AFTERLIFE

by Marcus Sakey

  It wasn’t going to be enough, Brody had realized. Their ride was drawing to an end. His will wasn’t strong enough, and they’d spent too much of the totem’s power. Perhaps if he’d let go of Claire’s hand.

  Instead, he’d stopped pushing, and with a wobbling snap, it all vanished, sun and traffic and staring woman. They’d stood in the abandoned street outside his loft, dazed, squinting. Back in the echo.

  It didn’t matter. Returning to life would have been nice, but he’d meant what he’d said. Gingerly, he poked at the flesh of his chest. It was tender and raw. Brody lifted the totem off his neck.

  The change was as intense and sudden as plunging into freezing water. He gasped, swayed, would have collapsed if Claire hadn’t caught him.

  He’d gone from being filled with electricity and made of light to being just Will Brody. But there was more to it than the power differential. There was also a sudden feeling of absence. As though someone had been breathing over his shoulder, and now had vanished.

  Edmund. Not his consciousness, but whatever fragment of him existed in the totem. Just as the bones had once been connected to his hand, Edmund remained connected to the necklace.

  “Baby?” Claire stared at him, eyes wide. “You okay?”

  “Watch that last step,” he said. “It’s a doozy.”

  She laughed, and braced herself under his shoulder. “Come on, old man. Let the dead chick help.”

  Back to the Langham Hotel, why not. The walk wasn’t long, but it was oddly glorious. After having seen entropy in its purest form, having witnessed the decline of all things, even the echo looked magnificent. They stared at the high-rises and empty shops with the wide eyes of tourists.

  “What in the risen fuck?” Kyle stood on the bridge, axe on his back, 7-Eleven sandwich in one hand. “Where the—you two are dead.”

  “We were. Also alive. Then dead, then deader, then deadest.”

  The man nodded slowly. Took a bite of his sub, chewed methodically. “Okay.”

  That evening, they all gathered on couches hauled out from the lobby, passing bottles of top-shelf liquor. The group was smaller, and the tone sadder.

  Brody’s plan to kill the sniper had been simple—an ambush to get the Eaters’ attention, and then a holding action to buy his team time to kill Tucks. But that holding action had meant regular people facing off against Eaters.

  In the end, it cost forty-three lives.

  Madeleine, who knit scarves and left them to vanish.

  Antoine, who had held the line even as they were overrun.

  Sonny, and Lucy as well, who must have died from her injuries minutes later.

  Emily Watkins, who had pretended to flee and in the process drew a dozen Eaters away from the main battle. No longer a victim—a martyr.

  Arthur. The professor. In the end, he’d broken his own prohibition against killing. When two Eaters cleared the lines and made for the hotel, where the youngest children had been hidden, Arthur picked up a knife and hurled himself at them. He’d managed to kill one by surprise and badly wound the other before he died.

  “The fight was grim,” Kyle said. “We managed to make it to this narrow street in the financial district to channel them. Should’ve seen Finn climb up the outside of the building with his bow on his back. We got in a few good hits early, with the surprise and all. But they were swarming us inside a minute. Pushing cars as cover, throwing manhole covers. I think Hector died happy—got to star in a real-life superhero movie. It was ugly as a dick in a meat grinder when the whole world went suddenly wonky. You know how departures feel like a boat rocking? Well, when you killed the sniper, it felt like the boat capsized.”

  Instantly, the shaky truce between the Eaters had capsized as well. Some turned on each other, hungry to harvest more power. Some were killed as they faltered. Most fled.

  “Days since have been hard,” Kyle said. “Lot of wounded too—”

  “Days?” Brody lowered the bourbon bottle. “That was this morning.”

  The gathered crowd exchanged glances. Kyle said, “Not so much, cochise. Try last week. Where you been?”

  Navigating between the planes of existence. Put it that way, he supposed it wasn’t the craziest thing in the world to imagine time got a little slippy.

