. Nothing for miles in all directions. Every way I look, it’s just an infinite plain of soil and murk. Just crossing this filthy terrain, I already want to take a shower. I regret my choice in shoes. At least I’m still wearing that comfortable outfit I’d planned on staying home in. It’d be really nice if Grim were here with me right now, telling me I’ll be okay.

  “Lost?”

  I jump, totally surprised by the sudden company I have. It’s an older lady, her hair in blue-grey curls. She peers at me over the rims of her glasses and says, “This is my sixth Raise. I do get very weary of these. Your first?”

  “Sixth??” I gawk. I hadn’t realized so many Undead were produced from this earthen grime.

  “Ooh, there’s my call,” she says, her ears perking up. “Good luck, darling.” And she’s off in the direction of wherever, pursuing some sound I can’t hear.

  “Hello? Wait!” I call out, feeling stupid and insecure, but she’s already gone, fog enveloping her.

  So I’m alone again. Ambling around without an idea what I’m supposed to be doing, without course, without any help, I keep staring into fogs and mists that seem to rise out of nowhere. The silver sky is so intense above me, it feels like with every passing minute my body grows double in weight, heavier, heavier.

  And then I hear a howl. Or perhaps it’s whispering, I can’t tell. If it is a voice that whispers, it’s in no language I understand, no words I can pick out.

  “Is that my cue?” I ask no one in particular.

  Following the sound of that unnecessarily-creepy whispering, my field of vision grows smaller and smaller. It’s like the mist is pushing in, swallowing me up. Whispering, howling, rolling winds like an advancing storm, I keep moving until the howling grows to a level far too thick for comfort.

  Then a hand bursts forth from the earth, grabbing my ankle.

  Naturally, I scream and fall backward. The hand clings to my ankle like a metal cuff, grip unrelenting. How and why the hell is anyone buried out here in the middle of nowhere? This isn’t a cemetery. Do the Raises just materialize in this field? … Did I?

  Questions rapidly fill my mind. I can’t answer them because there’s a hand on my ankle.

  Contrary to what any logical person would do, I don’t wrestle away from it, nor do I attempt to cry out or kick it off and run away screaming. Instead, I reach out and take the hand as though it were a friend’s.

  A friend hanging from a cliff.

  “I got you!” I cry out to my whoever. “Pull!”

  Of course they don’t. Taking hold of his or her hand, I decide quickly that just pulling won’t be enough to free the mystery person from the murk. Letting go for a moment, I start clawing away the dirt, shoveling it with my bare fingers like I were disentombing a treasure chest, unearthing a dog’s bone, digging, digging, until with that hand now bears an arm, and then a shoulder, and then a head. Helena was right. Like childbirth, but infinitely more regrettable.

  “I got you!” I cry out again, pulling with all my might the arm of my person. Slipping free now, she breaks from the earth and lands at my side, the whole length of her. Literally caked in soot, both slippery and dry as a bone, she just lays there with her eyes clenched shut and her mouth quivering like she’s cold, scared, or crying.

  The sight of her face, even ugly as it is painted in mud, inspires me to care for her instantly. This poor girl, just like I was, suddenly wrenched into this world she could never possibly know was waiting for her on the other side of death.

  “Hi there,” I murmur softly, still holding her hand.

  She doesn’t respond at all. Only her lower lip moves, still trembling, shivering, whatever it is.

  “Can you hear me? My name is Winter.”

  All around us, I hear that incessant whispering, ghostly, stormy, chaotic, psychotic. I realize belatedly that I’ve heard this whispering before at my own Raising.

  “My name is Winter,” I try again. “What’s yours?”

  It doesn’t dawn on me until after I ask it that, of course, she doesn’t know her name. She knows nothing. She’s probably trying to remember her life, even right now. This poor girl’s mind is desperately reaching for the familiar things she feels she knew only seconds ago, already fading away, already gone.

  “Don’t worry,” I decide to tell her, echoing the same words Helena used to comfort me. “You’re only dying.”

  Her parents she knows she has, but can’t picture their faces for some reason. Her brother or sister, their name or names escaping her. That last thing she clenched in her hand. That last meal she had with a friend. That one thing everyone would call her … what was it? … a name? … what was her name?

  “Undying,” I amend. “That’s what I meant. Undying.”

  She’s not screaming, not like I apparently was when I was Raised. No wonder Helena couldn’t stand me from the start … my incessant screaming. I remember how awful I was, how I could’ve broke my own voice right then, how I must’ve been such an awful experience. This girl before me, my own Raise, she isn’t so bad.

