Harmonic: Resonance (10 page)

We returned inside to see everyone standing in the living room, talking all at once, and staring at the curtain wall.

“What’s going on?” I asked as we neared the group.

Gary turned, put a finger to his ear, and said, “Listen.”

I glanced at Powell with a frown. He shrugged back at me, and then I realized what it was that we were hearing. The voices were coming from behind the curtain.

“Is that ...”

“It started right before you guys walked in, like someone just turned up the volume,” Gary said.

We watched in awe as Sarah spoke her first words to Sean since her passing. Her message remained inaudible over the murmur, but whatever it was brought both tears and a smile to his face. He reached for her hand but paused an inch or two away; both of them had learned that lesson time and time again over the last while.

The shocks hurt, like being zapped by a live wire; having experienced a shock from both bad wiring and from the ghosts, I can attest to the similarity in sensation.

I looked down at my own hands and then back at the couple. “I’ll be back in a minute,” I said and went back outside.

***

“Sarah?”

She turned and offered the broadest smile. “Thank you for taking care of Sean and Haley and for letting us stay here.”

“You’re very welcome,” I said through a smile and held out my hand.

She glanced down and frowned at the sight of my extended hand. She hesitated and then timidly extended her own, wincing at the expectation of a sudden shock, but there was no shock and no pain. Her hand felt solid in mine—not the hand of a ghost, but the hand of a woman returned to life. I turned to see Sean, his mouth opened to begin a question that didn’t need to be asked. I pulled off my work gloves and gave them to him.

20 | Signs of life

It wasn’t long before Sarah and the others reported new sensations. They no longer received shocks from furniture and objects, but said they were cold and hungry. I offered them clothes from my father’s closet and from my own, and most of the curtain wall was taken down. Sean and Sarah were the first to test the safety of non-insulated human contact; there was no shock or pain. Sean had his wife back, and Haley had her mom.

Dressed in regular clothes, the group of newly living was indiscernible from the rest of us; it seemed as though, for most, the process was done and complete.

During this time, Randall remained a silent shadow of the preacher we had first met. I wondered if it had been the actions of the living, or the resurrection of the dead, that had shaken his faith and made him want to shut down and distance himself from us all. I kept my questions to myself and left him alone, as did the rest of the group, all of us hoping time and space would heal his wounds and his faith. My guess was that Randall was unable to see where he, or his religion, now fit in. With so many new people, people who had, by whatever means, been returned to life, it was difficult to see where any of us fit in. No one spoke of God, or of Heaven and Hell; no one could answer any questions about the afterlife in any greater detail than that of a recalled dream. In spite of our surplus of oil lamps and candles, on the subject of God we remained in the dark.

I was somewhat relieved that the majority of our residents were now bound by the same physical rules. The solid and clothed were no longer able to walk through walls, and those few newly manifesting stragglers were now trapped by what remained of the curtain wall and furniture, fenced in to avoid accidental and painful contact.

Our biggest problem became the washroom lineup and the additional mouths that needed feeding, but Gary had said those with hungry mouths also had capable hands that could hold weapons to protect the house from anyone or any group that would come and try to take what we had.

It was hard to gauge what mood Gary would be in from day to day. He disappeared for hours at a time and would come back as one of many seemingly different men. One day he would be intent on working through security drills with an overbearing intensity that put everyone on edge; the next day he would come back happy-go-lucky and as overly friendly as a sheepdog puppy. On one of Gary’s good days, he called everyone together for a meeting. The purpose was to find out about the newly living—where they came from, where they had lived and died, and when. In modern-day clothing, people who had lived and died over a century ago looked no different from those who had died within my lifetime.

I tried to empathize with those who lived before television or the light bulb and with those who had never witnessed harnessed electricity beyond built-up static charge. It was a blessing that the power and modern comforts had been temporarily turned off or decommissioned, offering us time to warn and orient the newly living of the changes in the world and the advancements in knowledge and technology. How strange this new world must have looked to them; even within the confines of my house, there were wonders that could only be explained by magic, or by a trick of the devil, without knowledge of the past century’s technological evolution.

Some who had spoken about their death, had no recollection of the afterlife dream, and had woken seamlessly into this world, which had appeared as a ghostly landscape filled with translucent wonders and humanoid apparitions. To some,
we
were the spirits and our world was the spirit realm, where the dead seemed unaware they were dead. The prospect of this sent shivers through me; who could say for certain they were wrong? What if we were dead and they were joining us in the afterlife, in death? Perhaps the dream we mistook for the afterlife was merely an in-between stage, a transitional limbo dividing parallel planes of existence—when we died in one, we moved to the next parallel plane or dimension, unaware of our rebirth or manifestation. Perhaps my dad had moved on to the next plane, maybe to be reunited with Mom, and maybe Sam.

The fact that Sarah had returned to our world, the same plane she had left only years before, left me with more questions than answers. Those same questions were the ones I assumed were racing through the preacher’s mind, forcing him to re-evaluate his beliefs and somehow rework those old teachings into the new world that was unfolding around us all.

The newly living, who told of their past lives, were not kings or queens or famous rock stars—they were normal, regular people like us, shopkeepers, farmers, and factory workers. Sarah was the first to undergo a physical, which confirmed a pulse, a heartbeat, and a working respiratory system. They were alive, or as alive as the rest of us.