  Brody told them about the echoes that lay beyond this one leading to the plains of shadow. About the new breed of gods, elder humans who had taken the Eater ethos to its ultimate extreme. He wasn’t sure he was doing them a kindness, but they deserved to know. And while Isabella and her kind were horrifying, the journey itself held no particular terror. There was no hell at the end of it. Just a forgetting and a fading and an end. There was nothing frightening about a fire dying.

  They talked for hours. After their recent experiences, after learning of predation taken to its most extreme level, it felt wonderful to sit comfortably among a circle of humanity. Living people who breathed and laughed and farted. Who watched each other’s backs, and fought to keep the darkness at bay. Not to end it—how could you end darkness?—but just to keep it from winning.

  Eventually, people began peeling off. When he and Claire made to go, Kyle stopped them. “You gotta be tired. But if you’re up for a climb, you might try the 12th floor.”

  “What’s there?”

  Kyle smiled. “Call it the bridal suite.”

  They’d laughed, started walking. Brody had snickered, “Bridal suite. After today. Right.”

  “I dunno. This afternoon I was nothing but a candle flame in the heart of a ghost.” She shrugged. “Now that I’ve got a body again, seems crazy not to take advantage.”

  Their eyes met. That same sort of tangible snap that had happened the first time.

  They made twelve flights in ninety seconds, and found that they both had plenty of energy after all.

  That was two nights ago. The time since had been spent helping. Tending to the wounded, gathering supplies, watching the kids. Patrols were still going out, though they were smaller. A lot of Eaters had been killed, and a lot of Ray’s Disciples had fed. And as Brody had hoped, as they’d all gambled, it hadn’t turned them into monsters. Their trust and community ran deeper than simple rules. As a result, the echo was a quieter, safer place.

  “For a while anyway,” Kyle said. “Thing I’m wondering, can we use this time?”

  It was an interesting notion, and Brody and Claire had been talking it out on their stroll to L’Patron.

  There was a way to capitalize on the situation. A narrow path that kept to Ray’s general principles while also expanding their territory. It would be risky—no way to limit themselves to simply self-defense—but if it could be pulled off, it would mean an echo that was far less terrifying.

  “It would take real organization,” Claire said. “Leadership. We’d have to set up outposts all over the city. Build outward from the Langham. Drive the Eaters away, and kill those that didn’t go.”

  “That’s risky.”

  “The addiction, yeah.” She chewed a lock of hair. “Maybe if we planned it carefully. Made sure that no one killed more than once. That would still mean at least a hundred fewer Eaters. And a lot more newbies surviving.”

  “Doesn’t seem that long ago we were the newbies,” he said. “Still, even one kill would be too much for some people. Hard to taste that power once and then let it go.”

  “We’d have to set up safeguards. Some sort of a justice system. A way to judge who had gone too far.”

  “Build a new civilization in the afterlife.”

  “Yeah. It could be done. We could help do it.”

  Brody nodded. Pulled out the stool, his stool, and sat down. Claire took the other. For a moment they just looked at one another.

  “You were trying to mess with me that day.” Claire smiled. “Bringing me here.”

  “Maybe a little bit.” He shrugged. “You took my job.”

  “Your job? Ha.”

  “Besides, you were messing with me too. That ‘pick a place’ te
st?”

  She acknowledged it with a glance. “God those tacos were good.”

  “That look was good. Just before we left. Don’t get many like that. Not in a whole lifetime.” He paused. “Not more than ten, probably.”

  “Ten? Please. You never had anyone look at you like that before.”

  He reached out, took her little finger in his. Felt the warmth of her, the solidity. They’d lost and found each other so many times. He wanted to believe it would never happen again. He wanted to believe that it would happen over and over. He wanted to believe that they’d been lovers a thousand lifetimes over. Around them, the restaurant, the street, the city, the world, were gripped by stillness.

  “He’ll try again, won’t he?”

