Afterlife (13 page)

“I wasn't finished!” She pulled off her face mask and threw it on the floor. “You don't care about anybody but yourself. For the past two years all you've done is humiliate me!” She paused, narrowed her eyes. “Do you think I don't know what you've been doing, staying late at the office every night—”

I grabbed her by the arm and pulled her close. She winced in pain.

“What do you know?” I asked, my voice low.

“That you've been having an affair with that dark-haired research assistant of yours, that Ellen.” Her eyes blazed, a smoldering combination of fear and anger. “And apparently she's had more than enough of you and your gen-spike Jekyll-and-Hyde routine, because she split. I don't know what happened between the two of you and I don't care, but the mugs are pretty hot to find her—”

I gripped both of her arms now. She cried out and her knees buckled.

“They're here now,” she gasped. “Upstairs.”

“What did you tell them?”

“Just what I said. She's gone. You two were having an affair. And I don't care. About either one of you.”

I released her and she collapsed on the ground.

“Bastard.” She rubbed her arms, then glared up at me. “As soon as Isabelle gets back, I'm taking her and leaving—”

“I don't think so.”

She stood up and stumbled backward, away from me. “I'm her mother.”

“And that death certificate we used came from my father. Legally she's
my
daughter and you're nothing more than a surrogate.”

Marguerite watched me like a caged tiger, all bristle and claws and dagger-sharp teeth, and all of it useless. “You won't be able to stop me.”

I walked over and held the door shut so she couldn't leave. Crossed my arms. Flexed my muscles. Felt a left-over surge of gen-spike rush through my veins. When I spoke, my voice sounded like something out of a nightmare.

“Do you want to disappear like Ellen?” I asked.

She cocked her head, then her eyes slowly opened wider. She moved her mouth, but no sound came out.

I opened the door.

It took a long time, but she finally got the courage to walk past me.

Out of the room and away.

Russell:

I hate watching the news. Hate watching the world shrivel up and die. Especially hate it when the End of the World interrupts my VR transmission. I was trying to patch a transmission through to Aditya, but I was having problems. Probably because of the thick cloud cover left behind by that volcanic eruption in the Andaman Islands last month.

Then a special news bulletin jammed its way through.

A 3-D holographic map of the world rolled out across the screen. A horrific patchwork quilt of the inevitable, colors that marked the boundaries between tomorrow and yesterday.

A man's voice played over the scene, silver words framing enameled images.

“We interrupt your VR transmission for an update on the Nine-Timer Report,” he said in a bright artificial tone. “Last night a tour bus crashed in the city of New Delhi, already a known hot pocket chiefly inhabitated by Five-Timers. After the accident occurred, a large crowd of tourists and bystand
ers died almost immediately, their circuits on overload from the shock—”

Photos flashed larger-than-life on the screen. Like the aftermath of a medieval civil war. A portion of the once colorful city of New Delhi had disintegrated into brown and gray rubble; the once noble land that had competed with Japan as a leader in technology was crumpling like a handmade paper kite. Cars were stalled in city streets and dead bodies were strewn everywhere. In the distance, a river of dark water was thick with bloating bodies. The Ganges, once a holy river, had become a river of the dead.

“—this caused a panic, which then spread throughout several city blocks, within which both Six-and Five-Timers froze up as well.”

The newscaster stared into the camera. This was big news.
Pay attention, world. Somebody Important is telling you Something Really Important. Maybe you'd better go check your records and figure out what life you're on. Right now.

“They stopped breathing,” he said after a long dramatic pause. “Wherever they were, whatever they were doing, they just fell over. Dead. This is a new turn of events, something we've never seen before in the Fifth Generation clones—”

They hadn't seen it before, but I had. I'd even seen it take place in Third-Timers, when the stress factor was high enough. It was just one of the many elements that played into this bizarre end-times scenario.

“Riots and looting began soon afterward and, as you can see from our satellite photos, the panic is spreading,” the newscaster continued. “Right now, power is out throughout most of the state of Delhi—”

I switched off the Grid, rubbed my temples, glad that there were no children in the photos. No starving babies, no abandoned toddlers, no homeless adolescents. Although
that truly was our greatest problem here—all the clones after the Sixth Generation were infertile. The DNA broke down sooner than we had anticipated and, on top of that, with each successive generation there were fewer and fewer One-Timers. Before long, there wouldn't be enough sources of pure DNA left to go around. The Nine-Timer scenario that everyone had been fearing, a sort of New Dark Ages, could happen anytime. We used to think it would happen in another two hundred years, but we underestimated the popularity of resurrection, underestimated the possibility that large population segments might jump from one life to the next at a rapid rate.

