AFTERLIFE

by Marcus Sakey

  Told herself not to do it. Then crawled up onto it and collapsed with her face in the pillows on his side and buried her nose in them and breathed deep, and a fit of trembling swept her, sudden as an earthquake, her hands shaking and the tears so close, but god if she started crying—

  The bedside clock changed to 1:28 a.m.

  Claire leapt up and ran down the hall. Snatched her coat and purse and cell phone, then hurried out and let the door slam behind her.

  FOURTEEN

  “Okay, listen,” Kyle said. “I know how you’re feeling. I went through it too, we all did. I know you’ve got a million questions. But we want to be home before dark. Safer that way. So.” The man put a hand on his shoulder. “Are you okay?”

  “Am I okay?”

  “Are you okay enough? We got miles to cover.”

  Brody took a deep breath. “Yeah.”

  “Good man.” Kyle turned away, cupped his hands over his mouth and shouted. “Everybody, this is Will Brody. He’s coming with us. We’ll do the get-to-know-you stuff back home, okay? Ready up, let’s keep it fluid.”

  They cut east on Cermak to State, moving as a loose group past bland buildings and uncertain trees. The cars in the street were still. The shop windows were dark. The only things moving were the clouds and the thirty of them.

  There were curious glances thrown his direction, but the bulk of everyone’s attention was directed outward. They had an air of vigilant readiness to them, like soldiers moving through potentially hostile terrain. Brody was surprised how very glad he was to see other people. He drank in the details of them, the way a Hispanic dude in a Carhartt jacket favored his left leg as though it had been injured long ago, the quick smile of an older woman whose long hair was the color of cigarette smoke, the hushed joking of a pudgy boy with a snapped pool cue and an ebony girl carrying a length of rebar. It was comforting to be near them.

  How quickly he’d come to fear wandering eternity alone.

  Kyle had been right; Brody had known all along. He’d rebelled against it—he still rebelled against it—but some essential piece of his being knew. A metaphysical sensor light had blinked on. He was dead.

  This was the afterlife.

  He had so many questions they all seemed to collide, tangling in an intractable jumble of how’s and why’s and what next’s. He opened his mouth, not sure what was going to come out. “So,” he began. “This isn’t Heaven.”

  “I sure hope not,” Kyle said.

  “Is it Purgatory?”

  “Shit no. It’s Chicago.”

  “Is this a redemption thing, we’re here to atone for our sins?”

  “I don’t think so, but it might be.” Kyle sighed. “Look, I’m not trying to be unhelpful, I’m really not. But we all got here the same way you did. We died, we woke up. If God is involved, he hasn’t introduced himself. The echo didn’t come with an instruction manual.”

  “The echo?”

  “What we call it. Idea being, life is the sound, this is an echo. It’s the world, but faded. So right now we’re walking up State Street, the real State Street. That’s why there are cars stopped at the lights, and keys in the cars. Everything that’s in the real world is here except the people. Look, see that trash can?” Kyle pointed to a bin overflowing with newspapers and takeout containers and coffee cups. “It’s full because the one in the world is full. If you swung back here tomorrow morning, it’d be empty, because Streets and San will have come by.”

  “So why can’t we see people?”

  “Because they’re there, and we’re here. They’re creating the sound, we’re living in the echo. There are drivers in the cars and clerks in the stores and ladies walking dogs. Living people, doing their thing. Totally unaware that at the same moment, us dead folks are walking through an echo of their world.”

  Brody tried to picture it, an overlap of the real and the invisible. If Kyle was right, it meant that throughout his life, everywhere he’d been, he might have been surrounded by the dead. When he went into Starbucks for his morning coffee, murdered men and women had pressed against the glass. When he jogged down the street, he’d been running through people he couldn’t see. Last night, when he and Claire made love, a dead child might have been sitting on her couch.

  The thought made him shiver. It was repellent, horrifying, to imagine worlds overlaying each other that way. The dead existing in a world at a right angle to reality. What right did they have?

