Lament for the Afterlife

by Lisa L. Hannett

  They’re not your problem, he tells himself, jamming the thing into his pocket as he leaves the station. They’re not your problem. He takes to the oldest avenues, the widest, the most vacant. Jogs down open-air colonnades. Cobbled broadways. Tumbledown messes of ancient stone. He travels east, always east, into the mortared tomb of his city, aiming for its dead fringes, far from the living west. His legs take him far as they can get from bungalows and suburbs, from the twelve-sided front, from codenamed operations, from boys and Caps and weapons and that hideous mistake of a stadium. Guilty, he runs. Away—and to.

  No, they’re not your problem.

  But the voice in his head is riddled with bullet holes, and the woman’s face—her lovely round face—flashes with each remembered shot. It didn’t show fear, Peyt realises. It was sharp with curiosity, hurt, anger.

  Not your problem, he thinks again and again, now standing in front of the museum, reaching for a clay jug half-buried in a mud castle. This is what the child was running back for yesterday, this chipped hunk of terracotta, its athletic black gods mucked-over with tiny fingerprints.

  Peyt turns the amphora in his hands, brushes it off. She’ll miss it again soon enough, he thinks, propping it on the planter’s rim. A minute’s fossicking in his satchel produces two beets, three onions and a bouquet of carrots—a pathetic offering, but he hates to leave more in case the local herd sniffs it out first. The vegetables fill the vase nicely. Before retreating, Peyt packs its base in the dirt to keep it from tipping.

  Then he settles in behind the martyr’s plinth, scopes the museum’s foundations. Waits for someone hungry enough to come out.

  ####

  Maybe they’re dead in there.

  The clouds are gleaming pewter on top, grey fluff below, wisped with dreams of blue. A watery sun swims through the sky, its fat silver belly sinking as it runs out of puff. Wan light softens the museum’s stone façade; the proud towers capped with saw-toothed pinnacles, the tall mullioned windows, the imposing double doors surrounded by row after row of carved arches—they’re all vague impressions of grandeur glimpsed across the plaza, recalled more than seen. Peyt’s gaze slides across finer details, falling instead on featureless patches of black near the ground. That gap is where the woman came from yesterday. At least, he thinks it might’ve been that one. Scope raised, he flicks from rupture to gash but can’t penetrate the darkness. His calves are cramped from crouching and there’s a kink in his neck that aches down to the collarbone. The statue’s plinth has leached all warmth from his side, but he continues to lean against it, elbows on knees, shoulders bunched. A huge knot ties his stomach to his spine; it tightens with each passing minute.

  Maybe they’re hurt, he thinks, not for the first time. Maybe I hit one of them—or both. Not both, please… . They’d ghosted before he’d finally come to his senses, the gun hot in his shaking hands. Please… . Again, he scans flagstones and slope for signs of blood. Again he finds nothing but rocks and dust.

  Maybe they need a stretcher. He clenches instinctively, gripping invisible steel handles. Maybe it’s not too late …

  Joints creaking, he shifts his weight, stamps life back into his feet. The dull thudding carries across the square, comes back redoubled. It’s well past noon: surely they’d be hungry by now. Two girls alone, living in a squat—an impressive squat, he’ll admit, but still a squat—is about survival, dirty and basic. No way they’ve got a cold-box in there, and food goes off so fast in the dank… . Surely they’d have come out for a morning scrounge, or at least a trip to the pumps.

  That’s it, he thinks, half-standing, slinging his packs. Either they’re dead, or there’s another way out.

  Why hadn’t he thought of that before? He starts punching the pins and needles from his calves, harder than necessary. Experienced squatters hole-up in rundowns with debris piled high around them, counting on bricks and trash to play guard while they sleep, blocking all entrances but one. But these girls must be new to the circuit; evacs who’ve only just lost their homes, who think stone walls mean protection, who don’t realise many easy exits are far more dangerous than none.

  Look at all those windows… . Hundreds of open invitations to the greys.

  Peyt shakes his head. Legs still tingling, he stops. Listens. Anywhere else, the spill of pebbles would’ve been inaudible, the careful footsteps lost in everyday hustle. But this square was designed with performances in mind, the buildings positioned for amplification, to maximise reverberation. Peyt remembers coming here, ages ago, for school. Learning about the architect, who’d died penniless in a Lunar Street Asylum, and about the jade martyr, first in a long line of ossified men. Ma had chaperoned—for once—with Euri in tow, the toddler harnessed and kept on a leash. Even the smallest sound echoes for all time, Jean had said. Then, squeezing Peyt’s fingers white, she’d opened her mouth and sung a high note for eternity.

