AFTERLIFE

by Marcus Sakey

  What a woman.

  It struck him that he was sitting here with her, and all the things that meant. He’d only just begun to mourn the loss of her. As hard as the last days had been, they had been only a down payment on the pain. He was still in a sort of emotional shock. Ahead of him he’d seen the looming immensity of suffering to come. The unfairness of it, the ridiculous, horrifying randomness of having lived thirty-seven years and only finding Claire at the very end. Falling in love with her just in time to lose her.

  Now it seemed he hadn’t lost her after all. The realization brought a complicated mix of emotions. There was part of him, a big part, that was just so glad to see her, to be spared the agony of losing her forever. But what a selfish, childish, way to look at it. He hadn’t lost her—because she had lost everything.

  There was a family in the hotel, a father and two daughters, that Kyle had told him had been killed in a car crash. The mother had been in the car too, but she must have survived, because only the three of them had awakened in the wreckage. Brody wondered how they felt. Surely the man would prefer his children had lived. But was some part of him happy that at least they were together? Did he secretly wish for the death of his wife, so they could all be reunited—and did he hate himself for it?

  “Claire . . .”

  She’d been leaning back against the headboard, idly tracing the bruise on her face as she spoke. Looking at the city but clearly not seeing it. Now focus swam into her face. They stared at one another. That same unblinking stare they’d shared the other morning, when their heads were on the pillow and their future was taking shape in front of them. Whatever it was he’d been about to say slipped away. There was a communication in their gaze that made words clumsy things.

  Slowly he reached out a hand. Cupped her cheek, the heat of the bruise burning off it.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “That I couldn’t help.”

  “How could you?”

  “I don’t know. I just.”

  “I was alive. You were dead. Pretty much by definition, you couldn’t help.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You couldn’t.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sometimes things can’t be helped, Brody. Sometimes people can’t be saved. It’s not your fault. It’s the world.”

  They lay together, spooning, their bodies fitting like Velcro. Like they would have to be pulled apart.

  Out the windows, the sky was a cauldron of swirling grey.

  The light through the window was pale and hollow.

  “I thought I’d lost you.”

  “Shhh.”

  There were tears, and touching. Not sex; touching. The comfort given in the middle of the night after a particularly vicious dream. Touching meant to calm and to claim. To say, wordlessly, that you are where you belong, and the nightmare was only that.

  But had it been?

  Or was it just beginning?

  Late in the afternoon, Brody went downstairs, ignored the questioning gazes and knowing smirks, and found the kitchen. The industrial fridges were packed with beautifully marbled rib eyes and quivering pork belly and plump Cornish hens, but there was no fire to cook with. Instead he loaded a tray with fruits and nuts and bread and cheese. Bottles of water. A two-hundred-dollar pinot noir and two glasses.

  They spread the feast on a café table in their room and ate ravenously. Through the window and six stories down people milled in front of the hotel. Practicing with their weapons. Keeping watch. Talking and drinking and flirting. A group of children played chase, sprinting over cars and through buildings, their laughter arriving late and muted by the glass.

  “I’m hungry,” she said, spreading triple cream on crusty bread.

  “Me too.”

  “Funny that we’re hungry here.”

  “Arthur says it’s a residual thing. We don’t actually need to eat, but our minds don’t get that. He says that we adjust after a while, only eat if we feel like it. Twenty years he’s been here, I guess he’d know.”

  “He’s in charge?”

  “No. No one is. There was a woman, years ago, named Ray. The way they talk about her, you’d think there would be a shrine somewhere, candles and offerings. Of course, it would vanish the moment they wandered away. Anyway, Ray, she got them together, made a safe space.”

  “Because everybody else was . . . eating each other.” She spoke in that testing tone, not quite doubting, just hitting the weak spot in a story to see if it gave.

  “Not literally eating, but near enough.” He paused. “You remember Emily Watkins?”

  “The seventeenth victim. The one before you.”

