Afterlife (11 page)

Chaz:

Everything went black for a long, awful moment. Like the universe had been dipped in tar. I was coming out of it, swimming to the top, arms burning, like the bodies, like the smudged blue-black horizon of tiny bodies. I caught a breath when my head came above the resin-dark surface, thought I felt the heat of a coal-burning furnace.

“Hey! You can't do that”—Angelique seemed upset—“this is his crime scene—”

“Really?” Some nameless mug came over and held her down. Poured liquidmetal cuffs around her wrists. Paused a heartbeat while the nano-alloy hardened.

“This is against the law,” she protested. “You morons have no jurisdiction here—”

She was right, of course. Apparently everything she had learned in a previous life as a lawyer was bubbling up to the surface of the pitch, smoke-filled bubbles that burst when they crested the tar skin.

I was on fire.

A second mug pulled a laser from the holster on his hip,
then flashed a red-hot beam on my palm, burned off the top layer of skin, erasing my tattoo. I yelled and jammed my knee in Mug Number Two's gut.

“Stop it!” My voice wasn't loud enough. No one heard me.

Through the doorway I could see Russ and Pete on their knees, hands behind their backs while Skellar read them their rights. Meanwhile, a group of distraught parents stood in the hallway, some crying, some trying to push their way through the crime scene barriers. A VR camera scanned the scene, beams of white light scorching the room, white arrows that pierced swirling ash. Any minute now we would go live with the rest of world. Film at 11. Look, everybody, the Domingues are going down.

“Your badge is on the line,” Angelique said to the mug who held me down. She was standing now, hands braced against the counter, a glazed expression on her face.

“What the hell's goin' on here?” Skellar growled when he walked back in the doorway. “Drop that laser, Broussard! We haven't even processed him yet. And Domingue, tell your Newbie to settle down.”

The other mugs took a half step backward. Meanwhile, Angelique threatened to charge the police department with her bill—a thousand dollars an hour—when this was all over. She promised to make sure the lieutenant's supervisor got a detailed account of his incompetence.

Skellar glanced at me, raised an eyebrow. I was as confused as he was, but I tried to hide it.

“In the case of a murder that takes place in a private residence”—she stared at the floor, frowned as if trying to figure out what to do next—“a Babysitter has seniority over a police lieutenant.”

Skellar narrowed his eyes, seemed to remember some piece of information, probably buried away in a back file
cabinet inside his dusty brain. “Okay, that's enough with the client-lawyer routine.” An unexpected grin revealed teeth stained by years of jive-sweet. We all have our addictions, some legal, some not. “I'd fancy up, if I was you, Domingue. It's time to walk the gauntlet.”

“You aren't seriously going to make him walk through all those—” Angelique tried to stop him, but he and his crew of brainless musclemen were already dragging me out the door.

“In the case of a capital,” he said, leaning toward her as he paraphrased as best he could, “where the crime involves a minor, where the crime takes place in the home of a 'sitter—or a home that belongs to anyone in the 'sitter's ugly family—then the 'sitter may as well pack his bags and move into an eight-by-ten cell, custom decorated just for him.”

His jack-o'-lantern grin was fixed in place.

“Get the Newbie too,” the lieutenant said then, almost as if he'd been planning it all along.

 

I didn't see it of course. Not until all the excitement had worn off and nobody really cared anymore. But I heard that our exit from the crime scene got the highest viewer rating in almost twenty years, that it ranked higher than that Super Bowl incident where a Chicago Bears quarterback blew himself up to protest the war. Russell, Pete, Angelique and I were all dragged out, hands cuffed behind our backs like villains.

The gauntlet.

A special scenario reserved for top-notch terrorists and serial killers, those who had already lost all their civil rights and were one short step away from conviction.

Virtual-reality recording beams sizzled through the darkness like serpentine strobe lights; they caught and captured
our every nuance, memorized our movements in 3-D. We got in-your-face-and-then-some exposure as we were hauled past the parents of the dead children.

This same group of people, who had cowered downstairs only moments before, now demonstrated a callous bravado. They spat, cursed and clawed as we passed. One woman yanked a handful of Angelique's hair. One man swung the broken chair I had used to open the bathroom door. Pete stumbled beneath the blow.