We never guessed that stress alone could short-circuit a cluster of Three-or Four-or Five-Timer clones, or that once it started it could sweep like a blanket of darkness, knocking out several city blocks at a time. Eventually, even whole provinces could topple over like a row of dominoes, cascading into one another, turning off the lights for each other, shutting down farms and factories, cutting off communication and transportation. The Nine-Timer lifespan for resurrection was winding down, slamming to a rapid glue-in-the-machinery halt. We didn't even have a system in place to dispose of all the dead bodies. And there would be nobody left to take their place when the last set of clones died.

From its onset, people had advocated that resurrection would improve our world, that we would now have the opportunity to achieve long-range goals.

But those of us who stood behind the steering wheel knew the truth.

Resurrection had almost single-handedly undermined every major religion. We all just pretended to believe in an afterlife anymore. All our tomorrows were man-made, granted and blessed by man. We'd finally found a way to take the Big Guy out of the picture.

Today it was the state of Delhi.

Tomorrow it would be the Middle East.

Immortality. Resurrection. Death.

In the end, only a handful of One-Timers would survive. And I planned on being one of them.

Chaz:

There are moments that echo with beauty, like notes in a piano solo. They stir the soul, and then, like pebbles dropped in a pool, they ripple ever outward. The memory of one perfect moment can make you spend the rest of your life trying to recapture it, to reinvent it, to prove it really happened.

I slept. I don't know how long. At times it felt like my head would explode from Skellar's psychotropic cocktail, but somehow I managed to sleep through the pain, aware of it in some helpless nightmarish way, unable to stop it or wake up.

And then autumn sunlight poured into the living room, beams of honey, thick and sticky sweet with humidity. I woke slowly, with a sense of heat centered in my chest. And an unusual feeling of peace.

My eyes flicked open, blinded for a moment by the cascading light. Then I saw her—my niece—curled up beside me on the narrow sofa, her head resting on my chest. Her mouth was open and she was snoring softly. A slow, steady purring sound, almost like a kitten. My right arm ached, but I knew if I moved, it would wake her.

It would destroy this perfect moment.

I kissed her forehead, damp and feather soft. She sighed.

I lifted my gaze and saw Angelique sitting in the chair across from us, her legs tucked beneath her, both hands holding a cup of coffee. Her hair hung over her shoulder in glimmering waves and she was wearing a black dress and boots. She smiled quietly.

There was something about the three of us together in that morning of golden light that felt right. Complete.

This doesn't belong to me, I reminded myself. Isabelle's not my daughter, Angelique will be gone in a few days. All of this is borrowed. Imagined.

Still. If all of eternity could reside in one moment, this was the moment I would choose. This was the single note that I would want to resonate in my heart.

I wished that it could have lasted one more minute.

But even as I acknowledged its perfection, it began to dissolve.

Angelique:

Day faded into night and then back into day. I don't know how long any of us slept. At some point, Isabelle came out of her room and curled up on the sofa next to Chaz. I knew my time here was limited, this false sense of safety would expire. I just didn't know when. Russ was a ticking bomb now. At any point in time he would turn me over to Neville, or worse: to Neville's Nine-Timer boss, some high-level government official, and their interrogation would start. I wouldn't be able to hold out. I didn't have their advantage. I couldn't download into another clone when things got rough.

I got a few things together, and then realized how tired I really was. I paused for a few minutes to drink another cup of coffee, trying to clear the last bit of Newbie confusion from my head. That was when Chaz woke up.

There was a split second when I wondered if I should tell him everything. But my split second didn't last long enough.

Because that was when the war started inside me. A torrent of voices trying to drown me out. All of a sudden I
couldn't think and my skull felt like it would crack down the middle, like I had been struck by lightning.

I moaned, or at least I think I did.

I could feel the struggle between my past personalities, all of my previous hopes and dreams, drowning in the deluge, washing out to sea.

You can't tell him what happened, he'll turn you in—

You have to run, now, before Russ comes—

You can't run, you won't survive without Chaz, you have to tell him—

He said my name then, my new name, and I felt an overwhelming peace, something I couldn't explain or define. The horrid internal battle began to subside. It was temporary, I knew. I still had to leave, even if it meant ripping my soul in half. Even if it meant part of me would be destroyed in the process.

