by Daryl Banner
“Nice work, John,” I say, annoyed.
“What’d I do?” he asks innocently … through a face that’s half falling off.
Desperately, I race after the girls. My wild hope is, they’re running back to their home, which I pray is where my friends are—or at least someone who can help us. The woods mask my every attempt at seeing where the girls have run off to, so I rely on following their screams.
Soon, the noise becomes too fragmented to trace, and it seems for a while like every tree in every direction is screaming at me. Logic begins to drive me more than sight or sense as I plunge head-on through the woods in one single direction.
I have to find the others. “Please, girls, please lead me to your home,” I plead under my breath, whispering. “Helena, Marigold, someone …”
Then the screaming is gone and we’re all alone once more. I haven’t relented though, and even while the roots of trees keep trying to make a grab at my feet, I push on and on, inspired by the existence of those two girls—who I’m quite sure were Living. John asks something and I ignore it, hurrying, driven mad in my pursuit.
Quite suddenly the forest gives away to an enormous pair of formidable metal doors. It’s astonishing that I didn’t see them coming, the inexplicably dense forest hiding them well. They are thrice as tall as us and the tall, thick steel walls to which they’re attached extend in either direction infinitely, vanishing into the foggy distance.
John seems as stupefied as I am. “What’s this?”
“I …” I realize I can’t answer him.
And then I don’t have to. A voice booms over our heads from the top of the metal doors: “STATE YOUR NAME.”
The voice seems to come from nowhere. It might be from a loudspeaker, but I see neither person nor speaker. Adjusting John in my arms, I stammer my name.
“LOUDER.”
Annoyed, I shout, “Winter! And this is John! I’m looking … I’m looking for anyone who, um …” I don’t even know who I’m talking to or what to ask. “I need—”
“WINTER?” The voice in the loudspeaker turns amused. “IS THIS SOME KIND OF JOKE? TURN BACK OR WE SHOOT YOU DOWN.”
“Shoot me down?” Who the undead hell am I talking to? “What’ll that accomplish? We’re already dead.”
“BY THE POWER OF NEW TRENTON, TURN BACK OR WE WILL END YOUR EXISTENCE!”
A normal person would walk away. Clearly not being one, I awkwardly stumble to the metal doors, John still in my arms, and gracelessly kick it four times. “I have a Raise, mister so-called New Trenton!” I yell back, staring up at the—whoever, whatever. “I need Upkeep! If you’d be so kind, oh immortal mysterious moron, please fetch Marigold or Megan or the Chief or Helena or …”
My throat closes up, and the rest of my list of names dies on my self-important tongue. Instantly I’m thrown back into the traumatic memory of a great battle waged in a lush basin we once called Garden. Garden was supposed to be our salvation, but it turned into a place where many lives were lost … a place of fire and horror and death. Who did we lose that day? Which of my friends no longer exist? I have no way of telling, and my memory of it is an angry haze of pain and screams …
And John’s last breath as a Human.
Strange muffled sounds issue from the top of the door. I wait with every scrap of patience I have. John has no choice but to wait; judging from his merry expression, he couldn’t care less anyway. Between the two of us, we’ve waited for half an eternity; what’s just a little longer? The sounds we’re hearing become hushed protests, grunts of argument, then muffled discussion. In that order.
Finally, a changed voice rips from the speaker-that-we-cannot-see: “ENTRANCE GRANTED.”
The enormous metal gates slowly pull apart, the squeaks and groans of wheels and gears protesting the act. It brings me to wonder whether these gates have ever before opened at all.
When they’ve finally parted, a heavily-armored lady is standing there. For a moment, I’m struck by the sight, an involuntary gasp and a name surging into me: Judge Enea? But when the dust kicked up by the gates opening at last dissipates, I realize it is not the deceased Judge of Trenton standing before me: it’s my Undead teenage friend Headless Ann, which is a bit deceiving of a name as she isn’t headless at all.
“Ann?” I’m overcome with surprise. She looks so transformed. Even her hair is done differently, tossed and tied off to the right, the left side buzzed to the scalp.