“Murderers!” another man bellowed.

“That's enough!” Skellar said as he pushed the man out of the way.

The screams deafened and assaulted. The blows weakened us with every step.

Still there was something else, something much more sinister, which ran beneath the surface. Something that the video technicians quickly edited out.

It stood at the edges of the wild crowd. Passive and cold and calculating.

While some of the parents reacted with violent, out-of-control anger, a larger majority of them stood back, silent, almost numb. A familiar expression on their faces. One I immediately recognized.

Apathy.

These children hadn't been kidnapped: they were dead. There would be a legal death certificate in the mail in a few days.

These children could be replaced.

Angelique:

In typical mug fashion, I got slammed together with all the suspects in the case. Didn't matter that I was probably innocent. The fact that my arms had been burned from the liquid light should have branded me as a victim here. And although I still couldn't remember exactly what happened, I had a vague memory of pulling two of those kids into the bathroom and blocking the door. Just chalk it up to another good deed that went awry.

New body. Same old story.

Skellar shoved us single file down a narrow passage, hands cuffed behind our backs. For a few harrowing moments I was blinded by the VR strobe lights; in that instant the surrounding catcalls grew louder, more oppressive; the gauntlet corridor narrowed, transformed into a Mephistophelian birth canal that didn't want us to survive.

Meanwhile, the parents of the dead children loomed over us, arms waving, faces red with fury, shrill voices barking and howling and shrieking as we stumbled forward,
step by step. Suddenly somebody grabbed me by the hair. I screamed and fell backward, staggered to catch my balance.

I collapsed on top of someone else, my body pressed against his, my face against his chest. I felt it immediately—a horrible familiarity: his smell, the touch of his skin, his voice when he spoke to me, softly, beneath the cacophonous layers of the crowd. When I struggled to lift my head, my lips accidentally brushed against his cheek and his eyes met mine.

Russell.

In that moment I remembered everything. How he loved me. How he killed me. How his hands knew every inch of my body. How those same hands had closed around my throat in a death grip, pressed against my windpipe, crushed my bones—

“Russ.” His name came out like a hiss. I blinked, tried to pull away, couldn't breathe.

An electric shock flowed between us, an instant, silent, deadly communication.

He whispered. So soft no one else heard it. Maybe he didn't even realize he said it out loud.

“Ellen?”

He recognized me. He knows who I am. That murdering monster saw through my disguise before I even had the sense to hide.

I pulled away, forced my legs to stop trembling, turned my gaze away.

“Move along there, sister!” one of the mugs shouted as he pressed his palm against my back.

I ducked my head instinctively as someone swung a chair over our heads and slammed it down on Pete with a blood-soaked thud. He fell to his knees, cried out. Chaz tried to shelter him, managed to push him to the end of the corridor, then he turned back.

I could see Chaz looking at me through dark, twisted shadows. His mouth was moving, but I couldn't hear him. I nodded. Pretended I understood.

“I'm coming,” I said as I tried to push my way through.

But all I could hear was Russ calling me Ellen and I knew. It was time for me to get out of here. Time for me to run.

October 13 • 5:35
A.M
.

Chaz:

Shadows melted; clouds shattered; stars fell from the sky. The world became a barren landscape, painted in muted shades of gray and brown, a scorched horizon of broken glass and barbed wire. An invisible minefield surrounded by a poisonous moat. My throat felt like I'd been drinking fire, while my left hand melted and evaporated in the lava-bright heat.

Gone. Everything recognizable was gone.

I was empty. Tired. My blood had been drained out by some vampire and now there were ten more lining up, waiting for a drink. I couldn't remember the last time I'd been able to sleep longer than five hours. I wanted to close my eyes and lose my identity. Plunge headfirst into a Rip Van Winkle coma.

More than anything, I wanted to sleep without that nightmare.

“What nightmare?”

I lifted my head, stared unblinking into Skellar's Mongoloid face. I grinned. He was so ugly he was an insult to Mongoloids worldwide.

“You think I'm a Mongoloid, do ya? You want to spend the rest of the week inside? I got a sweet little cell with your name written all over the urine-stained walls.”

I glanced over my shoulder. Sensed a shadow there. Angelique. She nodded.

