AfterLife

by S. P. Cloward

  A group of people boarded the truck and lifted Wes onto a stretcher. Seeing only what was above him, Wes watched a concrete ceiling pass as they wheeled his body through a doorway and down another corridor before he was finally lifted off the stretcher and placed onto a table. A young woman with curly red hair leaned over Wes and looked at him with soft hazel eyes. Her hair was pulled back into a short ponytail. She smiled.

  “You must be Wes,” she said as her eyes passed back and forth over his face. She looked down at his left arm where his hand was missing and then up to Meri and Jordan who had followed Wes’s body into the room. “Did we get his hand?”

  “Yes, we got it,” Jordan said.

  “Good.” The woman with the red hair looked back down at Wes. “You’re going to need a lot of work, but I think you’ll be just fine. Lucky you kept your body in good condition while you were alive.” She gave Wes a reassuring smile. She aligned her face with Wes’s, her eyes right over his, and placed her hands on either side of his head. “Wes, I need you to focus on my eyes. Stare right into them as if you’re looking through them.”

  Wes looked at the woman’s eyes and for the first time in days, everything disappeared.

  Chapter 4

  It began with a feeling of being lifted out of his body. It was the first sense of motion he remembered experiencing since his death. The woman with the red hair picked him up with her glance and he entered her eyes. He found himself walking forward though darkness; the surroundings harbored an ambiance of nothingness. The black void gradually faded as he advanced until he was walking along a beach. It was night; the white sand reflected the light of a full moon shining directly above his head. In the distance there was a long pier that stretched out over the water, its lights mirrored in the surf below.

  Wes stopped and looked at his surroundings. The waves that washed up onto the beach were small and in the shallow water there were thousands of bioluminescent fish of all colors and patterns flitting back and forth in the tide. He found a place on the sand and sat down to watch the fish.

  “What do you think?” a voice questioned. “It’s one of my favorite places to visit.” Wes looked up and saw the red-headed woman approaching from the direction of the pier. She stopped by Wes’s side. “This will be your waiting room while we prepare your body.”

  “What is this place? Am I separated from my body?” Wes was relieved to hear he could talk.

  “No, you’re still connected to your body. Severing isn’t the topic of conversation today. I would hope it doesn’t come to that, though I…” Her voice trailed off as she mumbled to herself.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Wes stared back toward the fish swimming in the tide. A blue fish was courting a yellow one, their glowing skins brushing back and forth past each other. He wondered if their babies would be green.

  “It’s normal not to understand at first,” she said. “Let’s walk for a bit.”

  Wes stood, and they started walking along the waterline down the beach toward the pier; the soft white sand glistened in the moonlight and the air was still.

  “I haven’t introduced myself yet.” She looked over at him. “I’m Emily.”

  “Nice to meet you Emily,” Wes said.

  “I’m going on 53 years dead. Fifty-three years ago at the age of 22 I drowned right here on this beach. When I woke up, I’d already been collected by AfterLife.”

  “Fifty-three years dead? That’s impossible.” Wes stared, dumbfounded, remembering the image of the girl that pulled him into her eyes. He found it hard to believe she had been a corpse for as long as she claimed.

  “It’s true, even though now it may seem hard to believe. People die every day from ‘natural causes,’ and they don’t become Mortuis. One day, their mind, or soul if you want to call it that, separates from their body and moves on. You can die a second death, which is more than you need to know right now. What you do need to know is that you aren’t a zombie. That would be a misnomer for what you really are. Zombies are bodies without a soul, and such a thing can’t really exist. Your soul still resides in your body; it’s just not a living body as you think of one. We are called Mortuis. Dead bodies still inhabited by a soul.”

  Emily paused as she revisited her past. “After realizing I didn’t survive that day at the beach, it took me a while to come to terms with the fact that I could never see my family again. I was definitely a Daddy’s girl, and I missed my father terribly.” Emily paused. Wes could tell by the way she stared out across the water that there was more she missed than just her father. “With time,” she continued, “AfterLife showed me how to take care of myself, and I learned to live again. AfterLife became my family.”

  “Is that what will happen to me?” Wes looked along the beach in the direction they’d been traveling. The pier still appeared as far away as ever.

  “That depends on what you want. You can become a member of AfterLife if you choose. It’s a good place to be if you want purpose.”

  “Well, do I really have a choice?” Wes wondered about the alternative. What could he do as a dead person?

  “Everyone has a choice. Being human is to have choices, and we’re not here to take that away from you. In spite of what some believe, being Mortui is still being human. I don’t know how religious you are or were before you died, but I think you’ll slowly discover yourself becoming more spiritual now that you’re dead.

  “Don’t worry; you’ll have plenty of time to figure out who you are, and what you want to do. Try to think of this time as a Mortui as bonus time.”

  “I don’t deserve bonus time,” Wes said, kicking at the sand. “I had time and I threw it away when I stupidly thought about killing myself.”

  “You did kill yourself.”

  “I know, so why am I still stuck inside my dead body?”

