The Untimely Deaths of Alex Wayfare

by M. G. Buehrlen

  “He tried it out on kids.”

  Porter frowns, grips the wheel harder. “Micki had an older sister when she came to AIDA. She was twelve years old when Gesh performed the surgery on her.” Another swallow. “She didn’t survive the implant.”

  The snow slaps at the windshield, becoming more like slush by the minute. The wipers swat it away. I fist my hands on my lap. “How many kids did he kill before he stopped trying?”

  “Too many.”

  I wish I had another chance with Gesh one-on-one. I wouldn’t screw it up this time, wouldn’t be afraid. I wouldn’t let Porter smash his face in. I’d do it myself. “So not only does Gesh like experimenting on kids but he kills them too, all in the name of science.” I clear my throat, and it takes a minute before I have the courage to ask, “Were you a part of that, Porter?”

  I knew the answer. He didn’t have to say anything. Blue and I were kids when Gesh and Porter started their experiments on our brains, trying to fix our memory defects, but I had never let myself fully picture Porter being involved. Now, in my head, I imagine him standing over a little girl, the same age as my youngest sister Claire, and cutting her open. Attaching a chip to her brain. Watching her die because of it.

  An acceptable loss. Isn’t that what they call it?

  So this is my team. Hunters. Murderers. Child abusers.

  Monsters.

  I know I can’t fully trust Micki or Levi. Not yet, at least. But I still had a shred of hope that Porter was on my side. Now I can’t stop the images from coming, flipping before me like a slideshow.

  I can’t trust him either.

  I can’t trust anyone.

  Chapter 6

  The Liar

  After a delayed flight due to snow, and dinner out of a crappy airport vending machine, I’m finally at baggage claim waiting for Dad, turning my new phone over in my hand. Decoy Boy destroyed the original, but Levi was able to clone the SIM card and set me up with a new one. While I slept, Levi texted back and forth with Dad and Audrey, pretending to be me. Telling them everything was all right, that I couldn’t wait to see them, that the fireworks and the workshops were awesome. Lying to them, just like I would’ve done, had I been awake and concussion-free.

  He’s brilliant, Levi. Always thinking five steps ahead.

  I turn it over in my palms again and again, like my thoughts, wanting to trust them all, wanting to believe everything they say. Believe they are the good guys, even if they’ve done bad things. Because if I can’t trust them, then I truly am alone, like I told Levi. And the only person out there who could possibly know what I’m going through is lost. I could find him in the past, but would he remember me? Would he remember what it’s like to be a Descender in Base Life?

  “Bean!”

  Dad jogs toward me, beaming, arms outstretched. His dusky hair is shaggy and disheveled, and his gray eyes sparkle behind his glasses. He’s so happy and proud and everything he shouldn’t be as he approaches his Massive Liar of a Daughter. A daughter who’s at the center of an invisible war between rebels and brainwashed drones. A daughter who hides a busted ear behind her hair. A daughter who still has flecks of a dead man’s blood under her fingernails.

  No matter how hard I scrub, the red stains remain.

  Dad pulls me into a hug, and I feel rotten to the core. I hate lying to him, and I hate that I’ve gotten so good at it. I’ve treated him like the people I meet when I descend. I con those around me, letting them believe I’m the same person they know and love, when I’m not. I’m a stranger in their loved one’s body. Wearing another pair of fake glasses.

  “Have fun?” He takes my bag, and we walk through the parking lot, heading to Mom’s old Civic. The snow is even thicker here than in Chicago. We pull our hoods up to keep the slush from gathering at the back of our necks.

  “Yeah. I had a good time.” I try to put some cheeriness behind it, but I’m not sure it works.

  Dad lifts my bag into the trunk. “Digging the independent life already?”

  I let out a halfhearted laugh. “Yup. Can’t wait to graduate.”

  He opens the passenger door for me. “Don’t rent a moving truck yet. I’ve still got you for another year, remember?”

  On the drive home, wipers on full blast, Dad asks about my trip, but I turn the conversation back to him every chance I get. I peruse his phone for pictures of any family shenanigans I missed, interrogating him on each one.