  Then he remembered that now he was one of the dead, and shivered again. He would never do any of those things again. Never have a hot cup of coffee, or enjoy a morning jog.

  Or see Claire.

  The thought was a gut punch. Too big to grasp. He wouldn’t see her again. Wouldn’t touch her, wouldn’t talk to her, wouldn’t get to enjoy the pyrotechnics of her mind at work. And not just her. His parents, his sister, his friends, his—

  With an effort, he forced the thoughts down. There were questions that needed answering. He had to understand. “So why aren’t the cars moving? I get that we can’t see the people, or I’ll accept it, but if this is an echo—”

  “No instruction manual, remember? But my guess is that it’s because we’re not quite dead. Or, really, we’re not quite gone. We’re dead, yeah, but here we are, walking and talking. There’s something left to react to.” Kyle looked sideways, read the bafflement on Brody’s face. “Okay, like this. Those cars are frozen in the place they were when we came along. But when we leave, the echo will go back to reflecting the living world.”

  “So if we went around the block—”

  “We’d come back to different cars in different places. But if we set up camp here tonight, everything would stay the same. Something about us holds this world in place. But when we leave, it refreshes like a web browser.”

  They’d reached the southern edge of downtown, the rust-fenced parking lots and bland academic buildings of Columbia College to the east, the gargoyled grandeur of the Harold Washington Library ahead of them. An unlit sign on an empty bar offered Coronas by the bucket. They walked down the middle of the street, threading their way between cars. The quiet was startling. Brody had never realized just how loud the city was until all the sound went away, air conditioners and El trains and the buzz of neon.

  He was dizzy with the effort of trying to observe and evaluate and understand, to parse and place and sort. Everything here felt real, and yet everything had seismically shifted. It reminded him of his first deployment. In Afghanistan, he’d realized that the rules he’d assumed to be foundational were actually just affectations Americans enjoyed. The revelation had shaken him, but there was something brilliant in a hard slap to the cheek too. It woke you up. Reminded you that everyone had their own reality, and yours was just one version.

  So do now what you learned to do then. Accept that the new rules are the only rules, and learn them, fast.

  “The way I moved when you tried to hit me. That’s what you meant when you said I was flush and shiny and all that.”

  “Yup.”

  “And I can do that because I just died?”

  “Because you just killed.”

  “Huh?”

  “How did it feel?”

  The question put him back there, the cool painted metal of the canister, the visceral yielding of the woman’s skull. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “I’m answering your question. How did you feel?”

  “She and her friends attacked me. They’d have gutted me if I hadn’t—”

  “Shit, Brody, I don’t mean ‘Boo-hoo you killed someone how do you feel about it you monster,’ I mean: How. Did. You feel.”

  “I felt . . .” He realized now what the man was getting at. “Good. I felt good.”

  “You felt great,” Kyle said. “Win the lottery great. Weekend in Cabo with bisexual lingerie models great. Right?”

  Right. There had been the healed wounds, of course, but it had been more than that. A loose-limbed power, and a sense th
at everything had grown more vivid. Like a drug, only clean. No intoxication, no blurriness. He still felt it, like he could run for days.

  Or bend steel bars. Or move so fast everyone else seems to be standing still.

  “Kill here, you get stronger,” Kyle continued. “Dunno why. But bottom line, it lets you do some pretty incredible stuff.”

  “And you can tell by looking at me?”

  “Yeah, you sort of glow.”

  Brody held up his hands and squinted at them. No light he could see. But he remembered his feeling at the liquor store, huddled behind the security cage. A sensation that the three were more in focus than the rest of the world. “So the Eaters hunt people for a rush. What, were they serial killers when they were alive?”

  “Nah,” Kyle said. “Most of them were just people. I mean, you know that, you lived her.”

  Brody felt a rush of shame, like he’d been caught digging through the girl’s underwear drawer. True, the violation had happened through no intention of his own, but it had been a violation nonetheless. And a far more personal one than looking at lacy underthings. He’d snooped on Raquel’s most intimate moments, experienced her secret thoughts. She hadn’t been a bad person. There’d been baggage, sure, but it hadn’t been excessively weighty.

