Afterlife (12 page)

Chaz:

Sometimes the big, tough-guy image shatters. Like a fragile, handblown glass Christmas ornament, it slips through your fingers and tumbles to the floor; and suddenly everything is in slow motion. There's a second when you still see the world the way it should have been, the way it was just a moment ago. Then you see the destruction. Fragments of glass spray in every direction and you realize that it's never going to be the same again. Ever. It doesn't matter if it's your fault or not, doesn't matter if everyone in the whole world knows what happened or if you're the only one.

At that point you just can't pretend anymore.

For me it happened at about four o'clock in the morning, after a grueling night with Skellar, where we played party games with one of his latest interrogation drugs. That was when I learned that Russell and his wife, Marguerite, were still in custody. And I just about ripped the arms off a mug who said my niece would have to stay in some “safe house” until the authorities straightened everything out.

Lucky for him, he changed his mind.

I took Isabelle home with Angelique and me. I gave my niece my room, and tucked her into my bed. I planned on sleeping out in the living room, but when I headed out the door, Isabelle started to cry.

“Don't leave me, Uncle Chaz, please—”

A tiny glass reindeer started to spin, tumbling down.

“I won't go, sweetheart.” I went back inside, knelt beside her.

It hit the ground; fragments of light and shards of glass shot up.

She curled into my arms, pressed her head against my chest; her sobbing grew stronger and I suddenly realized how hard all of this had been on her. Up to this point all I had been able to think about was the fact that she was alive, that she was safe, I hadn't realized that to her, she wasn't safe. And maybe she never would be again.

A roomful of blackened, burned children. Dead on the ground. All of them her friends. Dead because they came to her party.

“Is he going to come back, Uncle Chaz? Is that bad man going to burn me too?”

“No, baby. No one is ever going to hurt you. I promise.”

But I could feel the world spinning even as I said the words, felt the pain in my chest tighten, felt my eyes sting as tears came. For the first time, I could actually imagine a world without Isabelle, a place where some evil monster could climb up a wall in the middle of the night. I didn't know if I was really going to be able to protect her from the people who had done this.

And the ache made me feel like I was being turned inside out.

 

I stood at the edge of the patio door, staring down at the street.

“Is she going to be all right?”

I turned, saw Angelique curled on the sofa, wrapped in shadows.

“Yeah,” I answered, trying not to think about the synthetic skin that now bandaged my niece's hands. This was one of those times when everything had to be interpreted in black and white. No gray. “Maybe not today or tomorrow. But yeah.”

“Good. I mean, I wouldn't want anything to happen to her, she's a good kid.”

I ran my hand along the door frame, finally settled on the handle, pulled the door open and let the cool, misty air inside. I didn't look at her. Didn't want to see her face, a chiaroscuro version of someone that I thought I knew yesterday.

“You saved her life,” I said when the air shifted around me. The silence between us turned heavy. “You might not remember it, but I won't forget. Ever.”

Outside the music of another day was already beginning. Cars shuddered down crowded streets and a helicopter flew in the distance, silver-and-black choppy noise that brooded over smoggy midnight blue.

“My memory's coming back,” she admitted, her voice soft, almost as if she regretted the things that were swimming to the surface.

I turned to face her. This was one of the things I hated most about working with Newbies—they could be your best friend one minute and they could forget they even knew you the next. But it didn't matter. I had no right letting my emotions get tangled up in this mess.

At this point I just had to trust her and she had to trust me.

Because I had a feeling that if we didn't, neither one of us was going to make it.

“Did I say anything about a dog?” I asked. “When Skellar was interrogating me?”

She frowned. Searched her damaged memory banks. Shook her head. “No, you were talking some nonsense about an invisible rat.” A smile flickered. “By the way, if you pulled that rat thing to irritate Skellar, it worked. But no, you never mentioned a dog. Why?”

I avoided her question. “Why did you act like Russ might have killed somebody?”

“It was a red herring,” she said, flipping back to her lawyer persona, that safe zone where she knew all the answers, her matter-of-fact voice solid and sure, cutting like a knife through the fractured morning darkness. “I just wanted to give Skellar reasonable doubt. So he would let you go.”

She sounded like she was telling the truth, but there was something in her posture that said otherwise. Her lip quivered slightly and she kept her gaze on her lap.

“You're lying,” I said, challenging her to defend herself.

“Am I?”

I sat in a chair across from her, waited for her to look up at me, so I could see her eyes. I'd know if she was telling the truth or not if I could only see her eyes. But she didn't look up. Instead she stood, headed toward her bedroom. Left me alone in the living room. Enveloped in a muggy, uncomfortable silence.

