The Aftermath

by Jen Alexander

  “They live on the third floor,” I say as we walk briskly through the lobby. It’s surprisingly clean. The last squatters were disgusting.

  We take the stairs. Again. There’s a buzzing hum of electricity all around, and a working elevator, but we still climb three flights of steps to avoid notice. I’m out of breath by the time we find the courtroom the couple has made their home base. My belly is on fire, and all I want is to rest, to lean against one of the benches to steady myself.

  I join Ethan on the other side of the room instead.

  Kneeling down behind the jury box, he bites his bottom lip. “Where did they get all this?” I see the top of his head moving—he’s taking count of the supplies. “There’s so much food and water... Hey, give me your bag, will you?”

  Usually he’s the lookout while I load the bags because I’m faster. Today, I don’t object. I toss him my empty backpack, and it lands quietly on the front row.

  “Be quick,” I order before stepping into the lobby.

  My tennis shoes tap softly on the beige tile floor as I pace in front of the door. I feel that at any moment, I will drop from hunger and yet I can’t keep still. I am not particularly patient, but when it comes to a raid, I try to have some restraint. Stealing someone else’s resources is a quick way to wind up dead. And it’s the thieves who are hasty or greedy that you see bloated on the side of the street or beaten bloody and left slumped against a building.

  I am still thinking about food and water and pacing frantically when I realize I’m no longer alone. The sound of a gun cocking and the bittersweet scent of menthol make me freeze.

  “Turn around,” orders a soft female voice. “Hands on top of your head.”

  I do as I’m told. I twist around so slowly that the rubber soles of my shoes make a drawn-out squeaking noise. My heart nearly tumbles out of my chest. For a moment, for whatever reason, I’m sure it’s Mia. My friend who decided she was better off somewhere else shortly after we celebrated freeing several people from a flesh-eater den. But then I blink a couple of times. Other than the dark hair and eyes, this person looks nothing like Mia.

  This woman is middle-aged, not seventeen, and has a gaunt, dented face. She is nearly shirtless and so skinny I can count the bones beneath her translucent skin. Tattered cargo pants hang low on her hips. Her feet are bare, worn and bruised. If not for the Glock aimed at my forehead, I wouldn’t be afraid of her at all.

  But there is a gun pointing at me, and the person holding it is not on my side. If I’m lucky, she’ll shoot me now instead of trying to breed me with a male captive in hopes of making more food. I’ve heard about flesh-eaters doing this because babies are so fat.

  “Need some help holding that thing?” I ask. My bold words surprise both of us, and she sneers. Lowers the gun until it’s aimed directly between my eyes. My chest contracts, but I don’t stop talking. “Go on. I dare you.”

  “You dare me?”

  There’s a gun in her hand and my fingers are clasped above my head and I’m goading her to kill me. I am a sadist. I am terrified out of my skull.

  I nod and smile.

  Instead of firing, she laughs at me. Her bony body shakes hard—like a skeleton dangling about. I only hope she’s loud enough for Ethan to hear. “You’re not getting out, girl. You’re worth too much for me to let that happen. Question is—” she twitches her head toward the closed courtroom door and grins “—how many more we taking with us?”

  We.

  The word makes me want to scream. Of course she’s not alone—flesh-eaters raid with their entire clan. I take a tentative step toward her, and her nostrils flare. “Do. Not. Move,” she warns.

  I take one more step. Two. Then three. I feel as if my muscle and bone have turned to jelly, but somehow I walk with confidence. If I pretend I’m not terrified, then maybe—just maybe—I’ll survive this day. It’s worked before, more times than I can remember. Still, I can almost smell my fear intermingling with her pungent minty scent; can practically feel the cold barrel of the gun. I am that close to her now.

  My lips move into a mocking grin. “Go on,” I challenge.

