Afterlife (5 page)

Angelique:

The tests looked easy at first. And they were. Then I glanced through the window and saw another man across the warehouse floor. He was talking to Chaz. I pretended not to notice him, but the back of my neck started to prickle. A strange feeling settled in my stomach, like I had a blender inside me and somebody turned it on real slow. Just fast enough to make me sick, but not fast enough to kill me.

All of a sudden I couldn't figure out the answers, my hands wouldn't do what I told them and my words wouldn't come out right. I hovered there, alone inside the booth, somewhere between nausea and death, wondering what was wrong with me.

They were arguing.

The other man looked a little bit like Chaz. Taller, darker, maybe a little more handsome. Maybe not. I tilted my head and stared at him, caught him looking back at me.

My hands started to sweat and I couldn't grip the controls properly.

I was done. I didn't care about the tests anymore. I just wanted to get out of there.

Wanted to get out
now
.

Chaz:

The marker lay on the table between us, a small chunk of glittering hardware that suddenly seemed more important than the trillion-dollar resurrection monopoly that surrounded us. For some reason I flashed on a Babysitter mantra that one of my teachers had drilled into me years ago.

Trust nobody during Week One.

I watched Angelique from the corner of my eye, saw her fumble at the controls, her hands slipping and her eyes blinking. I could already tell that she was going to fail this test—the easiest of the bunch. Last night she had almost wandered off with a meathead stranger who probably would have sold her before the sun came up. This was beginning to look almost as bad as a black-market jump. I wondered if she might have been involved in one of those suicide cults in her previous life—those bottom-feeder freaks who loved dancing on the knife edge between death and resurrection.

Meanwhile, my brother frowned and pulled the marker closer. He put on a pair of glasses. “What do you mean this
marker isn't one of ours?” he said. “We've got a patent, nobody else is allowed to—”

“It was made by the government.”

I continued to watch his face, saw his brow furrow, saw something resolute in the angle of his jaw.

“Where did you get this?” Russ demanded. “Chaz, you're not involved in something illegal, are you?”

“Are you crazy? I got it off my Newbie. I thought these clones were supposed to be wiped clean before your boys turned them over to me.”

He studied me for a long, silent moment. “They are.”

“Well, this one's on Day Two and she had government hardware jammed neat and pretty in her hand. On top of that, that jughead from the bar followed us last night, like he was after something.” I paused, leaning closer. “And believe it or not, his trail ended right here. At Fresh Start. So why is the government suddenly interested in what we're doing?”

Russ crossed his arms, let a slow grin slide over his cheeks, brought his I-should-have-been-a-politician dimples out of hiding. “Do you seriously think this is the first time that the government, or any of the myriad resurrection cults, have tried to get a piece of what we have?”

“Not like this,” I said. I decided to toss in a wild card, see if it would shake him up. “Is there some sort of secret project going on here? Something I should know about?”

He shook his head, then laughed. For a brief, surreal moment all my fears bobbed to the surface like dead bodies after a shipwreck. I wondered if he had sold us all out, if everything Mom and Dad had worked for was going to vanish in an instant, if the Feds were going to walk in.

If life and death as we knew it was going to change. Forever.

But that was ridiculous. I mean, Russ cared as much
about Fresh Start as Dad ever did. At least, that was what I'd always thought.

“Where y'at, Russ?” I said finally. Then I repeated my question. “Is there something you want to tell me?” I tried to read between the lines, tried to figure out if his deep, dark secret was life threatening.

“No.” His eyes met mine. “I mean, we're knee-deep in a senate investigation about that Nine-Timer claim that society is going to collapse in on itself in a few years. And we're getting pressure from the Right to Death committee—they want a census to track the success rate of jumpers. And there are a number of hot pockets in the Middle East, places where almost anything could trigger a Nine-Timer scenario if we can't get it contained in time. But it's really all just life-after-life business as usual.” He paused, suddenly reflective. “What did your Newbie say about the chip?”

