Afterlife (8 page)

Angelique:

We went downstairs again, the three of us, Chaz, Isabelle and I. That was when I realized that there was something sinister in the air tonight, more than the apparitions that had visited me. As bewildering as the transparent illusions were, I knew that I deserved their torment. But there was something else.

It was like the sound of hooves clicking on pavement, like an approaching danger.

Chaz sensed it too. I could see it on his face when he stared out the door toward the black, shapeless night. I turned and looked through one of the windows, but I couldn't see anything. Still I could feel it.

Fingernails scraping over brick, flesh ripping, teeth grinding.

It was like that slender breath of calm when the eye of a hurricane passes overhead, that moment when you realize your entire world is about to be destroyed.

I've heard that demons can disguise themselves as angels
of light. I don't know if it's true, don't know if demons even exist, but if they do, then one stood in our midst that night. It came in a shower of blinding light and it cast a spirit of confusion on all of us. Isn't that what William used to say?

Something happened outside. There were shouts—I thought I heard a woman's voice, but that was probably my imagination. A split second later, the outside of the house was bathed in light, bright and hot.

Then when I turned back around, I realized that the children were terrified. They wore thin, translucent collars, something that I had never seen before. One of the kids screamed. And then I didn't even have time to blink. A blinding surge of light blasted across the room—it started like a halo around one of the little girls, a pale amber that flashed and turned blue white. Then a radiant circle exploded outward, knocking people over.

I seem to remember that the light didn't affect any of the children, as if they had some sort of immunity to it.

But then my nanosecond of observation was over.

The blaze of brilliance hit me square in the chest, knocked me backward, cleaned my lungs of air, scorched my skin like an instant sunburn. And it blinded me. I've always thought blindness would be black and suffocating, but this was dazzling, almost sinfully addictive. I lay propped against the wall, numb and slightly aware of the fact that my skin burned. And I didn't care about anything else.

All coherent thought seemed to dissolve.

I took a deep breath, glad that I could still breathe. I blinked. Everything was white and luminous. I felt like I was glowing, like the burning sensation came from a fire deep inside of me.

Then somebody grabbed my arm, pulled me to my feet. I heard a man's voice and I tried to understand his words. We
were going up the staircase and I was stumbling, my hand on the wall for support.

“You gots to blink your eyes. Quick,” he said, whoever he was.

I did. My vision began to come back.

“Blinks 'em again. Hurry!”

I could almost see him now. It was that guy who came over to the hotel this morning. Pete. He had been talking to Chaz when I woke up.

“I think I know you,” I said, my words tangling on my tongue.

“Yeah, ya do.” He pulled me down the hallway, leaned me against the wall. “You gots to shake off the blast, Angelique. Come on, I needs ya awake, Ellen, come on!”

“What?”

“Look, I'm sorry—I done the best I could, but you was dead a long time when I gots there. Ya'll gots to come out of it, now—”

“Do you know what happened to me? How did I—”

“Not now,” he said, guiding me toward a door. “You gots to trust your instincts. You been trained for situations like this. You knows what to do.” He pulled the door open and I saw a bedroom filled with children. And Russ. A knife blade of terror pierced my chest when I saw him. “Whatever happens,” Pete whispered in my ear as I crossed the threshold, “makes sure Isabelle is safe. Do you understand?”

I nodded. Suddenly my instincts kicked in. Just like he said they would.

 

For a moment I could see fear as it hung suspended in the air. Then it descended, like droplets of sweat, until it covered everything and everyone. It glittered on the skin of the children, it sparkled in their fawn-dark eyes, it moved like a
frost around their blue-white lips. It followed in their footsteps, leaned against them, pressed against their backs, burrowing like a parasite through their innocence, looking for a way inside their souls.

And across the room I saw it mirrored in Russell's hollow eyes.

He couldn't save them. He wouldn't even be able to save himself.

I lifted my head, then took a deep breath. The air held a winnowing blast. Chaff would be separated from the grain tonight. Men would remain men and the others, whatever they were, would be exposed.

Pete was watching me. I could feel it.

In an instant I saw everything in the room, the position of the furniture, the windows, the doors, the slow movement of the children, the static posture of the guards. I felt both alive and electric, every muscle ready to do exactly what was necessary. I could kill—if I had to.

A tremor ran across the floor, brushed against my feet. I glanced at Pete. He felt it too.

It was time to pretend, to play another role.

“Isabelle,” I said, a soft smile on my lips. “Your pigtails have come undone. Let's go into the bathroom and I'll fix your hair.”

