Afterlife: The Resurrection Chronicles

by Merrie Destefano

  She curled into my arms, pressed her head against my chest; her sobbing grew stronger and I suddenly realized how hard all of this had been on her. Up to this point all I had been able to think about was the fact that she was alive, that she was safe, I hadn’t realized that to her, she wasn’t safe. And maybe she never would be again.

  A roomful of blackened, burned children. Dead on the ground. All of them her friends. Dead because they came to her party.

  “Is he going to come back, Uncle Chaz? Is that bad man going to burn me too?”

  “No, baby. No one is ever going to hurt you. I promise.”

  But I could feel the world spinning even as I said the words, felt the pain in my chest tighten, felt my eyes sting as tears came. For the first time, I could actually imagine a world without Isabelle, a place where some evil monster could climb up a wall in the middle of the night. I didn’t know if I was really going to be able to protect her from the people who had done this.

  And the ache made me feel like I was being turned inside out.

  I stood at the edge of the patio door, staring down at the street.

  “Is she going to be all right?”

  I turned, saw Angelique curled on the sofa, wrapped in shadows.

  “Yeah,” I answered, trying not to think about the synthetic skin that now bandaged my niece’s hands. This was one of those times when everything had to be interpreted in black and white. No gray. “Maybe not today or tomorrow. But yeah.”

  “Good. I mean, I wouldn’t want anything to happen to her, she’s a good kid.”

  I ran my hand along the door frame, finally settled on the handle, pulled the door open and let the cool, misty air inside. I didn’t look at her. Didn’t want to see her face, a chiaroscuro version of someone that I thought I knew yesterday.

  “You saved her life,” I said when the air shifted around me. The silence between us turned heavy. “You might not remember it, but I won’t forget. Ever.”

  Outside the music of another day was already beginning. Cars shuddered down crowded streets and a helicopter flew in the distance, silver-and-black choppy noise that brooded over smoggy midnight blue.

  “My memory’s coming back,” she admitted, her voice soft, almost as if she regretted the things that were swimming to the surface.

  I turned to face her. This was one of the things I hated most about working with Newbies—they could be your best friend one minute and they could forget they even knew you the next. But it didn’t matter. I had no right letting my emotions get tangled up in this mess.

  At this point I just had to trust her and she had to trust me.

  Because I had a feeling that if we didn’t, neither one of us was going to make it.

  “Did I say anything about a dog?” I asked. “When Skellar was interrogating me?”

  She frowned. Searched her damaged memory banks. Shook her head. “No, you were talking some nonsense about an invisible rat.” A smile flickered. “By the way, if you pulled that rat thing to irritate Skellar, it worked. But no, you never mentioned a dog. Why?”

  I avoided her question. “Why did you act like Russ might have killed somebody?”

  “It was a red herring,” she said, flipping back to her lawyer persona, that safe zone where she knew all the answers, her matter-of-fact voice solid and sure, cutting like a knife through the fractured morning darkness. “I just wanted to give Skellar reasonable doubt. So he would let you go.”

  She sounded like she was telling the truth, but there was something in her posture that said otherwise. Her lip quivered slightly and she kept her gaze on her lap.

  “You’re lying,” I said, challenging her to defend herself.

  “Am I?”

  I sat in a chair across from her, waited for her to look up at me, so I could see her eyes. I’d know if she was telling the truth or not if I could only see her eyes. But she didn’t look up. Instead she stood, headed toward her bedroom. Left me alone in the living room. Enveloped in a muggy, uncomfortable silence.

  I knew I should get some sleep. That drug of Skellar’s was still coursing my veins and part of me wanted to rip the skin off my face. It felt like my skull had suddenly grown too big, like my flesh had stretched beyond its capacity. I wished I could pound Skellar’s face through the wall.

  Instead I lay on the sofa, my legs hanging off the end. Before I had a chance to analyze how uncomfortable I was, I fell asleep. For some reason my familiar nightmare gave me the night off. Probably for good behavior—after all, I hadn’t flattened Skellar’s nose, like I wanted.

  Instead I dreamed I was in the bayou, wearing waist-high boots, wading through murky swamp water. I was looking for something lost, something important.

  At the same time, I was wondering how many alligator eyes were watching me from the darkness.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Angelique:

  In my mind I’m walking through a foreign city, following a lifeline that drifts through thick, choking clouds, each step leading me closer to some new understanding. Sometimes I unconsciously go too fast, and everything begins to spin out of control. Too much information tries to process at the same time.

  Then, in the midst of it all, I suddenly realize that the missing pieces have been erased by me. On purpose. Apparently it’s all part of the picking and choosing of our afterlife memories.

  But I got rid of the wrong things.

  One image flashes before me, beautiful and fleeting and incomplete.

  My son, Joshua.

  It’s immediately followed by an emptiness that I can’t quite grasp. Pain settles in my bones like a long-forgotten war wound, something that causes me to limp when the weather gets cold. But I can no longer distinguish it from the myriad shards of shrapnel still buried somewhere, waiting to be discovered like a carefully planned minefield.

