by Seth Patrick
Her eyes were closed. ‘Mom?’ He wondered where his stepfather was. The shattered web of the windshield blocked the view ahead. He had to get out of the car. The rear door on the passenger side failed to open. He eased himself along the seat to the other door. It opened easily. He stepped out, reeling from nausea as he stood. The car had come to rest in a muddy field, down a sheer thirty-foot drop after gouging through a line of saplings at the roadside. There were people at the top looking down, shouting to him and pointing. He looked along the field. It sloped up. Three men and a woman had run along the road and found a safe way down.
Stephen was stumbling over the uneven ground forty feet away, waving to them. Jonah moved around the car to his mother’s door. He wrenched it open, feeling ill at the sight of her. The side of her head was a mess. He knelt by her, taking her hand. It was warm.
‘Mom?’ He turned to the helpers coming. ‘Please!’ he yelled. ‘Please hurry.’ He was crying now. They were having difficulty, the mud sucking them down and slowing them.
Jonah laid his head on his mother’s lap and sobbed. ‘It’ll be OK. It’ll be OK. Help’s coming, Mom. Hold on. Hold on.’ He held her tightly. He couldn’t lose her. His voice shrank. He felt three years old. ‘Please, don’t leave me. Please, don’t leave me.’
An image flashed in his mind: his real father, switching on Christmas tree lights and smiling.
‘Please, don’t leave me…’ he said, his voice almost gone. There was a brief torrent of light and noise that he didn’t understand.
He sensed something. Three seconds later his mother spoke.
‘Jonah?’ The voice was odd: distant and vague and lost. He froze, stunned, still not looking at her. Part of him knew, even then. Eleanor Preston’s story had come to light six months before, a curio he had read with fascination, unaware of the significance. His mother’s hand in his, part of him grasped what this was. The rest was overwhelmed with the belief that his mother was alive. ‘Mom?’ He raised his head, his smile faltering. There was no life in her eyes. No expression on her face. Something was terribly wrong. Yet his need for her to live overrode all doubt. ‘Mom?’
He could hear the voices of the people approaching, coming to help.
His mother spoke again. ‘Please. Please, let me go.’
He stared at her.
‘Jonah. Please, let me go.’
Understanding rushed in, hitting him hard. ‘I don’t know how,’ he said.
The people reached the car. ‘Let me help,’ said a woman. ‘I’m a doctor. Let me…’ She stopped, staring.
‘Please, let me go,’ his mother said. Jonah heard a sound from behind him, a man swearing, the word filled with disbelief. The doctor turned her stare to Jonah, unable to speak. Jonah spoke instead, hiding from the truth of it.
‘She’s going to be OK,’ he said. ‘She’s…’
‘My God. What are you doing?’
Jonah turned his head. Stephen was leaning on another man, holding his head with one hand, watching with shocked anger. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ he said.
‘She’s going to be OK,’ said Jonah, through tears and a smile that was forced and breaking. Stephen stared with horror as the body of his wife spoke.
‘Please. Jonah. Let me go.’
His mother’s words broke Stephen’s inaction. He lunged, throwing Jonah back into the mud, Jonah’s hand letting go of his mother’s, the contact lost. He felt her leave, relieved by it and devastated even so. Stephen held his wife and sobbed. The others were all staring at Jonah, fear and confusion and horror in their eyes.
Jonah Miller looked up at the sky, trying to lose himself in the clouds. There was no sanctuary.
The only person he loved – and the only person who loved him – was dead. He was alone.
* * *
Jonah woke before dawn, with the sense of loss as raw as it had been twelve years before. He went to the bottom drawer in his bedroom cupboard and took out a small ring box he had found three months after her death, in a container of keepsakes in the basement that his mother had sometimes shown him and that Stephen Brinley had no interest in. Jonah had gone through the keepsakes, mourning his parents, when he had seen the ring box and taken it, not willing to risk its discovery by Stephen.