  Peyt blinks back to now. He stoops, pressing against the plinth. Focuses too late to pinpoint which part of the museum the ghost has come from. In ballet slippers and an old-fashioned tweed coat, she emerges from behind a pillar in the fossil garden near the right wing. Without hesitation, she dashes across the plaza to the planter, snatches the clay pot and sprints back to the building.

  Must’ve seen me plant it, Peyt realises, tracking her retreat. When she disappears around the corner, he sighs, sore and disappointed. Not because she’s eluded him—because she’s a different, less beautiful woman than the one he’d met yesterday.

  Peytr doesn’t slink very well anymore. Overbalanced with his head down, he lurches from cover to cover, reaching the museum with his heart in his throat. He wasn’t trained for this kind of recon. No, he wasn’t trained. Edging along the building’s foundations, he finds a blast-hole in the wall, crumbling and jagged. His satchels are bulky and the ruck’s weighing him down; top-heavy, he stumbles, rips his pants on the way in.

  As his eyes adjust to the darkness, he drops his bags behind a heap of gyprock and sandstone, buries them under grit and bricks. Unburdened, he’ll move easier, quicker—but three steps inside, Peyt’s staggered.

  That one time he visited the museum, Peyt had marvelled at the entrance hall’s splendour. Granite balustrades and brass railings had swept down staircases on each end of the vast space, guiding feet and eyes toward a prized piece of history: a gigantic beast’s skeleton, seventy-five feet of majesty defleshed. On both sides, arched galleries had run the room’s length. Their sandstone columns had been heavily carved with whimsical creatures—dogs riding ponies, monkeys wearing top hats, mermaids and griffins and owl-headed men. Each pillar stretched from the sunken parquet floor to vaulted, impossible heights. Decorative fretwork ribbed the ceiling, which had dazzled with stained-glass skylights. Concealed bulbs had illuminated mosaicked walls and cast golden beams upwards. When children and chaperones had shuffled past, the animals all seemed to dance.

  This museum is not that one.

  That museum is gone.

  In its place, an arid cavern that stinks of shit. Sulphur. Sour goat’s milk. The skylights are grimed over or broken, the magic bulbs crushed to powder and blown out through gaps in the walls. Shafts of bluish light sift down through decades of flies and dust; the buzzing is so loud, Peyt plugs his ears as he takes another step in. Gradually, silhouettes emerge as he crosses the landing, black on grey, resolving into lumps of destruction. Fallen capitals. Crumbled stairs. Missing columns. Gaping balconies. Peyt narrows his eyes, looking into the amphitheatre where he and Euri once watched a puppet show while Jean sat on a bench and rubbed her aching feet. From this vantage, he shouldn’t be able to see the rows of burnt seats, the stage, the ripped velvet curtain. There used to be a wall there, banked with glass display cases showing ivory sewing kits, heavy wax seals, some dead emperor’s tea set—over a hundred cups and saucers made of solid gold. Any cases still standing are now laden with rifles, bows, slingshots. Artefacts have been pilfered from elsewhere in the museum and jumbled together—black
oak thrones, painted sarcophagi, seal-hunters’ canoes, totem poles, curio cabinets—a nonsense of eras smashed and stacked for firewood.

  He steps closer, boots skidding on scree. For a second, he contemplates taking them off, approaching with sock-footed stealth. Stupid, he decides, seeing so many sharp glints on the floor. Glass underfoot scritches and squeals. Not far from the balustrade Peyt stops, breathless. Cold sweating. Tasting bile and regurgitated words.

  Where the monster’s head used to sway on its long, strange neck, a murmuration of flies now spins a hypnotic dance. The air is thick with them, swarming and dispersing without pattern, but with a certain instinctive logic. Up and back and left right left. At the last second, they part around splintered beams. Avoiding pillars and flames and random bones. Vanishing in the darkness, reappearing a beat later in the light. Their buzz-buzz-buzzing ebbs and flows, now a steady hum, now a shout. Entranced, Peyt steps forward as if summoned. He listens close, hears what the flies are saying. He understands.

