Afterland

by Lauren Beukes

  Almost there, she thinks, running her hand over her springy curls. Hang in there.

  They come for her in the early hours of the morning.

  Cole hears the latch on the door click, and she’s awake instantly. All that time on the run has made her alert to small noises, a small-prey mammal. She sits up in bed as the door swings open to reveal them, two women in dark red dresses and gauzy veils that cover their faces, like murdered brides.

  “It’s time, Sister.” Cole can’t tell who either of them are beneath the gauze that clings to them like death shrouds. Or birth cauls. Rebirth cauls, maybe, since the Mortification is about shedding your dead self, your dead name, and being reborn. She’s gathered this much about the ceremony during those endless Confidances.

  Mila grunts and covers her head with the blanket. Cole wills her back to sleep. Nothing to worry about, just the spirits of bloody tampons past, she thinks. They stand there, anonymous and unknowable. The gray light tells her it must be near dawn.

  “I thought this could wait until Miami?” she tries.

  “Sister Patience, your time is now.” She recognizes Temperance’s up-lilt. “Come.”

  “Can I get dressed?”

  “No need.”

  She follows them past rows of blank doors, closed against them, past the communal kitchen where the smell of last night’s stew still haunts the air, into an old classroom. Empty now except for a strut-back chair and a homely table with Cole’s own personal communion laid out for her: a pewter thimble of red wine, along with a misshapen green apple and a knife on a wooden board. One slice is already cut out, the creamy flesh browning at the edges. The chair faces a heavy red curtain on the other side of the room.

  Cole sits. The ghostly figures stand behind her. She can smell Chastity’s contraband vanilla body spray.

  “For the Serpent said unto Eve: Take, eat,” Temperance says.

  Cole picks up the piece of apple and puts it into her mouth.

  “This is temptation, this is knowledge, this is sin.” The two of them recite the words together from behind her, creepy angels on her shoulders. “And Eve ate of the forbidden fruit, for her flesh was weak and her spirit was weaker, as it is with all women.”

  “But the Savior said, Drink, this is my blood.” The red-veiled vision of Chastity hands her the glass.

  The wine is cheap and sour, worse following the metallic tartness of the apple. She’s willing this to be over already. Like sitting through years of Miles’s school Christmas nativity plays every November. Grin and bear it.

  “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

  “Blessed be His name,” Cole chants back. “Blessed be His daughters that find their way back to Him.”

  “Are you sorry, my sister?” Chastity asks.

  “I am sorry for everything. For all that I have done, and how I have gone astray.” But she’s alive, Cole thinks, and she feels the small, warm joy inside. The firm, real fact of it. Billie’s alive.

  “Stand up, please. Take off your clothes.”

  “I’m shy,” she starts, “is that really necessary?” but Chastity begins plucking at her nightie, small irritated yanks. “All right. I can do it.” She shrugs out of the nightgown, folds it up and sets it on the table next to the apple. The early morning air snaps at her skin, raising gooseflesh and the fine hairs all down her arms. But it is an exhilaration. Billie is alive, and nothing else matters.

  “Panties too?”

  “You must come before God naked as you came into the world, wearing only your shame.”

  She steps out of her sensible white cotton panties and leaves them on the floor. If they want to pick up after her, let them, she thinks. Smudge of brown on the gusset. Still spotting a little. Serves them right if she has menstrual blood running down her leg in the middle of their precious ceremony. Wasn’t that part of Eve’s punishment anyway?

  You seem awfully confident they’re not about to make a human sacrifice of you.

  Not helpful, Dev. What are they going to do, make her go through a ritual apology in the buff? She can do that. Easy. Upside down, doing a handstand if that’s what it takes to get through. Billie is alive. And they’re so close to getting home. Bring it, she thinks as Chastity sets a crown of woven grass on her head. The princess of Mortification. She has to suppress a smile. It’s ridiculous, this pageantry.

  “The grass withers and the flowers fall,” the former sex addict intones. Then she leans in close, tucking away an errant strand of Cole’s hair. “Lick your lips,” she whispers, too softly for Temperance to hear. “When the time comes. Trust me.”

  Cole tries to catch her eye. What the hell does that mean?

  But Temperance is starting in: “When you are ready, Sister Patience?” Still adding her unnecessary question marks: “When you have found the humility you need to confront yourself, um, you should go through the door?” She indicates the curtain and Cole nods as though this is a perfectly reasonable request. Exit, pursued by a nun. The Sisters withdraw, closing the door behind them, and she sits there in silence with her apple and her empty glass of wine, trying to find this humility of which they speak, but she can’t help grinning. Billie is alive.

  She remembers rushing to hospital after she’d gotten a call that Billie had fallen off a balcony at a party. They must have been in their mid-twenties, then, before Miles was born. She’d run through the wards with Devon, panicked, and found her sister sitting chatting to the nurses with nothing but a hairline fracture on her arm. She was so angry she’d punched Devon in the shoulder, the first available target. “I don’t know what you were expecting,” he’d said, mildly in the circumstances. “Your sister’s impossible to kill. After the apocalypse, it’ll just be Billie and Keith Richards roaming the world, taming cockroaches.”