Russell glanced backward, toward the window.

Something was moving toward us; something heavy and dangerous.

Isabelle looked up at me, wanting to believe that she was safe, seeing the promise in my eyes. Together, we headed toward the open door, the bathroom. Another little girl quietly followed us, slipped inside before I could close the door. She tried to hide her fear, but I could hear it, like a bird trapped in her chest, wings fluttering.

I didn't know what was coming, but I could guess. I locked
the door. I lifted the children off the floor and held them by the waist, one in each arm, then set them on the counter.

“Take those off,” I whispered, pointing to the slender plastic rings they wore around their necks. “Hurry!” I couldn't risk another explosion of blinding light.

They did as they were told.

And then the nightmare we had been dreading shocked into the room. First, a blast of broken glass, an almost musical destruction, and then a flash of fire that we could see in the narrow space between the door and floor. After that: screams, too many screams.

Liquid light. I had never seen it before last night when Chaz threw it in the bar, and yet, somehow, I knew everything about it.

I grabbed some towels and a rug, crammed them in the space beneath the door.

But I was a second too late.

I managed to plug the holes, but my hands were pressed against the towel when the light hit. It sizzled through the fabric and shocked up my arm, all the way through my body. I couldn't breathe and I couldn't let go.

And I became a conduit, pulling the liquid light into the room.

Neville:

The bayou shivered at my back and the house fell still, all cries and laughter inside quelled. Lights flooded the front lawn, but here in the back, shadows reigned. Just like I'd planned.

I climbed up the side of the house, then yanked open a pair of weathered plantation shutters. With a grin, I peered in the window—I was the last monster these kids would see. I waited until one of them looked me right in the eyes before I smashed the glass and tossed in a fistful of liquid light. Then I slid down the rope and dropped to the ground. If both the Domingue boys had been in the room, I probably would have lingered longer than I should have. I knew my boss wasn't going to approve of my methods on this one, but that Domingue
krewe
needed to be taught a lesson. Apparently they had all forgotten about what had happened thirteen years ago, that night when the three of them, father and both sons, wandered out of that Fresh Start plant late at night.

Well, I never forgets.

I was still running through tall grass toward the shelter of
the bayou when a blast of light sizzled and cracked out all the upstairs windows. A heartbeat later, a battalion of trees surrounded me and I heard the soft call of my boys, waiting for me in a boat. I was jogging then, knee-deep, through Louisiana mud, all of my muscles feeding off a sweet-as-sugar gen-spike high. With a leap, I tumbled into the boat and we were speeding away, carving a path toward the Mississippi.

We flies through river mud and swamp water, and I is remembering—

Those Domingues all thought it had been just another pro-death rally outside their plant that night. They had probably hoped that the barrage of catcalls would fade away and the protestors would go home to their perfect little One-Timer families in their perfect little One-Timer houses.

They was wrong.

That was when rocks had started to fly through the night sky. Invisible and lethal. Followed by a rough growling thunder as the rally changed, turned savage, almost bestial.

“Death is a choice,” one man had cried, leading others to join him in a chant.

“Your clones don't have souls!”

“Repent, Domingue! One life, one death!”

Stones hit flesh, then cement, then bone. Tears mixed with blood.

My
krewe
had laughed between the blows.

In the midst of it all, a rock hit Old Man Domingue square in the temple and, without a sound, he slumped to the ground. He never got back up again.

Dead by my command. Just likes I wanted.

And now, the wind was rushing over us, cold and wet. I shivered as one of my gutter punks wrapped a blanket around my shoulders. Those Domingues had no idea what it was like on my side of the gutter, or how many back-alley
knife fights it had taken to earn my first black-market jump. I'd shuffled along from one miserable and maimed clone to another, until finally I proved I could lead my own ragtag battalion of misfits.

Soon we were all going to get our reward. That fountain of eternal life was going to pour out, free and strong for me and my boys.

Or I was going to make those Domingues wish they'd never invented resurrection.

Russell:

I was standing right beside my father the night he was murdered, his blood wet on my hands as he slid to the ground. By the time the mugs got there, the lynch mob had melted away: turned into faceless, nameless voices that scattered in the misty New Orleans midnight. On the surface it looked like just another violent pro-death rally, spurred by radical activists. That was the way the mugs saw it. They said that people like to commit their evil acts in the dark—it works like an eraser, covers your tracks, destroys the evidence. When the world hides in black velvet, good people forget what separates them from the monsters.

