AFTERLIFE

by Marcus Sakey

  Brody wandered away, found a bench by the river. He sat down and stared at the water, not really seeing it. His attention was inward, trying to tally the things he’d lost. Evaluating the scope of the wound to see if it was survivable.

  First to mind was Claire. Speaking of potential energy. It was excessively cruel that he had only just met her. He’d been in something like love before, but nothing close to their bare-wire voltage.

  But of course it wasn’t just her. He’d never again smoke cigars and play chess with Dad, never shake the man’s hand or smell his particular scent or feel that neck-cracking hug. Never have lunch with Mom, bathe in the expression she wore when she looked at him; never talk about books they’d read, or hear her laughing protestations when he said something intended to shock her.

  The breath caught in his throat.

  There was his sister, Samantha, three years younger and weirdly conservative these days, especially for the girl he remembered dancing to pop music in their basement. Her four-year-old twins, Ashley and Amy, the three of them a mutual adoration society based on wrestling and tickling and songs about farts.

  There was every friend he’d ever had. High school boys he’d stolen beer with. Marines he’d gone to war with. The other agents in the Chicago office, whip-smart and sardonic in their government suits.

  He’d never see any of them again. Not unless they died. Violently. Abruptly. Badly. The contradiction between wanting to see the people he loved and the price they would have to pay for that to happen—

  Too much. Too big.

  Understanding was impossible. It was too big even to grasp the shape of it.

  He tried to start smaller. Considered his fourth-grade teacher. The cashier at the grocery store. The UPS driver who whistled Christmas songs all year. The neighbors he traded restaurant recommendations with. The woman he saw sometimes at the pool, with that tattoo on her hip.

  Nope. Nothing. He hadn’t really known them, and like most people, he was just solipsistic enough to not truly believe they existed when he wasn’t there. We’re all background characters in someone else’s movie.

  Maybe people weren’t the way to grasp this. Their loss was either too huge to bear or too small to matter. He decided to try things, the places and facts of life he was no longer privy to.

  No restaurants, flickering candlelight and sexy music, waiters presenting dishes elaborate as jewelry.

  No technology. No cell phone. No longer would the answer to any question, from an actor’s sexual orientation to schematics for an A-bomb, reside in the pocket of his jeans.

  No morning runs to the gym, cold air rasping in his lungs. No swimming a mile of tiresome laps, then sinking into the Jacuzzi to let the hot water soothe his muscles.

  No movies. He would never again see the screen light up and lose himself in a story and the roar of speakers.

  Shit. For some reason, that one got him. No more movies. Ever.

  “Don’t do it, Brody! You have so much to not-live for!”

  Without turning, he said, “Kyle, you’re kind of an asshole. You know that, right?”

  “Hey, you aren’t all blow jobs and candy yourself.” The man dropped on the bench beside him. “You eat? Kitchen’s full. One thing you got to give the echo, no matter how many times we raid the fridge, there’s always more.”

  “Not hungry.”

  Kyle pulled out a tin of Kodiak, offered it, shrugged at Brody’s look of disgust. “Yeah, I know. Not as good as cigarettes, but at least I don’t have to worry about cancer here. One upside of the echo, no diseases.” He tucked a wad in his lip, then put the tin away. A sudden breeze stirred ripples on the river.

  Brody said, “You have family?”

  “Everybody has family.”

  “How do you—”

  “I don’t. I don’t let myself.” Kyle stared out at the skyline. “You know the stages of grief? Denial, anger, all that.”

  “Sure.”

  “When you’re alive, if you lose someone, it sucks. There’s a hole in your world. But we didn’t lose someone. We lost everyone. There’re no stages of grief for losing everything. You just have to pack it away. Like it happened to somebody else. Somebody you used to be. Just . . . pack it away.”

  “Pack it away. That’s your advice.” Brody shook his head. “So that I can stay here? Never have a shower or a hot meal. Never see the people I love.”

  “Yeah. Because here is what you’ve got.” Kyle brushed off his knees and stood up. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  “Where?”