“Angelique. Her name's Angelique Baptiste, and I decided to ask you about it first.”

“Good idea.” He pursed his lips, then stared down at the marker again. “Why don't you leave this with me? I'll look into it.”

I forced a grin, not quite ready to turn this over to him. I picked up the bag, stuffed it back in my pocket.

Then Russell took a sharp breath, as if he just remembered something. “Sorry, with everything going on the past couple of days, I almost forgot.” He pulled something out of his pocket and tossed it on the table—an envelope with almost illegible printing.

To Uncle Chaz

“What's this?” I asked as I picked it up.

“An invitation to Isabelle's birthday party. She wanted to have it early this year, didn't want to share it with all the monsters on Halloween.”

I hesitated. I loved my niece like she was my own kid,
but after last night I wasn't sure if my Newbie was ready for social gatherings.

“Go ahead and bring the Newbie—I mean, Angelique,” Russ said with a flippant wave of his hand. “She may as well learn that families aren't as wonderful as everybody thinks. Maybe it'll even make her glad she doesn't have one.”

“Maybe she does have one.”

“Yeah, and maybe I have an island off the coast of India. Look, just be there tonight at six and let's not fight, okay?”

I could tell that there was more he wanted to say, saw a flash of emotion, heard his voice catch in his throat. I pretty much had it figured out, but I gave him some space. Let him say it.

“Mom's gonna be there,” he said finally, “and I think she's bringing Dad with her.”

Chaz:

I hadn't seen Mom for about a week. I guess I'm about as guilty as the next guy when it comes to staying in touch. Especially when I'm on a job, although that's really no excuse.

The last time I saw her was on Tuesday. Or maybe it was Monday.

It was about 6
P.M.
I usually go right after dinner. Watching one of the attendants feed her is a little more than I can handle. As liberated and open-minded as I try to be, I have to confess that sickness and death still bother me, probably more than they should, considering I'm a One-Timer.

She was in bed, resting. I came in and sat beside her and waited. I knew she would open her eyes soon. As quiet as I was, I knew the smell would give me away. VR suits always give off an odor; some people say they smell like maple syrup, others say it's more like vanilla cake. Since I'm usually the one inside the suit I don't really have an opinion. Virtual reality caught on big-time a few years before my father passed away, and I'm sure that's why he did what he
did. He got caught up in the craze and wanted to give Mom an anniversary present she wouldn't forget.

Well, none of us ever forgot that one.

Like I said, Mom was in bed, silver hair smoothed on the pillow, her skin pink and paper-soft with age. Her hands lay at her side, elegant long fingers wearing rings of wrinkles at each joint. She had lost some weight. The monitor over her headboard registered 101
LBS.
in glowing red numbers. Her pulse, temperature, blood pressure, electrolytes and cholesterol were all readily visible, along with a few other numbers that I never could figure out. I glanced at the cheat sheet I had brought with me, compared the current numbers with what they had been last time.

She was fading away. Pretty soon she would just vanish. All her numbers would read zero and her spirit would sail away.

When I finally got the courage to lift my gaze from my mother's frail body, I saw him. Damn holo has uncanny timing. Right when I looked across the room to the corner, where I knew it was—this supernatural, super-spooky, three-dimensional rendition of my father when he was thirty-eight years old—it looked up and stared right back at me. And smiled.

A tear formed and slid down my cheek.

I hate that holo.

He looked just like he did right before he died. Dad never grew old. Never got gray hair or wrinkles. So this creature that occasionally flickers and skips with a hiss and a crackle actually looks a lot like me.

It's disconcerting to outlive your own father. To realize that every year after this one will be one more than he had.

Mom woke up right about then, when I was analyzing the miserable lack of accomplishment in my life, when I was
silently cursing a technology that could keep a virtual ghost of my father alive forever but couldn't find a cure for what was slowly killing my mother.

“Hi, sweetheart.”

