AfterLife

by S. P. Cloward

  Wes thought about how dangerous it could be if Mortuis were able to influence an antemort’s thoughts. It might even be worse than taking life from them. It was taking away their free will. “Don’t worry. I don’t intend to control anyone’s thoughts.”

  It wasn’t much longer before Emily pulled up in front of a small building off the main road of a small town. “This bar is usually pretty busy. There’s a university down the street and a lot of the student housing is around here.” They parked in a poorly lit corner of a small parking lot next to the building.

  Emily turned to Wes after she had pulled the keys from the ignition. “Okay Wes, now before we go inside, I want you to practice soul-syncing with me a few times.” She leaned over the center console and looked at him. At first it seemed as though she was going in for a kiss. Startled, Wes pulled back slightly toward the passenger side window.

  “You’re never going to get fed like that, mister,” Emily said, laughing at him. “You gonna starve.” She leaned back in her seat and looked at herself in the rearview mirror. She rolled her upper lip under, leaving some lipstick on her teeth. “Is it my lipstick?” She smiled, revealing her covered teeth. “Too much?” She made a face, laughed again, and then wiped the lipstick off her teeth with her finger. “I haven’t been rejected like this in a long time.” She looked at Wes and pouted.

  Wes chuckled.

  “Okay, I’m a nice gal so I’m gonna give you another chance.” Emily leaned over the center console again.

  Wes knew at some point he’d have to take this seriously so he moved toward Emily and leaned forward to look in her eyes. As soon as Wes had lined his eyes up with Emily’s, she went cross-eyed. Wes fell back in his seat laughing.

  “You gonna starve, Wes. I’m telling you. You gonna starve.” After a moment, Emily sobered and touched his sleeve. “Okay, okay, I’ll quit teasing. For real this time.”

  Wes leaned toward Emily and aligned his eyes with hers. “Now look directly into my eyes past the reflection you’ll see of yourself,” Emily said, staring right back at Wes as he looked into her eyes. “Once you’ve done that you’ll look into the darkness of the pupil and then you’ll sense the connection.”

  Wes immediately understood what she was talking about. The iris around the pupil disappeared, and Wes felt as if he was moving into a black tunnel just as he had the first time they’d soul-synced.

  He continued through the blackness until he was standing with Emily. No beach this time. They were surrounded by nothing. It was just the two of them facing each other.

  “Good job, Wes, I’m impressed,” Emily said. “This is a full connection. This is the type of connection you would make when you’re doing a major feeding. Just remember never to feed for too long.”

  “Where’s the beach?” Wes asked, looking around at the absence of surroundings.

  “My mind is closed to you, sweet Wes. The beach was a special place for your first day. You synced with me so, if anything, I should be upset that you didn’t have something better planned than, um, nothing.”

  “Hmmm, didn’t realize it was my responsibility to entertain tonight.” Wes thought about changing his surroundings. Apparently he could make the black void into anything he wanted, and he quickly racked his brain for ideas. Then he had it. Immediately, they were standing in the middle of the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World. It was nighttime and the park was empty. Everything was lit up as if the park was open to guests. “How’s this?”

  “I like it.” Emily looked around, smiling. “Is this the place you consider your sanctuary?”

  “Yeah, I guess it is. When I was a kid, we went to Disney World about every other year. My brother and I would usually take off on our own – we had our very own favorite spots, but one year my Dad and I stayed late…until after the park had closed. My mom and brother had already headed back to the resort, but we wanted to be the last ones in the whole park.” A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “We were, too.”

  “This should be your place then. When you need to get away, come here. It’s a good place to go,” Emily said as she turned around to look at everything Wes had created with his mind. After taking it all in, she turned back to Wes. “Okay Wes, let’s practice breaking the connection. Just as you made all this appear, imagine nothing and then push the nothing away.”

  Wes did as he was told, and first the Magic Kingdom disappeared followed by the nothing as he mentally pushed it away. As quickly as he had moved toward Emily’s eyes, he was out again and back in the passenger seat of the Camaro.

