Afterworld

by Lynnette Lounsbury

  He wondered what her work duty was. She had plenty of minutes. Her hourglass was almost full and she was probably paid for being his Guide. Had she pretended to go to work just to get away from him? He frowned at the thought. No, he was sure he had seen her look at him this morning with a new interest. He was sure she had felt the same quick moment of electricity he had.

  Kaide also invaded his mind every few moments. He ran his vision of the accident over and over in his mind, more of it coming to him as he did. The truck hit the side of the car and Kaide had hit him. The car had flipped onto its side and then the truck had landed heavily on top. That was it. That must have been when he died. But if he was killed by the weight of it, she must have been too – she was on top of him. She had to be here somewhere. The thought agitated him and he found himself peering around in case she was up one of the nearby trees.

  ‘You wanna swap now?’ David was so close to his face Dom could smell his breath. It was the breath of someone who hadn’t eaten in a long time, vinegary and dry.

  ‘Okay.’ He moved to stand under the tree and got there just in time to catch a heavy basket that fell from the branches above. At least this wouldn’t be boring. There was no warning as to when the basket was coming. He just had to be ready to catch it or he might get hit in the head.

  ‘So what’s it like being the youngest one ever to come here?’ David leered at him. He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘You gonna do the Maze? I tried the Maze twice. Didn’t make it. Too scared to face the feather. Got lost. Didn’t like the River. Came back.’ He nodded and twitched. His speech was so halting and broken Dom struggled to concentrate on catching baskets and understanding him. ‘You coming to the Glass? After work.’

  ‘Um. Don’t know. Is that like a bar? Or an . . . eating place?’ Dom hadn’t heard Eduardo or Eva mention it.

  ‘No, no, no, no, no.’ David laughed. Much longer than was necessary. ‘It’s like a mirror. And a lake. It’s both. You can look down at the world. The one we came from. You can see life.’

  ‘Oh yeah. I saw it when I came in.’ It had seemed spooky and dangerous to Dom. ‘I didn’t realise you could go back there. Do you see your own life or what?’ He actually thought that would be tremendously boring, watching your own life over again, powerless to change it. His had seemed bland the first time.

  ‘No. Wrong again.’ David laughed again. He sounded slightly insane. ‘You can see the people you knew and your friends and what they are doing. And it all just goes on down there without you. I can see my kids. I can see my wife.’ He frowned and his face crumpled into deep ravines of sadness. ‘Although she’s not my wife now, she’s someone else’s wife. She married this guy with black hair. She has a car now, too. Cart’s full.’ He screamed the last words as if he were trying to break the tragic spell of his memories. No sooner had he yelled out than a pair of boots and then legs appeared down through the branches and the woman Dom had seen hours before at the beginning of the day appeared. She didn’t seem at all tired despite balancing on the ladder picking fruit for hours and Dom was surprised to find he felt a lot less tired than he should have. One of the great things about being dead, he thought wryly.

  ‘Don’t listen to him. He’s crazy. You spend too much time at the Glass, you’ll go crazy too.’ She gestured for both of them to help her with the cart. ‘There are just three of us today so we’ll all have to pull. He’s not strong enough to do it with only you.’ She frowned at David who appeared to miss the comment.

  ‘What’s the time? Is it nearly time?’ he asked.

  ‘No. We still have another couple of hours. We have to take the cart up and back.’ She spoke roughly and David’s face fell like a small child’s. Dom felt pity for him. He pulled the bottle of water out of his bag and offered it to the others. The woman seemed surprised, but said nothing and took a drink. She nodded in thanks. David shook his head, declining.

  They stood at the front of the cart, behind a large horizontal wooden shaft, and after tipping the huge thing forward onto its wheels they began to pull it. Getting it going required every ounce of strength Dom could muster. It was incredibly heavy and the wheels were stiff. Once they finally started it moving though, it was a lot less work. Hard, but not back-breaking and at least it wasn’t boring. They walked up the same row he had come down earlier that morning, occasionally passing empty carts coming the other way. Most of the crews seemed to be more social than Dom’s, there was a lot of chatter. Perhaps it would be more fun if he were working with friends. He hoped he wouldn’t have the same crew every day. David made him uncomfortable.