  “Your Old Life’s, uh … going away slowly,” I tell her, improvising. “No need to remember any of that stuff. You’re gonna be a new person with a new life now. You will, uh … and stuff …”

  I’m trying here. I’m trying really hard, but this girl is as good as dead. What else should I do? Is there anything in particular I’m supposed to be saying to this corpse?

  “We’re going to take you to the Refinery,” I go on, trying the most soothing voice I can manage. “There, we’re gonna clean you all up and, uh, criticize your skin and prod you and … Where’s your other arm?”

  The girl sits upright in an instant—nearly smacking me in the face, I might add. Her panicked eyes find mine at once, her little lips still quaking.

  “Hi,” I croak.

  And then the screaming starts—except she’s staring right at me, face-to-face, and the effec
t is very upsetting.

  “Please!” I try to shout, combatting her impressive, violent volume. “Stop yelling!—You’ll wake the dead!”

  Before I can even blink, the girl’s jumped to her feet, knocking me back. She’s flailing her arms—her whole left one, and whatever remains of her right—still screeching at the top of her voice.

  “Stop it!—Stop screaming!”

  The girl spins on her heel and bolts. I clamber to my feet, reach out with remarkable agility and manage to grab her by the ankle, just as she had done mine. The one-armed girl falls forward, shrieking murder, her left hand tearing at the earth, clawing her way to freedom as her right stub of an arm pummels the ground senselessly. I’m reminded for a moment of a fish thrown out of water, walloping and thrashing its way back home.

  But this poor girl, she has no home.

  “I won’t hurt you!” I cry out.

  Then she kicks me in the face, full-on, breaking not only my nose, but also free from my grip. She escapes again, this time with conviction.

  Into the mist, out of sight.

  “Stop!—Stop it!—Come back!”

  Blinded by the direct kick to the face, I plummet into the fog in pursuit of the screaming girl, desperate not to let her get away from me again. “Get back here!” I shout, muffled and nasally, holding my own nose so it doesn’t fall off or worse. “I won’t hurt you!” I keep calling. “I can help you!” But the screaming soon dies, the mist keeping her utterly hidden from me, too-perfectly veiled, too-impressively concealed among its vaporous curtains of grey-white secrets …

  I can neither see nor hear her any longer.

  “Where are you!?—Come back!” I holler, losing faith with every cry, stumbling over my own feet in my clumsy hunt for the girl, my earth person, my Raise.

  The screaming has been stolen away by the mists, along with the girl. The fog fades, revealing once again the barren plain that yawns in all directions, save the way back to Trenton by which I’m supposed to return—but not alone. Even the whispering winds have abandoned me, left me all by myself.

  “Hello!?” I bellow out.

  The girl is gone.

  C H A P T E R – S E V E N

  M I S T A K E

  “You what??” cries Helena.

  I am in deep doo-doo.

  “It was instant,” I say in my own defense. “I couldn’t keep ahold of her! She had all this fight, thrashing about, kicked me straight in the face and bolted!”

  “And you just … let her go??”

  “What was I supposed to do? All that fog in the way, it’s a miracle I’d even see her if she were only two feet ahead of me!—and I still need my nose fixed.”

  She pounds the empty Upkeep table with her bony fist—the table that was supposed to be hosting my Raise. Two other women are in the room with us, one of them the mouthless girl who fixed the hole in my chest, the other one Marigold, both familiar to me, both having mended me in dramatically different states.

  “You,” Helena growls, “will need to fix this. Who knows where she is now? Who knows what sort of awful state she’s in, tortured of mind as she is?—tortured of soul, tortured of body?”

  “Oh yeah,” I recall tardily. “She’s missing an arm too.”

  Helena and the two girls stare at me like I’m the world’s biggest moron. Maybe I am. Maybe there was something easy I could’ve done to trap the girl better, to keep her from running, to console her, anything.

  I know I messed up. I know I messed up badly, but admitting that to Helena, the rude woman who’s hated me for no reason at all since the moment she first pulled me out of the ground, is not something I have the humility to do right now. Or ever.

  “I have to report this to the Judge,” she decides in a chilling, quiet voice, shaking her head with utter outrage.

  “My nose,” I repeat, pointing at it, staring at the two Refinery girls imploringly. “We need to fix my nose.”

  “You need to find that girl!!” Helena screams. I step back, stunned by her snapped temper. “This cannot be allowed! You have committed a—a—a—”

  “Grave mistake?” I offer.

  I should’ve held my tongue. Helena swipes the first thing she can, a sharp tool off the workbench, and chucks it at my face. I’m deft enough to duck, then hop out of the way when she lobs a bottle of Flesh Molding at me too.

  “I,” she heaves, “regret,” she goes on, quaking all over, “the day I called you from the Grounds. Regret!!”

