AFTERLIFE

by Marcus Sakey

  Beyond there was nothing but blue. The feverish sky and the chilling navy of deep ocean. Waves slid and rolled, making the ship bob and surf. Sunlight—sunlight!—sparkled like diamonds on the crests.

  In each previous reality they’d visited, they’d arrived near Edmund. Spectators at a grotesque tableau. This was the last place, she could feel it.

  But they were alone. Marooned on a broken ship in the middle of an ocean under a blast furnace sky.

  “I know where we are,” Brody said.

  FIFTY

  A broken ship on an endless ocean. A boy, chewing smoked meat.

  “Edmund was a sailor,” Brody said, “on a ship called Persephone. There was a storm. When they ran out of food, they ate the dead. When they ran out of bodies, Edmund started killing.”

  He knelt down, touched the wooden deck. The boards were smooth and tightly fitted. His shadow was drawn in sharp relief. The sun made everything so real. Somehow the fact that the echo existed in clouds and shadow had kept it from ever feeling whole. “I wonder if it drove him mad, or if he already was when he got on the boat.”

  Claire said, “Where is he?”

  Brody straightened, looked around. The ship was low in the water, the aft section dipping under the waves. “You’re sure this is the last memory?”

  “Never done this before.” Claire shrugged. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure.”

  Brody understood what she meant. He’d used the totem himself, knew that like everything else here, it came without instructions. But Claire had picked it up far faster than he had, and with far greater effect. If she said they were at the end, that’s where they were.

  Yet Edmund was nowhere to be seen, and their plan, sketchy as it was, depended on finding him. They had to face him. Was he hiding, somehow? Perhaps he’d sensed them coming, and chosen not to fight.

  No. Frightened people hide. Five-hundred-year-old apex predators do not. He should be waiting right here . . .

  Wait a minute. “Maybe we’ve been thinking of it wrong. We’ve been picturing finding Edmund. But maybe he’s beyond ‘where.’”

  “Explain.”

  “Think about it. Where are we? One version of me is in a coffin. Another is on the couch in my loft with the back of my head blown off. And yet here we are, standing on the deck of a ship.” Brody watched a seagull drift on thermals. “‘Where’ is starting to seem like a bit of a meaningless concept.”

  “I see your point.” Claire sucked her lip between her teeth. The sun beat down. “We’ve been moving through his memories, formative experiences made physical. This is the end of that chain. But it’s basically the first memory. The primary one. For all intents, Edmund was born on this ship. The handful of years he was alive don’t mean anything. This is where he became what he is.” She paused. “I don’t think we’re in the echo. I think we’re in Edmund.”

  Jesus. It was a hideous idea, but it fit. On the way here, they’d been too busy running to think. But she was right. When he journeyed to the plains of shadow, he’d stayed in the same physical location. The world had faded around him, but he hadn’t moved. But with each shift here, they’d been to different places. On the banks of the Mississippi. On a wind-blasted tundra, facing a man whose eyes glowed red. Even in an impossible room hanging in the sky. “The totem is Edmund, part of him, at least. So when we followed it, it brought us into . . . what? His psyche?”

  “Maybe,” Claire said. “The elders are all about power and will, right? Maybe after hundreds of years of living that way, their will becomes their world. They live inside it.”

  Brody thought of the monstrous shapes that had pursued them, the moving mountains and many-mouthed hurricanes. Predators that traversed worlds and toppled buildings in their wake. “I guess it was silly to imagine him chilling with his feet up. Okay. We came looking for Edmund. And we found him. This is his heart.” He tapped the baseball bat against the deck of the ship. “So then all we have to do—”

  Claire grinned savagely. “Is tear this world apart.”

  FIFTY-ONE

  She had never been a plate thrower. Never punched a mirror, or hurled a glass at the wall.

