AFTERLIFE

by Marcus Sakey

  It was early yet, and not many people were up. A woman sat reading The New York Times. DeAndre and Patricia lay on a couch, her sleeping body covering him like a blanket. DeAndre had been awake, stroking her hair, and when Brody had winked at him, the teenager had managed to look at once sheepish and triumphant. The never-ending poker game at the sentry station continued, but no one questioned them as they walked past.

  They stood on the other side of the river, a block from the Langham. Across the river stood the Marina Towers, what everyone called the corncob buildings. Brody flashed on an old Steve McQueen movie, a car chase that culminated in the King of Cool sending the bad guy’s Pontiac hurtling off the building to plummet seventeen floors into the river. The water looked cold in the morning light.

  Claire said, “What do you mean, not moving?”

  “When we died, we woke up where we had been, right? That’s because all the worlds, from life on up, are layers. Once you put that thing on, you’ll have the power to shift us between them.”

  “So I just concentrate on one?”

  “The trickiest part was making myself imagine it that way. Once I did, I could see a bunch of layers at the same time. Like a stack of photographs.” He paused. “You know, maybe I should—”

  Claire flashed him a look that could have cut steel, then pulled the necklace from her pocket. “What’s it feel like?”

  “Getting electrocuted.”

  “Thanks for that.”

  He shrugged.

  With a rueful expression, she lifted the knotted leather cord over her head.

  The world tilted. Brody snatched for the railing. It was the same stomach-seizing vertigo of a new arrival, only a hundred times stronger. Claire was rigid, her arms out and head thrown back, lips peeled back from her teeth. Every muscle of her body seemed to be clenching at the same time. Across the bridge, the sentries had come alert, clutching weapons and leaping to their feet. In the hotel, curtains were yanked aside, revealing startled faces.

  Slowly, slowly, she relaxed. “Oh my god.”

  “You alright?”

  She nodded uncertainly. Held out a hand, and he took it, their fingers lacing. Her grip was strong, the skin rough.

  “Okay,” he said. “Now try to—”

  With a rippling sensation, everything changed. They stood in the same spot, but the world had shifted around them. The clouds were low and black. Wind knifed down the street. The buildings looked worn and battered, as if abandoned to twenty years of rain. Much of the glass was broken. All the people were gone.

  “. . . do that,” he said. He looked around. “Jesus. You jumped us further on your first try than I was doing by the end.”

  “This is amazing,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for this my whole life.”

  “Okay, that’s creepy.”

  “You know what I mean. It’s thought made reality. I can see so many things overlapping.” She turned to him. “Can you?”

  “No.”

  “What if you touch the totem?”

  He tried it. There was a tingle like static electricity, but nothing compared to the energy that had filled and buoyed him. “No. Built for one, apparently.”

  Claire moved her jaw side to side, rubbed at the joint. She looked around. “No one came. None of the elders.”

  “Traveling doesn’t do it. The one I saw came after I’d messed around, blown up that building. I think the energy caught his attention. Like striking a match in a dark room.” Brody stepped away, glanced around. There was a barge on the river, a flatbed piled with gravel. “You’ll need to get the hang of it. Try to tip that over.”

  When he turned back, he saw that she wasn’t looking where he’d pointed.

  Her eyes were closed and her hands were out, palm up. A halogen smear of light bloomed in each, spinning energy that was hard to focus on.

  “Claire?”

  The orbs of light in her hands were like miniature suns, twisting with heat. He couldn’t look at them, and he couldn’t look away.

  “Claire?”

  With a cry, she opened her eyes and flung her arms forward. White streaks blurred across the river, missiles bright as noon, casting everything into weird relief. The orbs slammed into the corncob buildings with a sound like artillery firing.

  The explosions started at the bottom, a blast of fire that drove concrete and metal in front of it. Another and another and another followed quickly, each higher, rings of flame and smoke chasing each other up sixty stories. The buildings trembled, listing slightly, and then the balconies began to fold inward. Thick smoke rushed outward in billows. There was a roar, and the scream of metal bent to breaking, and then buildings began to collapse. First one and then the other, a hypnotic inward and downward fall, each floor hammering into the one beneath it. The ground trampolined, and the river erupted as five-ton chunks of concrete smashed into it. A cloud of dust raced toward them.