21 | Revival tour

Even with the fires out, the potential for new and greater threats loomed. The escalating scarcity of food, now amplified by the countless new hungry bodies, would assure the rise of mob mentality and violence. It was hard to imagine a future without famine, rioting, and small-scale war, but the worst prediction was another of Gary’s—if the ghosts of family and friends could return to life, then so too could the ghosts of family foes and enemies, infamous killers, wretched kings, warriors, emperors, and tyrants. The bets were even regarding the reanimation of figures like Vlad the Impaler or Adolf Hitler.

“He’s not exactly inconspicuous with that little mustache. If he turns up, he’ll be hauled away or shot on sight,” Powell said.

“Okay, but what about Jack the Ripper, or Billy the Kid, or any number of murderers, gangsters, mobsters, or Wild West outlaws. There could be people who lived and died before our laws were even created,” Gary replied.

“Well, that’s a terrifying thought. Medieval rapists and murderers walking the streets,” I said. “Thanks for putting that in my head, Gary.”

Randall shook his head. “Why would God send those people back to us?” His question was rhetorical, but still he glared at Gary, seemingly waiting for an answer.

“I’m not trying to scare anyone. I’m just trying to plan for the worst. There’s no way to prove that the people in this house are, or were, who they claim.” Gary rubbed at his temples and let out a breath.

“What you’re saying is that once things go back to normal, if they ever do, we could be riding a bus with Attila the Hun or Al Capone,” Powell said.

“Or Jimmy Hendrix,” Owen said.

“Now there’s a bright side—think of the super groups. Jimmy Hendrix on guitar, Freddy Mercury on vocals, John Bonham on the drums, all the greats in one concert,
back from the dead and back on tour
,” Powell said with a smirk.

“Mozart on the piano?” I added.

My newly acquired smile fell away as I watched the ex-preacher storm out of the house.

Powell gave an upward nod toward the door. “What’s up with Randall?”

“I don’t know,” I said but quickly felt a rise of shame with the realization of what I had said. “The piano player.”

I left them talking about getting the band back together and followed Randall outside.

He stood by my father’s truck, staring out over the fields and hills toward town.

“Are you okay, Randall?” I asked.

In the afternoon light, the rings around his pale blue-gray eyes were as red as open wounds. The sunlight shone through the dry translucent skin hanging from highlighted cheek bones beneath his thousand-yard stare. His once hardened exterior had thinned with time, leaving only the lines carved though years of service. The war mask worn by this retired soldier could no longer conceal the emotional and spiritual losses of the more recently retired preacher.

“I can’t believe everything that’s happened—at the church and in town. I convinced myself that people were inherently good, turned bitter by circumstance, but I was wrong. At the first sign of trouble, they turn on each other, kill each other for scraps. It’s worse than war; it’s chaos, every man for himself.”

“Maybe you should focus on what’s happening in here instead of out there,” I said, gesturing back to the house. “They all seem like good people.”

“There’s food and shelter here—nothing to fight or kill for. I knew most of those people in the church. I’d known some of them for years, and not once did I think them capable of turning on each other the way they did,” he said.

I stepped around to intercept his gaze, but his stare remained fixed far behind me. Liquid lined his reddened lower eyelids, threatening to overflow as they trembled around his distant stare. “I will never be absolved for the things I’ve done. My judgment was made a long time ago, but I had hoped to steer as many as I could from the misgivings of men and into the grace of God. I failed them, and I have failed God.”

“What about the children, Haley and Kyle? You can still help them. Even if the rest of us are damned, surely
they
are worth God’s grace.” My words came out sharper than I had planned, and the ex-soldier’s thousand-yard stare raced back to refocus on me. “Maybe this is a wake-up call for us all. I’m not willing to accept that everyone is bad, or that we’re all doomed. You said yourself, back in the church, whatever this is, it brought Sean and Sarah back together. Haley has a mother again; it’s not all bad.”

Randall closed his eyes and dragged a hand across his face. “I just can’t get her out of my mind. I never thought I’d see anything like that again.”

“Who? The piano player?” I asked. “Is this about the night we went back to the church?”

His eyes reopened, bloodshot and glazed, and he nodded slowly. “She was eighty-two years old, and the sweetest lady you could ever meet. I found her curled up under the piano. I don’t know if she suffered a heart attack or if one of those animals
did
something to her. She didn’t deserve to die like that.”

“I’m so sorry, Randall …” I started.

“I can’t stop thinking about her, how scared she must have been, hiding under the piano just like Haley had, but with no one to save her. She devoted her life to the church, to God, and died alone and afraid. Margaret was not the only one. There were bodies strewn across the church floor, people I knew. The worst part is that it didn’t make me want to pray; it made me want to kill. I wanted to take God’s law into my own hands and send all those responsible to Hell.” His face turned a deep red and seemed to vibrate.

As I opened my mouth to speak, he turned away.

“What happened in the church was horrible, but there are still good people in the world, good people that need saving from the rest. We can turn into animals or we can try to be better; we have the opportunity of a new start. We’re alive, and we have people in that house, not animals, but people, that just want to survive and take care of their families.
My
family is gone, my mom’s dead, my dad too, and I don’t know where my brother is, if he’s dead or alive. The people in there are the closest thing to family that I have, the people in there and
you
, Randall. We’re all in this together, we need each other. If we’re all going to Hell, then so be it, but we should be good to each other until then, and maybe the kids might escape our fate. Doesn’t
The Bible
say that the meek shall inherit the earth?”

He turned back to face me and replied in a low monotone, “I don’t know how I can claim to have faith in God, having lost my faith in his creation. Do we have free will, or is this God’s will? Does he watch while we run amok of our own accord, or is this part of the divine plan?”