by Ann Christy
Forever Between
Book Two of the Between Life and Death Trilogy
by Ann Christy
Copyright © 2015 by Ann Christy
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, nor may it be stored in a database or private retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author, with the exception of brief quotations included in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses as permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, and events appearing or described in this work are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events, is purely coincidental and the product of a fevered imagination.
Dedication
For Sophie,
Because girls like you will rock the zombie apocalypse.
Other Works by Ann Christy
The Silo 49 Series
Silo 49: Going Dark
Silo 49: Deep Dark
Silo 49: Dark Till Dawn
Silo 49: Flying Season for the Mis-Recorded
Novels
Strikers
The Between Life and Death Series
The In-Betweener
Forever Between
Between Life and Death (Coming May 2015)
Short Works
Yankari
Anthologies with stories by Ann Christy
Wool Gathering – A Charity Anthology
Synchronic: 13 Tales of Time Travel
The Robot Chronicles
The Powers That Be: A Superhero Collection
Today - The Girl in the Cage
Noise. Why was there always so much noise?
The girl turns in a slow half-circle, seeking the source of the noise, but everything seems hazy and disordered, as if nothing is in its proper place. The place she’s in is familiar, yet odd and somehow incorrect.
And the noise!
It makes her want to squeeze her fists into her ears. Or around the head of whoever is making the noise.
It’s silent again for a moment, then the harsh clanking returns as she moves toward the edge of her enclosure—though even the idea of an enclosure doesn’t quite sink all the way into her muddled thoughts, only the idea of being in some way restrained. Then a sharp tug brings her up short.
When she lifts her arms, only to find that she can’t extend her hands, she finally puts the noise and the chains around her wrists together, almost into their proper perspectives.
Chains. Chains are for holding things down. These chains are holding me.
She lets her hands drop to her sides again and it’s a relief. One side of her feels almost too heavy to move and she’s listing toward the wall. A sound escapes her that doesn’t sound right and she lets herself lean against the cold wall.
More relief. Less clanking.
A scent reaches her nostrils. It’s tantalizing—rich, dark, and salty-sweet—and she wants it, wants to get near it. She wants to put it in her mouth. Her head follows the direction her nose instructs, and even though her eyes don’t want to focus properly, a flash of movement through a slit in a metal wall gives her a place to focus on. She can’t seem to stop herself and a snarl escapes her. The feeling of saliva filling her mouth is disturbing, the taste metallic.
People, there are people behind there. Why are they hiding?
The mental vagueness returns then, which is a relief in a way. There’s no more confusion or muddled thoughts, only a sort of blankness filled to overflowing with that delicious smell. She lets herself sink into the scent, breathe it in, and let it fill her entirely.
Different sounds begin to gradually break through the haze that clouds her thinking. Groans and the snapping of teeth. In the next cage the girl sees the sources of these new and bothersome noises. All across the floor are men laid out on boards. They aren’t just chained, they are strapped down. Even their heads have straps running across their foreheads, holding them still even as they strain against the bonds. But they must smell that delicious smell as well as she does.
Maybe that tantalizing smell makes them as hungry as it makes her.
Movement draws her eyes back to the opening in the metal wall, and this time some quirk of physiology allows her to focus a little better on the slit. There are eyes there. Familiar eyes. The hunger is so strong the girl finds herself straining against the chains once more, the clanking painful to her ears, but the urge beyond her control.
Then the eyes change somehow—some shift in the way the light hits them or some subtle alteration in the muscles around them—and the girl recognizes them, knows the face those eyes belong to. The name attached to the eyes appears in her mind during one brief burst of clarity.
Veronica.
The girl looks down and away from the slit, finally seeing her hands as they truly appear, the bits of gore and the blackened lines of older filth under the nails, the dirt ground into her skin, the matted bits of feather clinging to her sleeves.
Oh, no. No.
Behind the slit, the eyes disappear and through it, the girl can now see nothing but light.
Today - A Promise of Hope
“She’s sort of squishy looking, Veronica. You know…juicy,” Charlie says.
His fingers scratch at the peach fuzz he insists is a beard as he looks into the sectioned off bit of warehouse and the in-betweener chained there. “You’re feeding her enough, right?”
I snort and cross my arms a little tighter over my chest. Like any of us really knows how much is enough to feed the revived dead. “Of course. Six birds—or the equivalent—twice a day. Fresh water in the bucket as often as needed.”
I stand there for a while with Charlie, just looking through the viewing slit toward the cage. It strikes me, as it does sometimes, that this is the weirdest possible life we’ve fallen into. This year, I should be a junior in high school and Charlie should be a senior, ready to graduate within the next month or so. Instead, we’re discussing the feeding of a pet in-betweener. The in-betweener in question—a person who has died but whose heart has been restarted by her nanites—is my rescuer and best friend, Emily.
Is or was? Which is the correct way to think of her?
She was the person I trusted most in the world. Now, she’s a dangerous revived corpse who would eat me as soon as look at me.