  In fact, before today, Claire couldn’t remember a moment that she had consciously smashed something. It just wasn’t her nature. The closest she could think of was the private joy she’d always felt on snowy days, when she would come upon a parking lot or a playground covered in pure and unbroken white. How there had been a delight in stomping across it, feeling the crust snap beneath her feet, the flurry of snow as she kicked. It was the chance to destroy something beautiful without any guilt.

  But blowing up the Marina Towers had been fun.

  It had happened just how she’d imagined. She’d pictured a video of a skyscraper in a controlled demolition. How charges had been set throughout the building, impeccably timed, mathematically calculated. How floor after floor had blown, the backbone of the building shattered so precisely that the thing collapsed in on itself. Countless tons of cement seeming to hang for a moment before succumbing to gravity. The flash of light and the roar of force and the flashing billows of smoke.

  She’d pictured that, held it center of her mind’s eye, then conjured pure energy in her palms and unleashed it. It had been a rush unlike anything she’d ever known. A joy like the fraction of a second before orgasm when she knew it was about to happen.

  Yes. But it nearly killed Will.

  He’d been unprotected. The totem that had shielded her had left him standing alone.

  “It’s okay,” he said, as if reading her mind. “Do it.”

  Could she? Could she sacrifice this man like a chess piece, just to win? Of course not.

  But on the heels of that thought came another. Everywhere else, the totem had been an extension of Edmund’s strength. It had drawn on the energy he had collected. Something she could tap into across a distance.

  If they were right, then there was no distance now.

  “Try something,” she said. “Hold the totem again.”

  “We tried that—”

  “We tried it out there. Now we’re in Edmund’s heart. This is where his power comes from.”

  Brody shrugged. Stepped forward and put a hand to her chest to cover the necklace.

  They both gasped.

  She flashed on last night, the way the two of them had made love slowly. Teasing, easing, moving so gently that it was hard to tell where one began and the other ended. It was like that, but instead of their bodies, it was their minds. Their spirits, or souls, whatever name one wanted to put to it.

  It was them. The essence of them. Not her, not him. Them.

  It had often felt, even back when they were alive, like the connection they shared was deeper than just attraction and conversation. Deeper than like minds. It had felt like they had known each other for years. For lifetimes.

  And maybe, she thought, we have.

  They stared at one another, adrift on a broken ship in the imagination of a beast. Locked in communication—communion—unlike any she’d dreamed of. She could feel his strength flow into her. Feel him put his back to her burden. Together, what couldn’t they do?

  “Do it,” he said. “Just like with the buildings. A controlled demolition. Snap his spine and bring him down.”

  Claire took a deep breath, and remembered.

  Remembered every victim of the sniper, nurses and cab drivers and parents. Living human beings reduced to data in her files. She could picture their autopsy photos, rattle off every birthday.

  Remembered standing over the torn body of Will Brody on a metal table. Remembered a woman whose name she’d never known screaming as she burned in the heart of an inferno. Remembered a slave whipped to death three hundred years ago, reborn only to die again. Remembered a woman pinned to the ground and raped while the body of her husband lay feet away.

  She remembered it all, every face, every horror. Focused on them, felt them. Channeled them, imagining a beam of white light tearing the heavens.
Imagining blue sky shredding and peeling, the seas boiling, the world collapsing in on itself. Tumbling down just like the Marina Towers.

  When she had it, when she could see it in every detail, she set it free.

  It lashed out, perfect and sharp, a brilliant beam hurtling upward like a spotlight. Crackling with electricity and smelling of rain. Ten feet across and built of blameless fury. Like a spear that punctured the sky.

  We’re coming for you, Edmund.

  It was the most intimate thing he’d ever experienced.

  Standing in front of her, his hand pressed to her chest, to the necklace of bones but also to the warm flesh below. He could feel her strength, taste her rage. He could see what she was planning as clearly as if it was him visualizing it, and as she did, he poured all he could into it. A tub of melting ice cream on dirty concrete. A rainbow sun born in a dark church. Simon lifting Claire up by her hair. Brody on his knees in the real world, knowing her body lay invisible just feet away. The taste of a gun in his mouth. All the things that should never be allowed to happen. The horrors for which there were no adequate explanations.