Ann returns much the same surprise as I imagine is on my own face. She takes a few cautious steps toward me as if I might detonate. And I might.
“Winter?” she returns finally, her eyes wide as a child’s. “Is that … Is that really you?”
“Um, I hope so.”
“I thought … Everyone thought …”
“I’ve just been in the Whispers,” I say. “And when John rose out of the ground I … I found Trenton and it was … it looked completely abandoned, and—”
“John,” she repeats, her eyes finding his as if just now realizing he’s there. A small and nearly nonexistent sigh escapes her lips. “Oh. Oh, wow.”
“Yes, right, it’s amazing,” I agree hurriedly, annoyed, “but as you see, he really needs the Refinery. Like, now.”
“But you …” Her eyes find mine again, baffled. “You looked … You looked turned to stone. You wouldn’t move. You wouldn’t talk to anyone. You were … Winter, you were petrified.” The fear in Ann’s eyes won’t relent, bothering me all the more. “None of us thought you were coming back. None of us thought you or John would—”
“I’m fine,” I assure her, though I realize carrying one’s broken Undead lover who’s lost all memory does not a fine person make. “I was waiting for John to Rise. Just John and I.” I can’t stand the way she’s looking at me. “Listen, he really needs the Refinery. His arms don’t quite work, his left foot drags and, well …” I indicate his face with a nonchalant shrug.
“Um …” Ann shuffles uncertainly, peering over at two men I hadn’t noticed until now, also dressed up in as much armor as her. They must’ve been the polite morons I spoke to through the gate. “Winter, there’s no Refinery anymore. Things are … Things are very different now. As you can see, we’ve relocated. I’d figure by now that you’d, um … that you’d recognize where we are.”
I look around. The giant colorless steel walls extend in either direction. Within its walls, I see enormous, horrible warehouses and rusty, boxy buildings with wide windows or no windows at all spaced far apart from each other, making way for large barren cement courtyards. Peppered around the buildings are wooden houses that have no business in this vast industrial graveyard of a city. I see a tall tower in the distance that reminds me of a water tower, another that looks like a rice silo, and …
My lips begin to part. Something is piecing together in my mind and I dare not say it—and then quite suddenly I do dare to say it: “N-Necropolis.”
“New Trenton,” Ann corrects me quickly. “That’s what we call it now.”
“Is this … Is this a sick joke?” I say, my eyes scanning the horizon of sharp, unkind buildings … the factories that only breathe smoke and death … the chimneys of nightmares and torture spires that stab the sky like giant knives. “Why in all the undead world would we—??”
“It’s been our home for so many years now, Winter. It had lots of burn damage for some reason, but it’s fixed up now. You should’ve seen everyone we dug up from the pits and the graves, Winter. Do you have any idea how many Undead the Deathless Queen buried here?”
“The Deathless Queen, my mother, you mean,” I say quite acidly, narrowing my eyes.
“Oh.” Ann squeezes her face with shame. “Sorry. Crap. I didn’t think about that. I still can’t believe you’re related to her. She’s really your real mother? Like—your real, actual, First Life mother?”
“Can we get John some help, please? Ann, I can’t hear or process anything else right now, I’m about to bury myself a hole that I can jump in
, and I’m—” I stop talking and the words Ann uttered a moment ago suddenly sink in and render me speechless.
“Yes, of course,” Ann agrees. “Bring John this way.”
“Wait.” I’m still hearing her words over and over again. Maybe I misheard her. “Wait, wait, wait. What did you just say? About … About years?”
“What do you mean?”
“Years, Ann? This Necropolis—This New Trenton has been your home for years?” Ann bites her lip in that annoying way when she’s too nervous to answer a question. “Just say it,” I urge her, failing to hide the irritation in my voice. “How many years have I been waiting for John to Rise?”
“Twelve,” she blurts.
For a moment, it’s like I didn’t hear her. My eyes are blank and a breeze carries an imaginary tumbleweed past us. “Twelve,” I repeat numbly.
“Twelve.”
There’s no way twelve years passed, just like that. Sure, a number of days, maybe even a few weeks, but … but it can’t possibly be true that I was knelt there by John’s grave waiting for him to Rise for twelve years.
