Hereafter

by Terri Bruce

  Hereafter

  by

  Terri Bruce

  ♦ Mictlan Press ♦

  Table of Contents

  Hereafter Description

  Copyright Notice

  Also by Terri Bruce

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  If You Liked This Story...

  About the Author

  Also by Terri Bruce

  The Afterlife Series by Terri Bruce

  Hereafter Description

  Why let a little thing like dying get in the way of a good time?

  Thirty-six-year-old Irene Dunphy didn't plan on dying any time soon, but that’s exactly what happens when she makes one little mistake after a night bar-hopping with friends. She finds herself stranded on earth as a ghost, where the food has no taste, the alcohol doesn’t get you drunk, and the sex...well, let’s just say “don’t bother.” To make matters worse, the only person who can see her—courtesy of a book he found in his school library—is a fourteen-year-old boy genius obsessed with the afterlife.

  Unfortunately, what waits in the Great Beyond isn’t much better. Stuck between the boring life of a ghost in this world and the terrifying prospect of three-headed hell hounds, final judgment, and eternal torment in the next, Irene sets out to find a third option—preferably one that involves not being dead anymore.

  "5 out of 5 stars...What a book. Wow! To sum it up - witty, sarcastic, funny, smart, and a good book to curl up and read until you're too sleepy to see the words." ~Caterina, Reader Review

  "So many paranormal's have been done over and over. The same 'ol thing. Hereafter is a rejuvenation of the genre. Something different! Finally!" ~Mary, The Sweet Bookshelf

  “5 out of 5...This book is so good that I can't wait to make time to reread it. I highly recommend it. Not what I expected, in fact much much more. Do yourself a favour, and go out and get it-now.” ~Mallory, Mallory Heart Reviews

  This Special Free Preview Contains the First Five Chapters of Hereafter. You Can Purchase the Entire Book From All Major Book Retailers (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Book Depository, iBooks, GooglePlay, etc.) in Ebook, Paperback, and Audio Book Format.

  Copyright Notice

  Hereafter (Afterlife #1)

  Copyright © 2012, 2014 Terri Bruce

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Credits:

  Print Cover artwork by Shelby Robinson

  Print Cover model Chelsea Howard

  E-Book Cover artwork by Anile

  Digital ISBN:978-0-9913036-1-8

  Print ISBN: 978-0-9913036-0-1

  Printed in the United States of America

  Second Edition

  Also by Terri Bruce

  The Afterlife Series

  Hereafter (Afterlife #1)

  Thereafter (Afterlife #2)

  Whereafter (Afterlife #3)

  Irene and the Witch (Afterlife #3.5)

  Whenafter (Afterlife #4) (May 2018)

  Neverafter (Afterlife #5) (forthcoming)

  Ever After (Afterlife #6) (forthcoming)

  Short Stories

  The Tower

  The Wishing Well

  Welcome to OASIS

  Death and the Horse

  My Lover Like Night

  The Lady and the Unicorn

  Dedication

  For my Uncle Nelson,

  who would be thrilled to have a writer in the family,

  and for my mother,

  who would not be surprised.

  Acknowledgements

  This book would not have been possible without the support of my friends and family—thank you for sticking with me all these years and cheering me on during this last, mad dash to the finish. We made it!

  First and foremost, thank you to my husband and my sister—my heart and soul, respectively. This is your book as much as mine. To my father, who read to me when I was a child, and to my mother, who always bought me as many books as I wanted. To the bestest friend on all the planet—Heather Barrett—who read those first serialized novels I wrote in high school and didn’t laugh (at least, not to my face). To the Portsmouth, New Hampshire Public Library for supporting writers and the Portsmouth Library’s Writers’ Group, especially my mentor Charles Grosky, may he rest in peace—thank you for all the buffeting about adverbs, passive voice, and all of the other travesties new writers commit against the English language. And, finally, thank you to the wonderful women of Broad Universe for their friendship and support—Broads really are the best!

  Special thanks for this revised edition go to my editor, Janet Hitchcock at The Proof is in the Reading, and of course, the fabulous Shelby Robinson for the amazing artwork that graces this book’s cover. Last, but not least, thank you to Anna Erishkigal, Jean Oram, Jennifer Lopez, Kelly Harmon, and the innumerable other authors who held my hand and walked me through the steps necessary to get Hereafter back out into the world. I can never thank you all enough.

  One

  Irene Dunphy opened her eyes.

  Confused, she looked around. Strong sunlight glinted on water, blinding her.

  Where the hell am I?

  She was standing on the side of a road—by a brown, marshy river. Cars rushed by on the causeway behind her.

  No, really, where the hell am I? And more importantly, how did I get here?

  Irene racked her brain. For a moment, she drew a blank. Then memory rushed in.

  She remembered meeting Alexia and LaRayne at the first bar—a yuppie, after-hours tapas place. There had been a parade of free drinks from cute financial analysts and investment bankers. No question, peach margaritas had played a prominent role.