  The same could not be said of David, who kept up the sporadic and obtuse comments. ‘You can come with me if you like.’

  ‘Where?’ Dom asked.

  ‘To the Glass. To the Glass.’ He said it with religious fervour, a sense of whimsy softening his face every time he spoke the word. ‘The Glass.’

  ‘I don’t understand. So you look down and you can see life going on? When did you die?’

  ‘1916. Western Front. Think it was a bullet, though it may have been the gas. Fighting Germans. I’m twenty-two years old.’ He grinned.

  Dom was surprised by most of these facts. For one thing David appeared to be about forty. ‘If you died about a hundred years ago, isn’t your wife dead now?’

  David grinned again. ‘I see what you think. I do. I see it. But time’s not linear. Time goes round and round and you can see what you need to see. It just keeps going round and round.’

  ‘Don’t get into it, kid. It’s too much for your brain to handle. You get more and more involved in the lives of people you can’t touch anymore, people who get over you and forget you. You go crazy.’ The woman beside him spoke roughly, but there was compassion in her voice.

  He might already be crazy. He was intrigued though. He wondered if Kaide had survived the accident. If she hadn’t, then she might be here somewhere and he would have to find her. Even if she hadn’t he wanted to see what had happened to his parents. His mother. He couldn’t even fathom her surviving the grief of this loss, she was practically a zombie already. Would Eva and Eduardo let him go to the Glass? Perhaps the ‘rules’ said they had to do whatever he wanted. He doubted it. It sounded like something Eva would disapprove of.

  Unless he went without asking. If he went with David, however deranged he was, he could find his own way back to the apartment from the main gate. He was sure of it. They had walked a long way the previous night, but they had not made many turns. The plan started to take shape. He wouldn’t have to go to the Glass every day like David obviously did. He would just go this once to find out about his family and then he would be satisfied. David was still talking as they approached the main gate and the woman beside him gestured with her head that they needed to turn right. Dom could see a line of carts outside a huge open doorway and he pulled their cart up behind the others. There was a backlog and they waited almost an hour before they could unload their cart onto a conveyor belt that took the baskets deep into the warehouse. Where did they go? To the market stalls? There must be eating places as well. Diners or restaurants or something. He wondered if people had homes and kitchens here or if they all lived in apartments like his, ready to move out as soon as they had their minutes. Some people must be here permanently. Running the market stalls and the shops and the warehouses.

  The woman he was working with wiped her hands down her shirt and sighed as they unloaded the last basket. ‘That took longer than I thought. We’re done. We won’t get another load in today. If you head up through that door over there, you’ll get paid.’ She turned and walked away.

  Dom followed after her quickly and said, ‘Thanks. For helping me sort it all out today.’ She blushed profusely and stammered, ‘It’s just my job.’ She turned and almost ran away, tripping over her own feet.

  The line at the doorway was reasonably short. Most people were still working and Dom hoped that he wasn’t going to get paid less because they had finished early. Ther
e hadn’t been any discussion of payment with Enoch so he had no idea how much he would get paid. The calculations were easy enough. If he needed about 10,000 minutes to get out of here and he wanted to do it in as little time as possible, he hoped to earn at least 100 minutes a day. If it was anything like life though, picking fruit was probably only going to earn him about fifty or sixty a day.