Problem is we're all really monsters. And it doesn't matter if it's day or night. Evil flows through the streets of this city like a tidal wave, steady and constant.

But I didn't know that back then. I was only seventeen.

I was too young to see the irony behind a family of One-Timers holding the key to resurrection. Didn't realize that one of my ancestors passed down a legacy that none of us
wanted—a trillion-dollar empire that went against everything we believed in.

Chaz was convinced that the leader of the rally was one of the elders down at First United Baptist. But the guy had an alibi. Supposedly, he and half the church attended a baptism that night, over at Lake Pontchartrain. Somehow it never seemed strange to the mugs that the water in the bay was about fifty-five degrees that October, or that there were toxic warnings posted all up and down the polluted beachfront.

I guess if you have enough people to stand up for you, it doesn't matter if you're guilty or innocent.

The bottom line is my father's murderers were never caught.

 

That was the year my father had started training me to take over the business when he was gone. Neither one of us had expected it to happen so soon, although he had gotten plenty of death threats over the years. Sometimes he would laugh and mention one at the dinner table. “You won't believe the latest ‘Your Life Is History' letter I got today,” he would say casually, right in between “Would you pass the rice?” and, “Did you boys remember to wash the isolation chamber?” But I could always tell by the look on Mom's face that it wasn't a joke, that there really were people out there who hated us enough to kill us. People who pretended to be our friends when they saw us on the street, who smiled and waved during Mardi Gras.

And then, a month before Dad was killed, I saw one of our accusers for myself, up close and all-too-personal. A man wandered into the warehouse one night, after everyone else was gone, when shadows covered the streets and the seductive music from the French Quarter beckoned. I thought he was lost at first, this strange-looking man, his fleshy bald
head covered with metal studs, his heavy lidded eyes cloudy and unfocused. He wore a long dark coat, so I couldn't see him very well, although I sensed a growing tension within him, like expanding muscles were rippling beneath transparent skin. I wondered if he was a suicide cult member, one of those miscreants who gets high on rapid death and resurrection.

Then I overheard him talking to Dad. I guess I shouldn't say overheard. He wanted me to hear him, looked right at me with those lizard-green eyes, then licked his lips, slow and deliberate.

That's what I see at night when I can't sleep. His eyes on me, his slow tongue. A combination of evil and ecstasy flickering on his face like a pornographic movie.

At first he spoke too fast for me to understand, but when he saw me in the doorway he slowed down, enunciated every syllable like he was the teacher and I was the student.

“We gots a problem, Domingue,” he said, using Dad's surname, like he had a right to talk to him with disrespect. “Resurrection, it ain't working. Nine times ain't enough.” His voice sounded like tires rolling over gravel.

“Nine times is all there is,” Dad answered, smooth and calm, as if a soft answer could turn away this demon's wrath.

“No, there's always a way to gets more. No matter what ya wants.” Lizard Man shook his head. He leaned forward into the light. Shadows played war games on the crevices in his face. “Tell me, One-Timer, what does ya wants?”

Dad stood silent. Finally he answered, “I've got everything I want.”

“Maybe ya does,” the other man said. “But can ya keeps it?”

“Are you threatening me?”

The stranger shrugged.

Dad didn't say anything. But I had a feeling that he knew what the scumbag was going to say next.

“Nine times, it just ain't enough for the rest of us—” He paused to smile, to run his tongue over his lips one last time. “But maybe for you, one time ain't gonna be enough.”

He slid back into the shadows then, a quiet liquid movement, like a poisonous snake slithering off through grassy rocks. He became as invisible as the black night, but the stench of his presence remained. Thick, oily, rancid, the smell of unwashed hair and decaying flesh.

It was the smell of death, and from that day it never left me.

 

He became my nemesis, this dark creature of the night. I learned later that his name was Neville Saturno and he was addicted to genetic engineering. It was his Achilles heel, the bit in his donkey mouth that some other unknown monster used to move him across the chessboard of my life.

It was too dark, so I couldn't see him the night my father was killed. But I could smell him. That sugar-sweet smell of rotting flesh filled my senses and blinded me with fear. I know Chaz thought I was brave because I cursed our attackers and cried for help.

But I was only trying to save myself. I didn't care about Dad or Chaz. I was trying to run away when my father collapsed, when one of his arms got tangled around my feet.

I couldn't break free.

I panicked in the suffocating black night. I screamed and kicked and cursed until my voice faded to a whisper, until I was the only person left in my collapsing universe.

And sometimes I feel like I'm still trying to break free.