  I’ll admit, I was wrong about Keith Richards.

  Has it been long enough? She wants to get this over with. She arranges her face into an appropriately guilty expression, lifts the heavy curtain, and steps through the courtyard doors into the open air.

  The paving stones are damp under the soles of her feet. She can hear singing across the courtyard. The door of the chapel is standing open, a portal of gold and black.

  She takes a step toward it, and then something hits her in the back. She sprawls onto her knees, feeling the skin graze. A broomstick clatters beside her and then hands grab her by the hair and drag her to the fountain. She kicks and yelps, but whoever is holding her is stronger than she is—Generosity she thinks—shoving her face into the water. The shock of the cold pulls the breath from her lungs. She can’t breathe, can’t move for long seconds and then, instinctively, she opens her mouth to scream and ice water floods into her lungs.

  She bursts free, gasping and retching. Or wretching even, because that’s what they’re singing. “Amazing Grace.” A wretch like her. She vomits a watery mess onto the flagstones, and all her exhilaration empties out of her. What’s left is something dark and cold. Rage. You bitches don’t know what I am, she thinks. What I will do to make sure my son survives.

  Generosity crouches on her haunches beside her, her sleeves dripping. “You are cleansed of your old life. Now come to the light and the fire of resurrection.” She prods her with the broomstick. Cole tries to swat it away, but Generosity hits her hard against the haunches, and she scrambles away from her on all fours, like a dog.

  Again, the broomstick whacks against her hip bone. She yelps and manages to get to her feet, and jolts for the burning door and the singing that swells up around her.

  She stands in the nave, breathing hard, her teeth clattering like castanets, looking out across the chapel. Hope stands on the stage beside two women in gold and black, with fluted sleeves. “The prodigal daughter,” she says, but she’s angry, not forgiving, and that’s not how this is supposed to work.

  She can hear her own voice, over the speakers. It’s her Con
fidances, recorded and played back for everyone to hear. How fucking dare they! All the terrible intimate details—names and dates and places—and most of them real, truth woven between the lies.

  The Sisters are chanting accusations over the recording.

  “Gossip.”

  “Jezebel.”

  “Selfish.”

  “Disobedient wife.”

  “Heathen.”

  “Deceiver.”

  “Bad mother.”

  “Coveter.”

  “Slattern.”

  The broomstick hits her across the back again.

  “Go,” Generosity says. “Go confront yourself.”

  Some of the other Sisters stand along the edges of the row, and they are also holding switches and lashing out at her, forcing her to run, naked, tits swinging, while they rain blows down across her back and shoulders, her thighs, her buttocks.

  By the time she reaches the stage, she’s crawling on her knees, sobbing in shock and rage. The whole assembly falls quiet as she hunkers on the stairs. She can hear the whimpering coming from her traitor’s throat. Everyone can.

  But Billie isn’t the only one who knows how to survive. She can endure them. She has to endure them, for just a little while longer. And then all three of them, Miles and Billie and her, they can find their way home.

  She makes her face blank, and quiets her breathing, raising her eyes to Hope, terrible in her ceremonial robes, green stone eyes.

  “You come to us with your painted face scrubbed clean, sister,” she says. “But your soul carries the mark of Jezebel. You are one of unclean lips, and you live among a people of unclean lips, and your eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”

  “Yes, I am unclean,” Cole says, glaring at Hope’s knees. “Forgive me. I am sorry.”

  “Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a live coal in her hand, which she had taken with tongs from the altar.”

  Cole recognizes the All Sorrows Communion. She closes her eyes and raises her chin. Nearly over, she thinks. Nearly there.

  “With it, she touched my mouth and said…”

  There’s something hot near her face. She opens her eyes to see kitchen tongs, like you would use to turn meat on a barbecue, a burning coal clasped between them.

  Lick your lips, she hears Chastity whisper in her head, but it’s too late. Hope presses the burning coal to her mouth, and she screams in agony and jerks away. The pain is colors and waves, a soundscape of humiliation.

  “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for. Your sorrows are ours, as ours are yours.”

  Cole presses her burned mouth against the cool floor, in agony. Then she raises her head and locks eyes with Hope. The rage is a hard stone inside of her. She manages to mouth. “Amen.”

  But what she means is fuck you.

  The worst is yet to come. She limps back to their room, wanting only to collapse, to drown in sleep, to stop the terrible shaking, to find her daughter waiting for her, sitting on the edge of the bed, her face shining. Mila leaps up and embraces her, unaware of her bruises. “Mom! You got Mortified!”

  “Not a cause for celebration,” Cole mumbles through the blister. Her mouth is one huge, hot throb of agony, even though the Sisters gave her salve for it, as well as arnica ointment for the grazes on her knees and the bruises on her body. She’s had enough of this: salve and salvation both.

  “Whoever suffers in the body is done with sin,” Mila says.

  Where the fuck is this coming from?

  “Stop.”

  “You’ve humbled yourself and you are His temple.”

  “Mila! I said stop!” The words are thick and clumsy in her burned mouth.

  “Jeez. Chill, Mom.” She sits down on the bed again, shoulders hunched like her boring old mother is spoiling things. Again. “I’m proud of you. That’s all. It’s a wonderful day for you, Mom. You should try to enjoy it.”

