AFTERLIFE

by Marcus Sakey

  The thing had swerved and gone past.

  The man-thing looked back at him with eyes that seemed to spark red, and in those eyes was a hatred and a promise. The rider beat his horse harder, cutting vicious lines in the animal’s flanks, and then through some trick of the light seemed to vanish into the clouds.

  What the Christ?

  The totem. That searing feeling against his chest had been where it touched skin. Some kind of power feedback. Isabella had said as much, that Edmund had engineered it so that the others, his fellow monsters, could not take it. Edmund’s will stood between him and the others.

  The comfort that offered was terrifyingly small.

  Brody collapsed. Hugged his knees. Took deep breaths, filled his lungs with whatever passed for air in this ruined world. When he opened his eyes again, the street was as it had been before the thing came. A dying world lit in hangover shades and haunted by wind.

  He could change his mind. Isabella had brought herself back to life on will and power. The bones around his neck were those qualities made physical. He could be reborn.

  But Claire was out there. And she didn’t have a necklace to protect her from gods.

  Brody forced himself to his feet. He had to reach her. Isabella had said Claire was at the end of the worlds, but he didn’t know how to get there. In the few pants-fouling moments he’d spent here so far, he hadn’t seen any signs saying PLAINS OF SHADOW, 2 MILES.

  Still. He had the totem, Edmund’s stolen power. The rest he’d just have to figure out. He had clues. Isabella had said she had walked the length of existence. That she had watched the world fade as she moved toward the abyss.

  Well, this place is certainly faded.

  He imagined a series of worlds nested like Russian dolls. Each smaller than the last. No, not smaller—lesser. Diminishing one at a time, until nothing remained. If he had the right idea, then Claire would be at the farthest end, the faintest place.

  If this were a designed process, there would be a specific number of stages. But that didn’t fit the afterlife he’d seen. There wasn’t a neat order to it. There was no judgment, no shuffling of souls to a specific destiny. It seemed closer to physics than philosophy.

  So maybe it was a matter of attenuation. The worlds fading the way light did. Not in a series of rigid steps, but over a slow gradation. Which meant the number of steps might be essentially infinite. You could always cut something in half.

  Except. The elder, the beast that had come for him. Only seconds after Brody had flexed his new muscles, played with the power imbued in the totem, it had been rushing at him, mouth open. So it couldn’t be about distance. Not unless the monster just happened to be around the corner.

  Plus, each time Brody had died and been reborn, he’d landed in the same location. The world had changed, but not his position in it. All the metaphors he’d used to grapple with this—an echo, a chain, a series of valleys—suggested lateral distance. But that wasn’t it.

  The worlds aren’t in a row.

  They’re layers.

  Life and death are stacked upon one another.

  Which meant that moving between them was about choosing the right layer. A matter of perception and problem-solving. He wished Claire were here. He’d never met anyone who could sort and analyze data so fluidly, who could find the signal no matter the noise.

  If Claire were here, you wouldn’t be looking for the end of existence.

  Brody took another deep breath. He closed his eyes. Concentrated. Trying to imagine realities layered like a stack of transparencies, or old-school animation cells. Each almost the same as the one before. Changed only in vitality. He pictured them riffed out so that he could see not just the top, but the ones behind.

  Brody opened his eyes.

  Like putting on glasses in a 3D movie, everything snapped into a new kind of focus.

  The street was still there, just as it had been. But at the same time, it had become only part of the whole. There were other places behind it, others in front. The two understandings occupied the same space at the same time, neither more or less true than the other.

  Hold on, baby. I’m coming.

  He focused on the farthest reality. The same street, only darker and more ruined. Shattered and shaken. A postcard of the apocalypse.

  Then he went inside it.

  Again.

  Again.

  Again.

  The worlds blurred around him.

  The sky lowered and loomed.

  Buildings shook and shattered.

  Reality flowed like candle wax.

  Brody moved without taking steps. Chasing darkness. With each shift from one world to the next, things fell apart around him. A time-lapse of decay. Maggots feeding on the corpse of reality. Walls melted. Glass ran like water. The street was consumed by dirt.

  People began to appear.

  At first a few. Then more. With every shift he made, each step toward nothing, more people were on the street.

  More people, and yet they were somehow less.

  Fainter. Silent. Eyes blank as mannequins. Color and personality faded.

  Each becoming like the other, the way entropy made all things the same.

  At one point he stopped. Physically, if that word still had any meaning, he was in the same place he had been, but there was little to connect it. The buildings flickered. Hundreds of human forms milled aimlessly. They seemed only vaguely aware of each other, or of the world around them. In the dim light, features were difficult to distinguish. Out of curiosity, he crossed the street. The crowd of dead parted, their eyes fixing on him without menace or thought.

  His building was still there, after a fashion. It was in ruin. Holes gaped in the walls. Tatters of fabric blew in the breeze. When he put his hand against the brick, the whole façade seemed to wobble. He had the sense that the faint reality it retained was only for him. Brody walked to the end of the building, stepped into what should have been the entrance. The hallway beyond was gone, fading into nothingness.