  “Come have some fun.”

  The three sentries didn’t like it.

  Their table was littered with playing cards and poker chips. Brody presumed the table itself had been carted out of the hotel; it looked like it cost two weeks’ salary. The guard with the cowboy wrinkles set down his hand. “What do you mean, alone?”

  “Alone,” Kyle said. “The two of us. Solamente a dos.”

  “You know better than that.”

  “My man here needs to see his kingdom.”

  “Kyle—”

  “We’ll be fine. Didn’t you hear? Yesterday he faced down seven Eaters all by himself.”

  Brody started to argue, figured what was the point. “I’m flush.”

  “No vamps are going to take us on, not with him like that.” Kyle slapped the sentry on the shoulder. “Watch out for Laquan there, I think he might actually have the inside straight he’s representing.”

  “Oh, come on,” another man said, and then they were walking across the bridge.

  Brody touched the knife at his belt, the handle reassuring. “We need permission to leave?”

  “Permission? No. Nobody’s in charge here. We’re what you’d call an egalitarian society. Really only got two rules.”

  Brody walked three steps, four, five. Finally, he said, “Okay, I’ll bite. What are they?”

  “First, pull your weight. Second,” Kyle said, and glanced over with a smile, “don’t eat other people.”

  “Seems simple enough.”

  “Mostly it is.” Kyle went left, and Brody followed. There were cars on the street, stopped in that same ghostly ballet, though fewer than yesterday. It was early. People were just getting up. Showering, thinking about work. Taking for granted the miracle of their existence.

  “Your Spanish sucks,” Brody said. “Solamente a dos means ‘Only at two.’”

  “So how do—”

  “Solamente nosotros dos.”

  “Muchas gracias.”

  “What do they play for?”

  “Huh?”

  “The poker guys. They were too intense for it to just be chips.”

  “Oh,” Kyle said. “Chores. Patrol shifts, keeping an eye on the kiddies, graveyard sentry duty. That last one’s du-ull.”

  They cut onto Michigan, strolling down the middle of the street. There was a brighter spot on the clouds to the east, but nothing that Brody would call a sunrise. The same heavy pall of swirling clouds hung above.

  “So here’s the deal.” Kyle stepped up onto the hood of a sleek Jaguar XJ, walked the length of it, then dropped to the other side. “You can focus on all you’ve lost, and decide to throw yourself off something tall. But remember, you didn’t know the echo was here, and you don’t know what comes next. Big gamble.”

  “I sense an ‘or.’”

  “Or see it as new and exciting. This is our city. Our kingdom. You can do whatever you want.”

  Millennium Park was empty. Brody didn’t think he’d ever seen it literally and completely empty before. Even in the middle of the night there were cops, drunks on the benches, couples holding hands on their way home. Kyle quick-stepped up the stairs, headed for a giant sculpture. It was named Cloud Gate, but Brody had never heard anyone call it anything but the Bean. A slab of curves sixty feet long and shaped like, well, a bean, the surface was a highly reflective chrome, mirror-like in finish. When he’d first seen it, his analysis had been shiny tourist junk. But there
was something hypnotic about it. The first visit, you enjoyed the funhouse mirror aspect, the way the shape distorted everything. The second, you noticed the way it took in the whole skyline—the whole sky—as if it were subsuming it, rather than simply reflecting it. After a while, you half expected to see a previous version of yourself staring out.

  He’d never been there when there weren’t others around, though. In a minor way it was, he suspected, like Machu Picchu, or the Great Pyramid—a place you always forgot you’d never have to yourself. People imagined visiting them alone, climbing the steps in quiet contemplation of the past. They forgot about the stalls selling T-shirts and kebabs, forgot the tour buses of sunburned Americans, forgot velvet ropes and security guards.

  But now it was just Kyle and him. The surface shone so cleanly it was hard to tell what was cloud and what was cloud reflection. Kyle walked under the central curve and flopped on the ground. Brody followed suit. Warped versions of themselves stared back.

  “Admit it,” Kyle said. “This is cool.”