  Dad smiles as he navigates the expressways, answering my questions. He’s so happy to have me back, I can tell. I smile too, because there’s no place I’d rather be, but the lies are everywhere I turn. They blanket me like the snow blankets the world outside my window. They stick to my skin, piling up until I’m buried, never melting, never letting me forget their presence.

  My Greatest Fear

  Almost two hours and four expressways later, we pull into our street, and it hits me, how much I’ve missed home, the faces there, my own bed. But something’s wrong.

  All the big-picture things, all the things I’ve been through—the fountain, the fight, burying the bodies, finding out what I know about Gesh and his Subs, whether or not I’ll keep traveling—it all disappears. It shrinks and narrows until there’s only the here and now.

  Right now. The snow, the beating wipers, and the flashing red lights.

  Dad slows the car. I know his heart is probably racing like mine. I can feel our collective held breath, our fear filling the air as we pull up in front of our house.

  Two police cars are parked by the curb. An ambulance sits in the driveway, engine rumbling, back doors flung open.

  Before I know it, I’m running through a half foot of slush, squinting through the snowfall as blood-red lights dance in the darkness. My shoes and socks are soaked through. My breath is ice. But I don’t feel the cold.

  Crippling fear helps you overlook things like that.

  It helps me forget to put on my parka when I stumble out of the car, calling Audrey’s name as two EMTs haul her down the driveway on a stretcher. It helps me forget to be calm and hope everything’s going to be all right. It helps me ignore my dad as he shouts and runs after me. It helps me forget myself, lose myself entirely. Fear is the only thing left, staring me in the face, punching me in the gut, harder.

  Harder.

  “No, no, no,” I say, slipping in the slush and slamming into Audrey’s gurney with my hip. A thin dusting of snow has already gathered on her white face. On the oxygen mask over her mouth. On her closed eyelids.

  She can’t leave like this. Not when I just got back.

  I grab her hand and lock our fingers together, but one of the police officers strong-arms me away from her. Our hands slip apart.

  “I want to go with her,” I say, but the officer won’t listen. I’m still being pulled away. “I want to go with her,” I shout, struggling against the arms holding me back, my feet sliding in the slush.

  The officer grips my shoulders and stoops to look me square in the face. Her eyes are stern. “Listen to me,” she says, giving me a firm shake. “If you get in their way, if you delay them even one minute, it could cost your sister her life. Do you understand me?”

  It’s enough, hearing those words. I stop struggling, Dad pulls me away, and the EMTs finish loading Audrey into the ambulance. Mom rushes past, moving as fast as she can through the ice and snow, her coat and purse clutched under her arm. Snow clings to her long hair. She climbs into the back with them.

  Dad gathers me against his side. His arms are iron bars. Gran, Pops, and Claire join us, and we watch, standing in a line like sentinels, blinking back tears. The ambulance drives away, blaring its sirens, its lights dancing like scarlet ghosts through the white curtain of snow.

  And just like that, they’re gone. All is quiet. Finally, finally, the fear stops gut-punching me. It fades with the sirens into a dull roar in my ears. Hope whispers things like she’ll be OK. They’ll save her. My body registers how cold it is. It tells me to go inside, chang
e into warm, dry clothes, and head to the hospital with the family.

  I move like a zombie, not quite alive, not quite dead, replaying the scene in my head over and over. Her hand was so weak and cold. I don’t ask questions, just listen to Gran relaying everything to Dad.

  They were watching a movie. Audrey was laughing one minute, then the next, she wasn’t. Her breath went shallow, she started coughing, then her lips turned blue, and she collapsed. They have no idea what happened. Why she couldn’t breathe. It doesn’t make sense.

  The dull roar in my ears lasts the entire drive to the hospital. It lasts during the ride in the elevator up to Audrey’s floor. And it doesn’t let up until I’m sitting in a waiting room next to Claire, Gran, and Pops, with nothing to do but wait. It reminds me of waiting at the fountain, the worry, the what-ifs tumbling in my chest as I searched for Blue. Death came that night.

  What if it followed me here?

  It takes two hours for a doctor to appear and explain what happened. She takes Dad aside first, then lets him break the news to us.