  The next few moments are a complete blur. Ethan shouts something, and the woman turns in his direction. I rush forward. The gun goes off, and I’m trembling with my arms around this skinny creature that wants me dead, unsure which of us is wounded. The echo is so thunderous, and I’m so numb, it takes me a moment to realize Ethan is saying my name, telling me to let go.

  The woman collapses to the floor. She’s motionless, and I watch as a crimson stain spreads across the chest of her skimpy tank top. Then, her chest expands, a gasp bubbles from her throat and her eyes bulge open.

  “I— Where—” Wild brown eyes shift up to me. I want to disappear, to melt into the floor, but I stand still as a statue, staring down at her.

  “Help me,” she whispers. Her voice sounds different—there’s an accent now that wasn’t present before. “I feel it. Get it out of me!” She thrashes around, grabbing at her scalp, and I draw in a deep breath. The wound is right under her heart, not in her head. She must not realize this because she yanks her hands through her matted hair. Begs me, over and over, to get it out of her.

  “What?” I want to ask. “Get what out of you?” But I say nothing to the woman as I watch her. I don’t even look at Ethan when I say, “She’s been around a long time. Worth a lot of points.”

  Suddenly, it feels as if the space around the three of us is rotating, like a revolving door. I have no explanation for what I just said, but it sounds so familiar. Like something I heard or said once before, but I can’t quite grasp where or when. Or why.

  What the hell is wrong with me today?

  The woman stops moving, and this time I know she’s dead. Burning pain consumes my chest. For a moment, I wonder if we were both hit.

  “We should get her things,” Ethan whispers. He throws my bag at me. A few protein bars fall to the floor as it hits me in the chest. “Hurry!”

  I keep my eyes away from her face, which is partially covered by her limp arm. Swallow back the bile threatening to come up. Focus on stuffing my bulging bag with the brown-eyed woman’s belongings—one coat, a copper-stained pocketknife, a box of matches, a half-empty bottle of codeine syrup.

  “Hurry,” Ethan says in such a calm voice my shoulders tense up. He’s looking right at me, at what’s left of the woman, and he’s completely expressionless.

  I grab the gun, swing my bag onto my back and rise to my feet. “There are probably others like her in the building.” My voice is collected, detached.

  Ethan processes this for a moment, flicking his hazel gaze from the elevator to the staircase. Finally, he tightens his grip on his knife and starts toward the elevator. I sprint after him, but my brain is screaming at me, Coward. She needed your help and you just stood there, staring.

  I don’t know the person I’m leaving behind—the decisions we made when our world came to an end took us on two different paths—but I still feel like a traitor.

  It almost seems fitting that when the doors of the elevator squeak open, we come face-to-face with another stranger—a boy with dark shaggy hair and eyes so gray they seem black. I stand unmoving, ice crawling through my veins, as I take this intruder in. He’s dressed entirely in black and he’s weirdly clean—more polished than anyone I’ve seen in the past few years.

  “Don’t tell me you’re—” Ethan begins, but I don’t catch the rest of his words because the other boy swings something at him. Ethan ducks, and the object collides with the top of my head and sends me reeling back. Darkness closes in.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I seldom have dreams. And when I do, when I’m fortunate enough to close my eyes to something other than the nothingness that seems like death, it’s always the same; I dream I’m someone else. A girl in a world without
pain and hunger. The dreams are nice, and I always dread waking. Not once have I had a dream I wanted desperately to leave the moment it began.

  Until now.

  I’m standing beneath short rows of fluorescent lights, gazing down at a white metallic machine. It’s as long and as wide as the empty casket Mia and I found on a street corner last year after a torrential storm, but one end is rounded and there’s a thin glass panel running along the length of the top. Transparent tubes extend like tentacles from the bottom of the machine into even more machines with dozens of buttons and multicolored lights.

  And on the other side of the glass, inside the metal coffin, there’s a body.