  When the spear of light launched outward, the whole world jumped. A shriek rose from everywhere and nowhere at once, directionless, eternal, brutal as a mouthful of broken glass. He was every tiny mortal who had stared in wondering horror at things larger than themselves. A primitive hunter fleeing a snarling forest fire. A man on a beach watching the tsunami sweep in. A child outside Hiroshima seeing a mushroom cloud blossom.

  Because the sky

  was looking

  at them.

  And it was angry.

  His skin tightened and every hair stood at attention in a moment of claustrophobic terror. They were alone on a shattered boat in an endless ocean that only existed in the mind of a monster. And they had woken him.

  Storm clouds coalesced from nowhere. Thick and roiling, blotting out the blue. A sudden gale tugged at his clothing and whipped the waves, gentle swells turning grey and mean, tipped in white.

  The spear of light tore into the heavens, into Edmund, opening a wound, a hole that spread outward, shoving the clouds aside. The edges of the hole rippled with light, expanding, consuming what they touched. Behind the sky was nothing.

  Not blackness. Nothing.

  It’s working.

  Brody could feel Edmund’s shock, his rage. He thrashed like a beast in a pool, and around them the world reflected it. The ship began to roll with the waves. The wind carried spray.

  And a dozen feet away, where the ship met the sea, something thrust out of the water.

  A hand, gripping the wooden planking. And then another.

  Something was pulling itself out of the deep.

  Claire was the last straining lift of a long set of weights. The split-second tension of an almost car crash. She was force and potential. The more she used the power, the more she understood it. It was the collected promise of thousands of lives. It was pure creation, raw force that she could focus however she wished. She could have used it to build worlds, to shape cities.

  She used it to kill its master.

  Where the beam hit the sky, the abyss opened in an expanding circle. First it was the width of the spear, but quickly it was devouring the sky, feeding on it, spreading to cover half of the heavens.

  And between sky and nothing, she could see motion. Predatory ripples and the flash of teeth. The others like Edmund. The elders. Beasts that cared nothing for life or love or one another.

  That cared only for hunger. That had come to feed on one of their own.

  It was working.

  Until Brody let go of her.

  Brody stared at the hands on the edge of the deck. Feeling the shiver of lifting a rock and seeing the squirming life beneath, the blind and crawling things that do not know daylight.

  A dead man pulled himself out of the ocean.

  His skin hung in ribbons. Seaweed stuck to a scalp grown patchy and rotten. The rags he wore were old and faded. His face was a horror of fish-eaten flesh.

  The corpse hauled itself aboard. Its empty eye sockets turned to face them.

  Behind it, more hands rose. Dozens. Hundreds. Creatures pulling themselves from the depth of Edmund’s psyche. The souls that he had taken across the centuries. The stories he had consumed. Some part of them lived inside him now—and they obeyed.

  Brody looked at Claire. She was rigid, every muscle and thought engaged in attack. He could feel her savage concentration. She was focusing on every horror they had seen, every atrocity Edmund was responsible for, and directing all of it back at him. A blast of righteous ferocity driven like a wedge to split the sky.

  In the abyss above he could see the others circling. Probing at the edges of the hole, making the clouds ripple like claws scraping canvas. The elders were almost in. When they slithered into Edmund’s secret heart, they would tear him apart.

  But they weren’t in yet. And if those dead things reached Claire, it would all be for nothing. Maybe they could hurt her, maybe not, but at the very least they would distract her, split her focus.

  Brody let go of the totem and hefted the baseball bat.

  Four quick steps across the pitching deck brought him in range of the dead sailor. It had no eyes, but it swiveled to face him nonetheless, hissing and lunging.