He opened it now and took out his mother’s original wedding ring, which she had only stopped wearing the day she told Jonah she was to marry again. He took out another item from the box. His father’s wedding ring. She had kept them together. There was one other thing the box contained, a note Jonah had held and read so often it was as fragile as smoke. A note to his father, in his mother’s hand. He didn’t take the note out now, too wary of damaging it.
I miss you, it read.
Jonah replaced the rings and closed the box.
15
Four days later Annabel Harker woke at eleven in the morning to a knock at the front door. She had slept on her own bed, still dressed. She cursed as she remembered: she’d put in a grocery order late in the night. The thought of venturing out to a store repelled her, and she needed the food. She had used her laptop for the first time since her arrival, her father’s Wi-Fi settings unchanged since her visit last year.
A week’s worth of microwave meals, milk and cereal. She took the bags inside with gruff thanks and closed the door.
Once she had unpacked it all, she made herself have a bowl of cornflakes. Standing at the kitchen work surface, she managed to splash milk out of the bowl as she poured. She grabbed a paper towel and wiped it up, her eye drawn to the clean line she’d made through the growing layer of dust. She stared at it, vacant and lost. She wiped again, extending the clean patch. Then something gave way inside her. She wiped every surface she could see, taking away the dust and feeling better for it.
Without a pause, she hunted down her father’s vacuum cleaner and moved her way around the house room by room, a mixture of agitation and elation growing as she went. There was an element of panic in what she was doing, and she knew it.
She reached her own bedroom and took the sheets off the bed, gathering the small heap of clothes she’d been wearing.
Her father’s room, then, her breathing fast, her desperation shooting up. She managed to remove the bedsheets before she fell to her knees, distraught and sobbing, days of suppressed emotion coming out at last.
When she gathered herself, she saw it.
Under her father’s mattress, it had dislodged as she’d pulled out the sheet. A notebook. The notebook her father had always kept to hand, under the bed to keep away the prying eyes of his wife and daughter, even when those prying eyes were long dead and far away.
Annabel grasped it and flipped through the pages. Notes for his new novel. She recognized the name of a private detective character he’d used in a previous book. She kept flipping. There must have been forty pages of notes, before the final few entries.
And they were different. Two pages, the first a jumble of abbreviations and scrawled phrases, question marks, arrowed lines and heavy underscores that made no sense to her, and in the middle of the scrawl, a date. Three weeks before her father had disappeared, written beside the initials T.Y. Next to that, circled, was the word UNITY.
The second page had another date, three days before the disappearance, and the words: T.Y. NO SHOW.
Her father had mentioned to her that he’d been looking into something nonfiction. Here it was.
She’d assumed he’d meant something simple, innocuous. The dates being so close to his disappearance could change everything. Thoughts intruded in her mind, of how this could lead to a benign reason for his absence, but she couldn’t allow herself to think like that. False hope would only torment her.
No. She would unravel the scrawled text, and if it was relevant she would contact the police.
The capitalized words and abbreviations were the least illegible, and she listed them: TY, UNITY, BL, AB, BPV, AL.
She went to her laptop. BPV was the first to succumb, the name of a dr
ug used in revival. A line connected it to TY, and beside the line was the number fifteen. BL seemed likely to be ‘Baseline’. She found no clear match for TY or UNITY.
AB seemed to suggest Andreas Biotech, the biggest sponsor of the Baseline project. MA could have been Michael Andreas, the company founder; a thick arrow ran from it to BPV.
She read up on Michael Andreas. His face was familiar, and his profile had been high when Baseline had first formed, his company contributing significant money and expertise. Some of the coverage from the time was vaguely suspicious of the man, still under forty, crazily young to have amassed so much wealth. Five years before Baseline, a very public declaration of his personal aims had prompted ridicule: Andreas had stated that death would be eradicated within a century.
He was known to have invested in cryogenics, buying out a whole-body cryogenic storage facility in Nevada, rich clients hoping to avoid the inconvenient permanence of the grave.