She reached out and touched my VR arm with her hand, a caress as soft as velvet. That's as close as we're going to get, until her last few minutes and the doctors allow us to actually go inside her quarantined room. It's not so much that they're afraid we might catch what she has. It's more that what we have might kill her. A cold. A flu. Some random bacteria, happy to live innocuously on our skin, but much more excited to leap into her compromised immune system and develop into pneumonia or tuberculosis or tularemia. All deadly.

“Hi, Mom. How do you feel?”

Her eyes glittered, a pale blue sky filled with diamonds, like stars in the morning.

“Better now, honey. Always better when you are here.”

She smiled.

My mother is dying and we are surrounded by a world filled with people who refuse to die. We are the ones who give them more life.

And yet, this is the only one she wants.

I return her smile. And I refuse to cry.

Angelique:

We drove through the mid-evening gloom, daylight clinging possessively to the hem of darkness, sparks of light glimmering around us as the City That Care Forgot remembered it was time to get up and play. Silence hung in the car, heavier than the impending darkness. Tension peered in, my own reflection staring back from the window, watching the reflection of Chaz, watching the rocky brittle silence, a new barrier I couldn't seem to cross.

Chaz was distracted about something. He'd been acting strange ever since we went to Fresh Start. Ever since he'd had an argument with his brother.

“I remembered something,” I said, hoping to break through the suffocating quiet. My insides felt like a taffy pull: sticky, sugar-sweet pastel-colored emotions that didn't seem to connect, fears and hopes that stretched off into an invisible distance. “This morning I remembered my first life.”

“That's good,” Chaz answered, his face turned away from me.

We were riding in one of the company cars, heading over to his niece's birthday party. I wanted to go see a group of children—it was like being invited to the president's house for dinner—but I didn't want to see Chaz and his brother fight again.

“What's that?” Chaz asked as he pointed to the back of my right hand. “Did you cut yourself?”

I instinctively wrapped my left hand around my right one. I remembered the blood on my sheets last night, the sting on my hand in the bar.

“What's wrong?” he asked, looking at me now, his eyes dark, unreadable.

“I think I fell down in the City of the Dead. I must have cut my hand. I don't know.”

“You don't remember?”

I shook my head. It was an accident, it had to be, I didn't mean to talk to that strange man in the bar, I didn't mean to run away from Chaz in the cemetery, I didn't mean to fall, I didn't mean to hurt the dog—

I flashed on a black dog, lying lifeless on the ground. Dead. Then it got back up again. Alive. A series of images looped through my head. Over and over. The dog was on its side, then it was on its back, then it was on its stomach. But it didn't matter how many times we killed it, the dog wouldn't stay dead.

I tried to roll down the window, I wanted to escape, I wanted to run away from all of this—

Just then Chaz tossed something in my lap. A plastic bag with a small metal-and-plastic chip inside. “Here,” he said. “This is yours.”

I stared down at it, a numb feeling in my hands. “What is this?”

“A government marker. It was in your hand.”

Somehow I figured out how to make the window roll
down, a button on the armrest, almost hidden in the dark. The glass slid down instantly and cool air rushed in. A row of brightly colored shotgun cottages flew past. In one fluid movement I grabbed the bag, smashed the contents against the door, then threw the bag out the window. Chaz didn't have time to react, although I don't know what he could have done anyway.

He stared at me, a slight frown on his face. I had surprised him.

“Why are they tracking you, Angelique?”

I shrugged and looked away from him, ready to jump out if I had to. Somehow I had an entire escape route planned out in a millisecond, where I would go, how I would get there, what I would do when I got there. I could see a map of nearby city streets in my head, a vein of routes that would lead me to safety. A new strength flowed through my muscles, an ability to do whatever I needed to in order to survive. “I don't know,” I answered as the car began to slow down. We must have been close to our destination, Russell's house.

I still didn't know what was going on, or anything about my most recent life.

But I had figured out how and when I got the marker. That man in the bar.

He'd run his fingers down my arm.

Then my hand stung.

He'd put that marker in me. Whoever he was, he was looking for me.