  “I ever tell you I visited her husband? CPD was going to inform him, I said I’d do it.” He could picture their loft perfectly, the dusty exercise bike, the drowsy cat, and the framed 8 x 10 of them goofing on their wedding day, her husband tightrope-walking the bridge railing. “I told myself I was doing it because we were neighbors, but it was more than that. We want to save everybody, the good ones at least, and sometimes we can’t. That’s the thing I hated about being a cop. But the reason I bring it up, Emily is here.”

  “Here, here? The echo?”

  He nodded. “Yesterday she got attacked by an Eater. I don’t know why she was out wandering alone. Anyway, this time I made it.”

  A slow smile bloomed on Claire’s face. “You saved her.”

  “The second time. Better than nothing, I guess.”

  She reached across the table, took his hand. “I’m proud of you.”

  “Don’t be. I almost killed the Eater. I’d taken him down by then, he was helpless, no threat. But I wanted to kill him anyway. I mean, I wanted to. It wasn’t just anger. It was.” He paused, looked at her. Ashamed to say it. “I had the taste for it.”

  Claire met his gaze. He could see her thinking, but there was no judgment in her eyes. “But you didn’t.”

  “No. Emily did. She was hurt, and feeding fixed her. In more than one way.”

  “‘Feeding.’ You make them sound like vampires.”

  He laughed. “People here call them that. Vamps. It occurred to me, I wonder if maybe the whole myth of the vampire came from here. From some living person seeing into the echo.”

  “I thought the dead and the living—”

  “Yeah, I know, but maybe certain people. Maybe artists, or prophets, or madmen.” He shrugged. “Just an idea.”

  “Maybe,” Claire said, “it’s seeing across that boundary that makes them artists or prophets or madmen.”

  “Darn.”

  “What?”

  “Well, if I’d known that the street corner crazies were actually seeing dead people hunting each other with machetes . . .” Brody paused, timing it. “Well, I’d definitely have given more dollars.”

  Claire had just taken a swallow of wine, and tried to catch a laugh-cough in her hand, but didn’t quite make it. Red dripped from her fingers, and that got him going, first a cackle, and then when she grabbed her glass and spit the rest of the wine into it, a howl, and for a moment she hesitated and then she joined him in it, the laughter growing into hysterical can’t stop proportions, each of them prompting the other. Finally Claire caught her breath, wiped at her eyes. “You’re bad.”

  He smiled. “It’s nice to hear your laugh.”

  “You too. Even if it’s your fault I’m dead.” She nudged his leg under the table with the tip of her foot.

  “Ha-ha. What happened, anyway? How did you find him?”

  “That dream you sent.”

  “Huh?”

  Claire cocked her head. “The dream of you in the church. Finding the Stephen King paperback, seeing the sniper out the window?”

  Brody felt like he was on a call with bad reception. Like he could understand most of what she was saying, but that certain crucial words weren’t coming through. “You dreamed that?”

  “Yeah, like you meant for me . . .” She trailed off. “You didn’t se
nd me a dream?”

  “How would I?”

  “I don’t know. I figured it was an echo thing.”

  “Not that I know of. I mean, I did find that book. The Gunslinger. And I did see him. He was dialing his phone, and when I heard the pile of glass ringing I figured it out. Too late.”

  “Not entirely. That cop you tackled? You saved his life.” She bit at her thumb and turned her grey eyes out the window. “I was mad at you for that. Is that terrible?”

  “Yes.”

  She snorted, then kicked him again, harder this time. “Anyway, after the dream, I went to the church and found the book. I couldn’t believe it, I didn’t. But I remembered his face so clearly that I searched the database for it. I thought I was going crazy, but there he was. Simon Tucks.”

  “Simon Tucks? That’s the name of the guy we’ve been chasing, the one who terrified a whole city? Simon Tucks?”

  “Turns out.” Claire told him the rest of the story, driving to Old Town, knocking on the door, recognizing the voice. Tucks’s flight and her pursuit, the three rounds she’d put in his chest, the wires throughout the house she’d missed. At the end, she looked at his face and said, “What?”