  I watch quietly as a mechanical arm slides back and forth on the girl’s bloody face, like a pencil scratching lines across a blank sheet of paper. The girl in the machine is so still and quiet, I’d think she was dead if it weren’t for the slight shudder of her chest.

  There’s a loud beep behind me, and the metal picks up its speed on her skin. The coffinlike machine begins to make a humming noise, and when I lean in close to the glass, the girl’s injuries gradually start to change. Her skin is being made whole again.

  Small forehead, V-shaped scar at the hairline.

  Straight freckled nose.

  Lips that have spoken my every inadequate word for the past several years.

  I am looking at myself.

  I want to run away. I want to end this dream now and go back to my world, a world that’s filled with the type of fear that I understand. But instead of backing away, I tap my fingers on the glass and suck in an impatient breath. “This is taking entirely too long.” The voice I speak in is soft—almost childlike.

  The voice is not my own, but I’ve dreamed of it before. I’m that other girl again.

  “You would be better off going home to wait as she’s horribly damaged,” someone else says.

  “She fell on her face after she was hit. It’s nothing you can’t fix.”

  “It’s not her exterior that I’m so concerned about—the Regenerator can easily repair that damage.”

  My gaze is finally dragged away from my broken body and settles on the woman speaking. She’s bent over a desk, squinting down at a computer screen. She taps the screen a few times, and the machine behind me makes a grating noise. A see-through image of someone’s head drifts up over the desk. Even though it’s neon green, with grid lines running through, I can tell that it belongs to me from the round face and nose shape. The woman touches the screen again, and the projection changes to a floating model of a brain.

  “Making sure she hasn’t received any brain damage will take additional time,” the woman explains.

  I walk in a circle around the machine. This...thing that is slowly repairing my body’s injuries. My shoes clacking loudly on the tile floor are the only sound other than a steady beep from the machines. Heels. Even if I could find a pair, I’d never wear them outside of a dream because there’s no place for impractical shoes in my world.

  “Spare me the technical doctor talk, okay? How long will it be before I can have her back?” I demand.

  The woman lifts her eyes to the side of the white machine where I’m standing over myself. She swallows hard and fumbles with the last button on her white coat. “With all due respect, Miss Olivia, there are other characters far more advanced and with the newest technology that—”

  Even though this is a dream and I’m somebody else, that name makes me go cold. I want to wake up. I want this dream to be over now.

  “I don’t want another,” the soft-voiced me snaps. “I want her.”

  “But her vitals are incr—”

  “Perhaps you didn’t understand me, Dr. Coleman. Or maybe you lack the skills to perform what you were hired to do. This is who I want, so fix her!”

  Dr. Coleman touches her screen again. The brain changes back to the image of my head, and then the entire projection sinks down, disappearing. “She came close to dying this time.”

  “If she dies, then you will, too. Make her right again.”

  Again.

  Again?

  Wake up. Wake up right now. This is all wrong...

  Dr. Coleman sighs heavily and grabs something off her desk. As I step aside so she can walk past, I catch a glimpse of it. Long and silver—it looks like a square flashlight. She positions her hand over a blinking light on the side of the Regenerator. The machine beeps five times before the glass panel flips open. My body shivers visibly as Coleman brushes back strands of my blond hair.

  “Are you sure you just don’t want to wait until—”

  “What I want is her functional within forty-eight hours,” I say in the strange voice. “And don’t shave her head this time. She looked hideous the last time you did that. And no new scars, either—she already has plenty.”

  Wake up. Please.

  I want to turn away as Dr. Coleman presses the square black tip of the tool to my scalp. But my thoughts and actions in my dreams are just the same as reality. Severed. The body inside the machine comes fully to life when the doctor holds down a button on the device. Screaming, thrashing against dozens of metal arms sketching over the rest of its injuries. Somehow, I’d failed to notice them before.

  Wake up!

  At last, I untangle myself from the nightmare.

  And the pain of the girl who is struggling inside the machine coffin with the broken body—now it’s all mine.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “I hate when that happens.”

