Thicker than Blood (53 page)

Everything hurts. My skin is all icy and
bitter. My heart’s a heavy stone the earth is trying to wretch from
my chest and my vision is an angry haze—I am blind.

“Your eyes are adjusting, girl. Just
relax.”

Dying?—Did she just saying I’m dying?

“Undying,” she amends. “You’re undying. But
really it’s sort of the same.”

I’m reaching out for my mom. I want to find
my dad’s hands and pull them toward me, they should be there
somewhere. I’m furious that no one seems to be helping me, that no
one’s there.

“No use in screaming on, you’ll just break
your voice. You might need it.”

Why would I need a voice if I’m dead? And for
that matter, how’d I die? When did that happen? Shouldn’t I
know?

“No use trying to remember,” she murmurs
sadly, her voice strangely accented. “That was your Old Life … a
nothing life.”

I can’t picture my mom’s face. Or dad’s.
There’s a strange vacuum in my mind now, like I can’t even remember
having parents. The idea of anything existing before this moment,
that simple idea seems so difficult to understand suddenly.

“You’re the worst I’ve ever heard! This awful
screaming! Really, you should quiet down. You’ll wake the
dead.”

I don’t remember the last word I uttered. I
don’t remember the last meal I had. I don’t remember the last hour
I saw on a clock. I don’t remember …

I don’t remember my name.

“That was a little joke of mine,” she says
with a squeaky snicker. “Wake the dead. You’re not laughing.”

I’m panicked by the silence in my body where
a heart should be racing. I’m gasping for air that isn’t there,
with lungs that stubbornly refuse to fill. I’m in agony, I
think.

“Let go of my hair!—You’ll pull it straight
off!”

Her soft hair clenched in my fist, it’s the
first sensation I have that isn’t horrible. It grounds me like an
anchor. Suddenly gravity makes sense. My position of lying on cold
hard ground makes sense. I’m aware of my ears for the first time
and the information they helpfully lend … the ambiance of howling
winds and whispers … the distant rumbling of thunder … the precise
location of the strange accented voice that’s been speaking to me
…

“You’re coming to, at last. I feared there
was no hope for you, screaming as you were. Now please, a finger at
a time, let go of my hair.”

My eyes have been open, but they only just
now discover how to work. The furious haze of earlier releases me
to my new world. Hovering over me is the face of a
twenty-something-year-old with wide-set beady eyes and curls of
black hair that gather atop two sharp shoulders.

“Really, I’d hoped for a prettier Raise, but
you’ll have to do. Oh, your skin is so tragic.”

Who is this person?

“My name is Helena Trim,” she tells me, “and
yours will be—Oh, I hadn’t noticed your hair! It’s so … white. A
snowdrift in a dream. Almost makes up for your face. I’ll call you
Winter.” She smiles for the first time. It sits oddly on her stiff,
pointy face. “There, that was easy. Now are we ready to try
standing?”

I push myself off the damp ground. Curiously,
I find all the pain and torment I’d only a moment ago felt is gone,
leaving an empty ringing in my ears that echoes down my body like a
bell. I feel hollow. I feel weak. I feel like a vacuous shell
holding nothing, not even air.

“Where,” I say, startled for a moment by the
sound of my own voice, “am I?”

“The Harvesting Grounds,” this person called
Helena informs me. “This is where the dead are Raised, girl. This
is where everyone’s Final Life begins … if this can be called a
life.”

“I’m—I’m dead?”

“Undead.” She delicately moves a strand of
hair out of my eyes, wrinkles her face in pity. “We should get you
to the Refinery straight away. Death hasn’t been kind to your—ah,
never mind.”

I don’t remember leaving the murky field. I
don’t remember being guided down a winding road that cut through an
endless array of dead trees and into a city. I don’t remember
walking crowded streets or being steered into a squatty pink
building, but now I’m leaning back on some kind of doctor’s table
and there’s a large flush-faced woman with green eye shadow looming
over me.

“Her hair is just exquisite!” she squeals,
taking a handful of it into her puffy palm. “I’ve never seen hair
like this, the color of pearls. And coming straight from the earth,
no less! Her skin, however … oh, help us all.”

“Will someone,” I whisper quietly, “please
show me a mirror?”