When he got involved with Baseline, some commentators derided what they saw as an obsession with death, but as she read through various articles Annabel wondered why they would be surprised: the biggest contribution to the investigation into revival had come from a man fascinated by mortality. It was a fascination some articles traced back to the death of his first love, nine years before revival came to light. How they portrayed the loss depended on the tone of the article, ranging from heartbreaking romance to unhealthy fixation.
Baseline would have suffered without his involvement. Revival was faced with public, political and corporate unease; companies didn’t want to be too closely associated with it, and the same went for international funding. Even the United States government was careful to distance itself once the initial rush of public fascination subsided.
Andreas had done the opposite, drawing plaudits at first from the press, but in time cynicism won out. Why was he investing so much of his own money? What was his angle? They attacked him for his morbid obsession, they accused him of profiteering. When Baseline had finally closed down, many wondered if Andreas had had enough. He had withdrawn from the public eye by then, averse to being in the spotlight, behaviour the press interpreted as pique.
Annabel looked at her father’s notes. Andreas had been key in developing the drug BPV, which apparently inhibited post-traumatic stress in revivers. Why her father should highlight that link, Annabel had no idea.
She kept the abbreviation AL to the end, thinking she knew what it was and wanting to put it off. The only relevant hit was ‘Afterlifers’, as she’d expected. In the notebook, there were words dotted around AL that she couldn’t make out, but she finally deciphered one arrowed connection to TY. Abscom if know, it read. Another Web search took her to an old article about Afterlifer extremism.
‘Abscom’ had been how some of the most extreme groups within the Afterlifers referred to themselves. Absolute commitment. The word had also been used as a verb, a euphemism for doing what needed to be done, without question. It was a threat to those showing weakness or passing information to the authorities. Anyone who wavered was open to beatings, or worse.
TY must be a person, she reasoned. Someone her father had met and arranged to meet again, who then hadn’t appeared; someone with enough old Afterlifer connections to be under threat for speaking to a journalist.
Someone the police could identify.
‘What the hell were you getting into, Dad?’ Annabel said.
She picked up the phone and called Detective Harrington. She explained what she’d found, barely pausing for breath, not noticing the total silence at the other end until she had finished.
‘Miss Harker,’ said the detective in a slow, purposeful way that Annabel suddenly found terrifying. ‘Annabel. The case isn’t with us any more. There have been developments, but…’
‘Tell me,’ said Annabel. She could sense the unease on the other end of the phone.
‘Annabel, give me a few seconds.’ The line went silent, and she could almost see him scrabbling for information from those around him. Thirty seconds went by. She gripped the handset tighter. Then the line clicked and Harrington was back, cautious and awkward. ‘Annabel. I understand there’s someone coming to you now. They’ll arrive within…’
‘Tell me. Please.’
A long pause as Harrington made his choice.
‘They found a body four hours ago,’ the detective told her. ‘They think it’s your father.’
16
Detective Ray Johnson was cold. He was standing in the pathology room in the Richmond FRS building, watching someone hunt for maggots.
Daniel Harker’s body had been found in a rented house in Warrenton, Virginia. The rent had been paid two months in advance. The owner had been phoning for days to arrange access to take down an old tree at the back of the property. Unable to raise the tenants, he had gone there in person to find an abandoned house and a smell coming from the cellar.
The wallet in Harker’s back pocket had provided an initial ID. With a big story looming, the choice of who would lead the investigation rose higher than normal procedure required: the city, the district, the state. A badly managed investigation would be a conspicuous failure, and nobody wanted to be accused of overseeing a shambles in their territory.
The Woods case had been a media favourite for a few days, and Crenner’s name was pushed hard by those who wanted to cash in on the good will.
That morning, Johnson had followed Crenner and the pathologist at the scene, Peter Rierson, into the stench and gloom of the cellar, wearing a white respiration mask at Rierson’s advice. It was empty, save for the police photographer and the corpse. A single bare light hung from the roof.