Ann touches my arm gently. I flinch, brought out of my daze. “Let me take you and John to the hospital,” she says gently.
After a moment of due reluctance, I follow Ann into the bowels of the city I once fought to escape. I was held here in the Necropolis after being captured by a metal-legged Warlock dwarf, just so happens. I was in the company of Judge Enea, two of her henchmen, Helena, and Grimsky when I was taken. I made friends with Benjamin here, was imprisoned with my Reaper Helena, and met the little Human girl Megan in a cell adjacent to mine. I came face to face with the Deathless King—who was actually a queen—at the top of a rice silo they called the Black Tower. I wouldn’t learn that she was my mother until the exact moment I struck a sword through her body some time later and deposited her off the edge of a cliff. What a dutiful daughter I am.
Once many more unimaginable events unfolded, I returned to her. After John died and all hope was lost, I returned to what remained of my mother’s still-animated corpse at the bottom of that fateful cliff and I begged for her guidance. And what a surprise, she was there to give me just the comfort I needed. Mother and daughter, and a not-so-conventional reunion at last. I told her I’d be back, and then I’d—
“Ann, my mother,” I say suddenly. “She’s at the cliff. She’s at the base of the cliff. I told her I’d be back for her, and I’ve … It’s been twelve years and … Oh no! We have to go and get her!”
“Don’t worry,” Ann says very quickly. “It’s handled.”
“Handled??”
“You told us where to find her, Winter.” Ann studies the likely-perplexed look on my face. “Twelve years ago when we first came back to Trenton, Megan and I came to you in the Whispers and—You really don’t remember any of this?” Ann fixes her eyes on me. “I just … I know you have lots of questions and … Listen, rest assured, your mother was … was …” She leans in and quietly adds, “She was found. Please, I’ll explain later. Don’t bring it up again, please, please, please. Megan will have my head.”
I blink for an answer.
“First thing’s first,” she says. “Hospital.”
“Hospital,” I agree.
We pass through the streets of the Necropolis. Yes, I refuse to call this place New Trenton. I blanch to even let the name touch my mind, let alone my tongue. As we make way between the space of two massive warehouses, I realize the path is wide enough to fit eight trucks driving side by side and yet I still feel as though the buildings are pressing against my shoulders. As if to taunt me, I see a merry gathering of people at an opened garage, laughing at one another’s banter over a picnic bench full of food.
“Can I at least see my mother?” I ask, bothered.
“She’s not here.”
“What? Where is she then?”
“Please, Winter, I’m begging you, don’t bring it up. Please. Later, later, later. One thing at a time. John’s Upkeep comes first.” Ann regards me with a quick glance and two nervous eyes, then returns to leading the way.
I do not like the look in her eyes one bit.
We walk further on and I see an open cement area that’s been fashioned into a basketball court. Kids of all ages are playing, from teens to little children. Even their laughter can’t touch me as I stroll by, following Ann through this monstrosity of happiness.
“If there’s no Refinery,” I ask, my eyes following the basketball as a young boy of ten or so years dribbles it from one end of the court to the other, “then how do we Upkeep?” He shoots and scores. Ten points, I decide to give him. He catches the ball, looks up at me as I pass.
“We’ve advanced in those abilities, too,” she explains. “With the sciences of the past being reintroduced … anatomy, the biology of Humans—even Undead … now, when a problem is fixed at the hospital by the doctors, it’s pretty permanent.” She sounds so flippant as she tells me these things. John just seems to be listening curiously, smiling blankly as though he were watching some interesting science show on TV. “No Upkeep’s needed anymore,” says Ann. “My head’s affixed to my shoulders with titanium now. True fact.” She turns her head only to eye John, a sad tinge in her scrunched face.
Don’t scrunch your face sadly at John. “So you’re saying we’re going to … put titanium in him?”