“Not a chance, sweetheart. Roxie, dear
precious, hand me my Chromo and a two-inch carving blade, will
you?”

I’m not sure what is happening, but it
reminds me of prom night. The large lady starts working on my nails
while gossiping sweetly with the others. Another girl who couldn’t
be more than twelve years old starts scrubbing my legs for some
reason. The one called Roxie takes to my hair, combing it and
applying some pungent formula that makes my nose recoil. Helena
keeps stealing my attention away, talking her little head off and,
I suppose, trying to distract me from looking at myself. Despite
her efforts, I catch a glimpse of what looks like an arm missing
half its flesh, the bones of the hand visible. Of course I don’t
recognize it as my own hand because, well, denial’s a powerful
thing. And I’m still pretty sure I’m dreaming, except I’m not sure
where I’d wake up. The idea of having a bed, or even a home to
return to seems strange.

“Have I lost my memory?” I ask finally. “For
good?”

“Oh, here we go,” the large lady sings.

Helena faces me quite seriously. “Yes and no.
Your Old Life is gone. Your memory of it and all the memory you had
in your previous life is no longer. It’ll come back someday, sure,
but it’s best not to think of it at all. Just let go now and never
again look back.”

“But—But I remember how to speak, obviously.
I know language. I know how to walk. I remember concepts like …
like prom night!—of all things. How is that possible if I lost all
my memory?”

“Some things stay, most things go,” the large
lady chimes in, working some tool into my foot. “It’s not ours to
decide. Do you prefer cherry or coral toenails?”

I move my eyes back to Helena. “But you said
it would come back someday?—my memory?”

“It’s called a Life Dream,” she answers. “Or
Waking Dream. Or the Dreaming Death. It has many names, but it’s
when everything rushes back all at once, the memory of your Old
Life returning to you in an instant. It will happen someday, but I
assure you, it will be like an unwelcome enemy arriving at your
doorstep. It’s best to forget it and leave it in the dust behind
you, girl.”

The large lady murmurs agreement, kneading
something gritty into my skin like I’m dough. The one called Roxie
winces in her own form of concurrence. The twelve-year-old just
purses her lips, like the idea of remembering her life tastes
bad.

“That looks like it should hurt,” I point
out, staring at the large lady and the tool she’s poking into my
foot. “I feel it, but I don’t. Is that normal?”

“Perfectly,” one of the girls behind me
mutters. “Now keep still.”

The questions start coming like a wave of
nausea, I can’t help it. “What are you doing exactly?—Where’s half
my arm?—Are those my bones?”

“Helena,” one of them grunts, annoyed.

“Listen to me,” says Helena, pulling my face
toward hers and away from my own innards. “This new life you’ve
been given, your Final Life, it’s all that matters now. You’re one
of us.”

“One of us?” I ask. “One of what?—A
zombie?”

Wrong word. The large lady drops the tool she
had in her hand. Roxie steps away from me so quickly I might as
well have burst into flames. An icy hush has covered the room. My
gaze moves from one horrified set of eyes to another. “I’m sorry.
Did I say something wrong?”

“We,” Helena says, steels herself, then
finishes, “are not zombies. We are people, and we have standards,
and we have flesh, and for the love of God we do not eat brains! We
are a dignified people, all of us. Even you.”

I look around the room, my eyes meeting each
person before I speak again. “I’m sorry. This is all very new to
me. Obviously. I didn’t mean to offend anyone.”

After a very lengthy moment passes in which
I’m pretty sure the ladies in the room would gladly toss me back to
the foul earth from which I’d been yanked, the large one finally
sighs, if just a little, takes up her tool again and says, “It’s
okay, honey. I’m sure I said something equally as awful on my first
day, which was far too long ago if you ask me. Which you
didn’t.”

“You’re all dead,” I whisper, like I’m just
now discovering this.

“Undead. Every last one of us,” she agrees.
“I doubt there’s a Living left in the world.”

Looking at each of them, it’s dawning on me
what world I’ve been brought into. A dead world. Ageless. No one
breathes here or ever will again. Souls being fetched from soil and
made up into fake-alive people, like me. A world full of … silent
chests.

“Now,” she says, gripping my foot tight,
“hold still while I make you a new pinkie toe.”

