“—Sadie took her medicine, yes, I will get her there in time—”
“—piano lessons at three. Of course—”
“—Jeffrey is listening to the teacher, Mrs. Damotta—”
The Ideal Plan had been enforced for the past fifteen years, so I had to study it just like everybody else, whether I wanted to or not. The teacher did his best to explain everything, all the way from Life Number One to Life Number Nine, covering everything from sterilization to college to the legal procedures involved in fighting a death cert case; then he gave us each a contract. My best friend, Pete Laskin, signed his that same day. I heard that his mother cried for a week when she found out, but it didn’t matter. They kept us separated from our parents for a full month, so we could think about it without their influence. Sadie Thompson, a twelve-year-old dream come true who barely knew my name, laughed and signed hers almost immediately, dotting the “i” in her name with a heart. Russell, who was thirteen and of an age to make his own decision, immediately folded his contract into quarters and handed it back. Unsigned. No thank you, Mr. Government Man. Can I go home now, please?
At eleven years old, I was the youngest in our cell. Everyone else had to make up his mind within our month of isolation. But I had a full year to make my decision.
So that was when Dad started taking me to work, on the pretext that it was time for me to learn about the family business. I’ll never forget that first day. Mid-October. Dry leaves whisked across the streets, crackled beneath my feet and turned to dust. The sky burned blue and bright overhead. A cool breeze poured between the buildings like fresh water, a welcome respite after the unending summer. People had been dying all over New Orleans from an abnormally long heat spell. Mostly old people, but a few babies had passed too.
Fresh Start had been busy, everyone working double shifts. Two extra crews had been flown in from Los Angeles. I’m sure that’s why it happened. Somebody was too tired and the out-of-state crews didn’t know our procedures.
I have to believe it was a mistake. The other possibility, that my father let it happen on purpose to teach me a lesson—well, I just can’t go for that. Russell, in one of his dark moments, said that Dad did it to show us that life is, and should be, unpredictable, that we never should have pretended to be God.
Mom refuses to talk about it. I have to admit I admire her for not taking sides. I know she had an opinion about all of it, she always did. But for whatever reason, she let Russell and me make our own decisions, about Fresh Start, about the Ideal Plan, about what happened to the Newbie on that October day.
The inside of the plant was everything I’d hoped it would be. All stainless steel and molded plastic in the industrial sections; all luxurious leather and ceramic tile in the public areas. Not that anyone would want to, but you could eat your lunch on the floor anywhere in that 200,000-square-foot facility back then. It was that clean. And the smell was a bizarre mixture of dentist-office-scary and new-car-exciting.
For years, whenever anyone found out that I was Chaz Domingue, of the Fresh Start Domingues, a hush would sweep through the room almost as if something just sucked out all the oxygen. A long quiet would follow. And then when people started to talk again they would be ever so polite, opening doors for me, asking me if I would like some candy, asking my opinion about the weather. I liked the attention at first, but by the time I was a teenager I realized it was based on a combination of fear and envy. So I quit telling people my last name. Sometimes I pretended to be someone else entirely. When I got older I even pretended to be a Stringer, just because I wanted to fit in.
But on that October afternoon, when the sunlight was slicing through the warehouse at a steep angle, when the sounds of the city seemed muted because so many people had died, on that day I decided that I never wanted to jump. No matter how much I wanted to be like other people. No matter how much I wanted to live.
That day, one of the Newbies got stuck in between lives. In some nether world, where dark, swirling creatures spin traps like spiders. She got caught. Her old body, withered and white with decay, lay discarded on the other side of the frost-etched glass. Her new-cloned body, as beautiful as Eve herself, lay expectant on a metal gurney, modestly covered in white linen. Neither body breathed, neither had life. All the equipment was suspiciously silent, no beeps to register heartbeat or brainwave patterns. Too much time had passed. The technicians began to get nervous, but Dad just raised one hand to quiet them.
“Give her a minute,” he said, a tone of assurance in his voice.
But several more minutes passed and the clone continued to stare, sightless, at the ceiling.
And then, like it was straight out of a nightmare, she started to talk. The machines refused to admit there was life in either body, yet some alien consciousness caused the clone’s mouth to move and a hollow voice to speak.
The things she said have haunted my dreams, might just follow me all the way past Judgment Day into the great beyond. Might bring torment with me, like shackles, into God’s kingdom, whether he likes it or not.
“I can’t…I can’t break free,” she said, still staring up at the concourse of pipes and ducts that traversed the warehouse ceiling. “I’m tangled in something. It feels like a web.” Tears streaked her face. Slow, glycerin-like streams. “They’ve been chasing me and I’m so tired of running, of trying to hide. Oh, please get me out of here! I don’t know where I am. There’s no light, just a dark glowing horizon, like fire in the distance. And these creatures—” She moaned, a heartbreaking cry, long and low and inhuman. I found myself wondering if we were really listening to a woman or if some spirit from beyond had commanded an audience. “They’re like spiders, but much bigger. I saw one of them eat a man. It ripped his head right off.” Her eyes closed.
Meanwhile, my father ran around the room, fiddling with dials, gesturing to the other workers to try and save her.