  Far below, small orange tongues flick sparks up from the parquet. Some flies dip too low, singeing their bellies. Others immolate in a puff of smoke. Peyt doesn’t really see the ash of their bodies lilting down like snow: he’s stopped, paralysed. Eyes fixed on the crowd of greys below.

  Eighty, ninety, a couple hundred of them, communing around campfires and burning oil drums. The big ones cleaning, honing, polishing weapons. Sewing patches on clothes. Stirring pots. Boiling water. Taking stock of supplies. Sitting in circles, picking nits from each other’s scalps. Snapping table legs, smashing chairs. Stoking fires with scorched candelabrum. Sleeping on tapestries, lace gowns, ermine cloaks. Curling around a plump litter of their young. Chastising the toddling ones who screech while they play. Slapping their tiny loud faces, their arses, their grabbing hands. Applauding as they jump rope. Singing—yes, young and old, singing while little greys skip. Big ushering small away from hunched councils, the white-hairs talking on two frequencies. Strategizing with mouths and minds. Brewing up storm after storm of flies.

  This is it, Peyt thinks, losing all feeling in his limbs. I’ve finally found their lair.

  A pang knifes his chest as he thinks of the woman from yesterday, and the girl. So lovely, both of them. So vibrant. Such beauty, Peyt knows, stands no chance against the horde. Their straight, pretty hair is probably lining grey pillows now. Their eyes—teal blue, Peyt imagines—are adorning grey necklaces. Their pink skin is flayed and salted and already drying in strips—for grey jerky, maybe, or skin-ribbons to tie on grey effigies. Their bright red flesh is filleted for cooking, their guts are rendering to stew in grey pots. And now their stringy-meat skeletons are lying in the shadows somewhere, their empty sockets home to nibbling grey rats.

  I should’ve taken care of them, he thinks, hands squeezing a cold grip that isn’t there. Vision blurring, he tries to turn back but invisible greys have snared him. They lock onto his ankles, straddle his shoulders, hang like spoiled children from his waist. He is too heavy to move. His muscles convulse, straining to keep him upright and breathing. Ribs creaking as his lungs suck in, push weakly out. Overhead, flies become feathers become winged serifs become whirling letters become a gabble of words. So many noisy, renegade curses. So much poetry. Peyt grits his teeth, firms his mouth. Flares his nostrils, sieving as much air as he can from the buzz.

  It’s not enough. Spots shimmer across his eyes, spots float over the railing, spots freckle the pale creatures below. In flashes of green and blue, the spotted greys round out with radiation, they expand with it, they’re all aglow. Peyt’s jaw spasms, he clenches so hard. The edges of his sight vignette to black.

  While he stands there blinking, the solid stone balustrade separating him from them shifts into a barricade of wooden idols. Then it’s a collection of fat fire hydrants. It’s a row of pot-bellied urns. And right in the middle—how could he have missed her?—between two piles of sandbags is a child, huddled in a red polka-dot sundress.

  The girl. Peyt swears it’s the same girl. Tess. Tessa. Alone on the doorstep, a rifle across her skinny thighs. She can’t be a sentry, not at that age, not with her back turned. Surely not. Coatless and without a hood, she’s shivering, her head lowered—no, Peyt corrects, reading her furious ’wind. He takes in the shackle around her ankle, the chain anchoring her to the staircase. She’s crying.

  Tessa, he wants to say. Don’t be scared. I’ll let you go.

  But he can’t breathe, can’t move.

  Before them, the greys become ghosts.

  A blink later, the ghosts become women.

  Eavesdropping, Peyt hears: “The best men are gone.”

  The speaker, the lady, is skinny but solid, real flesh and blood. Squatting by a brazier at the foot of the stairs, no more than ten feet away. Flushed from the flames, wrapping duct tape around a musket butt. Tearing strips from the roll with her teeth. “The best fathers.”

  “But we make do,” says another, ’windless and slurring. A toothpick waggles from her lips as she talks. She leans over to pick up a bottle, swigs, and nearly topples into the embers. Her belly is eight months huge. “We’ll survive.”

  “All the best ones,” the first woman continues as if uninterrupted. Raising the gun, she checks the feel of it against her shoulder. She grunts, reaches for a bayonet. “All of them.”

  They aren’t really talking to each other at all, Peyt thinks. They’re just talking. Voicing stale thoughts.

  “Dead,” says a third. Hair shining with scum. Words shooting red sparks on her crown. Peyt holds his breath, wondering if the grease will ignite. “An entire generation—”

  “Generations—”

  “Gone to dirt.”