I knew I should get some sleep. That drug of Skellar's was still coursing my veins and part of me wanted to rip the skin off my face. It felt like my skull had suddenly grown too big, like my flesh had stretched beyond its capacity. I wished I could pound Skellar's face through the wall.

Instead I lay on the sofa, my legs hanging off the end. Before I had a chance to analyze how uncomfortable I was, I
fell asleep. For some reason my familiar nightmare gave me the night off. Probably for good behavior—after all, I hadn't flattened Skellar's nose, like I wanted.

Instead I dreamed I was in the bayou, wearing waist-high boots, wading through murky swamp water. I was looking for something lost, something important.

At the same time, I was wondering how many alligator eyes were watching me from the darkness.

Angelique:

In my mind I'm walking through a foreign city, following a lifeline that drifts through thick, choking clouds, each step leading me closer to some new understanding. Sometimes I unconsciously go too fast, and everything begins to spin out of control. Too much information tries to process at the same time.

Then, in the midst of it all, I suddenly realize that the missing pieces have been erased by me. On purpose. Apparently it's all part of the picking and choosing of our afterlife memories.

But I got rid of the wrong things.

One image flashes before me, beautiful and fleeting and incomplete.

My son, Joshua.

It's immediately followed by an emptiness that I can't quite grasp. Pain settles in my bones like a long-forgotten war wound, something that causes me to limp when the weather gets cold. But I can no longer distinguish it from the
myriad shards of shrapnel still buried somewhere, waiting to be discovered like a carefully planned minefield.

Maybe I did something wrong, made him angry. Maybe we disagreed about something important, and he stormed away to a far corner of the universe. I'll never know because I tried to wipe it away.

Isabelle reminds me of him. I didn't realize it until now. I can't quite figure out if it's her eyes or her smile, maybe it's everything put together. But right now I can see his face superimposed on top of hers. His life taped to hers like a paper-doll cutout.

I lie on the bed and wish I could sleep. The morning will come too quickly. The world will tip on its side, daylight will pour in the window and all my past sins will be revealed, like evidence beneath a microscope.

My body forces me to rest. But it is the uneasy rest of a convict, waiting for the verdict. Waiting for the moment when the executioner is going to walk through the door and demand payment.

Chaz:

I have a theory that we all carry a secret pain. Like a tattoo that you got back when you were a teenager, you hide it away beneath layers of baggy clothes and you only show it to someone you really trust, someone you know won't laugh because they probably have one too.

I don't tell very many people about my tattoo.

It started out like a beautiful drawing, a black intertwined gothic outline of two young people in love, with similar beliefs and goals. We were working on it together, filling in the hollow spaces with color. I wasn't going to hide this one away. I was going to wear it on my forearm, with my sleeve rolled up so everyone could see.

I wanted the whole world to know how much I loved Jeannie. We were going to get married, do the whole family routine; as soon as we got married we were going to use Dad's death cert and have a kid.

“What do you want?”

Jeannie and I stood on a hill, overlooking the Loire Valley,
a sinuous river somewhere down below, winding its way through the castle-dotted landscape. This was the storybook phase of my life, when every thought still had a happy ending and I still believed that I was the master of my own fate. I was twenty-three and had just finished studying music at Juilliard. Next month I was going to start basic training to become a Babysitter. My first courses would involve advanced weapons training, hostage rescue and counterterrorism, but I was trying not to think about it.

Because that was next month.

She turned to face me, her curly dark hair blowing in the wind. The afternoon sky held the fragrance of lavender, the colors of a Monet painting.

“What do you want?” she asked again.

I've heard that question countless times throughout my life, and it's always sounded like an accusation. I mean, what could I possibly want that I didn't already have?

“Besides you?” I asked. She didn't smile. It's always been hard for me to understand women. They seem to come wrapped in mystery, like layers of fine gauze. You think you can see through it, that you finally understand, but then you discover that you've only peeled away another layer and there are about a thousand more left.

I realized later that there was a subtext here. That she was really asking something else. She crossed her arms and tilted her head. I was taking too long to figure out the secret meaning of life.

“I want what everybody else wants,” I said finally, deciding to tell the truth.

She shook her head. “No. Everybody else wants what you have.”

“I mean, I want the right to choose.”

“Choose what?”

This was where the subtext got as loud as a roaring lion, just seconds before it snaps off your head. But I still didn't realize it.

“Life,” I said. “Death. What I do for a living. I never signed up for any of this, Jeannie. It just got dumped in my lap.”