“It’s so dark. So cold,” she whispered, her voice hoarse. “And I’m so alone.”
Most of them stood frozen, like me. Listening.
Then she turned toward one of them, looked right at him. Allen was his name. She reached one arm out, then shrieked. And she was gone.
To this day I still imagine her trapped in a twilight world, waiting for someone to rescue her. But I know now that no one ever will. God wouldn’t have left her there if she were one of His. Even if we had messed with His plan, with His order laid down from the beginning, He still wouldn’t have abandoned one of His chosen.
That’s the only way I can rationalize all of it.
CHAPTER NINE
Chaz:
Pete Laskin leaned over his laptop, thick bangs tousled on his forehead, his pale skin blue from the monitor’s glow. He cleared his throat, typed in a few more keys, long fingers looking almost ghostly as they flew in a blur. He glanced over at me, dark circles beneath haunted eyes.
“Where’d ya gets this?” he asked.
We both focused on the marker, still inside the plastic bag.
I shrugged.
He shook his head, then leaned back. “No, man. You gots ta tell me. I gots—I mean, this here—we’s in way too deep here.”
I peered over his narrow shoulders, tried to figure out what all the numbers on his screen meant.
“Look, Chaz. I promises I won’t tells nobody, but you gots to be honest with me.”
“I took it off one of the Stringers,” I said finally.
“It was your Newbie, wasn’t it?”
I just stared at him. The less he knew, the safer he was.
“This here’s a government job, boss.”
I frowned. “What do you mean? Since when does the government put markers in Stringers?”
“Is she in there?” he asked, gesturing toward Angelique’s room. The door was closed.
Outside, New Orleans fought against the inevitable. Fringes of black clung to the horizon, stale fluorescent light sputtered from spindly streetlights, and a steamy haze hung over the broken skyli
ne. Somewhere in the invisible distance daylight crouched, like a golden panther ready to leap across the heavens.
Angelique would be waking up soon.
I nodded. I didn’t say anything but I couldn’t help wondering how he knew my Newbie was a woman.
Pete’s mouth slid into a short-lived, sardonic grin. “Okay, so you don’t wants to talk about your current assignment, but it seems likes somebody is pretty interested in her. Or him. Or whoever they was before they jumped.”
“We were followed last night.” I took a sip of coffee, glanced at Pete from the corner of my eye. We’d been best friends since we were nine, but I still wasn’t sure how much I should tell him.
I could almost see the gears shifting in his blue eyes, thoughts processing through the motherboard in his brain. “Has you been tailed before?”
I shook my head.
Just then I realized that Pete wasn’t looking at me anymore. He was staring at something behind me. I turned and saw Angelique standing in the doorway, wearing a T-shirt that barely covered her thighs. Her long hair hung in a Rapunzel tangle, a glittering mass of gold and silver. Somehow she was even more beautiful without makeup. She yawned.
“Do I smell coffee?” she asked.
“In the kitchen.” I pointed toward a short hallway.
She ambled away on long sinuous legs. Poetry in slow motion.
Pete raised his eyebrows. “Man, I don’t ever wants to hear you complaining abouts your job again,” he whispered.
“It’s not what you think.”
“Trust me,” he said as he stood up. “You gots no idea what I’m thinking. And you should probably puts that thing away.” He gestured toward the marker. “My opinion is ya gots ta tell Russell. Forget about all the crap you two gots going on in your personal life for a few minutes and deals with this.”
He paused at the door, ready to leave, laptop folded up like a sheet of paper and tucked into his shirt pocket. “I don’t wanna scares you, boss, but that thing is trouble. The government’s been wanting to gets their paws on your company for ages.” He lowered his voice, forcing me to lean closer to hear him. “And it looks like they finally gots a way to do it.”
CHAPTER TEN
Angelique:
Chaz said that I should start writing things down, that it will help me remember my past lives. He says that everybody keeps a journal now—even One-Timers. A secret collection of memories that no one else ever reads. It’s supposed to help me remember what I don’t want to forget. But I’m afraid of the past and the future. And I’m worried about what I might find out about myself.
There was blood on my sheets when I woke up. My hand hurts but I don’t know why, and a heavy pain has settled in my chest, like my lungs are made of rock. We went to a jazz club last night, I think. I ran into a bald man there—his face, his voice—he seemed familiar. But then a fight broke out and in the midst of it, a picture flashed in my head: a stone crypt.
The City of the Dead.
Chaz took me there, but it didn’t help. The picture got louder and heavier, like the pain in my chest. I ran away from him through the misty fog, feet pounding against cement while the mist hung heavy and wet, almost like rain. I thought I heard a howling death, felt white fangs ripping my skin and I knew that I never wanted to fall in love again. Ever. That was when I saw it. The place that had called me. But I was too weak. Too afraid.
I felt the same way now.
I sat down with a stylus and a VR tablet, with trembling hands I began to write down random thoughts and words. Then it started to come back to me. Images. Sounds. Voices. The black holes in my memory dissolved into shocking memories; they thundered awake, sudden, immediate, demanding. My emotions were ripped and shredded.
A familiar face floated before me, a moment of joy and hope.