I don’t remember what else she or the Roxie
girl or the twelve-year-old do to me. I don’t remember having my
right ear reshaped, or my nose reset, or color fused into my lips
by some weird kind of gun-shaped mechanism. Even though Helena
claims otherwise, I don’t remember choosing Icecap Blue for my
eyes.

“And now, girl, meet Winter!” Helena’s guided
me over to the first mirror I’ve seen since my Raising. The
maybe-twenty-year-old face in the mirror is one I should probably
recognize since it’s my own, but I don’t. She has eyes like arctic
pools. Hair that falls like a soft mist, veiling half her face. Her
skin is a sea of satin. Her nails are little polished glass shards.
Her lips, a subtle pink, with cheeks gently blushed the same. The
person in the mirror is a person I do not know.

“What do you think?” the large woman asks me,
obviously proud of her work. “Can you live with this?”

My left hand falls off.

“Roxie!” the large woman yelps. “Adhesive,
honey! Proper, level-four-grade adhesive!—I do swear!”

A lot of shuffling, a slight shove from my
left side, and I’m whole again. I wiggle my fingers and they seem
to work. For how long, who knows.

“Should we try another blush?—another eye
color?” the large-in-charge offers sweetly. “We have enough time
before our next appointment.”

“This is fine,” I say, defeated somehow.
“Icecap Blue is fine. My name is fine. Whatever.”

Winter. I didn’t even choose my own name.

And so this is where Winter was born, and
how. Whoever she is.

Then I’m given a tour of where I’ll live for
the rest of forever. The heart of the city is the Town Square,
surrounded by rings of streets that hold businesses, stores, tall
apartment complexes. It’s all very downtown. Then on the outskirts
of the city you’ll find clusters of trailers, shacks and little
houses. One of them is mine, apparently.

Helena tells me living here is entirely free.
No bills or rent will ever be collected because, in her words,
“money is a bother.” Consequently, no one is required to work or
hold a job, even though many do. Some people form pretend-families
with one another, maybe for comfort, maybe for fun. Fun, they call
this.

Oh, and yes, there are children here. A short
girl, maybe twelve or thirteen, lives somewhere among my circle of
houses with another lady who pretends to be her mother. This is all
very normal and accepted. The girl has long black braided hair and
Helena tells me I’ll be happy to meet her someday. I would never
wish this on a child, but I guess I didn’t have a choice
either.

Trying for some levity, I ask where all the
stray city cats are. Helena replies, “What’s a cat?” I ask her,
where are all the birds in the sky. She’s like, “What’s a
bird?”

I think maybe she’s joking, but it occurs to
me that every tree I’ve seen is dead. Every blade of grass, a
browned, yellowed, or otherwise lifeless fleck of paper it may as
well be. Litter is all it is, the remnants of a world that once
thrived, now so very unalive.

To my surprise, she tells me there is
electricity, but nothing seems to work very well. Especially when
we draw near anything electrical. She wouldn’t elaborate further.
Oh, and she says there’s running water more or less, but it isn’t
good for our kind. I ask what she means and she says, “Think, like
magnets of opposing poles. Whatever you might call natural, we are
its opposite.”

What a comfort she is, this Helena
person.

Breathing and eating and dieting and
exercising and taking vitamins and rubbing age-defying creams all
over ourselves ... that’s all so obsolete now. It’s unnecessary to
maintain our dead selves. So last-season, says Helena, the idea of
dieticians and trainers and doctors.

“But if you absolutely need one,” she says,
pointing down the street, “there’s a clever pair of men who run a
gym. One of them had their Waking not too long ago, discovered he
was a bodybuilder in his Old Life. The other was a surgeon—his name
is Collin. So depressed he became, when he realized all his
knowledge of health is for naught in this dark new world … Darling,
please pretend to have a heart attack at some point, or perhaps a
little summer cold. Indigestion. A rash. He would so very much
appreciate the attention, even if it’s not real.”

Life was so unnecessarily difficult. Only
here in death, she explains, is anyone truly at peace.

Sorry Helena, I feel anything but peaceful.
It must show on my face because she looks particularly annoyed as
she presents me to a cluster of houses at the west edge of town.
“This one,” she says with a little nod, “is yours.”