“Nobody's forcing you to stay at Fresh Start. Your family can't make you…they can't keep you from—”

Suddenly I could hear the words within the words. One more layer of invisible gauze peeled off like a snakeskin and blew away on the wind.

“They can't force me to be a One-Timer, is that what you're saying?” I asked. She didn't answer. She didn't have to, but for the first time I realized that her eyes were the color of gunmetal, a cool liquid gray. “You're right. No one can make me choose death over life, although I've been preached to enough over the years.” I didn't want to look at her anymore, didn't want to see eyes the color of my future. “I thought we both decided that one life was enough.”

“That was what you decided.”

“Look, I just want to live the best life I can,” I confessed, my back to her, my words soaring like birds over this valley of forgotten French kings. “And then when it's all over, I want to die and leave all this behind. I want to see my father again. I want to step through that door into heaven and I don't ever want to come back.”

She was quiet. For a moment I thought she was gone, that she had headed back down the grassy knoll toward our rented car. But when I turned around, she was still there, and the wind had turned cold.

She gave me a half smile. “I just wanted to make sure,” she said. “I mean, if we're getting married, it's important, isn't it? That we understand what we each believe.”

Her words felt like a balm as I took her in my arms. I had revealed my secret heart, something I don't do very often,
and I felt a moment of complete peace. Maybe we disagreed about this small thing called resurrection, but we could still make it work. Somehow.

Together we headed back down, through mossy meadows.

It was probably the last chance I would have at a normal life and I didn't even realize that it was already gone. There was no way either of us could know that the rest of her life would be measured in hours. A slippery mountain road lurked up ahead with her name on it, written in blood.

Within twenty-four hours her body would shudder to a stop and she would jump.

She already had her next life preplanned.

And it didn't include me.

There was a time when I thought that she'd look me up, at least to say hi or “Guess what, I never really loved you.” But no. She just disappeared in the vast ethos of Stringers.

Like everything else in my One-Timer life.

Gone, but not forgotten.

Russell:

Somebody was pounding on my head with a jackhammer. Another second and I was going to grab the idiot sitting across from me and drag him around the room in a choke-hold. Crack his lazy skull against the cement wall. Watch his blood pool on the floor. And laugh. I was going to laugh.

“Hey, this guy hasn't stopped laughing since we gave him that injection.”

Funny. This was all just too funny. My house was full of dead children, so instead of trying to catch whoever did it, the mugs decided to drag me in for questioning. As if I had any idea who did it. Or why. Like I would want to hurt my own little girl.

“I don't like the look on his face. You think we should give him another dose?”

Did they really think I was crazy enough to hurt any little kid? I started to laugh until tears ran down my face.

“That drug isn't supposed to have this effect. You guys said he would answer our questions. But it ain't workin'. Hey, I'm talking to you! Can anybody hear me out there?”

I was done waiting for this human fungus to let me go, I was going to yank his ugly head off his double-ugly body, use it for a soccer ball, bounce it against the walls until somebody told me where Isabelle was and whether she was okay…

“Get this monster off me! I think he's taking spikes—somebody get in here,
now
, this guy's as strong as a moose!”

Soccer ball bounce, dead man talk, get me outta here, get me outta here, or you're gonna die, you ugly mug, I'm gonna peel your arms off one at a time, then I'm gonna snap your legs like breadsticks, and then I'll twist off your head. Bounce it around until all your teeth are gone. I'm gonna laugh and you're gonna be dead if you don't let me see my daughter, let me know she's okay…

“Hey! Domingue. Look!”

I lifted my head, loosened my grip on that lousy toad-eating mug, let him fall limp to the floor.

She was standing in the doorway. Tired, long hair still in tousled pig tails. Still wearing that tutu and black body stocking. My laughter melted into tears.

Isabelle. She was okay.

I fell to my knees. Somebody tackled me, pulled my arms behind my back, poured liquidmetal cuffs on my wrists. I rolled on my side so I could see her for one more second.

“Daddy.” A tiny smile curved on her perfect face. She held her arms out to me. But they wouldn't let her come any closer.

The bloodsuckers wouldn't let her come in.

The door closed and Isabelle was gone. A dream that never existed. The one good thing in my life. Gone.

Now there were five mugs in the room, all dressed in black. Two had some kind of hoods over their faces. As if it mattered whether I knew who they were or not.

“Ya gonna talk to us now, Domingue? Ya gonna tell us
about that break-in that ya orchestrated?” one of them asked.

I grinned. That drug of theirs was like candy compared to what I was used to. They could ask all the questions they wanted. I was innocent and I knew it, and that was all they were gonna get out of me.