  When he looked back, he saw that what had from the front looked like a wall actually only existed in two dimensions. Like the set in a play. A painted flat propped up by 1 x 4s. A ghost town with only the ghosts remaining.

  And so many ghosts. The figures were barely human any longer. They were more like shades.

  This is the path the dead walk.

  Not the ones with what Arthur had called potential energy. The others. The people who had died more traditional deaths. Who had succumbed to old age, or illness. The ones with no excess of life force remaining. Somewhere on this gradient was where Arthur himself would arrive, when he faded away completely.

  Somehow the realization didn’t make him sad. Didn’t fill him with melancholy. It was because, he realized, the dead themselves didn’t seem troubled. Whatever they were, they were no longer aware. No longer really human.

  They simply waited.

  He returned to the street. He touched the totem around his neck. The physical manifestation of the lives and dreams and secret fears preyed upon by an ancient monster. Decades of hunted souls.

  Brody kept moving. Darkness grew. At first he could see through it.

  Then he couldn’t.

  When he had chosen the darkest worlds one after another, when he had gained confidence and speed, when he had learned to navigate between the stacked and fading layers of existence, he finally reached the last, faintest world. The plains of shadow.

  Plains, because the city was gone. The buildings, the street, even the sky. Gone.

  Shadow, for there was nothing but flat, featureless darkness.

  All that remained were the dead.

  Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. Shoulder to shoulder as far as he could see.

  With each world, identity and form had been stripped away. The things around him had the shapes of men and women, boys and girls, but none of the traits that made them unique. They looked like a collection of shadows—formed, but featureless. Tallish, sho
rtish, vague. Perhaps their faces would look different, but it was too dark to see their faces. There was no sun above, no looming clouds.

  And yet he could see, because at the center of each shadow’s chest hung a spark. Right where the heart should be. A tiny flicker like the flame of a failing lighter. He could see the light through what remained of their bodies.

  An endless field of tiny sparks; a world lit only by the last miniscule hints of life. A tapestry of fading fireflies.

  They moved without intent, and did not speak. They drifted slowly forward.

  Brody tore his eyes from the multitudes to see what they walked toward.

  Nothing.

  It was nothing. Not blackness. Not space. Nothing.

  Pure and total nothingness. A black hole. An abyss. He could feel the pull of it, like gravity, like magnetism, like the hunger of matter for antimatter.

  The end of all things.

  As the faded people shuffled numbly forward, those nearest the nothing were swallowed by it. Like shadows entering a dark room, they simply vanished. The only trace of them was the tiny flicker of light in their chests, each of which floated free, drifting upward like sparks from a campfire, glowing briefly, wavering, rising, and then gone.

  The plains of shadow.

  It was beautiful.

  Except that Claire was here.

  She was one of these shades, these nearly empty vessels edging toward oblivion. The characteristics that had made her, that had distinguished her as unmistakably her, were gone. It was a nakedness of the soul. The little hopes and fears, the shameful secrets, the moments of triumph, all had been left behind.

  How would he find her? The world had lost all feature, all topography. The hordes were numberless. He’d no more recognize her than he’d be able to identify her shadow. Here, she was nothing.

  No.

  No. He wouldn’t allow it. Her death he could have survived. But he would not let her become nothing. She was Claire Goddamn McCoy. She had swept into his life like a hurricane, and nothing had been the same since.

  Claire, who could command a room with grace and skill, a Glock on her hip and her mind throwing fireworks.

  Claire, who had made love to him with such ferocity that they knocked pictures off her wall, who had tilted her head back and clenched her lip in her teeth as sweat gleamed in the hollow of her throat.

  Claire, who had chewed him out for chasing after the sniper, all those lifetimes ago.

  Claire, who had heaved herself atop a brick wall to watch dead children play soccer under a dead sky.

  Claire, who had yearned for the Unabomber, and with him, a world that made sense, where bad things happened for a reason, evil and awful as it might be, but still logical.

  Claire, brushing her teeth while she checked her e-mail.

  Claire, telling him about working for months to help her father rebuild a sailboat he’d bought on a whim, a boat he didn’t know how to sail yet. An eleven-year-old girl jammed behind a diesel engine with a ratchet in her hand.

  Claire, doing yoga in morning sunlight.

  Claire, ravaged and torn, adapting to the new reality of the echo in five minutes and moving on, when he himself had barely found space to take a breath.

  Claire, with her always-cold feet and lousy morning breath. Her time fetish. Her empty fridge.

  Claire, for whom he had put a gun in his mouth—

  Something was happening.

  Light. There was more light. He looked up, but there was no sun or moon or stars.

  And yet there was light like breaking dawn.

  It came from some distance, impossible to judge in a world without feature. Warm and orange and growing. Like a sun born in the darkness of a stellar nursery. Energy and radiance where there had been nothing.

  A spark had begun to flare. A single spark in the chest of an anonymous shade. It was growing, the light he’d barely noticed a moment before now a spotlight, incandescent, breathtaking. Coming from one of the shades.

  No. Not just one of the shades.

  The one that had been her.

  Brody started running, pushing through the figures around him. They offered no more resistance than crepe streamers, sliding and falling as he moved toward that light, toward the woman he loved.