  “Don’t focus on that so much right now.” Emily’s voice remained calm. “It may seem horrible, being stuck to your body when you know you’re dead, but there are thousands of people just like you.” Emily stopped walking to look into his eyes. “The real question is, how will you deal with it?”

  Wes nodded thoughtfully. His eyes scanned along the horizon where the water seemed to disappear into the sky and then over at the pier that never seemed to get any closer. The only evidence they were moving at all was the footprints they were leaving in the sand.

  “Where are we?” Wes asked again after reassessing their progress down the beach.

  “We’ve soul-synced. I’ve brought you into my mind to entertain you while the others take care of your body. It’s a long process where you lay in tubs of fluid while they rebuild and preserve your body. It can be a lengthy process, and as you’ve discovered anesthesia won’t work for your body anymore.”

  “So I’m in your mind?”

  “Sort of. We’re in a place where both our minds exist. It’s kind of hard to explain. We’re both in control only you don’t realize it yet. You’ve never been able to experience this before. It’s similar to lucid dreaming. Now that you’re dead, you can learn to fully enjoy it.”

  “So, how do I put myself in control?”

  Emily’s face lit up. “I just love soul-syncing with newcomers. I get to teach you all about it. Okay, this beach, that pier, and everything you see was created by my mind. That’s because you didn’t know you could have an influence on these surroundings, but you can if you want. How would you change what you see?”

  “I don’t know. It’s beautiful here.”

  “I know it is. I made it and I don’t make ugly things.” She smiled. “I may have died on this beach, but I’ve always loved it, and I still do. When I was a young girl, I used to walk along it just to enjoy nature and play in the sand. As I got older it was my place of escape. It still is, and I can always visit it in my mind.

  “This is my world, my creation. But since you’re here, you have the ability to influence it if you want. All you have to do is visualize in your mind whatever you want to ad
d to the scene. Is there anything you would change?”

  Wes looked around. What would he change? He wasn’t really a beach person and as far as he could tell this beach was perfect. He glanced at the water with the fish glowing just beneath the surface leaving swirls of colored light in the shallows. Waves might make it harder to see the fish. He thought for a few minutes and then observed the sky. It would be nice to see some shooting stars to wish on, he thought. Wes stared at the sky and waited to see a shooting star. Nothing happened.

  “You have to visualize it,” Emily said, interrupting his thoughts. “Don’t just think about what you want to change. See what you want to change. Oh, don’t tell me either, I want to see if I can guess what you’re doing.”

  Wes stared at the sky and saw a shooting star in his mind. Suddenly, one shot across the sky. Emily was still looking around and missed it so he tried it a second time and added a few more stars.

  “Shooting stars!” Emily lightly rubbed Wes’s arm. “Very good. Use some imagination now. What else can you do with the sky?”

  Wes continued watching the shooting stars he sent streaking across the sky. He began adding color to different stars, and the sky lit up with an array of colored lights. How could he make the scene bigger? Almost as soon as the idea came to him, a giant bioluminescent blue whale breached the surface of the water a few hundred feet off the shore and fell on its side, creating a giant splash. He didn’t know if whales even existed near the beach Emily had created, but he didn’t care. He wanted to see one jump. He looked over at Emily to see if she approved. She smiled back at him giving him the reassurance he needed to continue with something bigger.

  Wes looked out at the sea and in his mind saw the horizon begin to fill with the warming hues of a sunrise’s first rays. The sky gradually filled with warmer colors as the reds, oranges, and yellows grew brighter and pushed the darkness farther and farther away from where the two of them stood. Finally, the sun rose out of the water on the near horizon. He had created his first sunrise.

  “That was gorgeous, Wes,” Emily said softly, touching his arm. “I couldn’t have created a more fantastic sunrise myself. You must truly love and appreciate beautiful things.”

  “Yeah, I guess I do. At least, I’ve always appreciated a good sunrise and sunset.” He thought about some of the sunrises he’d seen over the years. Once on a road trip, while passing though South Dakota, he’d stopped just to watch the sun set over the stretches of grassland on either side of the freeway. Even the one he’d seen the night he died had been beautiful. It had been the last beautiful thing he’d seen. He remembered how bad his vision had become in the few days since his death. In this place where his and Emily’s minds were coexisting he could see fine, but in reality his vision was like looking through a dirty window. “Will I ever be able to really see a sunset again?”

  “Of course you will. That’s one thing you will definitely be able to do. Your vision will be as good as new once your body is processed. Your eyes were probably full of all sorts of crap when you arrived. You don’t produce tears like an antemort. Before we found you, you were dead for a few days, right?” Emily looked up at Wes as he nodded. “That’s normal. You weren’t able to naturally flush out your eyes with tears, and that made your vision worse.

  “I should warn you though, you will notice a lot of differences in the way you experience things now that you’re dead. You’re still connected to your body, but you’ll relate to the world around you differently. You won’t be able to taste, smell, or touch like you used to.” Emily sat down on the sand still watching the sun as it rose. She patted the sand next to her and Wes sat as well. “I’m teaching you calculus without starting with the basics of algebra. There’s a lot to learn and you won’t understand it all right away, but I’ll give you a broad overview to get you started. Once we begin the training process, it will start to click. I promise. Let’s see, we’ll start with something simple.