  “Wesley Lohmann,” Emily said in an announcer voice, “you have just successfully completed your first soul-sync. What are you going to do next? You’re going to Disney World!”

  They both laughed.

  “Honestly, Wes, that was fantastic. You’re a quick study. Very nice.”

  “Thanks, I’m glad you weren’t disappointed.”

  “Not one bit. Okay, now real quick before we go inside, I want you to try grazing on me. It’s simple. Make eye contact like we just did but when you see that you’re moving toward the darkness, don’t. Understand?”

  Wes nodded and did as he was told. As soon as the connection was made he broke it. “How was that?” he asked.

  Emily smiled and nodded. “It was good for me if it was good for you.” She winked at him. “I think you’re ready. Here’s the plan because I want you to have as much practice tonight as you can. First, I want you to practice a little grazing. Then, I want you to pick up a girl and bring her back to the car for a full sync. Do you think you can handle that?”

  “I don’t know,” Wes said, “I’ve never picked up a girl at a bar before.”

  Emily chuckled. “Of course you haven’t, I’m sure you were always the gentleman with the ladies. Don’t worry. You’re good-looking and the girls will be drinking. You should have no problem. Oh, and just be ready for how antemorts react to soul-syncing. You’ll get the hang of it after a while, but remember it’s much different than it is with a Mortui.” Emily opened the car door to get out. “Watch me do a couple to show you how I handle it and then we’ll let you try some grazing.”

  Emily and Wes got out of the car and started walking toward the bar. Behind the building was a back patio surrounded by white privacy fencing and Wes could hear the conversations and laughter of what sounded like a few dozen people. They walked around to the front entrance.

  Before they went inside, Emily turned to Wes and handed him the keys to the car along with a driver’s license. “You’re going to need these,” she said, and walked into the bar.

  Wes looked down at the license she had given him. The picture on it was his own, red hair and all, but his name and address were different. Where did she get Carter from? “I guess that’s my new name,” he thought.

  Wes followed Emily inside. It was fairly crowded, but not as busy as the amount of noise had led Wes to believe. He joined Emily at the bar. She’d already purchased drinks for them and Wes was slightly disappointed that nobody asked to see his new ID.

  “Can I drink this?” Wes asked after Emily slid his drink over to him.

  “Sure you can. It won’t affect you one way or the other, but you can drink it. You can expel it when we get back to the Hub.”

  “Expel it?”

  “Yeah. You know, use the facilities, go to the bathroom. Whatever you wanna call it.”

  “Okay.” Wes took the drink and sipped it. It had no taste at all. He thought it might taste like water, but now he realized even water had a taste. This had nothing.

  “Okay Carter,” Emily whispered, calling him by his alias, “watch your sister Karla go to work.”

  Wes assumed that Karla was the alias Emily had chosen and nodded. He watched as she walked to the other side of the bar where a young college guy was sitting by himself at a small round table. Emily pretended to flirt, and when the guy responded to the conversation he watched Emily sync with him for a brief couple of seconds. Quickly, she broke
the connection, faked laughter and hit him on the arm, which seemed to shake him out of the confusion from the sync. Emily excused herself and walked back to the bar where Wes was still seated.

  “That was one example.” Emily sat down next to him at the main bar. “Okay, now watch this.” She turned to the guy sitting next to her who was waiting on the bartender to make him his drink.

  “Excuse me, handsome,” Emily said. The guy looked up at her and as he did Wes watched as the man suddenly looked like he was in a trance. “Can you hand me that bowl of nuts please?” The trance was broken as quickly as it had begun. Emily thanked him and then turned back to Wes. “See how fast that was? Enough of a connection to take a couple days, but he never knew. Quick and easy.”

  “Yeah, quick and easy.”

  “Now it’s your turn.” Emily’s hand motioned to the room. “Go graze.”

  Wes took his drink and walked away. Where would he go first? He had already scanned the room a couple of times in the short time they’d been there and had seen some opportunities. Talking to girls was easy for him because he’d never felt like he had to impress them. This situation was no different. He just needed to make a few quick seconds of eye contact with a few of them and he would be finished.