Then I remembered. It wasn’t clear at first, but after a minute I could see.
My first life…
We lived on a farm in Scotland, William and I, on a parcel of hilly land near the River Esk. During the day we tended our herd of Hampshire sheep, watched as the wind ruffled the long grass, commented on how each blade enticed the sheep to linger, to fill their bellies. In the evenings after dinner we would sit before the fire, I playing my clarsach harp, he singing the old Celtic songs.
We were a strange pair, I know. Both of us willing to give up the modern city life to herd sheep, but you have to remember that the government gave incentives back then, trying so hard to get folks back to the farms. We were the lucky ones, that’s for sure. Got our little piece of property for almost nothing.
He was ten years older than I was, and quite dashing, with his rugged, country-squire looks. Not at all the sort of man I’d hoped to meet when I went off to university in Glasgow. Not the sort of man I’d planned to marry, but there it is. You don’t often end up doing what you have in mind in the first place.
I was going to change the world with my new ideas. I’d wanted to sail across the ocean and marry an American, leave this dull land of brilliant blue skies and emerald hills behind. Wash my hands of it, once and for all. Catherine MacKinnon, I said to myself more than once, you need to break with your clan and make a difference in the world.
Of course, I didn’t know then the things I know today, but I still don’t think I would have lived my life any different. It was time for one of us to stop the madness, to take a bold step into the future.
William never saw it the same way I did. And I don’t know if I can ever forgive him for it.
He was the true love of my life. The love of every life I’ve ever had, and I don’t like the counting of lives anymore. It makes me weary. But this was my first one, so it was different. It was special. It was the time I made my first decision to jump.
We were Catholics, both of us, but I never really took it to heart the way William did. He rose up in the morning and went to bed in the evening with his prayers. Granted, everything around us was changing. The Pope had made some radical changes recently, and the one before him was maybe even more liberal, if that was possible. So what we had wasn’t the same as what our parents before us had.
It all started when the Pope took the ban off resurrection. “It’s not the unpardonable sin,” I think that was how he phrased it in the beginning. It took a few years, but then pretty soon almost everyone I knew got the implant. Even my mom. Two of my sisters, Kelly and Coleen, decided against it, which didn’t surprise me since they made all their bad decisions together.
But my husband, William, he wouldn’t even talk about it. If we were ever divided about anything, this was it.
“One life was all God gave us,” he told me one day when we were herding the sheep into a different pasture. “It’s all I want.”
“But we could be together for almost five hundred years,” I argued. I had calculated it all out, from Life One to Life Nine, carefully reading between the lines of the contract. I knew each of the resurrected lives began in a body about twenty-one years old and that you would live to be about seventy-two. So with no accidents or major illnesses, a person could live to be around four hundred eighty-eight years old.
It wasn’t forever, but it was damn close.
I’ll never forget the look he gave me right then. The sunlight came down through the trees, touched him on the face, set his hair on fire and made his eyes glow. It was like the Almighty had taken residence inside him for a few moments.
“We can be together for all of eternity,” he said. “It doesn’t take a blasted Fresh Start implant to give us what God already promised.”
“But—but that’s not the same,” I said. “This is guaranteed—”
Another stony glance. He looked like Moses just after he stepped down from the mountain, when he had the Shekinah glory of God shining all around him. I wished the sun would set.
“Guaranteed? You don’t think Jesus rising from the dead was a guarantee?” he asked. “Not a promise from God: ‘Look here, this is what I can do for you’?”
> “I don’t know,” I answered.
“Since when don’t you know?”
“Since always. I never knew for sure.”
“Catherine, my love, you’re swimming in treacherous waters.” He paused for a long moment. “Are you having doubts about your faith, or are you telling me that you never really believed?”
I took a deep breath, afraid of what I was going to say next.
“What I’ve been trying to tell you—” I stopped to lick my lips nervously. “What I’m telling you is that I got the implant. Yesterday. I just signed up for resurrection.”
“Did you now.”
A silence hung between us then, like the distance between two continents.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Chaz:
Sun splattered the near empty streets. Only a few drowsy commuters passed us, all yawning and sipping coffee from paper cups. Apparently everyone in the Big Easy had a rough time last night, me included. Angelique and I stopped at a French bakery and picked up a couple of beignets drenched in powdered sugar. Her mood lightened and she laughed while she licked her fingers. Most of the city was still asleep when we got back in the car and drove over to the head office.
So I wasn’t expecting the voice memo that came blasting through my Verse.
“Stand by for the latest Nine-Timer Report—”
Felt like I’d been standing by my entire life. Right now I was waiting for India to self-destruct. I was glad Angelique didn’t have her smartphone implant yet. Explaining the end of the world wasn’t on my to-do list today.
“Explosions rocked the suburbs of Jaipur, India, a few hours ago,” the newscaster said.
Jaipur. We’ve got a Fresh Start plant there—it was probably the target of a local pro-death demonstration.
“Our sources are limited,” she continued in a bright, cheery voice. “But apparently the explosions triggered a Nine-Timer scenario that spread for about ten blocks—”
Afterlife: The Resurrection Chronicles Page 4