She shrugs. “To be honest, I pretend it’s titanium. I have no idea what they use. Whatever it is, it’s durable enough and a Human couldn’t knock my head off if they threw a battering ram into it. Well, uh,” she reconsiders, biting her lip, “not that one’s tried. I guess my armor kinda helps too. Look to your right, you’ll see some of our Gardening Bio-pods. The space is approximately twelve times bigger than the one we had in Old Trenton for those sorts of crops. It was Jasmine’s expertise once, but, well, nowadays everyone’s an expert. Leafy stuff and other stuff. It’s cool as crap. You should see the parsnip.”
Suddenly there is a howling blast of shrill noise, like an alarm. I lift my shoulders, startled by it. The noise breaks across the sky like digital screams.
“Crap!” Ann grabs me by the shoulder. “Hurry, here, hurry, Winter!”
We run under the awning of a nearby building. I turn my head to find all the kids have scattered from the basketball court, the ball left bouncing, forgotten. A pair of women that were strolling have run into the opened garage—the folk with their picnic having also rushed inside and they’re pulling down the door. As the howling continues to screech at us from all directions, I turn to ask Ann what’s happening.
And then as sudden as a thunderclap, the world is deluged with water. Rainwater. I gasp and throw myself against the wall of the building, John in my arms. The rain is the thickest I’ve ever seen—and the most sudden. I could be told the heavens decided to dump an ocean’s fill of water on the world and I’d believe it.
“We need to go inside,” Ann decides, fumbling for the nearest door. The water is lapping up near our feet now, and I remember the all-too-familiar sting of water’s touch on Undead skin: it burns worse than fire, worse than acid, worse than anything imaginable. “Hurry, here,” she calls out, pushing open a door.
I hurry to her, sliding against the wall until we’ve made our way into the building and the door shuts in front of us. Through the windows in the door, I watch as the world drowns.
“How …?” I try to ask, can’t find the words.
“It’ll end soon,” Ann assures me. “Always does. Hey, come this way. This building connects to the hospital.” She starts to go. I’m stuck staring after the window for a moment, shaken to the core by that very sudden and seemingly unnatural cascade.
It’s unlike anything I’ve seen in either of my Lives.
The sirens are still screaming outside, I can hear them as we walk through bright white hallways. John lets loose a dry chuckle and says, “That was a close call.”
“Always is,” Ann admits. “The only place it doesn’t rain is the Whispers.�
� She eyes me carefully. “I guess it’s the only place Mother Nature won’t touch just yet.”
“Rain? You call that rain?” I emit one single dry laugh of my own. “That was an assault. There’s nothing natural about that rain, Ann. That was … I don’t even have a name for what that was.” I look back, find the door’s too far away to see anymore. I can still hear the sirens through the impossibly loud rain pummeling the roof.
We turn a corner. A large set of double doors open when Ann pushes her palm into a button on the wall, and through them we go, passing into what I presume to be the hospital. We walk by many empty rooms, trudge down a echoing hall full of nothing, then arrive at a completely, utterly empty waiting room.
“We’re here,” Ann says unnecessarily. “Wait here.” At a little counter, some sweet-faced girl dressed in a modest uniform speaks briefly with Ann, then directs her to a door further down the hall. “Alright. This way, Winter.”
I follow. I’m still shaken. The world floods us, pouring and pouring and pouring, and my broken lover in my arms is the one and only comfort I know. And it’s not much of a comfort, to be honest.
Before long, I’ve laid John down on a stiff hospital bed dressed in pink-striped sheets. His eyes, sleepy-looking and glassy, simply bounce around the room as if he were still on some peculiar adventure. The rain keeps striking against the window in one unrelenting wave. “The doc’s gonna come in soon,” Ann explains calmly. “Oh, and Marigold too, if she can be found. She keeps herself busy in steelwork now. Hah. Can you imagine?” Ann touches my cheek suddenly, startling me. “I’ve really … I’ve really missed you, Winter.” Then her hand slips from my face just as quickly and she saunters to the door. I listen to the loud clinking of armor as she disappears down the hall.
And then we’re alone with the rain.
I turn to John, still lying happily as ever on the pink bed. I’m sure this place has never before seen a cheerier occupant. It’s almost annoying.
He faces me, smiling. “So, how do you know her?”