  “What happened to her?”

  “Word is you smashed her skull with a fire extinguisher.”

  “No, I mean.” Brody paused. “We’re already dead, right? So what happens when you die here?”

  “You die,” Kyle said. “Maybe there’s an echo after this one. But nobody’s come back to tell us about it. So don’t get any ideas of jumping off a building like you’re going to wake up.”

  “But . . . what’s the point? It has to mean something. Why are we here?”

  Kyle hesitated. He dug in his pocket for a tin of Kodiak and placed a fat wad behind his lip. “Did you have the answer to that question when you were alive?”

  “I . . .” Brody blew a breath. “I guess not.”

  “There you go.” Without slowing down, Kyle turned in a circle, scanning the whole group, his lips moving as he counted them. Satisfied, he faced forward again. “Doesn’t need to be any more complicated here.”

  It was an interesting notion. Brody hadn’t spent a lot of time demanding an explanation from the cosmos. He’d just lived. Tried to be a good friend, a good person. To enjoy the moment. But didn’t knowing this truth change things? Surely there was some purpose, some meaning.

  Kyle looked over, then clapped him on the shoulder. “Listen, man. It’s a lot. Don’t try to get it all at once, okay?”

  “Take death one day at a time.”

  “You got it.”

  Downtown Chicago. Buildings scratching the bellies of swirling grey clouds. Dark stairs to the Red Line, dull stoplights swaying in the breeze. Construction scaffolding without workers. Mannequins in the windows of American Apparel and Forever 21, coquettish guards for racks of clothing fading into gloom. And you thought the city had gone strange before.

  As they passed Macy’s, Brody caught a flicker of movement. A man’s face in the third-floor window, a crossbow in one hand. Beside him stood a boy carrying a claw hammer.

  “They with us?” He nodded to the third floor.

  Kyle tracked the gesture. “No.” He put his thumb and forefinger in his mouth and blasted a whistle that would have made a drill sergeant proud. “Vamps, up top!” Hands flew to weapons, and postures stiffened. The archer nocked an arrow to his bow. Behind the glass, the two stared, faces twisted like hungry predators eyeing a meal they knew they couldn’t bring down.

  “If we’re going to fight—” Brody started.

  “We’re not.” Without glancing from the figures, Kyle waved a lasso gesture and shouted, “Keep it moving, keep it tight. I know we’re close to home, but we ain’t safe till we’re safe. And how come the newbie spotted them first?”

  The troop continued north, leaving the Eaters behind. The last Brody saw was the boy’s hands shielding his eyes so he could press his face to the glass.

  “You didn’t go after them.”

  “No.”

  “Thirty of us, two of them.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t kill unless I have to.” Kyle’s voice was hard. “Do you?”

  “How’d you die?”

  Kyle glanced sideways. “Why?”

  “Just making conversation. Trying to wrap my head around things.”

  The other man spat a stream of black juice on the ground. “I was a fireman. We were on a warehouse call. Smoke pouring out the windows, but no flame, and situation like that you gotta find the heart of the fire, so we’re knocking in doors.” He shrugged. “I didn’t notice a hole in the floor. Woke up in the basement. Fell four stories with fifty pounds of gear on, but I’m fine. Not a scratch. It’s a miracle! Until I realize the whole world has taken a hike.”

  His tone was acrid. Brody thought again of Claire, and his family. All the things he’d lost. He let the subject drop. They walked in silence up State to Wacker, the multileveled thoroughfare hugging the river.

  “Home.” Kyle gave an offhand point.

  Brody followed the look to a clean black obelisk of Mies van der Rohe modernism standing fifty stories tall. A grid of mottled clouds reflected in the windows. “The Langham Hotel. That’s home?”

  “Pricey for the living, but free for us dead folk. I like the suites. Gotta climb a bunch of stairs, but when I bed down, I can pretend there’s some society hottie getting nailed beside me.”

  Despite himself, despite everything, Brody smiled. “There’s something very wrong with you.”