But for now, this one moment was heavenly.

Chaz:

Some days have no right to be beautiful. The sky shouldn't be blue, the birds shouldn't sing. There shouldn't be white puffy clouds sailing like catamarans across a vellum sea. The air shouldn't be fragrant with daphne, honeysuckle and gardenia; there shouldn't be a sense of magnificence in each stolen breath.

Today was that day.

I got out of the car, two bodyguards piled out behind me. Three others led the way. We pushed through angry cattle-like crowds, all poised and ready to stampede. Fortunately Fresh Start had sent a citywide Verse-warning a few hours ago, just in case anybody decided to pull another gauntlet. If there was a disturbance today, all transgressors would lose their ticket into the next life.

Just then, a herd of reporters tried to shoulder their way through the mob, media bands around their foreheads recording everything they saw and heard, as if that somehow justified their presence here.

“How does it feel to be responsible for the worst tragedy in the past decade?”

“Can you explain why your niece survived, when sixteen other children were brutally murdered?”

“How do you sleep at night, Mr. Domingue?”

I pushed my way past the reporters, wondered why the sun was shining, why ragged clumps of wildflowers dared to grow between weathered crosses and skewed headstones, why life still smells sweet in the midst of decay.

Catcalls circled in my wake and some blockhead threw a handful of rocks. One of the guards surged forward, grabbed the culprit, wrestled him to the ground, started to perform an on-the-spot, down-and-dirty extraction of the man's Fresh Start chip.

“Let him go,” I mumbled.

The sky hung, a brilliant blue, above the crumbling brick wall that skirted the cemetery perimeter, all of it guarded by a quiet sentinel, a gothic stone church.

Black clouds should have been assaulting the ground, tornadoes ripping through the firmament, dirt and dust searing our skin. The heavens should have been shouting a vehement protest. Bolts of lightning should have shot down like shards of celestial glass, striking every one of us through the chest and putting an end to this charade we called life.

Instead, every nation, tribe and tongue was converging on a tiny ninteenth-century cemetery just outside Metairie, Louisiana. Modern technology was colliding with ancient ritual. Off to the side, a crew of VR event coordinators frantically pressed buttons on a massive audio/visual board, alternately waving their hands and directing the proceedings like orchestra conductors.

And then a familiar face appeared in front of me—my mother. I hadn't seen her since her transmission shorted out last night. When the liquid light rolled into our lives.

“Hi, sweetheart. You doin' okay?” she asked.

I nodded. The crowd shambled around us, fists clenched, eyes swollen.

“I tried to get in to see you.” She coughed, then paused for a moment. She looked tired. “But my VR suit's been on the blink.”

“Are you okay?”

She grinned. We both knew she wasn't okay, and that she was never going to admit it. “How's Isabelle?”

“She's fine, Mom. I left her back at the hotel with Pete.”

“Yeah. She's too young for this,” she said. Then she coughed again. “All those kids were too young for this.”

“Time for you to get into position,” one of the ant-like VR coordinators interrupted. He pushed a remote-control button on his sleeve and she started to dissolve.

She disappeared, and at the same instant the ancient landscape around me began to magically transform as VR wizards practiced their dark technological sorcery. Row upon row of shimmering virtual patrons began to pop up in pre-paid positions—Mom was probably crammed in there somewhere, but I couldn't tell which one was her. Meanwhile, the brick wall that surrounded the cemetery morphed, blurred and then refocused, until it finally resembled the staggered seating in the Roman Colosseum. Within a few minutes the guests were stacked in six rows, one on top of another.

Spectators were coming from all around the world to see the funeral of the century.

Just then a crowd of bodyguards drifted past. And at their center, Russ and Marguerite.

I had a feeling none of them saw me, or if they did, they were ignoring me. Either way, it helped me decide which way to go. My guards joined theirs and we followed a few steps behind, close enough for me to listen in on their conversation.

“This is awful,” my sister-in-law, Marguerite, whimpered as she held a handkerchief to her eyes. I wondered if she was crying or trying to hide from the press. Despite the heat, she wore a long-sleeved black dress. “I just hate this morbid fascination with death.”

“Death is part of life,” Russ mumbled as he shepherded her forward, threading their way through the throng of nearly five hundred people; a variegated hodgepodge of reporters, bodyguards, mugs and VR technicians mixed in with immediate family members and friends of the deceased children.