  Brody tore his eyes away to stare at Claire. She was smiling. “What?”

  “So much for starting slow.”

  “We wanted to call the sharks, right?”

  Yesterday, pacing the restaurant, he’d described the creature he’d seen, the elder. How massive and impossibly powerful it was. How he’d felt like a man in an ocean churning with sharks.

  “That’s it,” she’d said. “That’s how we beat him.”

  “I don’t know. From what Isabella said, they’re constantly circling each other, never letting down their guard. But I don’t think they fight much. Any battle would leave them prey for another.”

  “And sharks don’t usually attack one another . . . unless one is bleeding. Then the others will tear it apart.”

  It had hit him like a slap. “We don’t have to beat him. We just have to lure the others nearby—”

  “And make Edmund bleed.”

  The first step was simple enough. The second they’d have to figure out. Hopefully with the benefit of surprise, and by using his own power against him, they could wound him enough. Spill blood in the existential water, so that other predators finished the job. Then escape in the midst of the feeding frenzy.

  It had sounded good. But now his hands shook and his armpits swamped up.

  Because it had worked. They were coming.

  Seeing one had been bad enough. A man turned monster, an embodiment of raw predatory power. Brody’s mind had struggled to even perceive the thing, to focus on it, seeing at one moment a moving mountain with gaping jaws, and in another a savage rider beating his horse past death. As the thing had moved, the world had fallen to ruin behind it, a streak of smoking devastation that swallowed the clouds.

  Now, as Brody looked around, he didn’t see one.

  He saw a dozen.

  From every direction they came. Rings of teeth and bleeding gums, hurtling balls of black force. The whole city trembled as they tore through it, buildings canting and streets erupting. The air reeked of scorched metal and burning chemicals. It sounded like an earthquake, like tectonic plates of rock grinding and shearing.

  Claire wore a look of pure animal joy. She seemed lifted up by light, swept up in power. She yelled, “It’s working!” her voice barely audible.

  The beasts were coming. Converging on them from all directions. Tearing this fragile echo apart.

  Then something occurred to him. An obvious flaw they should have thought of. “We have to go. Now!”

  She turned, confusion in her eyes. “What’s the rush? You said the totem kept you safe. That they couldn’t harm the person . . .” Suddenly she got it. “Oh. Oh no.”

  Claire thrust out her hand, and he grabbed it. With her other hand she gripped the totem. She closed her eyes.

  Blasts of concussive sound buffeted them from all directions. The world shuddered. Brody squeezed her hand, whirled around. They were coming, these devourers of souls and destroyers of worlds. The river vibrated like a tuning fork. Clouds swirled and sucked inward, tornadoes touching down in every direction. Something black and shifting s
lammed through the State Street drawbridge, snapping it like a screen door torn off the hinges. The barge he’d seen lifted from the water and spun over their heads like a thrown playing card. He could see the thick algae on the bottom, and the massive anchor trailing a lash of spray. It careened into the high-rise behind them, which began to lean, the upper stories tearing away in a rain of stone. He couldn’t hear he couldn’t breathe he couldn’t move and there was death coming from every direction—

  “Claire!”

  FORTY-NINE

  She had been made of light and fire. When the Marina Towers collapsed the way she’d imagined, a controlled demolition and a rain of stone, she had been filled with a physical joy of such intensity it was almost painful.

  Now, as other, older beasts swept in, she realized how small she was. Whatever power Edmund had put in the totem, it was only a fraction of himself.

  The ones coming were his equals.

  And while she might be protected, they’d tear Brody apart.

  She snatched up his hand, wet against her palm, and closed her eyes. Around her, the world was shaken like a rat in a tiger’s mouth. She tightened her other hand against the finger bones, smooth and warm.