  As they neared the river, a whistle blew from the other side, not Kyle’s thumb-and-finger version, but the old-fashioned metal sort favored by coaches and cops. The sequence was picked up and repeated by others farther away, the shrill notes bouncing discordantly off dark high-rises. The mood of the group eased notably, hands leaving weapons, people pairing off or hurrying across the bridge.

  The hotel was nestled into a curve with limited avenues of approach. Anyone swimming the river or crossing the bridge would be an easy target for the sentries who watched out broken windows. And the streets running north, Brody knew, were broad and exposed, with few good hiding places. The choice of location began to make sense. Solid defensive ground.

  The east side of the hotel was a curved driveway bounded by a curved sidewalk, and seemed to be the informal common area. Brody heard a guitar, and the sound of laughter. People lounged in chairs and expensive sofas, sharpening weapons and passing bottles. Their clothes tended to utility rather than fashion, the informal uniform being Levi’s or Dickies, sweatshirts layered under work jackets, and good boots. The men ranged from scruffy to bearded, the women wore short hair or ponytails.

  “Jesus, how many people are here?”

  “About two hundred disciples of the Gospel According to Ray.”

  “The what?”

  “Come on.”

  Everyone knew Kyle, and he nodded and smiled and shouted yo. When they saw Brody, their expressions changed, sometimes to curiosity, sometimes to something more brittle. It wasn’t hostility, exactly, but a heightened awareness. The way people might look at a large dog wandering without a leash. He fixed a mild smile on his face and kept his posture relaxed.

  A crash of breaking glass followed by high-pitched laughter made him jump. He turned to see a gang of children stomping on a parked cab. One of them wound up a Louisville Slugger and knocked the windshield the rest of the way in while the others danced and cheered.

  Kyle followed his gaze, shrugged.

  Brody said, “They’re . . .”

  “Dead? Sure. Get a lot of kids. Dylan there,” pointing to the one with the bat, “chased his ball into the street. Got creamed by a delivery truck. Dragged his body thirty yards. But,” Kyle smiled wolfishly, “he did get his ball back.”

  Before Brody could reply, a woman stepped
out of the hotel, letting the door drift shut behind. Medium height, brown hair, a pretty face running to elfin. He recognized her immediately. Even after everything he’d already seen, after his existential certainty and his grudging acceptance, that was the moment he knew.

  A carton of vanilla ice cream melting onto pavement.

  Emily Watkins. The seventeenth victim. He’d stood over her body yesterday. He’d looked through her purse and visited her house. He had a flash of sitting opposite her husband, trying to think of anything to say. Noticing all the details of a life, the photographs and bookshelves, the bills and the furniture, and thinking how Emily would never again see them. Would never again curl up in a favorite chair, or cook a meal, or reach out for her husband after a nightmare.

  Yet here she was, walking toward the river. In-turned shoulders and a haunted look in her eyes, yes, but walking.

  Oh my god. Oh my god.

  It was so huge and horrifying it was almost funny. Everything he had once thought about Emily Watkins now applied to him.

  Just this morning he’d awakened next to Claire. Her eyes had been open, and she’d been radiant, smiling. When he asked what she had been thinking about, she’d said, “Us,” and rolled over to face him, and they’d lain there grinning and staring like kids. Silently imagining forty or fifty more years of waking up like this.

  Instead, he had been hours from losing everything forever.

  “Brody? You okay?”

  A ribbon of vomit had leapt to the back of his mouth. He forced himself to swallow. “Sure.”

  “I want you to meet some new friends.”

  FIFTEEN

  Kyle picked a path between the couches and chairs, the clustered groups. The mood was jovial, people laughing and flirting, drinking from plastic cups. It put Brody in mind of a heavily armed block party.

  Near the river, Kyle found the person he was looking for, a handsome teenaged boy playing an acoustic guitar. There was something familiar about him, though Brody couldn’t place what. He was pretty good, playing what sounded like an acoustic cover of a Lil Wayne song as kids, none older than six or so, danced with spastic unself-consciousness.