  She remembered the second bar—a euro-trash, wannabe-techno club. Alexia, recently single and on the prowl, had wanted to go dancing. The light reflecting off the beads on LaRayne’s flapper-style sheath had looked like flashes of lightning under the strobe lights. Irene was pretty certain Long Island iced teas had made an appearance.

  The third bar was a little fuzzier. A serious bar for serious drinkers—more of a roadhouse really, complete with broken jukebox. Possibly... tequila shots.

  Then last call and stumbling out of the bar, laughing. Something had been funny.

  A short line of taxis bunched together near the door like a school of tropical fish. LaRayne and Alexia had angled toward them, buoyed and jostled by the handful of stumbling drunks and the permanently pickled emptying out of the bar, while Irene continued more or less straight.

  “What are we gonna do now?” she asked.

  “Are you nuts?” Alexia shouted. “Some of us have to work tomorrow!”

  LaRayne added, “Yeah, Monday is a school night for some of us.”

  They looked like a moving letter A, leaning on each other’s shoulders as they walked, their legs moving away at a slight angle from their bodies. With their heads so close together, it was hard to distinguish LaRayne’s dark cornrows from the cascade of Alexia’s chemically-induced violet-red hair.

  “What are you macaroons talking about? I have to get up in the morning, same as you!”

  Alexia and LaRayne hooted with laugher, clutching each other to stay upright. “I think you mean maroon,” Alexia shrieked through gasps of laughter.

  “I think you both mean moron,” LaRayne howled, tears running down her face.

  Irene had laughed, too. It was funny. Everything was funny.

  As the girls headed for the taxis, Irene kept moving toward the street.

  “Yo! Where are you going?”
LaRayne called.

  Irene didn’t stop. “My car.”

  “Yo, loser. You parked over here, on the other side.”

  She could hear the howl of the girls’ laughter over her own.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  She changed trajectory in a wide, sloppy arc, still plumbing the depths of her handbag for keys.

  “You are so wasted!” Alexia screeched over peals of laughter. Irene stumbled past them as they hung onto a taxi’s open door. The driver sat in glassy-eyed boredom, waiting for them to get in. “You better ride with us.”

  “Yo, dim wit. How the hell am I supposed to get to work in the morning without my car?”

  That set them all off again. Then LaRayne had shoved Alexia into the cab. “Let’s go. I got like four hours until I gotta get up.” LaRayne gave Irene one last, sympathetic look over the top of the cab. “You sure you won’t come with?” She waited a second, and then she also disappeared into the cab.

  Irene remembered all of this. Less clear was what followed: fumbling to unlock the car door; getting in and starting the car; driving away; realizing she had left the driver-side door open, and stopping to close it.

  She remembered a harvest moon—swollen and heavy—low in the sky. The moon had been straight ahead as the road stretched out before her. Its burnt umber glow had seemed to expand until it blotted out everything else, and the dark line of the road had led straight into its heart. She remembered thinking that it was as if she was driving directly into it.

  Then... a yawning pit in the middle of her memory. The next thing she remembered was the world changing. Light had disappeared. Buildings and streets and streetlights had vanished. In their place had been a foaming, swirling mass of green-blue light—light with texture and weight. It moved around the car, crowding it, covering it, filling it. She stared at it, fascinated by its beauty.

  It had taken a moment for her to understand.

  It wasn’t light.

  It was water.

  Water was pouring in the open window of the car.

  There was sinking.

  She remembered the sinking.

  Then... nothing.

  Now she stood on the side of the road, staring at a river as cars rushed by, and it was morning. Her silver BMW was beside her, clean and dry.

  She took in her surroundings and instantly recognized where she was. She should—she drove this road twice a day on her way to and from work. She would have had to drive it last night, as well.

  I must have fallen asleep at the wheel. I must have dreamed it all.

  If that were true, then what had happened after that? Had she slept in her car on the side of the road all night? She didn’t remember waking up or getting out of the car. However, she was still wearing her clubbing outfit: a thigh-length, candy-apple red cocktail dress with spaghetti straps and silver sling backs with four-inch stiletto heels.

  She sighed and ran a hand through her hair. Last night pins had held the long, mahogany-colored strands in a chic updo, but now half of it hung down to her shoulders, loose and tangled. She pulled the rest of the pins out and ran her fingers through it, restoring her usual stylishly tousled look.

  She’d had some wild nights before but had never blacked out. Must be another one of those perks of getting older—thirty-six and no longer able to hold her liquor. LaRayne and Alexia would pee themselves laughing when they heard this story.

  Irene glanced at her watch and did a double take. “Shit!” Was it really two p.m.? Yes, that was the little hand and that was the big hand and it was indeed two o’clock. She groaned. She was up the creek as far as work was concerned.

  Irene rubbed her temple. Surprisingly, her head didn’t hurt. She actually felt fine. Stressed, but fine.