  She stood glowing on the plains of shadow. Whole and perfect, her skin flush with blood, her eyes bright and wet. She stood and saw him coming and she opened her arms.

  He swept her up. Not a ghost, a living woman, heavy in his arms, full of life and possibility. Her cheeks were wet and her eyes were confused and she said, “Will?”

  “It’s me.”

  “I died.”

  “You keep doing that.”

  “It was different. Everything . . . went away. It was dark, and pieces of me kept falling.” She shivered.

  “It’s over,” he said. “You’re back. We’re together.”

  For the first time, she seemed to notice their surroundings. “What is this?”

  “The end of the line.” He took a shuddering breath. She’d been so close to that nothingness. To being gone forever. There was relief, but a shaky sort of panic too. It had only been the power of the totem around his neck, coupled with his memories of her, his desire, that had rekindled her. Brought her back to life like blowing on an ember. “You know how we thought there might be echoes after the one we saw?”

  “They’re so beautiful.” Claire stared at the shapeless people all around her. “How did you get here? Did Simon kill you too?”

  “No. I killed him. When I did, I came back to life.”

  “You . . . what?”

  “I was alive again. The real world.”

  “Back to life?” She tore her eyes from the riot of sparks. “Then what are you doing here?”

  “I came for you.”

  “You don’t mean—Will, what did you do?”

  “What I had to.”

  “Baby, please tell me that you didn’t—”

  “I was alive,” he said. “And it was so sweet. Blue skies, people, music, hot showers. All the little miracles we took for granted our whole lives. But I realized something.”

  She waited.

  “Life was sweet.” He paused, smiled. “But I’d rather be dead, and with you.”

  For a moment she just stared at him, lips parted, eyes wide.

  And then they were locked together, arms wrapped too tight for breath, faces buried in each other’s hair, warm bodies pressed against one another as all around them the shades of the dead shuffled toward the abyss, the last flickers of their lives streaking like shooting stars, free and bright and perfect and gone.

  FORTY-FIVE

  “Everything looks different now.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Not just this place. Everything. All of it.”

  “I knew what you meant.”

  “Think about it, Will. That was the end. We’ve seen the whole span, beginning to end. Life to nothingness. We know every step of it. Every fading footfall.” She paused. “And still don’t really know anything, do we?”

  “That time you lost me.”

  “Well, we don’t really know what happens. Not really. We know about the echoes, the way life fades out. We know that everyone who dies ends up somewhere on the spectrum, moving toward the plains of shadow. And we know that at the edge of that is the abyss, where the last bits of us flicker out. But what happens then? Maybe there’s a Heaven after that, and a God. The real one, I mean. Maybe we just fade into nothingness. Maybe we’re reborn, and start the whole cycle over.”

  “Maybe,” he said, “we’ve had this conversation before. Maybe you and I have found each other, fought for each other, across a thousand lifetimes.”

  “Aww. That’s cheesy. And sweet.” She paused. “I wish we knew.”

  “One way to find out, I guess.”

  “I don’t want to know that badly.”

  “You know what I want? A taco.”

  They sat in L’Patron, the res
taurant where they’d first connected. An ordinary place made holy by an everyday act of communion, and coming here had been a pilgrimage of sorts. The joint looked much like last time, when Brody had been mourning her. Stools and chairs pulled out, specials on the chalkboard, salsa bottles on the table. No doubt there were dozens of living people here right now, feasting on grilled steak in warm tortillas.

  The journey back from the plains of shadow had been strangely lovely. Like rising from the depth of the ocean. Her fingers had laced with his, and they’d held hands as he’d shifted them through the worlds, the carpet of dancing fireflies fading behind them. There’d been a real sadness to leave their light. But each shift brought them new light, new reality. Brody had grown comfortable controlling their motion, and went fast, jumping stage to stage to stage, the world reassembling itself around them.

  Pitch black gave way to grey light, and then eventually to color. The featureless surface beneath their feet developed texture, tone, became concrete. Bricks pieced together like LEGOs assembled by the invisible, knitting into walls. Shattered panes of glass flowed and smoothed and became whole. The sky started as a fog, then lifted to a poisonous cauldron swirling above their heads, then retreated further, slowing, softening, shifting to shades of silver and chrome. The effect was almost like a sunrise, and it was beautiful.

  Finally, there were no more worlds to choose. Ahead Brody could sense the membrane separating death from life, and pushed against it. The totem grew warm against his chest as the sun burned through the clouds. He could see the living world flickering like a movie projected on smoke: cars and delivery trucks and a city bus moving where a moment before they had been still. Bright lights in the payday loan place, the real thing of course unaffected by Brody’s fit of destruction. In front of them, not five feet away, a woman spoke rapid Spanish into a cell phone. She was facing them, and suddenly stopped talking. Cocked her head and squinted.

  She can see us. We’re almost there.

  Against his chest, the finger bones went from warm to hot to searing. Brody grit his teeth and concentrated on the world, tried to seize details—music from an open window, the smell of exhaust, the bright autumn leaves on the scrawny trees—and weave a line to haul them back to life. The woman’s mouth fell open. The cell phone fell from her fingers.