Afterlife (2 page)

Neville:

I stumbled out the door, my feet numb, my vision blurred. I slumped onto broken cobblestone, strains of jazz seeping into the alley around me as I landed facedown. Behind me, a high-pitched twitter mingled with the bright notes of a clarinet. One of my own boys was laughing at me.

“Boss, you shoulda seen yourself, you was tumblin' backward like a First-Timer with a mouthful of jive-sweet! Man, I wishes I had a VR of that pretty scene—”

I struggled to my feet, then grabbed the black-haired gutter punk by the throat and shook him until the change in his pocket jingled. The boy didn't fight back. He didn't dare. He sputtered and coughed, his lips turned blue.

Finally I dropped him to the ground, watched him gasp and flail.

“Was it pretty, like that?” I asked.

The boy cringed. Two other slender young men slid deeper into the shadows, their faces covered with fresh bruises from their recent mock battle inside the club.

I laughed until my voice echoed. “Good job, boys,” I said.
Then I tossed each of them a token that spun through the evening gloom, engraved words catching the dim lamplight: F
REE
A
DMISSION TO THE
U
NDERGROUND
C
IRCUS
. Dangerous grins spread across their faces as they each pocketed their new favor.

“Was it her?” one of them asked.

I shrugged. Seven ladies downloaded in New Orleans today. I'd already discounted the two that had tumbled through the black market, a process that left their brains scorched and empty. Could be this one, but I didn't want to say yeah or nay, not yet. Still had three more to track down.

I sucked in a long, dark breath. My boys waited for a sign that it was time to move on.

I nodded. Slow, so they'd pay attention.

“We goes that way.” I pointed toward the other end of the alley.

They all stared like they didn't believe me.

“But, boss,” the punk on the ground finally coughed out a few words, his voice raspy, his neck still red from my grip. “That guy's a 'sitter. He's loaded with light. Nobody says he gonna be carryin' light or—”

“Or you woulda been too chicken to belly up for the job? Look, you gots a sister, right?”

The kid nodded, then looked away.

“And you wants yur sister to keep that pretty face. Or maybe ya don't cares no more.”

“I cares.” The boy shoved himself into a sitting position, then scrambled to his feet. “Let's go.”

“Yeah.” I punched him in the arm. “We follows the 'sitter.”

The four of us headed down the alley. I rubbed my hand where that puppy had jammed a marker. I had to get this thing out, couldn't be on somebody's trackin' screen. The dark city stretched out before us like a maze, black-shadowed streets, yellow edges of light—all wrapped up
with knife-sharp corners. Only one safe path led across the Big Easy once the sun went down. We lived in the belly of the alley, gutter water ran through our veins, and the sewer stench was our perfume.

I is the shadow, the fire that burns, the smoke that blinds.

I thrust another spike in my arm and then held my breath.

F'true, I'll gets the marker out. Soon as my spike halo fades.

Chaz:

It was late, but an unrelenting crowd of bohemians, gutter punks and tourists still jostled their way through the Quarter, all of them carrying black-market imitations of Jamaican rum punch and Dixie Crimson Voodoo Ale. Musicians gathered on street corners, playing jazz improvisations to passersby, waiting for the steady waterfall of tips that jingled into open trumpet cases. Antiques shops and art galleries lured tourists toward brightly lit windows, and a pair of prostitutes strolled arm in arm, gossiping in French. The Newbie and I had walked from one blues club to another, watched the moon snake its way across the sky. My feet hurt and my head throbbed from my last glass of whiskey. A sure sign it was finally time to end the evening.

But now Miss Margarita was in the mood for adventure. As if her run-in with that genetic monster never even happened.

“I want to see the Cities of the Dead,” she said.

“The Cities of the Dead are gone,” I answered in my best
monotone. Nobody needed cemeteries anymore. The empty carcasses left over after resurrection were just piled into incinerators and toasted.

She shook her head. Waist-long platinum waves shimmered.

Why did they always look like Hollywood movie stars, when they should be sucking up worms and dirt? I sighed.

“I'm not stupid, you know. I used to be an attorney. I just, hey, yeah, didn't want to be one this time.”