  My first words when life rushes back into my body are so nonchalant, they nearly knock the breath out of me all over again. A throbbing ache claws the left side of my face, pulsating from my jawbone to my temple and, finally, to the top of my head. I try to open my eyes. They are so sticky, and I’m so weak, I only manage to part them enough to see slivers of bright light and dark faceless figures moving about. My breath quickens as panic surfaces in the pit of my belly and digs its way into my chest.

  Where am I?

  “Welcome back,” Ethan says. I can detect a hint of a smile behind his voice. Just like three years ago when we’d first met, right after a flesh-eater had attacked me, taking a chunk of my right ear with him.

  “Welcome to The Aftermath,” Ethan had said before helping me up. Then he’d touched my bleeding ear and added, “We better get that fixed. Wouldn’t want you to bleed out the first day in.”

  Now I should feel more relief he’s alive. That I am with him and not fenced in by rotting flesh and half-dead emaciated captives in a flesh-eater’s den. But I can’t. My head is aching, and the sensation slinks through the rest of my body, leaving a bitter sting wherever it touches. Like poison.

  “Here,” Ethan says. A wet cloth covers my eyelids. “Better now?”

  No. Not even a little. How could it be better when my head feels as if it’s about to explode and I’ve no recollection of what happened to me? The only thing I remember after being hit by the boy with the dark gray eyes is a string of horrible nightmares.

  A vision of me stretched out and bruised in a machine, with tiny mechanical hands repairing my body, flashes through my mind. I swallow back a sour taste in my mouth.

  No, nothing is better. And I have a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that things will become much worse.

  “It’s perfect,” I say, my voice scratchy. Raw. Suddenly, I don’t want to open my eyes. I want to stay like this, curled into the fetal position with my head ablaze until I gather my bearings. Piece together my broken memories.

  My eyes open anyway.

  Ethan’s face hovers over mine. He is smiling widely, despite the open cut on his lip. But for the first time, his eyes startle me. They aren’t injured or anything like that, but they’re glassy, like hazel marbles. My hands suddenly feel clammy. In the three years I’ve
known Ethan, I’ve never felt wary around him.

  Until today.

  “I’m glad,” he says. His fingers intertwine with mine, and I feel weightless as he helps me to my feet.

  We aren’t in the jail, I realize as he pulls me to him and into a suffocating embrace. There are no cell doors, no chipping blue paint or exposed piping or opaque windows. This place is open and well-lit, thanks to its many windows, and I know it well. It’s the museum in the Park. Once, I’d found a tourism brochure with a picture of this place tucked inside a tin box in a crawl space. The paper was so old that I could barely make out most of the tiny typed print, except for the words “Tour the Parthenon.” I can’t imagine anyone wanting to tour this museum now, though. These days, it overlooks a lake that’s slowly drying up to reveal a makeshift burial ground.

  Dozens of pillars enclose us. Two stories above, light gleams through windows in the beamed ceiling, illuminating splashes of graffiti and blood on the columns. And positioned behind the concrete—with missing heads and appendages—are sculptures that seem to turn accusingly toward me.

  Coward, they seem to say.

  Inside, I wince.

  “I know you said you didn’t want to come here, but it was so close to the other place,” Ethan explains, leaning against one of the pillars. He glances away, and my heart jumps at the sight of the long gash that runs from the nape of his neck to just by his throat. I want to reach out and touch it. Ask him if this is what happened to him on our raid, if he knows what happened to me when I went under. If he knows what happened to the boy who came out of the elevator.

  “I hope you’re not upset,” he whispers.

  I stare at Ethan for a long moment, studying his injuries. I feel as if I’m about to pass out from my own. Did I speak to him deliriously, words I’ve now forgotten? I have no memory of talking to him about living here. And even though I would’ve argued against it because this museum practically screams to be raided, I don’t understand why he’d think I’d be upset.