  “I feel like a tourist.”

  “Still cool.”

  Brody nodded. For a moment he just let his gaze roam the mirrored surface, the bent versions of themselves, the hints of swirling sky and staring city. “So if I pack it away. What would I do here?”

  “Whatever you want. You’re free now. Freer than you ever were in life.” Kyle pointed upward at the chrome, his reflected finger pointing back down at the two of them. “Groove on somebody, and they groove on you? Bang like bunnies. You’re not cheating on anyone, and you don’t even need a condom, no babies here, and no disease. See something you wish you could have afforded? Take it. Pissed off? Visit the Art Institute and slice a van Gogh to ribbons. You don’t even have to feel guilty, because the moment you leave, it’ll stitch itself back together.”

  “If it’s so free, how come everyone is hiding out at the hotel?”

  “Well, the Eaters are always out there. But so long as you can pull your weight and only kill in self-defense, you’re good with us. And as long as you’re with us, you don’t have to worry about them. They’re like jackals. Jackals are vicious bastards. If one finds you alone, you’re in for a bad afternoon. But against a group, they’ve got no chance.”

  Brody remembered the bending bars, the speed. “Looked to me like they had more than a chance.”

  “Oh, a single Eater can mess up a single person, or even a couple. But if there’s twenty of us, they won’t even try.”

  “Unless there are twenty of them.”

  Kyle shook his head. “Doesn’t happen. Biggest Eater group I’ve ever seen is five, and I saw that exactly once. They can’t trust each other. You’re talking about a group who chooses—not has to, chooses to—kill others for a fix. How would you sleep next to somebody like that?”

  “What if I wanted to just leave? Head out of town.”

  “Go for it. Me, I didn’t go to the suburbs when I was alive, not planning to start now. But if you feel like finding a white picket fence, knock yourself out. Sounds lonely, though.” Kyle slapped the ground, then rolled up to standing. “Come on. I’m hungry.”

  He led Brody down Michigan Avenue another couple of blocks, then cut in front of a bus. The way he did it was jarring, and Brody had an impulse to put an arm up, keep him from walking into the street and getting creamed. But of course, the bus was as still as the rest of the traffic. He wondered how many people were on it. Imagined climbing aboard; would there be purses and bags?

  Kyle paused in front of a broad window. “You like sushi?”

  “I could be buried in it.”

  The other man unslung his axe. He spun it around with the ease of a man who knew his tools, wound up, and slammed the back end into the window. The glass splintered like ice, but didn’t break; the second hit smashed it in, shards raining everywhere. He scraped the bottom of the frame to clear the last fragments, then climbed in.

  Brody followed. The restaurant was dark, chairs on tables. Kyle wound his way to the counter, turned and lifted himself onto and then over it. He stooped to the refrigerators below, came out with a plastic-wrapped tuna loin. Set it on a cutting board and began to slice.

  Brody hadn’t thought he was hungry, but the fish was fresh and cool, odorless but possessed of a faint briny tang. The flesh almost melted in his mouth. He found himself wanting sake, wishing he could hail a waiter. Then he remembered where he was, and walked to the bar, helped himself to a bottle of Akita Homare. They ate with gusto, each bite of rich tuna washed down with bright and floral rice wine.

  “We’re actually kind of lucky,” Kyle said. “At least we died in Chicago. Imagine the echo in Mosul, or Mogadishu.”

  “My god.” Brody paused. “Imagine dying in a shooting war. You’d wake up—”

  “And find some of the other side waiting for you. None of you knowing what was happening. Probably go right back to killing each other.” Kyle skewered a piece of tuna on his knife. “While you’re at it, imagine the echo in Manhattan on 9/11.”

  Suddenly Brody wasn’t hungry anymore.

  The next stop on the tour was an alley behind the Hilton. Kyle went to an unmarked door, pulled a credit card from his pocket. “These things still have uses.”

  Two minutes later, they were climbing a three-hundred-foot metal ladder. The fire escape rungs were thin and cold, not built for comfort. Up and up and up they went, Brody feeling a tug in his belly that part of him found funny. What was he worried about—dying?