I wished I had another drink. Even a migraine would be better than this.

“I know they kept one graveyard—yeah, they did. For tourists. Saw it on the news, babe. You know, before.”

“Before you went in the joint.”

She nodded. She didn't want to talk about the joint. None of them ever did. I felt bad immediately. I should have let her bring it up first. Tears formed in the corners of black-mascara-rimmed eyes. Maybe she was remembering a husband and a kid that she left behind. Maybe there was a best friend, rotting away in a nursing facility somewhere, waiting for a phone call that would never come. Maybe there was a lifetime of memories crowding to the surface, all struggling to be part of the 50 percent that got to survive.

“Fine,” I said, although it really wasn't. I shot a pulse beam into the night sky and signaled a taxi. “We'll go see the last City of the Dead.”

Her eyes darkened when the cab pulled down from a nearby rooftop, gliding through the misty evening fog to stop beside us. I thought she would be happy. Thought she would smile at least—I mean, I did exactly what she wanted. But she just climbed inside the taxi and turned away from me, then stared out the window, hands rolled in tight little balls on her lap.

The cemetery appeared a few moments later, a gothic land of stone and skeleton, hard edges softened by moonlight and transformed into something mythic. We stepped from the taxi, both of us hesitating. The wrought-iron gates screeched when I pulled them open. I wanted to laugh, but for some reason I couldn't. This was a place where bones marked the transition from life to whatever lay on the other side.

No matter what the Stringers say, this was still a sacred place.

I watched as Angelique moved silently through moon-beams, shadowy fog clinging to her feet. It followed her like a living, breathing creature as she walked from one tomb to the next, poised beside her as she read rusted bronze placards. Names of the dead dripped from her lips.
Christophe. Marguerite. Francois
. She shook her head, moved on. I realized that she was crying. Something was wrong; some of her circuits weren't firing right. Tears slipped down pubescent-perfect cheeks. Movie-star lips quivered.

Suddenly I couldn't focus my eyes anymore. I staggered and grabbed on to a towering stone angel, almost lost my balance. Whiskey jitters were finally catching up with me.

“You shouldn't drink that black-market crap,” she said. Her speech patterns were changing. I detected a faint Scottish brogue, a late twentieth-century accent. I had to watch out. She could collapse if the memories came back too rapidly. “I worked on all the synthetic alcohol patents. Whiskey's probably the worst.”

I nodded. We finally had something in common. Standing in the middle of a cemetery beneath a silvery moon, we both agreed that contraband liquor was bad news. A whispering breeze passed between us, stirred the mists into curving rococo eddies. Just then I turned away and leaned against my angel friend again. Vertigo forced me to wobbly knees.

“Drink tequila next time,” she said.

I held up my hand to silence her. Even a Babysitter deserves a moment of peace. Especially when he's curled over with jitters. The world seemed to be all mist and shadow, everything in soft focus, like I was looking through a camera fitted with the wrong lens. I wiped my face on my shirt-sleeve, then caught my breath and stood up.

“Angelique?” Dead leaves rustled and tumbled through a narrow courtyard.

She was gone.

“Hey, yeah! Angelique. Where are you?” Stone met stone, shadows changed from gray to purple to black.

Babysitting 101: Never turn your back on a Newbie. Especially on Day One.

There were no sounds except my own footsteps as I stumbled through uncharted darkness; my own heartbeat, as it chugged along like a train on rickety tracks. I began to jog between temple-tombs, moved through what looked like a black-and-white vampire-movie set. I imagined Dracula, arms open wide, imagined Angelique welcomed into a land of the undead. A hundred dangers lurked in the shadows: thieves, murderers, kidnappers, hiding in the neat and narrow spaces between the tombs, waiting for tourists, hoping someone would pass by, someone unarmed and innocent.

Someone like my Newbie. Memories rose to the surface, stories of half-baked Newbies, caught and sold into slavery. They were so easy to program during the first week. I was running faster now. Thought I saw someone, watching me from a dark corridor between the tombs.

“Angelique—where are you?”