  “Edmund?” Brody nodded. “It’s too good a notion for him. It might take a while, but he’ll find another Simon Tucks. Someone to terrorize the living world, and to be his pawn in the echo. Whoever it is, every time they kill, every time their followers kill, it will trickle power upward. Edmund can just lean back and get fed.”

  “The afterlife as a pyramid scheme.” Claire shook her head. “After all of this. After chasing Simon Tucks through life and death. We didn’t really accomplish much.”

  “That’s like saying there’s no point in catching Ted Bundy because John Wayne Gacy also existed.”

  “Back when I was an FBI agent I would have agreed with you,” she said. “But now we know different. Simon Tucks was a sad little man, but he wouldn’t have, couldn’t have done it himself. Edmund rode him like a horse. And from what Isabella said, the same was probably true of Bundy and Gacy.”

  “What I wonder,” Brody said, “what if the same was true of Hitler?”

  “Jesus.”

  He knew what they were doing. Their conversations tended to be icebergs, the part above the surface only a small piece of the whole.

  On one hand, what they were not quite talking about was crazy. Ludicrous. Maybe even impossible.

  On the other, how many atrocities had Edmund orchestrated? How much darkness had this dead man birthed into the living world?

  “White blood cells,” she said. “You once said that’s what cops are. Something harmful gets in the body, our job is to take it out. And I said—”

  “That you’d rather cure the disease. I remember.”

  “Well, Simon Tucks was a symptom. Edmund is the disease.”

  “Yeah, but . . .” Brody had a flash of the thing that had come for him after his suicide. A moving mountain with gaping jaws. An impossible predator that blotted out the sky. He shivered involuntarily. “Five hundred years he’s been accruing power. Like, literally since the Middle Ages. I don’t think he’s even a man anymore.”

  “Sweet,” she said. “So how do we kill him?”

  He blew a breath. “Yeah.”

  They sat in silence for a moment. Brody found himself thinking about Isabella, in her fortress in the sky. Hundreds of years old, weakened by her battle with Edmund, and yet still so drenched in power it felt like he could have gotten a sunburn just by standing too close to her. She’d seen people as nothing but food. A resource to be harvested. Never mind that they had lives and dreams and children. To her, that had been beneath consideration. People had been beneath consideration.

  “He won’t be expecting us to come for him.”

  “Why not?”

  “Edmund and the others like him don’t think of themselves as us. They’ve been at the top of the food chain for centuries. And the top of the food chain isn’t really in the food chain anymore.”

  “That’s a Louis C.K. bit, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” he acknowledged. “But he’s right. Everyone talks about people as the top of the food chain, but really we’re outside of it. We don’t consider the creatures below us active threats.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Every time I go in the ocean, I think about sharks. I know it’s stupid, but I do.”

  “That’s because splashing around in the ocean, you aren’t at the top of the food chain. But how often do you lock your condo door, crawl into bed, and worry about bears?”

  “Never.”

  “So that’s something.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe he won’t think we’re a threat because we’re not.”

  “We’ve got the totem. It’s part of him. I’m pretty sure it will let us find him. And maybe more.”

  “It’s just a small piece of his power though, right? From what you’ve said about these elder things, they’ve raised paranoia to an art form. Would he have made it strong enough to destroy him?”

  Brody shook his head. “No chance.”

  “So then how do we do it?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. Paused. “Yet.”

  She smiled. “Like my dad and his sailboat.”

  “Yeah.” He rubbed at his chin. Three-day scruff rubbed back. “I wish I’d known you then. Eleven years old and helping your dad fix a boat he didn’t know how to sail.”

  “You probably wouldn’t have liked me. I was skinny, had braces. Used big words. Finished my homework right after school. I didn’t have a lot of friends.”

  “I’d have liked you.”

  Her pinkie squeezed his. She stared down at the battered wooden counter. “You know what I wish? I wish . . .”

  “What?”

