Afterworlds

  She rolled her eyes. “I’m not senile. Just sick.”

  “But some of your meds affect short-term memory. And you’re not going to feel like cooking for yourself most days. And because the deferment’s for medical reasons, my spot is a hundred percent locked in. And don’t forget, you won’t have much income for a while, so my financial aid app will kick ass next year. There’s nothing but upside.”

  She stared at me for a long moment. Across the ward, the other patient was humming along with his music. The ghost was sitting motionless, hands folded.

  “You’ve thought about this way too much,” Mom said.

  “By which you mean, my logic is irrefutable?”

  “By which I mean, you could have included me sooner in your thinking.”

  “You’d’ve told me not to think about it at all.”

  My mother sighed in defeat, staring off into space. “Okay, Lizzie. But only one year. You can’t give up your life for me.”

  I took her hand. “Mom . . . this is life. Right here in this room, with you, is life.”

  My mother surveyed the room—the blinking lights of the transfusion machine, the fluorescents in the tile ceiling, the tube in her arm—and gave me a droll look. “Great. Then life sucks.”

  I didn’t argue. Life sucked all right. It sucked hard, because it was random and terrifying and too easily lost. Life was full of death cults and psychopaths, bad timing and bad people. Life was broken, basically, because four assholes with guns could kill an airport full of people, or some microscopic error in your mother’s marrow could take her from you far too soon. Because you could make one mistake in righteous anger, and lose the person you most loved.

  But everything that sucked about life also proved that it was priceless, because otherwise all of that wouldn’t hurt so bad.

  “I want to be here for you,” I said.

  My mother smiled. “That’s sweet. But are you sure this isn’t about staying near your boyfriend?”

  My reaction must have showed on my face.

  “Oh. He’s not your boyfriend anymore?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him for a while.”

  * * *

  On our way out to the hospital parking lot, we went through the waiting area for the emergency room. My mother had to stop and pee, so I was alone for a moment in a crowded, bustling hallway. I leaned against the wall watching the floor, hoping not to see any more ghosts.

  But something must have made me look up.

  A paramedic was passing by, pushing an empty folding wheelchair. He was young and handsome, with a freckled shaved head and a whisper of a mustache. A radio was slung over one shoulder, and his uniform was rumpled, like he’d been working a long shift.

  He looked up at me as he passed, our eyes catching for a moment, and he slowed. His skin shone, luminous even under the harsh fluorescents in the hospital hallway.

  A smile cracked his tired face. He’d seen my shine as well.

  “Need any help?” he asked.

  It took me a second to realize what he meant.

  “No, I’m fine. I’m just here with my mom.” I glanced at the bathroom door.

  “Gotcha. It’s just, you look like you caught a gnarly one.” He took a quick look both ways down the hall, and lowered his voice. “Round this place, you can run into some pretty fucked-up wraiths. Some real Do Not Resuscitate assholes.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” A shiver passed through me. “But it’s cool. It’s just been a tough few days.”

  “Ain’t they all,” the paramedic said, and placed his hands on the wheelchair’s handles again. “Hope your mom’s okay. Let me know if there’s any wheels you need greased around here. I’ve got connections.”

  “Really?” I finally managed to smile. “Thanks.”

  He winked. “Us shines, we gotta stick together.”

  With a grin, he turned and pushed the wheelchair toward the ambulance bay, and it occurred to me that most of his days were probably tougher than most of mine, whether his patients lived or died.

  And I realized I finally had a better word than “psychopomp.”

  * * *

  As we drove back to San Diego in my new car, Mom talked about all the stuff she was going to do when she stopped working. She wanted to paint the garage and remodel the kitchen, start an herb garden in the backyard. I didn’t ask where she would get the money, much less the energy, to do these things. I didn’t point out that she wasn’t an actual cyborg now. I didn’t want to kill her buzz.

  We cooked together that night, with Mindy watching, a strange but happy little family. All the futures I’d imagined for myself might be closing down, but somehow that made the present more precious, more real.

  It must have been exhausting for my mother, or maybe the transfusion had taken something out of her, because she went to bed early. From her bedroom door she called, “You really thought about how my illness would affect your financial aid next year? Well played, kiddo.”

  After I’d cleaned up the kitchen, Mindy was still bouncing, so we went for a walk. I decided to steer us past the ghost school, just as an experiment.

  It had faded since I’d seen it last. The line of the terra-cotta roof was indistinct against the gray sky. Maybe someone who’d gone to school here had died in the past week, leaving one less living memory to hold its shape.

  “Remember this place?” I asked.

  “Of course, silly. We went in there once.” Mindy took my hand and squeezed. “It was pretty scary.”

  “Yeah, no kidding. What did that voice say again?”

  “I can heeeear you up there,” she sang softly, and collapsed into a fit of giggles.

  It was weird. Mindy knew exactly what had happened here, but she sounded like someone retelling a scary movie, not a little girl talking about a man who’d kidnapped her. It still seemed like part of her was missing.

  I shivered a little myself, recalling the sound of the old man’s fingernail traveling across the floorboards of my room.

