“Michelle,” he said, a crooked smile cracking his haggard face.
“It’s over,” she said.
“No, you don’t understand.” He pointed to the two men on the floor. “These men are behind everything.” Taking a step toward her, he held out his hands. “Trust me, I’ve changed. They wanted to hurt you, do terrible things to—”
“Is that really your plan?”
He shook his head. “You have to trust me, Michelle. All I want to do is protect you.”
“Like you protected my mom and my sister?”
“I was heartbroken about your mother, so tragic and unexpected. And, believe me, I don’t even know where your sister—”
“She’s dead.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Aren’t you tired of death, Michelle? Wouldn’t you like to live forever?”
She laughed and approached him. Clearly afraid, unable to tell she was powerless, he backed away. Tripping over the leg of one of his fallen men, he collapsed to the floor. His arm slapped the leg of a refreshment table. The table teetered, doughnuts and bagels spilling around Winslow.
“Seems I’m not the only one surrounded by death,” she said.
“Please,” he whined. “You’re different, Michelle. We can have so much together. Don’t throw it away.”
She grabbed a coffee pot from the table and brought it down on Winslow’s skull. Time seemed to slow as glass shattered. And she saw revelation in his stunned expression. He knew she was as powerless, too, but the knowledge was a beat too late for him, rivulets of blood flowing down his face.
Michelle pulled a piece of glass from the floor. And, swiftly, she jabbed the longest end of the triangular shard into the soft spot of Winslow’s throat. Then she stepped away, watching him die.
He choked, blood gushing from the wound. Finally, he wheezed his final breath, his head lolling.
The floor suddenly shook. Michelle braced herself as tremors coursed through her body.
Screams rang out—some near, others distant.
Footfalls thundered.
The ceiling came down quickly, and Michelle was knocked to the floor by falling debris. Breathing heavily, heart racing, she looked up and saw a thick beam falling toward her.
Air left her lungs in one powerful, searing collision of bone and iron.
Windows shattered, light spilling through the room. Metal groaned and wailed.
Pinned, unable to move, crushing pain consumed her for a brief moment. Then numbness spread rapidly across her body, her vision cloudy.
The world went crooked.
More screams sounded, the building’s groans intensifying, glass shattering everywhere, wind howling.
This is it, she thought. The end.
Then everything became incredibly still and silent.
The calm before dying.
A male form coalesced slowly through a thick fog.
A gentle breeze caressed Michelle’s face.
Wind chimes sounded.
Recognizing the man, she smiled.
Pa, his radiant wings spread wide, returned her smile.
Then he took her hand and pulled her beyond The Old World. Beyond The Dominions.
Beyond Anon.
THE END
—Afterword—
As far back as I care to remember I wanted to be a novelist.
Life, however, takes strange twists and turns, and somehow I became another thing, moving through mid-level management and marketing jobs, most of them in the financial sector.
Then in 2008, I reconnected with my best friend from childhood, Scott Bradley. And, damn it, he was a professional writer, was even working under contract with HarperCollins. We talked a lot. And the spark that still flickered deep down began to catch fire; soon it was an inferno.
I started writing, even collaborated with Scott on a short story that sold to a mass-market anthology. I won’t bore you with details. Bottom line: I was suddenly a published author.
But my thirst to become a novelist was still unquenched. So I sat down over the course of several months and wrote a really bad, disjointed novel titled Dark Echoes. That book, if I have my way, will never see the light of day, but I learned a lot from the exercise. In fact, I dragged many of the better elements from that first effort into my second, the book that eventually became Anon. The novel went through more titles than I’d been given in fifteen years of the corporate rat-race, a game that I was tired of playing. It’s no wonder I used that pain to create the world of Anon, and no surprise that it worked a lot better than Dark Echoes. Still, I didn’t really know how to write a novel, so I did what most people do when they’re staring out; I made everything up as I went along. That seemed easiest to me at the time, but it proved otherwise. As a direct result, I rewrote Anon more than thirty times, and even though I’m immensely proud of it, I still want to rewrite parts of it. At one point in the painstaking process, Anon was over 150,000 words long. Reading the damn thing became a chore. Fearing it would be a similar slog for others, I kept reworking the novel until it was a respectable, entertaining 80,000 words.
The book was eventually published, but it didn’t sell well. I cashed paltry royalty checks and soldiered on.
Flash forward one year. My short fiction was selling to professional markets, and I’d just completed a novel titled The Dark with Scott Bradley for Ravenous Shadows, under Executive Editor John Skipp. Things were looking up in more ways than one. A lot of people, not just friends and family, started reading Anon. And many of them—holy shit!—liked it.
Though I’d always planned a sequel for Anon, I thought I’d dodged the bullet of actually having to write one. Sequels terrify me, so you can imagine my horror as I received emails from people I didn’t know, most of them asking for one.
I reread Anon and asked myself the most important question: Does this book need a sequel?
The answer was yes.
So I revisited Michelle and asked her who she was six years later. And, thank God, she answered in surprising and interesting ways.
I hope you enjoyed Beyond Anon half as much as I did writing it. Like the first one, I love this book, but—make no mistake about it—this is the end of Anon. I have so many other things to say, and I hope you keep following me on my journey.
Rather than include a lengthy list of acknowledgements in this book, I’d simply like to thank everyone who read Anon. Her sequel is as much yours as it is mine.
Thank you.
Peter Giglio
Lincoln, Nebraska
May 1, 2012
—About the Author—
Peter Giglio is a Pushcart Prize nominated novelist, screenwriter, and anthologist. He is the author of two previous novels—Anon and The Dark (with Scott Bradley)—and two novellas—A Spark in the Darkness and Balance. His short fiction can be found in several books, including two anthologies edited by John Skipp, where he had the honor of sharing TOCs with Thomas Harris, George R.R. Martin, Neil Gaiman, Charlaine Harris, Chuck Palahniuk, and many other literary icons. He is also the editor of the anthologies Help! Wanted: Tales of On-the-Job Terror and Evil Jester Digest, Volume One.
Peter lives in Lincoln, Nebraska with his wife and three cats. He stays busy but always has time for readers at www.petergiglio.com.
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