I rubbed my face. They must have given me something to make me talk. I was probably babbling like a teenage girl with her first smartphone implant.

Skellar chuckled. “What do ya know about teenage girls?”

“That's enough, he's clean and you know it,” Angelique said. “The Fresh Start lawyers already gave you the surveillance tapes from the Domingue security team. Chaz was outside when some nutcase climbed up the side of the house and doused Isabelle's bedroom with liquid light—”

“And you both know that all his fancy lawyers got no jurisdiction here, not when it comes to a capital involving a minor.” Skellar leaned against the wall, slid a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it. A cloud of sulfur and smoke circled his face, made him look even more demonic than before. He picked a sliver of jive-sweet off his lip before he spoke again. “So, what about you, sweetcakes? Why did you take those kids in the bathroom right before the blast? You were in on it, weren't ya?”

“Look,” she snapped. “If I had known that somebody was going to blow up that room, I would have gotten
all
those kids out. I wouldn't have grabbed just two. How heartless do you think I am?”

He shrugged. “You tell me.”

“Sugar, I've got whatever it takes to play this game with
you.” She braced her hands—now neatly bandaged with synthetic flesh—on a long, low table and leaned toward him. “We can go on like this all day and all night long. We can do it in here,” she waved at the interrogation room, “or in the courtroom. Your choice. Just remember. The meter is running and your dollar pays for it all.”

He shook his head. “Not if you lose.”

“I've never lost a case.”

I rubbed my temples. I felt like I had just swallowed a rat and it was trying to claw its way back up my throat. I could feel it, one paw at a time. I closed my eyes. I was going to lose it, at any moment—

“Here, use this.” Angelique shoved a wastebasket in front of me.

There's no pretty way to say it. I puked. Rat and all. I knew it was there, somewhere. An invisible ball of fur and claws and teeth.

“Would you shut up already? There's no stinkin' rat.” Skellar crushed his cigarette out with his heel. “You're going down, Domingue. You and your whole family. And you better believe your brother, Russell, is spilling his guts in the next room.” He laughed at his unintentional joke. “Well, probably not like you just did. But we got some inside info that claims he might be behind this.”

Angelique avoided his gaze as her lips curved in a slow, dangerous smile. She nodded.

“What do you know about all this?” Skellar asked, his eyes hooded in shadow.

She ignored him. Stared across the room as if she could see things we couldn't.

He came closer, predatory head lowering, voice soft as a silken noose. “Why did he do it? Was he testing resurrection on those kids?”

She ran her fingers through her hair. A deafening silence followed.

“She just downloaded two days ago,” I said. “Her memories haven't stabilized yet.”

“Leave her alone, Domingue. And don't pull any of your Babysitter mumbo jumbo,” Skellar said. “If she has information about this investigation—”

“All I know is, it's not right to kill someone,” she said then, as if she needed to justify something, “even if they resurrect, it's still murder—”

“Is your Newbie nuts, or did your brother kill somebody?” Skellar was in my face now.

I paused. Russell could never kill anybody, he didn't have what it took—something I'd had to do more often than I wanted to admit. Anytime there was a really dirty job, I got stuck with it. That was why I was the Babysitter and he was the one sitting pretty in the CEO chair all day long—

“Look, I don't need to hear your friggin' family history, Domingue. I'm tryin' to figure out if we got another homicide here. You two know something about this and you're gonna tell me, if I have to keep ya here for—”

Angelique turned toward him, all the curves in her face melting into sharp angles, her spine turned to steel and her eyes diamond bright. “This interrogation is over, Skellar,” she said. “End of your miserable mug story. Go ahead and investigate Russell until the hybrid cows come home, for all I care. Maybe he's guilty and maybe he's not. But you've got nothing to implicate either one of us in the murder of those kids. So, hey, yeah, you're going to let us out. Now. Or I promise you, you won't be able to buy your jive-sweet next month because my expenses will be coming out of your paycheck.”

Skellar stopped.

Apparently Angelique had finally found his hot button.

He made a weak effort at maintaining control, pulled another cigarette out of his pocket, lit it, watched us through billowing smoke. Then he made a slight, almost insignificant gesture with his left hand. A second later the door to the interrogation room breezed open.

We were free to go.