  “Before you went in, did you sit in your car with your weapon in your lap?”

  She nodded. “Making up my mind. Why?”

  “Because I dreamed that.” Brody stared at her. “That’s how I knew you were in trouble.”

  “So we both had dreams—”

  “—that weren’t dreams. Yeah.”

  They sat in silence for a minute, chewing on that. Brody felt certain it meant something. He just didn’t have the faintest idea what.

  On the bridge below, a gang of kids had lined up alongside a Jeep and were rocking it back and forth. Timing their jumps, getting the thing bouncing, bouncing, higher each time, until the wheels began to leave the road. They hooted, kept going, getting it high enough that they could put their backs to it, the truck hanging on the diagonal a long moment before toppling sideways to teeter on the railing. The kids charged, and then the Jeep wobbled, hung, and fell over the side to plunge into the river below. Water geysered. Screeches of laughter and cheers floated up. Brody found himself smiling.

  “He’s still out there, isn’t he?”

  “Tucks?” He thought for a moment, nodded. “Doesn’t seem like Eaters want to take each other on. They like easy prey.”

  “Meaning he’ll keep going.”

  Brody stiffened. All of his attention had been on Claire—on trying to save her, caring for her, filling her in. He hadn’t really had much time to ponder the fact that the man who had murdered them both was now a neighbor. “Yeah.”

  “Only now, he’ll be murdering the poor confused people who just got here. People who have already lost everything. Terrified, helpless people.”

  “Yeah,” Brody said, slowly.

  She looked at him across the table. Her face swollen and purpling. Scalp torn where clumps of hair had been ripped out. Her posture was perfect, her voice commanding. Brody suddenly remembered that in addition to being his lover, she’d been his boss. “We okay with that?”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “Brody! Come introduce the missus.” Kyle waved from the edge of a couch, a bottle of bourbon in his hand. It was early evening, the sky still bright enough to carve the buildings into stark relief. There were probably a hundred people hanging out, cross-legged on the hoods of cars or splayed on couches. In a fancy leather chair, Lucy knelt astride Sonny, grinding into him, her arms around his neck, locked in a tongue-heavy kiss that showed no sign of either ending or accelerating. Finn, the archer kid, sat talking to an older woman knitting a scarf. DeAndre and Antoine tossed dice with a handful of men. The Hispanic guy in the Carhartt lay on the hood of a hundred-thousand-dollar Mercedes, reading a Punisher comic book. Somehow they’d hauled the piano out from the lobby, and Arthur played a rollicking version of The Beatles’ “Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds.” Everyone had weapons close at hand, although Brody had realized that was less about fear of an attack and more so they didn’t simply disappear, vanish into wherever things went.

  O brave new people, to have such a world in you.

  Once Claire had raised the question back in the room, the answer had been obvious. No, they most definitely were not okay with it. Simon Tucks had to die again.

  “Problem is,” he’d said, “how? Even setting aside how to find him, our guns don’t work here, and it’s not like we can call in SWAT. And you saw what Tucks can do.”

  “Yeah.” Claire fingered the bruises on her face. “Okay. So we need help. Maybe your buddy, what’s his name, Kyle. And that biker you mentioned?”

  “There’s a woman seems like she knows how to use a sword too.” Brody had stopped. “I wonder, though. We didn’t know this world was here. The echo. What if there’s another after it? We might just be passing the buck.”

  “Then someone like us will have to kill him there too,” Claire said. “We can only do what we can do.”

  He nodded. “These people, the Disciples of Ray. They have rules. They only kill in self-defense.”

  “Good rule,” Claire had said, “I like it. I live by it. But we’re talking about a terrorist. Nobody can want this guy running around.”

  “I don’t know,” he’d said. “You just got here. Things are different.”

  “They can’t be that different,” she’d said, and he’d recognized the tone, knew better than to keep arguing.

  Which had led to them getting dressed and heading downstairs to join the party.