That was when I rounded a corner and found her, kneeling in front of the burial tomb of a legendary voodoo queen.
She stared at the stone slab as if it belonged to her; she was running her fingers through a fresh pile of Mardi Gras beads left by pilgrims seeking favors from the dead, a puzzled expression on her face. She must have heard me, but for the longest time she didn't move. She just continued to stare down at the tokens, mumbling to herself. Finally she turned and looked at me.

“Did you see him?” she asked.

“Who?” I glanced behind us.

“He's running away, he's free now.” She tried to stand up, a ghostly smile on her lips, a long-dead memory. But then she blinked, her eyes rolled back, and she collapsed, disappearing beneath the mist.

I picked her up, checked her pulse, sheltered her in my arms for a moment while my head cleared. “She's fine,” I said to myself, as if I needed some sort of reassurance. I struggled to forget about all the things that could go wrong, about the hidden clauses in the Fresh Start contract that protected me from scenarios just like this. I was tired of being the one that always came out on top of every bad situation. “You're going to be okay. Hang in there, kid,” I mumbled as I carried Angelique toward the street. “We'll get you straightened out. Some jumps are just rougher than others.”

But deep down inside I knew that wasn't true. There was something wrong here: too much information was trying to get through. Almost as if whoever did her jump didn't know what the hell they were doing. Fortunately the cab was waiting exactly where I left it. I signaled the driver.

Then I used two Master Keys, preprogrammed commands hardwired into every Newbie at start-up, and I whispered into Angelique's ear. “Wake up. Focus.”

She instantly opened her eyes, stood up and climbed into the cab, one hand holding mine for support.

We drove away.

I was too tired to care about another Newbie whose life just got mangled and torn in Fresh Start machinery. Too tired to realize that there might be more going on here than just a rugged jump.

It was the first mistake I would make on this case. But that didn't really matter. Because I was about to make plenty more.

October 12 • 1:16
A.M
.

Chaz:

Angelique leaned against my shoulder, babbling softly, staring into space. The city melted around us as one narrow fog-drenched street bled into another. We swung through that section of the Quarter where the streets changed names; St. Charles Avenue veered off into downtown and turned into Royal Street, leaving the nineteenth-century millionaire's row behind.

I tapped the Plexiglas that separated us from the taxi driver. A row of colorful tarot cards clung to the barrier with a handwritten sign: F
REE READINGS WITH A TOUR OF THE CITY.

“The Carrington. Bourbon Street.”

He nodded. At least, I think it was a he. Long dreadlocks, black lipstick, massive biceps. I saw him studying me in the rearview.

“Newbie?” the he/she asked a few moments later, heavy-lidded eyes confronting mine in the mirror.

I nodded.

“You the Babysitter?”

Another nod. Followed by a yawn.

“Mind if I see some ID?”

I flashed my palm.

The driver shrugged. “Ever since that incident over in Barcelona last year, I always check.”

“Yeah.” I yawned again. “What can I say? The laws are different in Spain. You should be glad you live here.” Just then the Carrington Hotel loomed into view, a tall brick-and-mortar Baroque masterpiece. For seven days and nights I have no life. I eat, drink and sleep with my assigned Newbie. I don't mean sleep in the biblical sense—nobody touches my baby like that, not even me.

Sometimes we stay in a hotel; sometimes we go to my place. On rare occasions, we go to the Newbie's home, but there are usually too many memory pegs there, even after it's been sterilized. My main requirement is that wherever we stay, I need my own room and a VR room. Once in a while a customer balks and says that's too expensive. I usually raise an eyebrow and tell them to take their business elsewhere. Right about then I laugh. Not hysterically. It's more like a well-planned “ha.”

There is nowhere else. We're the only ice-cream store in town.

Angelique and I made it through the hotel lobby without incident. I take that back. There was a brief moment when she became disoriented, right about when I was getting the room key.

She looked up at me through half-closed eyes. “William?” she asked, confused. A tormented pause. “Jim?” She shook her head. I made eye contact with the concierge, then silently showed him my ID.

“Who are you?” Angelique asked.

“Chaz. Chaz Domingue. Your Babysitter.” I briefly debated which of the five Master Keys to use. “Recognize.”