  “When you’re alive, the mind and body are so intertwined that it’s hard to consider that one might exist without the other. The body needs the mind to live and operate even though, when broken down to its simplest functions, the body is just a machine. It takes in fuel and processes it into energy to operate. A living machine is much more complex than a non-living machine.

  “Your body is now a non-living machine and so its functions will be decreased. You’re still in control of it just as you were when you were alive, but it will be more like moving your body in a virtual reality machine. You can move it around, see what it sees, and hear what it hears but the other senses will be greatly reduced.

  “The rebirth process will help. We are slowly replacing the fluids in your body with ones of our own design. We call them “animal spirits.” They’ll help your body exist for longer periods of time without recharging. We’ll talk about charging and feeding later, but just as any machine needs an energy source to work, so will you. You’re no longer able to make your own energy through metabolism, so you’ll have to get what you need from others.”

  Wes watched Emily talk. He understood the basic concepts she was talking about, but some things didn’t make sense. How did you charge a dead human body? It wasn’t like you could just plug it into a wall socket. He concluded that would be one of the things he’d probably find out sooner rather than later.

  Emily paused in her explanation. She picked up a handful of sand and slowly released it into a small pile in front of her and then brushed off the particles that remained on her hands. “There are some other things you should know about walking dead.” Emily looked Wes in the eyes. “AfterLife isn’t the only group of us out there and not all groups have good motives.”

  She stood up unexpectedly. “Let’s walk a little more.” Wes complied and the two began walking again. After a few minutes, Emily continued. “There are dozens of groups of walking dead in the world, but basically we’re all break-offs from one original group. We actually coexist pretty well since we share such a unique situation. There are about 10,000 known living dead. For the most part, these groups function unnoticed within living society. We’ve also become pretty organized, especially in recent years.

  “The process we use for rebirth was first used in the early nineteenth century in Europe and then traveled to America shortly before the Civil War. Advancements and improvements have been made in the science and the processes, but even with these we have not been able to find a way to completely survive without feeding, or charging as I like to call it, off living humans. We don’t feed in the traditional sense, but what we take from a living body is much worse, in my opinion, than actually eating them. We take time off their life.”

  “How do we do that,” Wes asked, not understanding how this was considered feeding.

  “Through the eyes. When you soul-sync with an antemort, or living person, you are actually feeding off his or her life energy. You connect with them and that’s how we get the energy our mind needs to maintain its connection with the body.”

  “Aren’t we soul-synced right now?”

  “We are and that’s part of what’s helping your body through the rebirth process. I’m allowing you to feed off my charge, but you aren’t receiving nearly as much charge from me as an antemort would provide. When two Mortuis soul-sync, it doesn’t seem to have the same impact on them as it does an antemort. Even though our minds are still connected to our bodies, we don’t lose any connectivity to our bodies from it. I have to warn you though; you must be careful which Mortuis you sync with. You can be severed while being soul-synced with the wrong person.

  “I also need to warn you about the Truly Dead, as some of us call them. They’re members of the original, ancient Mortui organization that AfterLife broke away from, called the Atumra. They’re Mortuis who have souls that are as dead as their bodies. They believe they are an entitled race – not evil, but they are evil. They see themselves as more than human, and antemorts as an inferior breed, useful only as a way to keep them alive.


  “You’re lucky AfterLife found you first. Life as a Truly Dead can be pretty unfulfilling. Of course, there have been members of AfterLife who have gone to the other group lured by ideas of entitlement and the idea that they might have a chance to inhabit a living body again. Like I said, life is about choices.”

  Wes considered the appeal that being alive might have. He hadn’t been dead for very long and didn’t know how much the rebirth process would fix everything that was wrong. He wasn’t able to feel, smell, or touch, and the thought of not experiencing anything associated with these senses did make joining the Atumra something he could see considering.

  “It’s not fulfilling though,” Emily said as if she knew what he was thinking. “It’s hard enough to know you’re stealing days from the life of a living person just to survive. The thought of taking everything from someone else is selfish.

  “Wes, look at me.” Wes pulled his attention from the water and turned toward Emily to give her his full attention. “We don’t usually go into this much depth about the Truly Dead with a new Mortui until they’ve been around for awhile. However, recently we’ve lost a good number of our members to their ranks because of the promise of one day being able to be alive again. If they ever figure out how to possess the body of an antemort, they will steal that person’s opportunity at life as much as any murderer would.” Emily placed her hand on Wes’s arm and studied his face. “Regardless of how you, I, or any Mortui died, we don’t have the right to take the opportunity of life away from someone else.”

  After staring into his eyes, Emily’s hand dropped back onto her lap and she straightened to look out over the ocean. They sat in silence and watched the waves rolling in and out. “Life is about choices,” Emily finally said. “I just have this feeling you’re a good guy.”

  Wes had always thought of himself as a good guy. Sure, he’d made mistakes during his life, but for the most part he considered himself a good person. “I like to believe I am.”