In the middle of the concrete floor was a chair, fallen on its side. And in that chair, a figure. Hands tied at the rear. The skin purple and blackened, the appalling smell brought into extreme focus. Johnson noticed movement. There was a maggot on the corpse’s cheek.
‘Christ,’ he said, trying not to retch.
Rierson nodded. ‘I’ve already spent ten minutes gathering the little bastards. I’ve probably only got half of them. I like my corpses to stay still.’ He crouched down and pulled a plastic container and tweezers from his pockets, gathering larvae one by one.
‘Shit,’ said Crenner. ‘I can’t even tell if it’s him.’
Staring at the swollen and distorted face of the hunched shape in the chair, Johnson knew what he meant.
‘How long’s he been dead?’ asked Crenner.
‘We’ll need a better idea how warm it gets down here by afternoon,’ Rierson said. ‘We’d expect a place like this to stay quite cool, but with so many warm nights and hot days recently it plays havoc with the guesswork. These maggots have been feeding for a few days now, probably hatched within two to four days of laying, species and temperature depending. Relatively few larvae, perhaps a single insect in the cellar with him when he died or one got lucky getting inside later. Must be well sealed or we’d be overrun by now. That’d give us maybe five days as a minimum, but by the look of the body I’d say longer. It might not be a species that lays on fresh cadavers. Some wait until they get a little more mushy, and then lay on pre-existing wounds. They’re mostly in this area of the neck, so maybe they were laid around an injury. Deep scratches would have been enough of an invite. We’ll have a better idea later when an entomologist’s had a look.’
‘Five days minimum, what’s your maximum?’
‘Hell, look at the state of him. Could be ten days, even two weeks. He’s pretty ripe. I assume you’ve no intention of trying a revival?’ Rierson’s expression showed he didn’t expect there to be a chance of it.
‘Pathology liaison from FRS North East should be here soon,’ said Crenner. ‘We’ll see what they say.’
What they said wasn’t encouraging. Onsite was impractical. With the right facilities they gave a 5 per cent chance, even for the best revivers in the country. While it was North East’s jurisdiction, all of their highest-ranking staff were on tails.
Crenner would have to beg elsewhere if he wanted it done that day, and he knew exactly what his first call would be.
The decision made, Harker’s body was removed, covered in polythene sheeting while still tied to the chair. It was transported to the Richmond FRS preparation room, where the corpse was finally untied, the clothing removed and dispatched for examination.
The blackening of the skin was worst around the head and throat, the rest of the corpse lighter, green veins tracking the paths of decay. There was a simple Celtic tattoo design at the top of the left arm. That sealed the identification – dental results and DNA would take days, but the tattoo was visible in a photograph Harker’s daughter had supplied. Crenner called it in, and set off to bring the news to Annabel Harker in person, unaware that the news had already reached her.
That left Ray Johnson, watching Peter Rierson continue his examination for an hour, before spotting a few maggots he had missed earlier.
‘How long do we think until we’re good to go?’ Johnson asked.
Rierson looked up. ‘Once I’m sure I’ve got the last of these guys it’ll take me another twenty minutes, say, to get the rest of the preliminary samples, help us get a better handle on cause of death.’
‘What’s the working hypothesis?’
‘Not pleasant. Severely dehydrated, probably hadn’t had food or water in days, but we need to get inside him for that. It looks like he was tied up and left.’
Johnson shook his head. ‘Fuck. How long would it have taken?’
‘Depending how cool that cellar stays, maybe three or four days before he lost consciousness, another day or two before death. He was securely tied. There were clear signs of him struggling to free himself.’
‘Jesus.’ His cell phone rang and he answered. It was Bob Crenner. Johnson listened for a moment, then told Crenner they’d be ready in another half hour. He hung up and wandered back to the corpse, watching it for a moment in silence before he spoke. ‘Harker’s daughter is on her way here. She wants to be present for the revival.’