  “I wish that someone else had gone into that church.” She looked up, her lips twisted. “I know that would have meant more innocent people dying. But . . .” She shrugged. “We’d just gotten started.”

  He imagined it. The other path.

  If he hadn’t died, she wouldn’t have dreamed the face of his killer, and she wouldn’t have died either. Sooner or later, though, Simon Tucks would have been caught. He’d have screwed up, or imploded under the pressure, and they or someone like them would have caught him.

  And a surprisingly short period of time later the city would have forgotten about being under siege. Life would have returned to normal.

  By December he’d have left the FBI and bought her a ring.

  He could see them, hand in hand, walking streets soft with snow and lit by Christmas lights. Speaking without words. Planning the life to come.

  Music on the stereo while they painted a new place, her elbow streaked with blue.

  Lazy weekend mornings, something braising in the oven, the couch their universe, constellations of novels and the Sunday New York Times.

  Her promotions, his new job. Working late and waiting up for one another. Living room passion and midnight feasts.

  Seasons and haircuts and presidents changing. Discussions and decisions.

  Making love to make a child, the intensity that must bring, the way their eyes would be locked in wonder at this thing they were doing.

  The surreal swelling of her belly, skin straining like it might tear, the bump of a tiny foot moving beneath.

  Playgrounds and patched knees. Midnight emergency room visits. Cartoon-themed birthday parties with sheet cake and balloons. The ache of standing over a single bed, watching a child sleep, knowing that someday that child would have a life of their own, that they would leave and never truly return.

  Dinner parties and crying jags, terrorist attacks and sitcom marathons.

  Lonely 3:00 a.m. insomnia.

  Parents dying. Coming face-to-face with the relentless rhythm of life, how the children their grandparents had watched sleep were now gone. How one day their child would think the same of them.

  Grey creeping into hair, pounds thickening around the waistlines. Politics and fights, couch sleeping, making up. High school graduation and college-bound boxes. Earlier bedtimes and questions about meaning. Thanksgivings and Christmases and holding each other in the night while storms raged outside.

  Perhaps someday a sailboat rebuilt together, and a cruise that never ended.

  All of it spent as normal people, unaware that the world they saw was only a layer in a larger whole. The brightest layer, the base of all that came
after, but just a fragment nonetheless. Existence wasn’t a painting, one clear vision laid over clean canvas. It was a palimpsest, meaning layered over meaning, each forever changing the shades and tone of original intent.

  “We don’t have to,” she said.

  Brody blinked. “What?”

  “We’d be safe here. And we could do a lot of good.”

  “Do you want to stay?”

  She twisted a lock of hair, slipped the coil between her lips. “Do you?”

  Hell yes. He’d already made the choice between being alive without her and dead together. Doing what they were not quite talking about risked everything they had managed to salvage. If it was even possible.

  Really? You’re going to let dying a couple of times keep you from being yourself?

  There was a chance to end a monster. They had the totem, and they had each other. That combination might be the greatest threat Edmund had faced in five centuries.

  True, he was only one of a host of monsters. But he was their monster. They couldn’t end predation, but maybe they could end a predator. It was like cancer. You never beat cancer—you just beat it back. But that could make all the difference. Who knew how many people they might save, how much horror it might prevent.

  “If you had known you might die if you visited Simon Tucks,” he said slowly, “would you have?”

  “If I’d known, I’d have brought a SWAT team.” She shrugged ruefully. “But that’s not what you’re asking. What about you? Would you have gone into the church, if you’d known there was a chance you wouldn’t make it out?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there was a chance to save people too.”

  She nodded. “Exactly.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go kill a god.”

  FORTY-SIX

  One more night.

  They’d talked longer, pacing the restaurant, kicking around notions. It was Claire who broke it, of course. Claire who figured out the answer, or at least the best answer they’d been able to think of so far. By that point they were amped up, and tempted to just go, to hold hands and step off the precipice. But they agreed it was better to be well rested.