  “There was a blood clot,” he says, running a shaking hand through his hair. “Caused by the chemo. None of her doctors caught it. It moved to her lungs. They’re trying to stabilize her.”

  I don’t know if he says anything after that. All I can hear is the rush of blood to my head, my ears, only my heart thudding in my throat. The dull roar is now a thundering avalanche.

  “Is she…” I start to ask, but my throat’s too dry, and I have to swallow before I can continue. “Is she strong enough to fight something like this?”

  But we all know the answer.

  And I’m already blaming Audrey’s doctors, the ones who see her every day, who are supposed to be watching out for things like this.

  If someone had asked me what I feared the most, I would’ve said this very moment. The moment there’s a complication and the cancer makes her body too weak to fight back. The moment she’s taken from us. The imminence of it, the looming shadow it has cast over our home for years.

  We acted like it wasn’t coming for Audrey. Like she’d sidestep it somehow. But we were just biding our time. Holding our breath. Because it hurt too damn much to think about what if. We’ve all been dying right alongside Audrey, alone in our beds, screaming into our pillows. We kept it together on the outside, for Audrey’s sake, so she didn’t see it was killing us, watching her die. She didn’t deserve to watch us fall apart while she was in so much pain. She didn’t deserve that guilt. So we hid it. We acted hopeful when in reality we were crumbling beneath the surface. Decaying beneath our glowing smiles.

  We knew one day our facades would come down.

  Today is that day.

  How cruel is fate, to give me fifty-seven lives when Audrey only gets one brief moment on this earth?

  Dad slumps into a chair next to Pops. He takes his glasses off and rubs the bridge of his nose, his temples. I walk over to him, my feet heavy, my legs sluggish, and lay a hand on his shoulder. His hand engulfs mine, warm. Secure.

  “How long before we know anything?” I ask.

  “Shouldn’t be too long now.”

  I give his hand a squeeze, as much to comfort me as him. “Coffee?”

  “Dear Lord, yes, please.”

  The labyrinth of hospital halls is a welcome change. Anything is better than the stagnation of the waiting room. You sit for hours, staring at your hands, wondering what to do with them, while doctors and nurses sweep past, muffled voices float down halls, and some nightly news guy stares down at you from the TV on the wall. You could change the channel, but there’s never anything good on. You could flip through the magazines, but they’re all ads anyway. You could stare at your phone, but you’ll never find a distraction strong enough to silence the whispers in your head. The ones that say, She could be dying right now, right this very moment, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

  A few floors down, I find a coffee vending machine and shell out two bucks for two Styrofoam cups filled with black sludge. It smells burnt, but I don’t care. It’s caffeine. It’s warm.

  By the time I get back to my family, Dad’s gone. I sit next to Claire and sip my coffee, leaving Dad’s on the end table next to me. Claire stares at her feet, her long, pencil-straight hair hiding her face. Her feet sway back and forth, not quite touching the floor.

  Gran leans over. “Your dad went back to talk to your mom and check in on Audrey. Nothing to report yet.”

  I draw in a deep breath, steadying myself, wondering if I should be preparing for the worst. For Dad and Mom to come through the double doors, arms around each other, tears streaming.

  What would I do? What would I say?

  “Why are you drinking coffee?” Claire says, frowning up at me. She’s annoyed with me. Even more than usual.

  “It calms my nerves,” I say, but in reality, it’s a residual I picked up from one of my past lives. I used to hate the stuff until I walked in Susan Summers’s shoes and came back with her addiction to coffee. My thoughts flicker back to 1961, when I stood on the side of the road talking to Blue, leaning against my turquoise Corvette. The setting sun on his skin. His dark hair in his eyes.

  I push the memory away and take another sip.

  “But you hate coffee.” Claire’s scowling at me now.

  I’m not in the mood for one of our regularly scheduled arguments, so I say, “People change.”

  Her eyes fall and search the scuffed tile floor; her hands grip the edge of her seat. What she says next is strained, like she can barely get the words out. “I don’t like when people change. One minute they hate coffee, the next they’re drinking it black like Daddy. One minute they’re laughing, the next they can’t breathe.”