  As he got closer to the doorway he watched the man in front of him pull his hourglass from a beat-up old satchel and hold it up to the booth against the wall. He couldn’t see how much the man was paid, but he could tell the hourglass was not very full. He pulled his own out and saw the tiny droplet in the bottom. One minute. He held it up against the booth. There was a clicking sound and three shiny silver balls rolled into the top of his glass where they melted into a liquid and sank to the bottom. The number four appeared faintly in the brass along the outside edge. His heart almost stopped beating. Three minutes for a day’s work. Even if he could get another cartload done in a day he would earn only five or six minutes. That meant that he would be here almost a decade before he earned 10,000 minutes. Not to mention that he had to eat and he probably had to pay for the room he was staying in. If food and accommodation only cost one minute each per day, he would be here for almost thirty years. He stumbled at the thought. That’s why so many people were here for so long. It wasn’t possible to get out of the place. It was eye-wateringly depressing.

  He gazed out over the large paved square in front of him. There were dozens more stalls set up and the place had a much more lively feel. Almost like a real city. People were finishing work and arriving to get food and drink at the tables and bars and most seemed cheerful and sociable. There was the occasional person, flanked by Guide and Guardian, who seemed lost and confused. The newly dead, Dom thought wryly. He could certainly pick them. He looked for Eva but didn’t see her. He wasn’t entirely surprised. He had finished work quite early and many people were still picking fruit. Eduardo was nowhere to be seen either. He was hungry, but didn’t want to spend any of his minutes. Eva would know where to get the most value for his money. Or time, if that is what he was supposed to call it.

  ‘You wanna come? You can come with me.’ It was David, croaking a few inches from his ear, his acidic breath burning the skin on Dom’s neck. Dom was unsure. It may be his only chance and there were too many things he was curious about. He wouldn’t be able to sleep until he knew what had happened to Kaide.

  ‘Okay. But let’s hurry.’

  David didn’t need any urging, he was already loping away at what might have been a run if he’d had any muscular strength left. As it was, he only managed a quick shuffle punctuated by repeated tripping. They followed the general route Dom was familiar with, the main street past his apartment building, past Giraldo’s, the bar where they had found Eduardo, and then made a sudden turn down a tiny alley. Dom was thrown. He was unfamiliar with this area and he didn’t want to get lost. In fact he had never wanted to be as ‘not lost’ as he did in this city, but David kept limping along, twisting down another side street further along. It was narrow and dark and there were bodies lying along the edge of the road. Obviously they weren’t dead, but they weren’t moving either and they looked as skinny and weak as David. He had gnawing second thoughts. Pausing and glancing behind him he knew instinctively he would not find his way back. He had to stay with David. They reached the wall. David slipped behind a dingy building, its black stone scuffed and with chinks missing. They came to a small hole in the wall.

  David twisted through it easily, but Dom had to wriggle his shoulders together to squeeze through. He realised as he struggled just how solid the wall was. It was a couple of metres thick and he had to drop almost four feet to the ground on the other side. When he stood up he recognised the foggy, shadowy place he had woken up to the day before. It felt like months ago.

  Even in the afternoon light it was dark. There was a thick forest on the far side of the lake and it curled around towards the City. The banks were a rough mixture of dirt, sand and pebbles and the mist clung to the air a few feet above the surface – as though it was wary of getting too close. He walked closer to the Glass, smooth and unsettling in a calm, stagnant way. There were hundreds of people bent over the edge, faces as close to the liquid as they could get. Most had thin and twisted bodies like David and some that were close enough that he could see red, bloody tears trickling from their eyes. David leaned out over the first clear space he came to and his face instantly softened into ecstasy. The same expression was on the face of everyone gazing into the Glass. Dom hesitated. It was a drug. He didn’t want to end up like them, but at the same time, he couldn’t help himself either. His family was down there. Life was down there. Kaide. Walking to the edge of the lake, he leaned over and gazed into it.

  He had the same feeling of being sucked into a vortex as the images swirled into view and a scene, grim and unsettling, came into focus. Immediately he saw something that nearly stopped his heart, and startled, he felt himself lose his balance and fall towards the noxious liquid glass.

  6

  Dominic’s Hourglass

  4 Minutes

  His head snapped back with a force that nearly broke his neck as he was jerked clear of the liquid just in time. Trying to keep his balance, his hand brushed the surface briefly and it burned like acid. He was thrown backwards onto the sandy shore and squinted up into the angry face of Eva.