  If only I’d been given an ounce of forgiveness from her, I’d be apologizing now instead of visualizing twenty different ways I can behead Helena fast enough to make her shut up. Way one, with that tool she just chucked at my head. Two, with my pretty fingernails. Three …

  “Whatever the judgment you face,” she threatens me, pointing at me like Death’s finger, “you face it alone. I will not be blamed for this.”

  “Why would you be?” I ask honestly. “It was my fault. I let the girl slip away … She’s missing because of me. It was my mistake.”

  There, I said it.

  “Because I’m responsible for you,” she answers. “You are my Raise, my reflection, my problem. That’s why.”

  I sigh, collapsing into a stool-like thing. “I still don’t understand what this has to do with you.”

  “The Judge will assume,” she goes on, “since you allowed the girl to get away from you—without an apparent care in the world—that my own Raising of you was not an effective, educational, or otherwise rewarding experience for you at all. That I, in essence, failed you. Thank you very much.”

  “I’ll fix this,” I tell her plainly. “Whatever I have to do, I’ll find the girl. Leave it to me.”

  “I’ve left enough to you.”

  With that, Helena storms out of the Refinery, her heels clicking against every spot of wooden floor she crosses, stabbing every stair she descends. The room is shrouded in silence now, the first moment of concord since I arrived here to deliver my admittedly awful news.

  I turn to the girls with renewed hope. “My nose?”

  So an hour, maybe two hours later, I’m finally free of the squatty pink building and slumping my way back home. As much as I dislike Helena, a part of me realizes she’s completely right, and I feel awful about it. I failed not only the new girl, but Helena too. I’ve shown her to be a bad example that, in one way or another, I copied. I even used some of her lines on my own Raise, but nothing seemed to pacify her. Or maybe the mistake was mentioning the missing arm. I suppose that’d be enough to freak anyone out, new to this world or not.

  And now there’s a girl out there, confused, panicked, scared half to death, scared half to life—and it’s my fault.

  I suddenly have to sit down, collapsed into a bench in front of a closed hair salon. When I look up, I realize I’m not alone. On the other side of the street seated in a bench of his own is a bearded man with messy hair. He doesn’t seem to regard me at all, just staring off into the silver night. His totally lax demeanor, for a moment I envy. I take notice of the facility he’s seated in front of, realizing it’s the brothers’ gym I’ve been hearing about.

  “Are you the owner?” I ask, bothering to disturb the silence of this barren street.

  He doesn’t flinch, doesn’t respond, doesn’t even so much as bat an eyelash. I wonder if he’s dead, then realize we all are.

  Then it clicks. “You’re the brother,” I say. “You’re the doctor … the surgeon. Collin is your name?”

  “Was,” he agrees unflinchingly.

  I try humor. “I think I suffer from a severe case of hate existing in this fake dead town where I apparently can’t do anything right syndrome. Any treatment for that, doc?”

  He doesn’t respond, still staring off. Just being in his presence saddens me. This unwavering, perpetual sulk of his. A total disregard for this new mindless existence ever since his Waking Dream. All the life in him—the unlife—gone. Even without having mine, I think I can relate.

&nbs
p; “You’re not alone.” I put on a smile. “I haven’t even had my Waking yet, and I feel so little purpose in this place. Already, I’ve gone and messed everything up. I just had my first Raise and let her run away from me. I don’t know what to do.”

  Again, no response, not even a nod or a shrug. I lean forward and say, “My name’s Winter.”

  Nothing.

  “This conversation has been the loveliest I’ve had all week. Oh, what peace of mind one can bring without uttering a word at all. Thank you.”

  No response.

  “You know,” I go on, unable to help myself, “maybe you should consider employment at the Refinery. With your knowledge of anatomy, you might be able to supply them with a valuable perspective they don’t yet have. They’re all the fakery, the cosmetics, the art of a person. You have the science. You have the truth, Collin.”

  Again, nothing.

  I was almost sure that last bit would’ve inspired a smirk at the very least. Maybe a shrug. A sigh. Anything. But I get nothing.

  I tried. Figuring I’ve said enough—might as well have said nothing at all—I rise from the bench and continue my way home, leaving the surgeon Collin with his own thoughts, whatever they are. Really, I don’t blame him. If I weren’t so restless, I’d be sulking just the same.

  Back home now, I realize it’s the dead of night when I sing my little tune climbing the steps and no one’s there to let me in. John must not be paying attention. Slightly annoyed, I peer over my shoulder to ensure no one’s watching, then push at a weak spot in the window I trust no one knows about, swing it open, and let myself in the awkward way. Once inside, I lock up the window and move to the bedroom doorway where a big brawny Human sleeps curled up like a cat on my pillow.