  Brody wasn’t an introvert, but big groups had never been his scene. He liked close teams and real conversation. This kind of thing, trying to make small talk on a grand scale, people wandering in and out of a group, all those names to remember, it wore on him.

  Claire, though, shone.

  He’d known she was far more outgoing than he, the ready politician. She’d confessed early on that she planned to become the first female director of the FBI, saying it as if daring him to laugh. He hadn’t. Putting aside the way they felt about each other, she was easily the best boss he’d ever had, tireless in her work, relentless in her thinking, and effortless in her socializing. Despite the bruises and the bandages, she charmed everyone. Learned each name the first time it was said. Asked personal questions and listened to the answers, her gaze cool and level. When Kyle passed her the bourbon, she didn’t hesitate, just tilted it up in a long swallow, and then another.

  Brody followed in her wake, content to be there. To be standing near her, watching her do her thing. He knew it was selfish. He didn’t care.

  He was glad she was here.

  Arthur had moved through “Love Me Do,” “Yellow Submarine,” “Paperback Writer,” others Brody didn’t recognize, and was now onto “Hey Jude.” It was the hour the fire pit would have been lit, if fire burned here, and he and Claire had joined a group of people on a couch near the piano. His arm was around her shoulders, her body warm and the smell of her in his nostrils, and he could have stayed like that forever, had almost forgotten they were working an angle when Claire said, “You guys want to hear a story?”

  She told them about a morning in September when four people were shot in two hours. About a little girl killed in front of her father. About a woman gunned down in a grocery store parking lot—Brody looked around, relieved that Emily wasn’t nearby—and an FBI agent who died in an explosion. About two dreams, and a second explosion. Everyone sat rapt; no television, no Internet, and Brody imagined stories had special currency.

  “This is the guy we saw?” Lucy was fidgeting with her sword, sliding the blade out an inch, then back in, the metal whispering softly. “The one who, umm . . .”

  “Kicked my butt?” Claire nodded. “That’s him.”

  “Something weird about that,” Kyle said. “He’d just gotten here, right?”

  “About two seconds before me.”

  “But he was mad flush. We only caught the end of
the show, but the way he held you with one hand?” Kyle shook his head. “Only Eaters have that kind of strength.”

  “He killed eighteen people in the last two weeks,” Brody said.

  “Yeah, but living people, when he was alive. We didn’t think that crossed over.”

  Claire shrugged, spread her hands. “Maybe he’s a special case. He’s certainly a special kind of crazy.”

  The piano stopped abruptly. The sudden silence was sharp as a gavel’s bang. Arthur said, “You want to go after him.”

  “It’s not revenge. This guy is a monster. He won’t stop killing.”

  “No,” Arthur agreed. “He’ll probably get worse.”

  “I’m glad you understand,” she said. “Because we could really use some help.”

  Glances flew around the circle, bouncing like Super Balls. The mood shift was palpable. Kyle said, “Claire, you’re new. We’ve got two rules, just two. First, pull your weight—”

  “Second, only kill in self-defense. I’m an FBI agent, I get it,” Claire said. “And this is how I pull my weight. Trust me, this guy is different from what you’re used to. I head one of the largest joint law enforcement task forces in . . .” She paused. “I did, I mean. And this guy—”

  Arthur asked, “How’s the pay?”

  “Pardon?”

  “In the FBI. You work for money, right?”

  “I get a paycheck. I wouldn’t say that’s what I work for.”

  “And vacation days. Direct deposit. An IRA. A mortgage. Maybe a pet. Furniture from IKEA. A gym membership.”

  “Where are you going with this?”

  Arthur started fingering the piano keys again. The melody was immediately familiar, but it took Brody a moment to recognize the song as “Yesterday.” Without ceasing to play, Arthur looked up. “None of that is true now. No mortgage, no IRA, no cat. Everyone starts over. Sonny doesn’t ride with the Outlaws. Kyle doesn’t fight fires. And you’re not an FBI agent.”

  “That doesn’t change the fact that Tucks is a monster.”

  “No. It just means that it’s not your place to hunt him.”