  Brody swung, and the bat met the thing’s skull with shattering force. He didn’t wait, just spun and swung the other direction, this time into the dead thing’s chest, feeling ribs crack like kindling. It toppled into the sea with a splash.

  Others took its place.

  Brody tuned out everything else. Tuned out the rolling seas and the hole in the sky. There was nothing but the fight. Nothing but the baseball bat in his hand and the muscles of his body. Striking, dodging, shoving. Weaving patterns of whistling aluminum.

  A spin, a plant, a swing. The crack of bone, the spatter of blood and seawater. A woman missing half of her head lunged at him. Her fingernails, ragged and filthy, tore into his cheek. He head-butted her backward, then swung. The force of his blow lifted her off her feet.

  Panting, he took a moment to look around.

  Corpses rose on every side. Skeletal hands gripped every edge of the boat. Hundreds of dead. The souls Edmund had taken into himself across centuries.

  And beyond them, the sea was churned to froth with others.

  She wanted to yell to him, to scream, to tell him to return to the safety of the totem. But it took all of her energy to maintain the attack. All she could do was watch, out of the periphery of her consciousness, as he faced the horrors Edmund had dragged up from the deep.

  Brody took one down with ease, then a second. A vicious blow knocked a third into two that came behind it.

  The corpses were slow and weak, almost hesitant. As though unwilling, or imperfectly understood. Despite their numbers, Brody was managing to hold them back.

  Then why would Edmund send them?

  The answer was obvious. She felt it coming. There was the reek of ozone, but it wasn’t that. She could sense it. Knew that the corpses were a distraction to separate them, and to mask the real attack. There was no time to think, to weigh consequences.

  As lightning ripped downward, Claire flung herself in front of Brody.

  The death meant for him instead lashed her.

  A billion volts of electricity. Her body rang like a steel plate hit by a bullet. The totem crackled against her chest, searing so hot that her flesh blackened and peeled. Conscious thought scattered like papers in a hurricane. There was nothing but pain. She hung in a state of perfect agony like a martyr of old. Pure white wiped away the world. Her fingers seized and joints sparked and lips spasmed.

  But the scream came from something else.

  FIFTY-TWO

  A rip of thunder knocked Brody off his feet. He was swept up in white. Lived inside the pure brilliance of the lightning.

  There was a scream Brody could sense more than hear. Sandpaper stroking a bare nerve.

/>   Then it was gone, the electricity and the scream and the blinding white.

  The dead men and the circling monsters.

  The ship, and the sky, and the sea.

  Brody was in a white room. He blinked, tried to focus. The walls were white, the floor polished hardwood.

  “Will?”

  He whirled. Claire stood on the other side of a low coffee table. There was a comfortable-looking couch behind her, grey fabric with yellow throw pillows. Above it was an open window. Trees swayed in the breeze, their leaves whispering.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” Claire said. “He was trying to separate us. Get you away from the totem.”

  “The lightning,” Brody said. “I felt it hit you. Hit us.”

  “I tried to block it,” she said. She stared around the living room. “Where are we?”

  “I don’t know.” The room was airy and bright. He didn’t recognize it, but he liked it. There was a fireplace framed in painted bricks, and candles along a side table. An abstract painting on one wall, a riot of colors. Sunlight through the windowpane caught dust motes dancing in the air. “Maybe the lightning killed us. All the way this time.”

  “I don’t think so,” Claire said. “I think maybe he sent us somewhere. Sidelined us.”

  Brody squeezed the handle of the baseball bat, glad to still have it. He felt like a man about to wake from a dream, that sense that he was in two places at once, and believing in both of them. “Let’s see if we can find him.”

  Claire nodded. Her fingers were on the totem, rubbing it gently. Brody led the way, bat at the ready.

  A sliding glass door was open to a small but pleasant backyard. There was a patio set and a barbecue grill. A hammock slung between two trees. The ground was carpeted in red and yellow, and a neighbor must have been burning leaves, filling the air with a campfire scent.