Perhaps sensing us somehow, Emily turns in her chains toward the slitted peephole cut into the corrugated metal. She sniffs the air and opens her mouth in a quiet snarl. She does look squishy, sort of puffy around the cheeks and glossy where the skin is pulled tighter. Only her bright, white teeth—the result of years of braces, she once told me—are still unchanged. We’re basing what we feed her on the tests she ran on other in-betweeners, but clearly it’s not working out the same for her. One eye, the one pressed forward by the brain tumor that killed her, looks to the side, but the other stares with hungry intensity at the peephole where we stand.
I put my hand on Charlie’s arm and we ease back from the opening, moving away from the barrier around her cage on silent feet. Neither of us speaks or makes noise until we step out onto the sun-splashed loading dock. Fresh air, the almost belligerent greetings of the birds, and the faint sound of children at play in another warehouse lifts the darkness inside me.
It always feels a bit like a curtain is dropping between me and the world when I see Emily. I loved Emily, was grateful to her and yet, now I want to smash her head in every time I see her face. At the
same time, I’d move mountains to help her.
It is a very conflicted set of feelings that I have.
“You really want to do this? You’re sure?” Charlie asks, avoiding my eyes. He scans the lines of the rooftops and the birds covering them. Nesting season is in full swing, the weather warming up but not yet hot, and the birds seem annoyed that their almost-grown nestlings are still hanging around. They grow up so fast, the birds. Even with us taking a dozen birds or more each day for Emily, their numbers never seem to decrease. In fact, it seems the opposite. It’s like they know this area is for humans and on the balance of things, we’re the safer ones to be around.
When I don’t answer, he sneaks a glance at me from the corner of his eye. I can feel it the moment he looks at me. Being around so few people means that you get to know everything about the ones you are around. Their mannerisms, speech patterns, and even the tiny signals that they make before they speak are as clear to me as the words that will follow.
Rather than see me biting at my lip—my sign for indecision—or scowling with my eyebrows drawn so close together they’re almost a single long eyebrow, I make sure he only sees my certainty. He’ll jump on any show of indecision. I tilt my face up to the sun and have to force it to remain smooth and relaxed. It’s surprisingly hard to do.
I know how he’ll react to any sign that I’m not absolutely sure, because I know that he’s uncertain. I know he’s afraid of how this thing we’re thinking of doing will change our lives. It isn’t just about our safety, but about disturbing the homeostasis our lives have achieved. If we manage to do what we hope to do, then we will have the additional burden of knowledge and the responsibility of doing something with that knowledge.
There’s much to be said for a predictable life. I wouldn’t have agreed with that before the nanites turned the world on its head and divided humans into three groups; human, in-betweener, and deader. Now, I’ll take predictable any day. And it has become blessedly predictable.
I spend each morning smashing up any deaders that wind up on the perimeter. Each day I take a turn at cooking, babysitting, and working in the gardens just like everyone else does. Each evening I huddle around our lantern along with everyone else, our books turned toward the light for a precious hour of forgetting. Then each night, I sleep the sleep of the tired, knowing I’ll do the same again the next day.
Except that we can’t do this forever. And we have a good reason to break the balance of our ordered lives. Love and hope, and the promise of future love and hope for one thing. Getting the world back would be another big reason. But for me, it’s a distant second to the first right now.
“Yeah, I’m sure,” I answer, my eyes still closed and face turned toward the mild, morning sun.
His sigh is loud enough to cause a ripple of wing flaps from the metal awning above the door. “Then we should just do it and get it over with,” he says, a resigned tone to his voice.
I know he doesn’t feel as strongly about this as I do. By the time we found Charlie, Emily was already pretty sick, her head pounding frequently and her tumor making her short-tempered and fearful off-and-on. He doesn’t know her like I did. He didn’t know the girl who braved the downtown gauntlet by herself with an in-betweener in her car just to find some kids who needed rescuing. To find me. To find Jon. He can’t possibly understand what I feel or what I feel that I owe her.
He sighs again, this time a hint of impatience in it that I can hear as clearly as words. I open my eyes and put a hand on his arm. Then I give him my most understanding smile, the one I reserve for the kids when they push me to the limits of my patience. That makes him chuckle because, after more than half a year, he knows me pretty well, too.
“Let’s go get ready,” I say.
Two Years Ago - Save the Rotator Cuff
“No, no, Veronica! You have to hit them like I showed you. Otherwise, you use up more energy for less result. Plus, you’ll tear up your rotator cuff and I haven’t seen any good shoulder surgeons lately,” Emily says, taking the hammer from my hand and shaking off the goo in one smooth motion.
She pauses then, cocking her head at the deader in front of her and says, “Unless maybe this one is a surgeon. You get my point, right?”
I nod, but ask, “What’s a rotator cuff?”
She gestures toward the top of her shoulder with the goopy hammer. “Bunch of muscles and tendons that keep the shoulder in its joint. You don’t want to mess with your rotator cuff.”