I closed my eyes and rode the wave. Like an expert surfer that knew how to navigate this opiate ocean, I could handle the swells and the curls, avoid the hidden shoals.

Because I had to survive.

For Isabelle.

 

I didn't know if it was day or night. It felt like I'd been in this room for a week. I think I fell asleep curled in a corner and then when I woke up, every inch, every muscle ached. I wondered how much of that rotten interrogation drug they had given me and whether they would give me another go-round when they realized that I was awake.

But I was glad for the absence of my interrogators. Figured that they had all gone to sleep. I pressed my skin against the cold cement wall. The rough chill scratched my face, made me realize I was still alive.

I had to remember what I saw. I locked it deep within my brain where no drug could ever steal it.
Isabelle. Safe
. I hated to admit it, especially in this dark snake pit where the mugs had found a way to make my every thought known, but the fact of the matter was that I didn't care about the other kids. The ones that were dead. I only cared about one.

Mine.

It was my secret just how shallow my heart was. My secret cross to bear.

I could hear a symphony playing inside my soul. A bittersweet serenade. The battle between light and dark would be over soon. A crashing, thundering crescendo of violins and drums and wind instruments. Beautiful and sad. I could
almost see my heart curling at the edges, burning, folding up into something hard. Like coal, it almost glistened.

Black and brittle and broken.

And dead.

 

The door flew open with a crash. I jerked awake. Didn't even know I had fallen asleep. Realized someone had removed my liquidmetal cuffs. I licked my lips and wondered how long it had been since I'd had anything to drink.

“You got a visitor, Domingue.” A mug stood just outside the doorway. I couldn't see more than a dim outline of features, closely cropped hair, broad shoulders. “Fancy up, pal. It's your lawyer.”

A tall, slender man gingerly walked into the room, his features slightly feminine, long hair pulled back in a neat ponytail. He was some sort of hybrid. I'd seen that model before, in the illegal chop shops that competed with Fresh Start on the black market. He had fair coloring, blonde hair and blue eyes combined with Asian bone structure. It was one of the latest prototypes that wed the exotic with the mundane.

He grimaced as he sat across from me.

This guy wasn't my lawyer, I'd never seen him before.

The door closed.

“They can't hear us,” he said, his words precise as he looked me up and down. “This conversation is completely private.”

I leaned forward. I could break this pretty boy in half if I had to. I thought about telling him that, but decided to wait and see what his game was.

He folded his hands neatly in front of him on the table. I could see that he had something tucked inside his right palm. Some sort of device. Maybe he was one of those new messenger models I'd heard about, disposable clones built for one-way missions followed by a quick download.

“You're a Newbie,” I said, recognizing the unmistakable glitter. “A month old, maybe.” It was my turn to look him up and down. “East Coast chop shop. My guess is you came from Harry Kim.”

“Yes, of course. East Coast. You now have four minutes.” His eyes turned cold, his speech pattern skipped a beat, slipped into something almost foreign. He said a couple of words I couldn't understand, then he returned to English. “If we waste time, you will regret it.”

I shrugged.

“Where is Ellen?”

I felt the hair on the back of my skull stand up. I glanced around the room, tried to figure out if there were any cameras or recording devices that I couldn't see.

“I need to know the research progress,” he continued. “You haven't turned in any reports for several days and my sources have informed me that the last dog, Omega, is missing.”

“Okay, you wanna know what happened? She split, that's what happened,” I said, trying to sound angry and betrayed, trying to keep my thoughts in check. “That mediocre research assistant your boss pawned off on me just disappeared. She ran off when the last dog died, that's how much she cares about your little project. And this research is all a pile of crap, I haven't had anything to report because it all failed—”

“That's a lie. This model,” he made a sweeping gesture that referred to himself, “is equipped with many modern conveniences that Fresh Start does not offer. You are lying about—” He paused and looked up to the right. “The dog, he is not dead; the research, it did not fail. And Ellen.” He took a deep breath. “You are at least telling a partial truth. She ran away.”

He glanced at his watch. “You have one minute. I have to tell you, this is your second warning.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We gave you a clear warning just before the break-in. We told your brother that we needed the dog. And the research. But now the stakes have gotten higher. For you.”

“You monsters almost killed my daughter last night! How much higher can the stakes get than that?”

He smiled: a thin decadent crescent that revealed dimples. “Do you really think that death is the worst thing that can happen to a young girl? Just how naive are you, Domingue?” He flashed long eyelashes at me, lowered his gaze flirtatiously. “I, myself, grew up in the Underground Circus, back in my first life. It would be delicious to teach your daughter a few of my own special tricks—”

I flew at him then, lunged across the table and grabbed him around the throat. We crashed to the floor and tumbled. But he didn't fight back. Instead, I saw a faint light flash in his hand—the device he had hidden in his palm.