  Wes walked up to a trio of girls who were talking. While scanning the room earlier he noticed that one of them had dropped something out of her hand-held purse when she went to pay for a drink. He bent down to pick it up – a lip liner – and stood back up. The girl was looking at him. “Hi,” she said.

  He locked onto her eyes. The sync happened quicker than he expected and as the darkness of the pupil expanded he gazed into her energy. Emily was right. The connection with an antemort was much different. The girl was vulnerable, he could feel it. He could also feel that she had a lot of life in her, and he could feel that energy transferring from her to him. It felt exhilarating! Then Wes caught a glimpse of a memory of the girl as a child crying over the loss of the family dog. He felt her grief. Next he saw a memory of her reading her college acceptance letter to her parents. He felt the feeling of optimism she felt as she read it. Wes broke the connection. He hadn’t expected to see the images. “Here, you dropped this.” He put the lip liner in the girl’s hand to break her trance, and then turned and walked out of the bar, dropping his drink in the trash on the way to the parking lot.

  “Are you okay?” Emily asked, catching Wes just outside the door.

  “I can’t do this…”

  “You saw some memories didn’t you?” Emily asked, hugging Wes. “I wasn’t sure how you’d react so I didn’t tell you.”

  “I can’t do any more. It was fine when she was a stranger and what I was taking from her didn’t mean anything because I didn’t know her. Now I know her. I know that she hopes for great things in her future, a future I’m taking away from her.”

  “Oh honey, I know. I completely understand, but this is what you have to do to survive. It’s a rough existence for someone like you – someone who has a heart. That’s why you’ll always be looking for ways to pay back what you’ve taken.”

  “How do you give back time?”

  “You try to make the time a person has count more.” Emily pulled Wes’s forehead down and stood up on tip-toes to kiss it. “You are a good person, Wes. I could always feel that about you.”

  Emily reached down and took Wes’s hand in hers, pulling him back in the direction of the bar. “It will get easier, Wes, you just have to keep doing it.”

  Wes unwillingly followed Emily back into the building and they resumed their place by the bar.

  “So, now I need to see you do a full sync,” Emily said. “Pick a girl and go for it.”

  Wes swiveled on his seat, placed his back to the bar, and looked around the room. The thought of doing a full sync was less than appealing. If he had seen so much from a half-second glance into a girl’s eyes, he could only imagine how much more he might see though a stronger connection.

  He picked a cute girl in her early 20s who had just come out of the ladies room and moved toward her. She hadn’t made it back to her party yet, and she looked like she’d been drinking for a while. “Hi,” Wes said, smiling to her as she walked unsteadily back toward the group of friends she’d been sitting with. “Can I buy you a drink?”

  The girl stared openly at Wes, looking him up and down a few times. “You’ll do,” she said. “Is your place close?”

  “I’ve got a car,” Wes said, not knowing what else to say.

  “Then to the Batmobile.” She giggled slightly and fell onto Wes’s arm for support.

  Wes led her to the Camaro and unlocked the door, holding it open for her.

  “Wow, when I said Batmobile,” the girl said, running her finger along the hood of the sleek car, “I didn’t think you actually had the Batmobile.”

  Wes smiled and helped her into the seat, then walked around to the driver’s side and got in. He was impressed and appalled at how little effort it had taken to pick the girl up. She must be pretty stupid or pretty drunk. Maybe both. Either way, he was certain she was easy. She had definitely made this feeding easy for him.

  After adjusting himself in the seat that had been pulled forward to accommodate Emily’s shorter stature, Wes turned to the girl who was already running her hands up his shirt.

  “You’ve got a great body.” She tugged up on the shirt bottom, which Wes interpreted as her way of telling him to take it off. He felt uncomfortable.

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Wes said, smoothing his shirt down and holding her hands in his. “Let me look at you first.”

  “What ya wanna see?”

  “Just your eyes.”

  She raised her upper lip and made a sour face as if she was bothered by what Wes said, but he didn’t care because she was looking at him. He could see her eyes and that’s all he needed. He focused on them, the pupil expanded, and he walked into the darkness as it closed around him.