  Maybe I did something wrong, made him angry. Maybe we disagreed about something important, and he stormed away to a far corner of the universe. I’ll never know because I tried to wipe it away.

  Isabelle reminds me of him. I didn’t realize it until now. I can’t quite figure out if it’s her eyes or her smile, maybe it’s everything put together. But right now I can see his face superimposed on top of hers. His life taped to hers like a paper-doll cutout.

  I lie on the bed and wish I could sleep. The morning will come too quickly. The world will tip on its side, daylight will pour in the window and all my past sins will be revealed, like evidence beneath a microscope.

  My body forces me to rest. But it is the uneasy rest of a convict, waiting for the verdict. Waiting for the moment when the executioner is going to walk through the door and demand payment.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Chaz:

  I have a theory that we all carry a secret pain. Like a tattoo that you got back when you were a teenager, you hide it away beneath layers of baggy clothes and you only show it to someone you really trust, someone you know won’t laugh because they probably have one too.

  I don’t tell very many people about my tattoo.

  It started out like a beautiful drawing, a black intertwined gothic outline of two young people in love, with similar beliefs and goals. We were working on it together, filling in the hollow spaces with color. I wasn’t going to hide this one away. I was going to wear it on my forearm, with my sleeve rolled up so everyone could see.

  I wanted the whole world to know how much I loved Jeannie. We were going to get married, do the whole family routine; as soon as we got married we were going to use Dad’s death cert and have a kid.

  “What do you want?”

  Jeannie and I stood on a hill, overlooking the Loire Valley, a sinuous river somewhere down below, winding its way through the castle-dotted landscape. This was the storybook phase of my life, when every thought still had a happy ending and I still believed that I was the master of my own fate. I was twenty-three and had just finished studying music at Juilliard. Next month I was going to start basic training to become a Babysitte
r. My first courses would involve advanced weapons training, hostage rescue and counterterrorism, but I was trying not to think about it.

  Because that was next month.

  She turned to face me, her curly dark hair blowing in the wind. The afternoon sky held the fragrance of lavender, the colors of a Monet painting.

  “What do you want?” she asked again.

  I’ve heard that question countless times throughout my life, and it’s always sounded like an accusation. I mean, what could I possibly want that I didn’t already have?

  “Besides you?” I asked. She didn’t smile. It’s always been hard for me to understand women. They seem to come wrapped in mystery, like layers of fine gauze. You think you can see through it, that you finally understand, but then you discover that you’ve only peeled away another layer and there are about a thousand more left.

  I realized later that there was a subtext here. That she was really asking something else. She crossed her arms and tilted her head. I was taking too long to figure out the secret meaning of life.

  “I want what everybody else wants,” I said finally, deciding to tell the truth.

  She shook her head. “No. Everybody else wants what you have.”

  “I mean, I want the right to choose.”

  “Choose what?”

  This was where the subtext got as loud as a roaring lion, just seconds before it snaps off your head. But I still didn’t realize it.

  “Life,” I said. “Death. What I do for a living. I never signed up for any of this, Jeannie. It just got dumped in my lap.”

  “Nobody’s forcing you to stay at Fresh Start. Your family can’t make you…they can’t keep you from—”

  Suddenly I could hear the words within the words. One more layer of invisible gauze peeled off like a snakeskin and blew away on the wind.

  “They can’t force me to be a One-Timer, is that what you’re saying?” I asked. She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to, but for the first time I realized that her eyes were the color of gunmetal, a cool liquid gray. “You’re right. No one can make me choose death over life, although I’ve been preached to enough over the years.” I didn’t want to look at her anymore, didn’t want to see eyes the color of my future. “I thought we both decided that one life was enough.”

  “That was what you decided.”

  “Look, I just want to live the best life I can,” I confessed, my back to her, my words soaring like birds over this valley of forgotten French kings. “And then when it’s all over, I want to die and leave all this behind. I want to see my father again. I want to step through that door into heaven and I don’t ever want to come back.”

  She was quiet. For a moment I thought she was gone, that she had headed back down the grassy knoll toward our rented car. But when I turned around, she was still there, and the wind had turned cold.

  She gave me a half smile. “I just wanted to make sure,” she said. “I mean, if we’re getting married, it’s important, isn’t it? That we understand what we each believe.”

  Her words felt like a balm as I took her in my arms. I had revealed my secret heart, something I don’t do very often, and I felt a moment of complete peace. Maybe we disagreed about this small thing called resurrection, but we could still make it work. Somehow.

  Together we headed back down, through mossy meadows.

  It was probably the last chance I would have at a normal life and I didn’t even realize that it was already gone. There was no way either of us could know that the rest of her life would be measured in hours. A slippery mountain road lurked up ahead with her name on it, written in blood.

  Within twenty-four hours her body would shudder to a stop and she would jump.

  She already had her next life preplanned.

  And it didn’t include me.

  There was a time when I thought that she’d look me up, at least to say hi or “Guess what, I never really loved you.” But no. She just disappeared in the vast ethos of Stringers.

  Like everything else in my One-Timer life.