  What a mess. She wasn’t really keen to explain to everyone what had happened. She could just imagine the conversation with her mother:

  “Yes, Mom. That’s right. I was so shit-faced I passed out in my car on the way home. What does shit-faced mean? It means I drank myself silly. Yes, that’s right. I was drunk. Mmm hmmm. That’s right. I missed work because I spent the better part of the day sleeping it off. Yes, I was sleeping off a drunk. No. No, we weren’t celebrating anything. No, it wasn’t a special occasion. No, I didn’t get engaged to anyone. Yes. That’s right. You didn’t raise me that way. Uh huh. I know, Mom.”

  She sighed again. Well it was obviously too late to go to work. By the time she got home, showered, changed, and went to the office, it would be time to leave. At least she could use the drive home to think of a good excuse. She had killed off an imaginary uncle for cover last month. The month before had been the story of an emergency hospitalization due to food poisoning. She ran through the list of stories she had used in the last six months to cover over-indulgences—flat tire, the flu, sick mother. Nuts. It looked like alien abduction was the only thing left.

  She opened the car door and slipped behind the wheel. At least the keys were still in the ignition.

  How did I end up standing by the side of the road?

  The engine purred to life. She had been unconsciously holding her breath, and now she blew it out in a loud, fast rush. Well, whatever had happened last night, at least she still had the means to get home.

  With a quick look over her shoulder, she eased onto the road. Steadying the wheel with one hand, she groped around on the seat beside her with the other. Through random flailing and the occasional removal of her eyes from the road, she managed not only to find her purse but to open it and fish out her cell phone. She held the phone up in front of her and, with one eye on the road and one on the phone, tried to dial Alexia’s number. The screen remained stubbornly dark, despite random jabbing of buttons.

  No juice.

  Frustrated, she snapped the phone shut. She flicked her eyes to the seat beside her just long enough to ensure the tossed phone landed safely. As she lifted her eyes back to the road, the angle of the sun changed, blinding her. She lowered the visor. Well, at least it was a nice day. The Indian summer that had made it possible for her to wear a little nothing of a dress without a sweater or coat in Boston in mid-September seemed to be holding. She frowned. Usually the nights cooled down, though. She was dressed in a short, thin, rayon dress. If she had slept in her car, she would have gotten cold and woken up, wouldn’t she?

  Date rape scenarios flashed through her mind. All the news stories she had ever heard of strangers slipping women “roofies” melded together in a panic-inducing collage.

  Maybe someone had dumped her by the side of the road.

  A sudden, unexpected movement ahead of her shoved these thoughts aside. Instinct made her slam on the brakes before she was even sure what was happening. The sight of a gray-green Buick cutting in front of her registered, and she leaned on the horn while swerving around the slower moving vehicle. She lifted her hand from the horn only long enough to gesture emphatically as she passed the offending driver. The woman, perhaps in her sixties, stared resolutely ahead, refusing to acknowledge her.

  “Learn to drive!” Irene yelled, even though the windows were up in both cars. She breathed out hard through her nose as she heard ex-boyfriend-Aaron’s voice in her head, “You know they can’t hear you, right?”

  She settled back and focused on the drive home. The nondescript triple-deckers and seedy strip malls of the run-down, blue collar city of Lynn passed in a blur; she crossed into the historic and decidedly nicer Salem and the view improved. Irene continued north for a few more blocks, passing the beautiful Federal-style mansions that populated the historic district, and then turned off the main street into a neighborhood of modest but well-maintained 1950s era Cape Cod-style homes.

  As her driveway came into view, Irene felt both relief and dread. She still felt disoriented and vaguely out-of-sorts, and she hadn’t figured out what she was going to say to her boss, Donna.

  She mentally shrugged as she turned off the engine. “Oh, well. Fuck it.”

  Shower first, then the firing squad. />
  She climbed out of the car and surveyed the yard for any signs of the neighbor’s dog. “Kitty,” the hairy little rat, had made her life hell since Jamaica had adopted him a year ago. The Jack Russell terrier raised ankle biting to an art form. He had learned how to jump like a pogo-stick, which gave him enough height to clear the chain-link fence that both encircled and divided the white duplex’s back yard.

  Kitty was usually napping in the grass around the time Irene arrived home each night. The moment she pulled into the driveway, he would jerk to his feet and start yapping for all he was worth as he bounced higher and higher. Every night it was a race to see if she could scramble through her front door before Kitty gained the height to clear the fence. If only she could find a way to poison the wretched little thing without Jamaica finding out.

  She was in luck; the yard was empty. It was still early afternoon and Jamaica wasn’t home yet. Which meant Kitty was locked safely in the house.

  “What the...?” She almost fell over the large stack of mail that lay in wait for her behind the front door. In fact, she had to step sideways into the front hall to get around it. She gave the door an absent-minded shove to close it as she surveyed the mess. This appeared to be a week’s worth of mail. Was the mailman on a bender again?

  With a sigh, she waded through the debris, not really sure what to make of it. She’d deal with it later—just as she’d deal with her boss.

  She stopped in the bright, airy foyer to drop her keys onto the console table and leaned down to pull off her shoes, balancing with one hand against the wall.

  She pulled off each shoe in turn and tossed it onto the hardwood floor and then followed the short, narrow hall straight back to the kitchen.