  When Brody had come for her, he had been heading for the last, darkest place. The plains of shadow. But that wouldn’t work for them, wouldn’t protect them. And it wasn’t their goal, anyway.

  They had spilled blood in the water and summoned the sharks. Now they had to bring them to Edmund.

  This is not jewelry.

  It is not a magic necklace.

  It is Edmund. His finger, sawn off by his own will. His power.

  The world bounced and shook. She heard Brody shout her name, but didn’t dare open her eyes. Not yet.

  The trick is not to think of it as moving.

  They weren’t looking for a place.

  They were looking for a man. A man who had become an idea that bent the world around him. She concentrated on the totem. Felt a presence in her mind, like something peering over her shoulder. Grasped at it, focused on it, and on the bones in her hand. The roaring grew louder, her ears ringing, dust whipping her skin like sandpaper.

  “Claire, now!”

  She focused all her will on the totem. Let it take the wheel while she put a foot on the gas.

  Ahead of her she could sense something, a cyclone of furious light and a million rabid mouths racing at them, yards then feet then inches away and she screamed and pushed—

  And everything went silent.

  She opened her eyes.

  The city was gone. The river. The buildings. The funnel clouds and monsters.

  Brody gasped and panted and gripped her hand so hard her joints ached.

  They were . . . somewhere else.

  A room, of sorts, only without walls or ceiling or boundaries. A platform floating in nothing. Around them empty space hung with shining stars. Infinite and twinkling, every constellation in the night sky.

  There was a bed, an antique four-poster baroquely carved and draped with silks. In the bed lay an attractive older woman with hair of purest white. Her eyes were closed and her chest rose and fell. Kneeling on the bed beside her was a teenaged boy with long hair. His hands were poised above her throat, as though about to strangle her.

  Brody said, “Are you okay?”

  She turned to him. “Are you?”

  He nodded. All around was silence, and the twinkling of stars. “This . . . is not Chicago.” Then his eyes fixed on the woman. “Isabella.”

  “Who?” Then she remembered. The elder Will had met. The one who had offered to trade her life for the totem. “Then is that—”

  Brody nodded. “Edmund. I saw him in the dream Isabella sent me, and again when I killed Simon Tucks.”

  “It can’t be this easy.”

  “Easy?”

  “No, listen. I did what I did before, what you did, when we traveled. But instead of looking for an echo, I focused on the totem. I let it drive. So this is . . .” She shrugged.

  Brody nodded slowly. “This is the moment before he betrayed her. They were lovers, partners, for a long time. Decades. Then he turned on her.”

  A ripping crack like a lightning strike. Claire whirled.

  Behind them, a shape her mind couldn’t process blotted out the stars. Moving. Coming for them.

  Another lash of sound, and then another presence, and another.

  “It’s working,” Brody said. “They’re following us. But how do we make him bleed? Should I just . . .” He hefted the baseball bat.

  “No,” she said. “This isn’t him. There’s more.”

  “More?”

  A wind whipped up, a wind that came from no place but the stars. Cold and mean. Claire said, “Like how when you came for me, you kept going until there weren’t any more worlds. There’s more.”

  He nodded, looked around. “Then maybe we should . . .”

  But she was already concentrating.

  The stars blinked out. The bed hung in nothingness, two ancient predators in the sky. Again she matched her desire to the totem’s identity.

  They were back in the world. Outdoors. The air was soupy and vegetal with the smell of growing things. There was a river, but not the Chicago River. This one was wide and brown. They were on the outskirts of a city of ornate low buildings. Whitewash and cast-iron railings, thick trees draped with Spanish moss.

  A ghostly woman knelt in the water. She was pale and translucent, the world visible through her. Her face was dirty and her cheeks were stained with tears and she held something under the river’s surface.

  Beside her stood Edmund. He was smiling. A good-looking teenager, a little thin but strong, smiling like he’d gotten the birthday present he’d been dreaming of. In his arms he held a baby.

  “This looks like New Orleans.” Brody turned a slow circle without releasing her hand. “Sort of.”