  ‘You stupid, stupid . . .’

  ‘Calm down, let him breathe.’ Eduardo placed a casual hand on Eva’s shoulder and she was unable to budge. Not that she wasn’t trying. Dom wondered if she would actually hit him. It looked like she wanted to slap his face and he was feeling so weak and dizzy that he wouldn’t be able to stop her.

  ‘I was just—’ he started, but didn’t know how to explain himself. What was he doing again? He couldn’t remember. He glanced around. He was by the lake and it was dark. Not completely, there was still the last glow of twilight, but it was mostly deserted. He could see David a few feet away still peering intently into the Glass. Despite the gloom and mist that was filling the area he could tell David was crying.

  A sudden flash of what he saw shook him. ‘I was trying to find my sister.’

  ‘And? How did that work out for you?’ Eva snapped. ‘You almost fell in. You’ll burn up if you touch that, you know.’

  Dom held up his hand, the blackened skin on it still healing. ‘Satarial. He was down there. He saw me.’

  Eva glared at him with only slightly less anger. ‘What? Don’t be ridiculous. That’s not possible. They can’t see us.’

  ‘How did he get down there?’ Eduardo spoke. He seemed less concerned about whether it was possible. He lifted his hand from Eva and squatted down next to Dom. He looked directly into his eyes and Dom could tell that for the first time since he had met the man, his Guardian was completely sober.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Eva was still sceptical. ‘You were barely there a moment.’

  Dom pursed his lips. ‘I saw her bedroom. Kaide’s bedroom. But she wasn’t there. There was no mess. Not like her. And there was a figure standing there. It was him. The Nephilim. He was watching me.’

  ‘If he can return to the world, something must be out of balance. I am surprised the Awe would allow it.’

  ‘Maybe he doesn’t know?’

  Eduardo smiled gently. ‘He knows. But the rules that govern this place are the result of millions of years of thought and belief. They evolve very slowly, but they do change. I have seen them change.’

  ‘There isn’t any time for philosophy, we have to get out of here before he gets all of us torn apart.’ She glared at him. ‘Torn apart, Dom – does that sound good to you? Without the luxury of being able to die!’ She warily scanned the forest and on cue the laughter and howling began.

  ‘Are they listening to us?’ Dom asked.

  ‘Of course they are. They are just people. People who have spent too long looking in the mirror.’ Eduardo spoke
loudly so that his voice echoed through the forest and he laughed heartily as though there was nothing to be afraid of. ‘Get up, boy, we have to find some way back into the City. The gates are closed and I don’t think it would be wise to sleep among the wolves.’

  Dom stood unsteadily and gestured to the crack in the wall he had climbed through with David. The other man continued to gaze into the Glass.

  ‘David.’ Dom touched his shoulder lightly. ‘We need to go. Come with us.’

  David flicked his hand away lightly and murmured, ‘A few more minutes. Just a few more. I’ll make my own way back.’

  A low groan came from the mist and a flickering light danced through the trees. Dom followed Eva through the wall, grateful that he wouldn’t witness the demise of his workmate. Whatever that might entail.

  Eduardo seemed to negotiate the small hole in the wall easily and walked several paces ahead on the way back to the apartment. Dom and Eva were side by side most of the way. She was still seething and Dom’s own anger grew as they walked.

  ‘It’s my choice if I want to look, you know. I bet you did it. I bet you still do.’

  ‘I don’t. It’s dangerous. You start and then you can’t stop. You end up like those poor people in the forest. Wild and mad. And then you stay like that forever.’ She watched him sadly. ‘And forever is a very long time here.’

  She seemed suddenly vulnerable and Dom said quickly, ‘Are you angry at me because you don’t like me? Or because you do?’

  Eva was startled by the question and stopped walking. She stared at him, but didn’t answer. The crease between her eyebrows made her even more alluring and Dom suddenly lost his nerve.