  Thirty stories later, Kyle strutted the thin ledge of the Hilton’s rooftop. He walked to the corner and sat down. Brody followed, tamping down the vertigo, his arms and legs quivering from exertion. He put a hand on Kyle’s shoulder and lowered himself to sitting. Their legs dangled off the edge, heels tapping the glass. Far below, the abandoned cars looked like toys. The architecture was rendered strange by angle and shadow. The clouds seemed almost close enough to touch.

  “I shouldn’t be here,” Brody said.

  “No cops to stop you.”

  “No. I mean, I shouldn’t be here.” He turned to face the fireman. “I spent my life fighting for people. I died saving someone.”

  “You expected the pearly gates, Saint Peter waiting with brandy and a blonde?”

  “No. Maybe. Who knows about Heaven. But I was a good guy. I tried to make the right choices, to be kind—”

  “Helping little old ladies across the street and such.”

  “—and I get the same afterlife as a meth-dealing biker?”

  “Careful.” Kyle’s voice was suddenly hard. “Sonny’s a friend.”

  “I’m sure he’s wonderful. Fun to hang out with, good with the ladies. But how many people you think he cut with those knives? How many tweakers picked their faces raw on his supply?”

  “That’s over now. Same as you being an FBI agent is over. We all start fresh here.”

  “Well whoopie-de-goddamn-do,” Brody said. “So the choices we made didn’t matter. Being a good person didn’t matter. Rape, rob, murder, who cares? Everybody gets the same as a firefighter died in the line. Lucky Sonny.”

  Kyle grimaced, then rubbed at his head with his hands, the bristles of his short hair riffing. “What do you want? I didn’t design this place. You want to mope about how unfair it all is? Fine. But you got a second chance. Maybe it’s not what you expected, and yeah, you lost a lot along the way. But if you can get over yourself, you can make a life. And not for nothing, but people here could use your help.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Being human, man.” Kyle sighed. “Look, yesterday I told you we lived by the Gospel According to Ray. It’s a bit of a joke, and it’s not too. Ray was actually Raylene. I never met her, she was gone before I got here.”

  “Where’d she go?”

  “Faded.”

  Brody started to respond, caught himself. Thinking of the way Arthur had appeared almost translucent. “Like the Professor?”

  “Yeah, like the Professor. Arthur won�
��t kill, even in self-defense. Neither would she. You stay here long enough and don’t take energy from somebody else, you fade. One morning we’ll wake up, Arthur will just be gone.”

  “Where?”

  “How would I know? On to new adventures. Maybe there’s another echo after this one. And fading happened in life too, we just called it getting old. At least here you don’t fall apart.”

  “We don’t age?”

  “Nope. Bit of a kick in the crotch for the kiddies, but a nice benny for you and me.”

  Brody rubbed at his cheek, the stubble rubbing back. “If we don’t age, how come our beards grow?”

  “I dunno.”

  “If you’re hurt, do you heal?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. If we heal and our hair grows, then we should—”

  “Brody,” Kyle cut in, “don’t try to lawyer the afterlife. You’re not going to catch it in a technicality and suddenly be alive again. It is what it is. Can I finish my story?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Anyway, Ray, she organized people. Until she came along, there was no safe zone. No place we could be okay. Arthur told me—remember, he’s been here two decades—he told me he spent the first year hiding in a storage room. Because it was kill or be killed, and those were the only choices. Ray came along, she started getting people together. She reminded us there was no reason we had to live that way. So long as we could trust each other, we could be safe. Because that’s the thing the Eaters can’t do.”

  Brody thought about that. The three who’d come for him had worked together, and the Scarecrow with the machete had been upset about Raquel. Even so, they’d just walked away. Turned their backs on the man who killed their supposed friend.

  “So the question is, who are you when the rules change?” Kyle turned to look at him. “You say your choices didn’t matter, I say they still do. You can be them, or you can be us. Jackals or men.”