  “We’re making do,” says the pregnant one. “We’re surviving.”

  Not greys, then, Peytr thinks. But mimicking them.

  Disappearing in order to live.

  Hiding to thrive.

  No, he decides. Not just hiding. Another quick glance around the hall, a quick count, and Peyt realises there are at least five children to each woman. Newborns, toddlers, pre-teens. Girls, mostly. A town’s worth of girls. No boys over the age of, say, ten—but even so, a good number of these. Enough to man four or five squads. A large platoon. And another few teams being carried in their mothers’ bellies.

  They’re protesting, Peyt thinks. Quietly. Passively. Keeping the next generation of soldiers out of the firing line.

  “All that life,” adds a sad voice from somewhere under the landing.

  “That potential life,” corrects the rifleman, taping the blade to her weapon. Testing its balance. “Wasted. Trapped underground.”

  “For now,” says the soon-to-be mother. “Where I come from it’s different—”

  “All that death,” one of them says. “And for what.”

  “And for what.”

  “And for what.”

  The conversation is definitely an old one, Peyt thinks. It has the rhythm of rote to it. The mindlessness of a hymn. Of humming. Humming a hymn. With little food, little water, the women are just talking to give their mouths something to do.

  Hymning a hum, he thinks, snorting.

  The girl whips around.

  “Tessa,” Peyt says, raising his empty hands. Harmless, see? I won’t hurt you. “Tessa, wait—”

  But he’s too close to her now—how did he get so close?—and she’s opening her gap-toothed mouth and screaming. Shackle clanking, she jumps up but doesn’t run—can’t run—but kicks, hard and true, sharp bursts of purple pain in Peyt’s shins. She screams and claws and pulls on Peytr’s hood strings, grabs his coat, his collar, and yanks. Boots thunder up the stairs beside them. Below, pistol hammers cock. Repeaters lock and load. Tessa twists, red-faced, and Peyt’s got a ribful of balustrade, the broken railing, jagged marble, gouging into his side as he flails, the ceiling turned floor turned ceiling turned floor as he falls, embracing air. He lands, winded, on his back, on a cabinet, on his front, on the parquet. Cap’s voice in his
ear hollering Take cover! Take cover! and he’s scrambling to knees and feet, crashing through legs—tables, children, chairs, women—shots firing from above, zinging from all sides, bullets wailing, ’winds biting, stinging, clipping his arms, his throbbing back, word-shrapnel bloodying his mouth, glancing off his hood. Spitting oaths and hate and fear, he scuttles between campfires, crouching, slipping, bodies colliding, bodies crowding, bodies cutting off his escape. Daylit breaches in the walls taunt from the sidelines, too far, too far, but closer holes gape in the floor, yes, do-able, holes in the floor, over there, over there.

  And for a second, stupid, fuckin’ stupid, skidding over the edge, tumbling into the black, into nothingness, maybe, into the greys’ headquarters, into a dark horde of mothers, Peyt wonders if the beautiful worrier he saw yesterday is here. If she’s near. If she’ll be the one to kill him.

  A metallic echo, like a mess-tray being punched by a bully, as a shelf buckles beneath Peytr’s weight. Plaster tile-dust snows down on him and bullets ricochet off the shelf’s rusted steel supports—too close, too close—and he quickly rolls, clutches the edge, hangs from his fingers, toes swinging. He drops and the floor rushes up, bone-jarring. Heels and shins throbbing, Peyt collapses, then rats into the gloom on hands and knees. The basement is full-shadow, pierced by a few shafts of warm light shining down from the hall above. Aisles lead in all directions, anywhere, nowhere. Far away, too far, rubble slopes all the way up to a dim gash in the ceiling, a dead end or a way out. Peytr aims for it, groping along the floor, feeling his way around locker bays and vertical cabinets. Blocks of drawers. Row after row of archival stacks, racks on wheels that scare the shit out of him, rolling into him as he passes.

  The mothers follow on silent feet, lanterns blinding, bayonets glinting sharp.

  Peyt hears them barking orders. Short signals in the darkness, tracking with vocal location, talking ghost. No point wasting ammo down here; they’ll hunt him with numbers, with logic and blades. His palms slap the floor, faster and faster, knees clunking and banging and raw. He squeaks into a crouch, wishing he’d kicked off his boots when he’d had the chance. Glass or no glass. He’d bleed for a bit of stealth.