  “A long time ago, I think.” Claire stared at Edmund. He was breathing, but not moving. Like a figure in a tableau, or an actor playing freeze.

  Brody walked over to them, peered into the water. For a moment he stared, confused, and then he recoiled, one hand clutched to his mouth.

  “What is it?”

  “She’s . . . the woman . . . she’s drowning a . . .” He looked at Edmund, at the baby in his hands, face twisted up in a silent squall. “He must have ridden her like he rode Simon, and convinced her to drown her son.”

  “These aren’t echoes,” Claire said. “They’re memories. The moments that made him.”

  The river began to ripple and shake. Brody said, “They’re coming. Keep going.”

  Claire had gotten the hang of it now. It was a matter of at once relaxing and concentrating. Like yoga, remaining calm while also engaging her muscles. She provided the impetus, and the totem provided the destination.

  Without moving, they went through place after place. Around them the world changed as they journeyed deeper into Edmund’s self. Each place a memory, some vital component of his being.

  Each a nightmare.

  An African American man, six feet tall and muscular. His back a mass of gore, like he had been whipped to death. Edmund held him in the air by his throat. At his feet, indolent as if recently fed, lay a lion, a huge male with a full mane.

  Next they stood on a plateau dotted with twisted trees. They were squat, ugly things, all bent in one direction as if by wind that never ceased. A Native American in full war regalia sat atop a horse. The man’s face was lean and hard, painted with streaks of grease. His eyes sparked red, and Edmund recoiled from him, hands up. He looked frightened.

  Then came a primitive village of thatched huts, domes that stood beneath a clouded sky. In the doorway of one of the huts lay a man’s body, a knife in his chest. Thirty feet away a woman was pinned to the ground. Her head was tipped back in pain. Edmund lay astride her, his legs scissoring hers open.

  Claire couldn’t take her eyes off the woman’s face.

  She was starin
g sideways. Looking at the dead man, Claire realized. Her husband? If so, Edmund had killed him and then raped her in sight of his corpse.

  It was one thing to know, intellectually, that he was a monster. She’d had more than enough motivation to hate Edmund just based on Simon Tucks. The innocent lives stolen, nurses and cab drivers and marketing executives. A young girl shot in front of her father. And then the damage Tucks had done in the echo, the woman burned alive, the forty-three good people who had died buying them time to kill him.

  It wasn’t that moving through Edmund’s memories made her hate him more. It was that it gave her a fuller context. The wide-angle lens to just how much damage he had done. The savagery and horror he had spread across the centuries.

  The ground began to tremble. Brody said, “They’re still with us.”

  She forced herself to look away. Took a deep breath. Let it out, took another.

  For the first time, though, shifting didn’t come easily. The process was the same, and she could sense the destination ahead of her. But as she pushed for it, something pushed back. Before, it had been like stepping through curtains. This time it was a wall.

  It’s the last one, she realized. Beyond this was Edmund himself. The real one, not the avatars of his memories.

  The totem grew hot in her hand. Her animal brain screamed to let go, but instead she gripped tighter and looked at the woman on the ground. Violated near the body of her husband. Had she prayed for help? Had she screamed to the universe, begging for someone, anyone, to kill this monster?

  I’m sorry we were too late to save you. But we can avenge you.

  Do you hear me, Edmund? We’re coming to end you.

  There was a sudden yielding, and a sensation of falling. She staggered.

  Heat lashed her skin. Claire squinted against brilliant light. Cobalt blue and burning white.

  Blue sky, and white sun.

  My god. The sun.

  Claire stared upward, let the light warm her face. She’d almost forgotten what blue looked like. The sky was perfect, unmarred horizon to horizon. The world bobbed around them.

  It was the ocean.

  They stood on the deck of an old wooden ship. It had been badly damaged, the masts just jagged splinters, the rigging in tatters. The ship heeled drunkenly. Though much of it was underwater, it didn’t seem to be sinking. Water lapped at the side, soft and susurrant.