  Wes didn’t want to see any images the girl may have had in her mind and the focus he placed on not receiving any seemed to work. He saw nothing but the same nothing he had seen when he and Emily had synced earlier that night. But suddenly, the girl was there looking at him, and she didn’t look anything like the drunk girl he had in the car. She was much shorter and heavier, and her face was covered with pimples. This must be the way she sees herself, he thought.

  Just as with the shorter connection earlier, Wes could feel the energy transferring to him from their connection, but he could also feel how much quicker this deep connection was taking time off the end of her life. He didn’t want to see how much he could take before he would feel a major change in the amount she held. The picture of the emptying water bottle Emily had referred to came to mind. Wes moved back from the girl’s energy and broke the connection.

  The girl passed out and collapsed into Wes’s lap. He straightened her up in her seat. He’d seen the way she saw herself. Stealing life from her made him feel worse than he had when he’d grazed off the girl in the bar. He realized she was stuck in an emotional time warp from her childhood, and he could almost relate to her situation. Hadn’t his own time warp contributed to the disturbing emotional state he’d been in when he’d died? He wanted to help her, but he didn’t know how. Instead he gave her a few quick shakes and she came to again.

  “You look tired,” Wes said. “Let me take you back to your friends.”

  Embarrassed, the girl looked down at her clothes to confirm that nothing had happened between them, and nodded. She probably thinks she passed out, Wes thought. After helping her back inside to her friends, Wes tapped Emily on the shoulder and exited the bar.

  “I watched from a distance but I saw you do it,” Emily said quietly as she collected the keys from Wes. “I think you did great tonight, I really do.”

  “It is what it is, I guess,” Wes said as he sat down in the passenger seat where the girl had just been sitting.

  Neither of them spoke for the next few minutes as Emily re
adjusted the seat and pulled out of the parking lot back onto the narrow road that would take them back to the Hub. They were both quiet for a long time. “I lied,” Emily finally said. Her quietly spoken comment disrupted Wes’s thoughts about the evening. “It never really gets easier. I remember the face of every person I’ve taken life from.”

  Wes knew Emily was telling the truth. He could sense the same sadness he had felt in her when they were talking on the beach during their first meeting. Now that they were away from the bar, the forced gaiety was gone. She seemed different. She made feeding look so easy that Wes never imagined how much it hurt her to do it. He still wouldn’t have if she hadn’t said anything.

  Neither of them spoke during the drive back to the Hub. Wes felt he was getting to know the real Emily. They had reached an unspoken understanding; there was nothing left to say. This was his world now and from this night on, he would be feeding on antemorts to survive.

  It was late when they arrived at the Hub. Emily pulled the Camaro into its parking space in the underground parking garage and took the keys from the ignition. “So Wes,” she said, looking over to where he was still drifting through his thoughts, “that was all the training we needed to cover tonight.”

  Wes nodded as if he understood, but he didn’t. Before he died, a night with alcohol usually ended with him crashing fully clothed because he was too intoxicated to change. He realized his past behavior had set him on a path of destruction that had led to tonight. What do you do if you can’t drink or sleep? “What else is there to do if we’re not going to be training? I’m not exactly tired.”

  “No, not physically, that’s for sure.” Emily opened her door and stepped out of the car. “But you still need to let your mind rest.”

  Wes trailed after Emily as she made her way through the parking garage back to the box of car keys by the door into the Hub. “How do I do that?” he asked as he caught up to her.

  “Go to your sanctuary. Go to Disney World.” She put the Camaro keys on their hook in the box, and then turned to Wes. “When an antemort sleeps, a lot takes place that isn’t intended for the recuperation of the physical body. Much of sleep rejuvenation takes place in the mind and the connection between the mind and the physical brain. Biologically, antemorts fall asleep when this process takes place. You may not need to sleep in a physical sense, but you still need periods of time in which your mind rests. Also, it’s a great way to conserve energy. Your focus is turned inwardly to the mind and not on the mind-body connection.”