  She looks at me like she expects me to say something, to comfort her somehow, but I can’t find the strength to respond. There isn’t any air in my lungs.

  She stalks over to the windows on the far side of the waiting room, her hands fisted tightly at her sides like she’s trying to keep everything in. All the raging emotions clawing at her from the inside. I recognize the agony she’s going through. I feel the same way. But I’ve never been able to open up to Claire. I’m not as close to her as I am with Audrey.

  I’ve never regretted that distance until now. The moment Claire needs me and I’ve got nothing to give.

  Gran follows her and wraps her in her arms, both of them going blurry as my eyes fill with tears, their bodies bleeding into each other under the fluorescent lights.

  “What if we never get to see her again?” I hear Claire whisper, her face pressed into Gran’s cardigan. “What if she never comes out of that room?”

  I set my coffee beside Dad’s. I can’t stomach anything now.

  After another hour, Dad and Mom emerge from the beyond the double doors. Gran, Pops, Claire, and I stand and try to gauge their expressions. They look tired, but that’s all. Not tearful, and that gives me hope. Claire runs to them, and they pull her into an embrace. I walk forward, slowly, hugging my arms across my chest.

  “How is she?” I ask. Gran entwines her arm with mine and squeezes.

  Mom’s smile is warm. “She’s all right, for now. They have her on blood thinners.”

  “Praise the Lord,” Pops says with a sigh.

  “But she’s weak,” Dad says. “They want to transfer her to AIDA West so her regular doctors can keep her under supervision for a while.”

  “How long?” Claire asks.

  Dad takes in a deep breath before he answers. “Could be weeks, Bear. Months. This has been really hard on her body. She’s going to be weak for a long time while the blood thinners do their work.”

  “Can we see her?”

  “She’s sleeping, but you can peek in for a minute.”

  I’m the last one in the room. I’m almost too afraid to go in. It’s been three years since I last saw Audrey lying in a hospital bed, when she got so sick and the doctors told us it was leukemia. That night seemed like the hardest thing I could
endure.

  This is harder.

  The room is small, and we all huddle together at the foot of Audrey’s bed. Only the light from the hallway stretches in, faint and yellow, but I can see her well enough.

  So thin. Like she’s gotten thinner in the past few hours somehow. Her skin almost fades into her stark white bed linens. Her bare head on her pillow makes me shiver some more.

  “Isn’t she cold?” I whisper. “Where’s her stocking cap?”

  Mom’s hand finds my shoulder. “She’s fine,” she says, her voice low and reassuring. She rubs my arm. “They’ll take good care of her.” She adds that last part because she knows my question has more weight than just wondering if Audrey’s cold. It’s fueled by worry. More what-ifs.

  What if they miss something again, like they missed the blood clot? Even the best, well-meaning doctors make mistakes. Even the ones Mom and Dad have faith in at AIDA West.

  Why isn’t their faith shattered like mine? Why are they still putting their trust in the very doctors who could’ve prevented this from happening?

  If only I could go back in time and save her. Travel to a few months prior and give her doctors the heads-up to look for a clot. They could’ve prevented all of this. But that’s not how descending works. I can only travel back in time to my past lives, jumping back decades at a time. Not days, not months, but lifetimes.

  My hands form into fists, and I turn and walk out. If I stay any longer, I’ll punch a wall, or worse, fall apart, and I can’t fall apart. The last time I did that, with the EMTs in the driveway, it could’ve cost Audrey her life. I can’t lose control like that again. I have to keep it together. For Audrey. For the whole family.

  Chapter 7

  Dead Sexy

  In the car on the way home, I text Porter’s number. It fails to send, which means he has a new burner cell, and I don’t have a way to reach him. I have to wait for him to make contact.

  The last few days of holiday break are restless. I pace the house and busy myself with the fix-it projects I have on my schedule, like turning a vintage Peavey amp into a smartphone speaker and building a GoPro mount for a dirt bike, both for kids at school. Still, it doesn’t help calm my nerves or get my mind off anything. Mom and Dad spend most of their days at the hospital and Gran and Pops are left to entertain Claire and me until the doctors say it’s OK for us to visit.