  Gone, but not forgotten.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Russell:

  Somebody was pounding on my head with a jackhammer. Another second and I was going to grab the idiot sitting across from me and drag him around the room in a choke-hold. Crack his lazy skull against the cement wall. Watch his blood pool on the floor. And laugh. I was going to laugh.

  “Hey, this guy hasn’t stopped laughing since we gave him that injection.”

  Funny. This was all just too funny. My house was full of dead children, so instead of trying to catch whoever did it, the mugs decided to drag me in for questioning. As if I had any idea who did it. Or why. Like I would want to hurt my own little girl.

  “I don’t like the look on his face. You think we should give him another dose?”

  Did they really think I was crazy enough to hurt any little kid? I started to laugh until tears ran down my face.

  “That drug isn’t supposed to have this effect. You guys said he would answer our questions. But it ain’t workin’. Hey, I’m talking to you! Can anybody hear me out there?”

  I was done waiting for this human fungus to let me go, I was going to yank his ugly head off his double-ugly body, use it for a soccer ball, bounce it against the walls until somebody told me where Isabelle was and whether she was okay…

  “Get this monster off me! I think he’s taking spikes—somebody get in here, now, this guy’s as strong as a moose!”

  Soccer ball bounce, dead man talk, get me outta here, get me outta here, or you’re gonna die, you ugly mug, I’m gonna peel your arms off one at a time, then I’m gonna snap your legs like breadsticks, and then I’ll twist off your head. Bounce it around until all your teeth are gone. I’m gonna laugh and you’re gonna be dead if you don’t let me see my daughter, let me know she’s okay…

  “Hey! Domingue. Look!”

  I lifted my head, loosened my grip on that lousy toad-eating mug, let him fall limp to the floor.

  She was standing in the doorway. Tired, long hair still in tousled pig tails. Still wearing that tutu and black body stocking. My laughter melted into tears.

  Isabelle. She was okay.

  I fell to my knees. Somebody tackled me, pulled my arms behind my back, poured liquidmetal cuffs on my wrists. I rolled on my side so I could see her for one more second.

  “Daddy.” A tiny smile curved on her perfect face. She held her arms out to me. But they wouldn’t let her come any closer.

  The bloodsuckers wouldn’t let her come in.

  The door closed and Isabelle was gone. A dream that never existed. The one good thing in my life. Gone.

  Now there were five mugs in the room, all dressed in black. Two had some kind of hoods over their faces. As if it mattered whether I knew who they were or not.

  “Ya gonna talk to us now, Domingue? Ya gonna tell us about that break-in that ya orchestrated?” one of them asked.

  I grinned. That drug of theirs was like candy compared to what I was used to. They could ask all the questions they wanted. I was innocent and I knew it, and that was all they were gonna get out of me.

  I closed my eyes and rode the wave. Like an expert surfer that knew how to navigate this opiate ocean, I could handle the swells and the curls, avoid the hidden shoals.

  Because I had to survive.

  For Isabelle.

  I didn’t know if it was day or night. It felt like I’d been in this room for a week. I think I fell asleep curled in a corner and then when I woke up, every inch, every muscle ached. I wondered how much of that rotten interrogation drug they had given me and whether they would give me another go-round when they realized that I was awake.

  But I was glad for the absence of my interrogators. Figured that they had all gone to sleep. I pressed my skin against the cold cement wall. The rough chill scratched my face, made me realize I was still alive.

  I had to remember what I saw. I locked it deep within my brain where no drug could ev
er steal it. Isabelle. Safe. I hated to admit it, especially in this dark snake pit where the mugs had found a way to make my every thought known, but the fact of the matter was that I didn’t care about the other kids. The ones that were dead. I only cared about one.

  Mine.

  It was my secret just how shallow my heart was. My secret cross to bear.

  I could hear a symphony playing inside my soul. A bittersweet serenade. The battle between light and dark would be over soon. A crashing, thundering crescendo of violins and drums and wind instruments. Beautiful and sad. I could almost see my heart curling at the edges, burning, folding up into something hard. Like coal, it almost glistened.

  Black and brittle and broken.

  And dead.

  The door flew open with a crash. I jerked awake. Didn’t even know I had fallen asleep. Realized someone had removed my liquidmetal cuffs. I licked my lips and wondered how long it had been since I’d had anything to drink.

  “You got a visitor, Domingue.” A mug stood just outside the doorway. I couldn’t see more than a dim outline of features, closely cropped hair, broad shoulders. “Fancy up, pal. It’s your lawyer.”

  A tall, slender man gingerly walked into the room, his features slightly feminine, long hair pulled back in a neat ponytail. He was some sort of hybrid. I’d seen that model before, in the illegal chop shops that competed with Fresh Start on the black market. He had fair coloring, blonde hair and blue eyes combined with Asian bone structure. It was one of the latest prototypes that wed the exotic with the mundane.

  He grimaced as he sat across from me.

  This guy wasn’t my lawyer, I’d never seen him before.

  The door closed.

  “They can’t hear us,” he said, his words precise as he looked me up and down. “This conversation is completely private.”

  I leaned forward. I could break this pretty boy in half if I had to. I thought about telling him that, but decided to wait and see what his game was.