“Ah,” I say, but I can tell she knows I have no clue what she’s talking about.
She exchanges the hammer for her filet knife, kept handy in an amateur-looking leather sheath she made from leather car upholstery. She names each one after the car she took it from. This one is called Lexus.
“Here, let me show you. It’s actually really interesting. All layered and nifty,” she says almost eagerly. Her hands move toward the shoulder of the deader, the knife flickering in the light.
I swear I’ll hurl if she does what I think she’s going to do. “Uh, I’d rather look at it in a book, Emily. Really.”
Emily stops just shy of her first cut and looks over her shoulder at me with a grimace. “Sorry. I, uh, forget sometimes that they were people.”
“Yeah, but they are former people who need their heads smashed in and I do need some training,” I say, trying to get things back on topic and turned away from any weird embarrassment.
The knife slides back into the sheath and the hammer back up and out. “Watch me,” she instructs, focused once more on the task at hand.
I nod and hug my arms to my chest.
She steps toward the next deader she’s already tied to the fence by looping wires around their necks. It’s been a few days since she did more than that, so we’ve got quite a collection lined up for disposal. Usually, she smashes them on the same day she catches them, but Jon’s had a little cold so we’ve been staying close to our home at the warehouse. He’s feeling better now and getting some sun while he naps just on the other side of the fence, nestled inside a big box we took from the furniture warehouse.
Emily jams her gloved hands into the pockets of the deader’s pants and fishes about, bringing out some change from one pocket, which she examines and then tosses onto the ground. From another pocket she pulls out something that makes her grin. When she holds it up, I see it’s a fire-starter, the good kind.
She grins and says, “And always check the pockets.”
She tosses the fire-starter at me and then cocks the hammer back over her shoulder. She gives it a dramatic little bounce. “And don’t swing the hammer back so far. You almost got yourself in the back with it.”
With that, she swings the hammer straight into the forehead of the deader, creating a smacking, crunching sound that turns my stomach. In one smooth motion, she lifts her wrist and pulls the hammer out of the hole she’s made. Then she demonstrates that same motion once more in the air, bits of deader dripping off the hammer head while she does. “And if you lift like this, you’re far less likely to get it stuck in the skull. Handy when they aren’t tied up.”
I’m barely holding in my gorge and I for sure can’t speak, so I settle for making a sound of agreement. It comes out sounding more like a gag, so Emily—hammer already lifted and ready for another blow—stops and turns to me.
I must be as green as I feel, because she makes an “aww, poor baby” face and drops the hammer. She steps away from the deader and gives me a one-armed hug, squeezing my shoulders as she does.
“I know this is hard. I hate to say it, but you’ll get used to it. It has to be done,” she says, her voice soothing and sweet.
Head bashing aside, Emily is sweet and nice. She’s probably the nicest person I’ve ever met aside from Sam. Of course, Sam wound up eating three of us and I’m only alive because I hid with Jon inside the mechanical closet in our apartment for three days. That makes my judgment of who is nice and who isn’t somewhat suspect.
Nice or not, she’s
right. I’ve not had to deal with the deaders much on my own. My parents took care of me as much as they could and then, when they disappeared, I found Sam and hid inside a loft apartment, letting him take the risks while I looked after the other kids. But I have to learn now. It’s just Emily, baby Jon and me. I’ve got to pull my weight.
“I’m okay. I promise. I just…just have to get used to it,” I say, and swallow back the scratchy feeling of rising vomit at the sight of the deader. It’s still moving, however sluggishly, and the glistening brain inside the wrinkly dead body is the ultimate in grossness.
“Good girl! That’s the spirit!” Emily says with more volume than is wise. She puts her finger to her lips in recognition of that, then reaches down to pick up the hammer again.
“Spirit, yeah,” I mutter. She doesn’t hear me.
“Okay, back to training. You see how wet that brain is? That’s the last thing to go with these guys. Once there’s not enough brain to have primitive instincts, the whole thing just collapses and stays down for good. It doesn’t die, per se, but it won’t go anywhere. To kill it for good, we’ve got to completely destroy the brain.” She hefts the hammer and demonstrates for me again the best way to destroy a brain.
I manage not to puke this time. It’s progress.
Today - Two for the Road
The kids are fully into insane-cooped-up mode when we get to the warehouse that we live in. Like Emily did before us, we all live in the offices on the upper observation deck because the metal stairs are awkward and loud, making them the best sort of alarm in case of a breach. The floor of the warehouse, which used to hold massive quantities of very strange food, is much clearer now. That’s not good because it means the food is slowly running out, but it does make for a nice play area.
Jon, who is probably four by now—I have no way of knowing for sure exactly when his birthday is since I lost track of the calendar—and Maribelle, who is a very bossy six, are running around and smacking each other. They call it tag. I call it frustration at being indoors so much. Savannah is watching them from her perch on some re-purposed crates, her face the very picture of resigned patience.