  Mr. Hamlyn hadn’t troubled me since our visit to his private hell. Maybe he was keeping his promise to wait for me to call him. And maybe one day I would need his knowledge again. For the moment, though, the scars his web had left on my arms and legs were reminder enough of who and what he was.

  “How was Anna today?” Mindy asked as we headed home. “Was she grumpy about having a transfusion?”

  I looked down at Mindy. She might not remember her own awful past, but she kept careful track of my mother’s illness now.

  “She was grumpy, but not about the treatment. I told her about putting off college.”

  “You’re in trouble,” Mindy sang, and threw her arms around me. “But I’m glad you’re sticking around.”

  “Me too. As long as Mom doesn’t call the admissions office and find out I was totally bluffing. I’ve got sixty days to change my mind.”

  “You always were a fibber,” Mindy said. “Like that time you convinced Jamie that there were two moons in the sky, but one was invisible.”

  “Huh. That was, like . . . eight years ago.”

  “Yeah, but did you know Jamie only pretended to believe you? I heard her tell Anna about it the next day. They were both laughing at you!”

  I came to a halt, stung a little by this bygone humiliation, but more astonished that Mindy could remember it. She’d never said anything like this the whole time she’d been afraid of the bad man.

  Maybe the part of her that had been emptied by his death was slowly filling up again, but with less horrible things.

  When we got home, Mindy wanted to go exploring. She was officially bored with our neighborhood, and had started spying on the people who lived on the next block over. She was hungry to make her world larger, so I let her go on alone.

  I stayed awake in my room, lingering on the flipside, hoping to hear a voice on the currents of the river. Yama had to be back in the underworld by now. He had a city to protect, after all.

  I stared at my
hands, wondering if someday I would be able to smell the blood on them. Maybe, as my shine powers grew, the murder I’d committed would slowly become visible, like the black stain of squid ink on my palms.

  Did Yama still think about me? Did he wish he could leave his gray city unprotected and take me someplace windswept and silent and alone?

  His absence was a new cold place in me, a hunger on my skin, a fissure in my heart. Without his lips to calm me, I didn’t sleep much anymore, and my world seemed smaller than it ever had. The walls of my bedroom had shrunk around me.

  So when, just after midnight, a voice reached me on the rusted air of the flipside, at first I didn’t believe that it was real. But then it came again.

  “Lizzie, I need you.”

  It was Yamaraj.

  * * *

  By now I knew the moods of the river well enough to know that it wasn’t taking me down to the underworld. The voyage was too quick, the current too calm and steady. So he wasn’t inviting me to his gray palace. I could deal with that. Any place was fine with me.

  When I alighted, it wasn’t another windswept mountaintop. It was somewhere I’d been once before, definitely a place to which I was connected.

  Dallas/Fort Worth Airport.

  Yama waited for me beneath a wall of blank television monitors. We were just beyond the metal gate that had stopped everyone from escaping that night. It was two hours later here than in San Diego, well past midnight, so the gate was rolled down, just as I remembered it.

  My heart beat sharply in my chest, and flickers of color pulsed in the corners of my vision. But I kept myself under control.

  “Why here?” I asked.

  “I’m sorry, Lizzie. This must be hard.” His voice was ragged, like he’d been arguing with someone all night. “But you’re needed.”

  I stared through the gate, at the place where so many had fallen. It looked almost the same as it had just before the attack. A few dozen people waited, bored and restless, for their flights to be called.

  There was only one addition. Just outside the security gates was a gray block of stone enclosed in a glass cube about ten feet across. It was blocked off with scaffolding, still under construction.

  A memorial for the attack, I remembered now. When the design had been published, some reporter had called Mom to see if I had a comment about it, and she’d told them that I didn’t.

  “Are you sure I’m needed here? It feels like all of this has gone ahead without me.”

  “Not all of it,” Yama said.

  I stared at him. He looked older, as if the short time he’d spent in the overworld to let his body heal had been much longer. A scar lay across his cheek, looking fresh and pink, and his skin was a little pale.

  He was still beautiful, though. My skin was thirsty for him, my head dizzied by his presence. Tsunamis of black oil didn’t faze me anymore, but Yama did.

  “There’s someone I need you to meet,” he said. “But only if you’re up to it. We can do this later.”

  “Now is fine.” To be here, the setting of all my nightmares, with him was better than being anywhere else alone.

  He held out his hand, and I reached for it. The heat of him, the fire on his skin, came surging into me. The cold places inside me grew warmer for a moment.

  I had to say something to keep from sobbing. “Aren’t you afraid Mr. Hamlyn will visit while you’re gone?”

  Yama shook his head. “He hasn’t been snooping around for a while. He’s playing a long game, waiting me out, thinking I’ll grow lazy again. And this will only take a few minutes.”

  “Oh.” Only a few minutes.

  I focused on the feel of his hand in mine, the way his silk shirt moved across his skin.

  As we passed through the gate where I’d almost died, a trickle of remembered panic went down my spine. But the metal grid was as flimsy as smoke in sunbeams. I could walk through mountains now, if I wanted.