  “I can’t,” she indicates her scorched lips. “Look what they did to me.”

  Her daughter squirms, but only briefly. “Generosity says that’s your sin burned away. Every bad word you’ve said, every thought and deed. When the blister heals, so too will you be! I can’t wait for my time.”

  She comes so close to slapping her daughter, she frightens herself. With every last bit of control in her bruised and aching body, she forces the words out. “You are not going to have your time.”

  Mila gets up, jaw set like concrete, cold shark eyes, and stalks out.

  “Mila…” Too broken to chase after her. What more is there to say? She’s misread this, she’s fucked-up.

  Her eyes are shut against Mila’s flounce, the slamming of the door.

  How did this happen?

  Maybe she should take the cash she’s already stolen, grab Mila, and run now. Get away from these dangerous zealots, with their deadly smiles and their insane ideas.

  Dev, where the fuck are you when I need you? Oh God, I need you so much.

  You got to sit tight, boo. Couple more days.

  You’re not here. You don’t know what it’s like. It’s too much.

  You’re going to let these freaks get you down? After everything?

  Fuck off. Fuck you, you’re not here.

  But you are. And you’re all he’s got.

  48.

  Billie: Turned Tables

  “She wants to talk to you,” Zara says, handing her the phone, in a better class of hotel, in Nashville, Tennessee, and the look on her face, oh, that is something. That is everything.

  Billie wouldn’t let Zara see the messages. Logged out of her email, refused to log back in or hand over the password, even at gunpoint. She knows her worth. If they can communicate with Cole without her, if they know where she’s going, who she’s with, she’s dead in a ditch.

  “Mrs. A.,” Billie says. “Yes. It is good news. We’re back on track. I’ve got it under control.”

  Zara scowls at the implication, but how is she going to contradict her? The truth is the truth, a flaming sword against the dark.

  “Would you mind?” she says to old gloom and doom, nodding at the door, but Zara shakes her head. Licking her wounds, but not ceding ground. Not yet. We’ll see about that. Billie’s willing to let it slide, for now. A brand-new pack of antibiotics with two years to go on the expiry date has her feeling generous. Not so difficult to lay hands on, after all. She even insisted on Zara getting her own prescription, because that ear, darling, that ear looks terrible. She might want to consider some cosmetic work to fix it up. There have been promises of private doctors and the best surgeons, post-Miami, post-delivery. And they are so close. She can taste it. What’s the flavor of two million, the mouthfeel?

  “Anything you want to say to me, you can say in front of our friend,” Mrs. A. says over the phone. “But please remember this isn’t a secure line.”

  “I wanted to discuss the terms.”

  “Really? You are barely out of the woods, and you want to renegotiate?”

  “Fair’s fair. I could have sunk this whole thing. I know about the buyer.”

  “Our friend said you had been poking your nose into private correspondence. What do you know, Wilhelmina?”

  “That she doesn’t want the product. She wants a replacement. For what she’s lost.”

  “The artwork, yes. It was a very valuable piece. And nothing could replace it, truly. She’s heartbroken.”

  “But this could go some way to ameliorating her pain.”

  “If that was true, and I’m not saying it is, what of it?”

  “There are considerations.”

  A soft huff of laughter. “Aren’t there always.”

  “A moral accounting.”

  “Not the cold, hard finances?”

  “We’ll get to that.”

  Mrs. A.’s tone sharpens to ice blades. “Do you want to talk about the losses I’ve incurred? In no small part due to your mismanagement of the situation.”

  “We’re
both businesswomen. I think we’re both more focused on outcomes.”

  “I feel like you have a proposition.”

  “I need to have a sense of where this is going, that it’s the best possible circumstances considering the, ah, current marketplace.”

  “I can assure you it will be appreciated. More than you can imagine. Our client is a woman of means who will do everything in her considerable power to ensure this piece takes pride of place. Let’s say she’s a singular collector, well versed in proper maintenance and care and keeping. She desires this very, very badly.”

  “And the seller?”

  “You?”

  “The other party. I need to know she’ll be taken care of too.”

  “Of course.”

  “I was thinking maybe she could accompany the piece, as the…curator.” A nanny, really. If she could speak plainly, which she can’t, because the FBI might be listening in somehow, and everyone’s turned paranoid. And Cole would adapt to whatever the circumstances are. A palace in the Emirates, a chalet in Switzerland. She’d still be in contact. And Miles would have the best, the absolute best possible upbringing. No expense spared. Win-win for everyone.

  “I’ll certainly put it to the client.”

  “That’s all I can ask, right? Looking after her interests. I need to know she’ll be well cared for.”

  “And you? What about your interests? I know you’ve been dying to discuss that.”

  “Well, Mrs. A., let me tell you, I think I deserve a higher commission, considering the very inhospitable climate and the challenges that have come up. There was the matter of the fucking drill, for example.”

  “Poor Billie. You’ve had a rough time of it.”

  “I really have. But I know you’ll make it worth my while. Because I’m the only one who can bring this to you, Mrs. A.”

  “You really are.”