His limbs fell limp, his features waxen. His eyes met mine.

“Second warning,” he whispered.

Then he died.

I stood up and screamed, then I started to kick the weasel. Bones cracked in his chest and blood seeped onto the floor.

“Get in here and pick up your rubbish!” I shouted as I continued to beat his worthless carcass. “Hurry up and get your garbage before I make a mess!”

The door opened quietly and two mugs dressed in black, wearing hoods again, came in and carried out the dead Newbie.

Then another man walked in, someone I'd never seen before. There was a weariness in his features, but his eyes were dangerously bright.

“You're free to go, Domingue. Apparently your brother threatened the jumps for every mug in the station if we
didn't let you go,” he said. “So go ahead. Get outta here. But if I was you, I'd use the back door. There's a mob waiting for you out front.”

 

The sun splintered through the darkness. Black sky changed to indigo.

I hovered in the doorway, an intruder in my own home. Black boot marks stained the floor; like a dotted line they led upstairs, where the investigation continued. Strange voices murmured. Someone was talking with a French accent, someone else was slipping through the bayou mud in Gutterspeak.

“I don't sees how they gots liquid light. It's illegal for anyone 'cept the lawmakers and the 'sitters—”

“That was the idea. This stinks like a setup.”

“So ya still thinks they're innocent, those Domingues?”

“I didn't say that. But we need to forget whose house this is or we're gonna miss the important clues.”

“I'll tells ya the important clues. Them dead kids. Them sixteen babies that was burned alive. That's what ya needs to remember.”

I couldn't face the mugs that had taken residence in my daughter's room. Instead I turned down a hallway, followed a path of polished wood and painted wainscoting. I could hear a faint hum in the distance, felt a slight electric buzz in the air. Saw a pale blue glow beneath the door as I came around the corner. Heard the whisper of voices.

The hallway smelled like a bakery: shelves lined with cookies and cakes, walls smeared with vanilla frosting.

I hate that smell. Virtual reality. The candy shop that never closes.

I heard crying, so I opened the door. My wife, Marguerite, stood in the middle of the VR room, wearing a VR suit, surrounded by about a dozen faceless, shapeless creatures that
looked just like her. All sobbing and sniveling. It was her
sous-terrain société:
her flesh-and-blood surrogate family, grafted and stitched together from serendipitous encounters. They usually met in Grid chatter bars and, after several months of friendship and a brief civil ceremony, they chose assigned familial roles. Brother, sister, mother, cousin. Like children playing with blocks, they built their own fragile ancestry.

Weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. That's about all the
sous-terrain société
was good for. This group of Stringers didn't even notice when a real live human walked in the door.

“Hey, I thought you were going to wait for me at the station,” I said, then watched as startled VR heads turned.

Marguerite swiveled to face me. Even with her suit on, I could see the tears glistening on her cheeks. Her voice wavered when she spoke, “I was—I did, but the mugs made me leave.”

For a moment I realized how vulnerable she was, how our lives were never going to be the same after last night. I thought about the first time we met, that red dress she wore, the sound of her laugh. Then I did something I hadn't done in months.

I put my arms around her, held her for a long, quiet moment.

“Why don't you turn that thing off and go take a nap,” I whispered. “You'll feel better—”

“But the funeral is this afternoon. I need to invite my family—”

“Marguerite, you're a Stringer—” She didn't have any family. They were all dust in the wind and had been for years.

“You've never understood what it's like to be
les enfants sans sourire
,” she said as she pulled away from me. All the
VR heads around her nodded, murmured in agreement. “To be one of the children of no joy—”

For a second I thought I saw sixteen children, dead on the floor. Their ghosts seemed to surround us, filled the room. “Where's Isabelle?”

“Chaz wouldn't let me take her. He said I'll need at least seven guards before he'll let her leave his hotel suite.”

I paused, frustrated. Felt tension building in my chest. I needed another gen-spike, but my stash was upstairs. And so were the mugs. “Okay, why don't you round up ten or twelve guards. We'll pick her up after the funeral.”

“I don't—I don't know who to—”

“Just call Pete. He'll take care of it!” I snapped. I wanted the tension and the pain to stop, wanted her to shut up, to quit being weak. “And I told you to turn this off! I have a conference call with Aditya Khan in a couple of minutes.” I hit the
DISCONNECT
button and the glittering crowd around Marguerite faded away.