She squinted her eyes, looked me up and down. “My
Babysitter
?”

“Focus,” I said, pulling another key phrase from my limited bag of tricks. “This is Day One.”

“Day One.” She looked at the ground, shoulders sagging as the weight of the world came rushing back. “Then William is really gone.” Her voice faded below a whisper. “And that means I must be dead.”

“No, Angelique,” I guided her toward the elevator, away from the concierge, who looked concerned. Few people see or remember the anguish of a Newbie's first week. If they did, they might not be so eager to jump.

“You're alive,” I told her as the elevator took us almost instantly to the thirty-third floor.

But she just shook her head and kept mumbling the same dark phrase over and over.

“That means I must be dead.”

Sometimes this job is enough to break your heart, if you've still got one.

1:58
A.M
.

Fresh Start keeps its word when we say we give our clients a new beginning. I may be part of the family, but I don't have access to any “secret files.” I honestly didn't know who the hell she was or who she used to be, any more than she did. And I didn't care.

Like I always say, I don't make the rules.

So, I tucked Angelique into bed, made sure she was safe and sound and asleep; then I locked all the doors and windows. It's habit, of course—no one has wandered into a Babysitter's suite, even by accident, in more than twenty years. Still, it makes me feel better, so I do it. Lots of things
make me feel better. Like black-market whiskey. Like jazz clubs. Like a midnight session alone in a VR room.

The moon had all but forgotten about us. It disappeared behind the rugged skyline, and headed off to seduce other countries with silver shadows. I was long past tired. But I needed absolution.

I shut the door to the room, slipped into a VR suit, then snuggled down in the sensory chair and closed my eyes while it morphed to fit my body. With a thought command I switched on the Grid. Narrow bands of red, blue and green light shot across the room, sought and defined its dimensions, creating a chart of horizontal lines. The light quickly formed a graph of horizontal and vertical bands.

The Grid was up.

I went to my home page, a glittering seascape where waves crashed against a mountainous shore. Sandpipers waddled across the narrow beach, following the tides like tiny Charlie Chaplin impressionists. I took a deep breath, sucked in the smell of saltwater, felt the charge of negative ions.

I always have a hard time leaving my home page.

It was well past midnight in my tiny corner of the universe, sometime between rest for the weary and insomnia for the troubled. And yet—elsewhere on earth's canvas—dawn painted gray skies; sherbet colors layered the horizon; and the earth waited to run a rough tongue over the flavors of tomorrow. I spun a VR globe with my right hand, looking for places where the sun still cast long shadows, where the inhabitants had reached that point in the day where they could pause and catch their breath.

I have ten preselected locations around the world, ten different time zones, places I can visit whenever I have a chance.

Not everybody has a regular nine-to-five. I've learned over the years to find my solace where and when I can. To
night it waited for me in a tiny stucco building in George, South Africa. I always start on the outside, on the dusty street. I know I stand out from most of the regulars, me in my glittering VR suit, them in their brightly colored caftans and turbans. But there will be others like me, visitors from around the globe. One man comes from China; his almond eyes watch me as we stand beside each other. I've never actually talked to him, but he nods and smiles, glances down at my right hand.

I'm carrying my sax.

The building glows from within, the glimmer of a thousand candles. I've come to fill up all my empty spaces, to patch the holes in my heart, to revive my ever-dull, ever-disobedient soul.

I sit in a back pew, my eyes closed, letting the song wash over me, cleansing me. Already I can hear her voice. Beulah. An old black woman, frail and tall, her nubby hair cropped close to her head, her neck long: her wide lips lift praise in a velvet-rich tone, her lungs an instrument as pure and clear as mountain sky. Then I lift the saxophone to my lips, joining the song. Somehow we always manage to stop at exactly the same moment. There is a hush, an expectant
selah
-pause as angels themselves draw nearer, eager to know more about this thing called salvation.

Sometimes I wish I fully understood it, how my part is going to add up to anything of significance in the end. Most of the time I think I'm fooling myself, trying to convince myself that I really matter at all.

But for now I just have to take it like every other One-Timer does.

Like credit in the bank. Invisible, but there when you need it.

Like faith.