  We reached the security area, the place where it all had started. This late, the metal detectors and X-ray machines were mostly shut down. A few bored TSA agents waited around, and two National Guardsmen in body armor stood watching, backs against the wall. The bloodshed in Colorado was still recent, and Jamie had told me that security was high everywhere. Maybe a little more so here.

  I didn’t look at the memorial. It was for the other eighty-seven people here that night, not me.

  “I still don’t get it. Why do you need me?”

  Yama answered with his eyes, glancing at a boy my age waiting in one of the big plastic chairs. I’d hardly noticed him there in the corner. He was muttering to himself, his cap down low over his face, almost huddled in his football jersey.

  He was gray-skinned and shadowless. But he looked so crisp, his outline clearer than any ghost I’d ever seen. And I realized that millions of people still remembered who he was, what he had done.

  I’d tried to forget every detail of that night, but even I knew his name.

  “Travis Brinkman,” I said.

  He looked up at me, a little alarmed, a little defiant, like a kid caught doing something suspicious. “Do I know you?”

  I shook my head. “We never met. But I was here that night.”

  “You were?” He thought for a long moment, and shrugged. “Don’t recall you. Guess that was a bad night for making friends.”

  “It was bad for everything.” I looked back at Yama, wondering how I was supposed to help. He gave me a soft smile of encouragement.

  “Don’t know what else I could’ve done,” Travis said. “Nobody was doing anything. Just letting those guys shoot.”

  “Yeah. It didn’t seem real at first.” It was strange, talking to someone who’d actually been there, something I’d thought would never happen. “No one was moving, because it didn’t make any sense. And everyone being frozen just made it more unreal.”

  He clenched his fists. “I know, right? But when those guys were out of ammo, I thought everyone would move. So I moved.”

  I sat down next to Travis. I’d gone through what had happened that night so many times in my head, imagining myself calling for help faster, or leading the crowd in a safer direction, or simply missing my plane from New York and not being here at all.

  How must it have felt for Travis, who’d actually done something? Who’d come so close to stopping them?

  “Too bad it was just you,” I said.

  “Nobody else helped.” He was muttering to himself again, his hands jerking a little with every word. “But if I could’ve got one of those guns . . .”

  “At least you tried.”

  “Didn’t make any difference. They got me. They got everybody.”

  I stared at him. Probably ghosts didn’t read newspapers. Maybe he hadn’t heard the whole story about the symbol of hope.

  “Travis. They didn’t get me.”

  He looked up, face wide open, his hands still for the first time.

  “You kidding?”

  I pointed at the metal gate. “I was over there when it started, on the phone with my mom. And while everyone else was getting shot, I called 911.”

  Can you get to a safe location? The words flickered like static through the air around me, making my breath catch. Color trembled through the world. But I had to stay here. I had to keep telling Travis my story.

  “The operator told me to play dead, and right that second a bullet went past my head. So I fell down.”

  “You played dead?” He stared down at his hands. “Damn. Wish I’d thought of that.”

  “It wasn’t my idea. The woman on the phone told me to.” I stared at him, recalling how close I’d come to being shot. “My brain was barely making sense of everything, and she told me what to do just in time. That was time I wouldn’t have had, except for you.”

  Travis gave me a hard, disbelieving look, then jerked his thumb at Yama. “That guy tell you to say all this?”

  “No. I was here that night, for real.”

  Travis didn’t look convi
nced. “He always used to come around here and argue with me. Kept telling me I was a hero.”

  “You are.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Even he got bored of saying it. Hadn’t seen him for a while.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you want to call yourself,” I said. “The guy was aiming straight at me when I finally realized what I had to do. It was all down to those last few seconds. . . .”

  He stared at me, and I could see how deep his disbelief ran. He’d been sitting here for months with that fixity of mind that ghosts had, thinking he’d failed somehow. That was the story that the papers had told—he was the hero who’d died bravely, but in failure—and it was how the living remembered him.

  No one had ever realized that I’d needed Travis Brinkman to survive.

  Not even me.

  “Thank you,” I said. “For everything I have now.”

  “You sure I helped?” he asked softly, and I saw it in his eyes then, a bright shard of hope that lingered there. The same one that had sent him running unarmed against the guns.

  “I’m sure. Maybe you only delayed them a few seconds, but if you hadn’t, I’d be dead.”

  “Hell, had to do something.” Travis glanced at Yama. “He an all-right guy?”

  I nodded.

  “What about where he wants to take me?”

  “It’s kind of weird, but beautiful. And a lot better than this airport.”

  “Yeah. I hate airports.”

  “Me too,” I said. “They suck.”

  “Yeah.” His hands slapped down onto his knees, and he stood up and looked around. “I guess I’m about ready to get out of here.”

  “Okay, good. But, Travis, do you mind if I talk to my friend first?”

  * * *

  For a long moment Yama and I were silent. It was too hard for me to speak, and he was probably worried about his sister, his city.

  But finally he said, “Thank you for doing this, Lizzie.”

  “I owed it to Travis. You must know that.” I looked up at him. “Why didn’t you bring me here before?”