“Not anymore. Funerals are just outdated, superficial ceremonies—”

He grabbed her by the arm and she almost crumpled from the pain.

“Show some respect,” he hissed as he pulled her closer. “They were children and they died in
our
house.”

“Take your hand off my arm.” Her voice was fading as they moved away. “I'm sick of this marriage and I'm really sick of you—”

Just then Lieutenant Skellar muscled his way through our private army until he stood between Russ and me. I gave Skellar a toothy grin, raised my left hand and waved, sporting newly grafted skin and a fresh tattoo on my palm. He pretended like I was invisible. Just the reaction I was hoping for.

Instead he focused on Marguerite, like a shark considering a between-meal snack.

“Trouble in paradise?” he asked. I had a feeling this guy planned on becoming our new best friend.

Russ swiveled around, noticed me for the first time. His eyes narrowed when they focused on Skellar. “This is the wrong time and the wrong place, Lieutenant.”

“Just wanted to give the ‘Mrs.' my card.” The mug slipped a thin piece of plastic into Marguerite's hand. “That's got my
contact info on it, Mrs. Domingue. Call me if you remember anything else about the other night.”

She palmed the card silently.

“Where's your Newbie?” Skellar turned a laser-beam glare on me, then scanned the surrounding crowd. “Thought you two couldn't be parted without destroyin' the universe.”

“We opted for a trial separation.”

“Sounds like something your brother and his wife might want to consider.”

“Shut up, Skellar,” Russ growled. “You're out of your element here.”

“I'm never out of my element,” Skellar replied. But I noticed a tremor in his hands, just before he stuffed them back in his pockets.

“I heard that the latest shipment of jive-sweet was cut with strychnine,” I said. “Saw a VR report that said some of your good old boys are in the hospital, hooked up to artificial respirators. Maybe that's why you're cranky today.” I started humming a popular jive-sweet tune.

“You're goin' down, Domingue. You and your whole family.”

“In your dreams, Skellar.”

He sauntered away, stage left, through a sea of anonymous faces, most of them watching Russ and me.

“Where's Isabelle?” Russ asked.

Good to see you too. How'd your interrogation turn out? Anything you want to tell me, like what the hell is going on? “She's back at my place. With Angelique.”

“You left my daughter with a Newbie? Are you crazy—”

“Guess you forgot. That Newbie saved your daughter's life.” I could see his freak level had just about reached its limit, so I gave him a break. “Don't worry, Pete's there. And a team of guards. Hey, did you see Mom? She's here somewhere.”

He glanced up at the surrounding VR stadium seating, then back at me. “I need to talk to you after this is over.”

“I think we both have some stuff to discuss.” I was thinking about that Newbie who downloaded on his front lawn. Her cryptic message about some dog and a girl named Ellen.

A thought burned behind guarded eyes. He lowered his voice. “I tried to get hold of Aditya Khan this morning, but couldn't get through. India's gone brown.”

The Nine-Timer scenario. My pulse ratcheted up a notch. “What about Saudi Arabia?”

“Not yet. But they've got a number of Five-and Six-Timer hot pockets.”

“This ain't good. Especially right now—”

Just then the crowd parted like the Red Sea. A stream of pallbearers marched past, carrying tiny caskets. A river of sixteen miniature coffins, close enough to touch. All sound vanished. No one spoke or moved. Then somewhere in the distance, one bird started to sing, a surreal off-key melody, discordant and unsettling. My fingers turned numb and I realized that I had been holding my breath. There was something unholy and unnatural about all of this, like watching the world being turned upside down.

I wished God or one of his angels would step forward and ask if we wanted any do-overs. How about you, Chaz? Would you like to relive the past three days? Absolutely, I'd answer. But this time, I'd stop those bloodsucking monsters, I'd eat that liquid light before I'd let it get inside Isabelle's room…

A ball of light rolls across the floor like a toy, then ignites and blasts, a heat so intense that it fries the kids from the inside out. Boils their blood, melts their brains, sizzles their skin.

One coffin was barely the length of my arm.

For a long moment the sky blotted out and turned dark. All I could see were cinder-black bodies, sixteen scars on the bedroom floor.

Sixteen children. Gone forever. Meanwhile, somewhere on the other side of the world, the epileptic convulsions of the Nine-Timer scenario were beginning.

The end of everything was about to begin.