Page 1 of Aftermarket Afterlife

Prologue

“Take a bow and leave them wanting more. That’s the best thing I can teach you how to do. If your audience is tired of you, you’re done.”

—Frances Brown

Old Logger’s Road, Buckley Township, Michigan

Eighty-four years ago

THE SUN HUNG LOWenough in the sky that Mary Dunlavy put a little extra speed into her steps, moving along the road toward town as fast as she could. She knew she shouldn’t have taken Old Logger’s Road after sitting for the Cherry kids—it was too close to sunset, and no one with any sense wanted to be that close to the woodsorthe old Parrish place in the dark, much less both of them at once. But taking Lakeside would have meant walking for more than twice as long, and her daddy trusted her to have dinner on the table when he gothome.

Technically, she shouldn’t even have agreed to sit today, but when Mrs. Cherry called and said it was an emergency and she’d pay Mary twice her double rate to come out and watch the twins for a few hours, well. Double pay was double pay, and bread and butter were increasingly dear these days. Daddy’s paycheck didn’t stretch as far as it used to, and wouldn’t have even if he hadn’t been drinking half of it downtown before he came home every Friday. She ate as little as she could, but he was a working man, and he needed his strength.

Mary had known it was a bad idea, and she’d also known she didn’t have a choice. Accepting had been the only right thing to do.

Only now it was almost sunset and she was still well away from home, and it was anybody’s guess whether she was going to beat her father there. He’d never say a word if he came home to a dark, empty house and no food on the table. He wouldn’t chastise her or shout. But he would start drinking as soon as he realized she wasn’t there to see it, and by the time she did get home, he’d be well on his way to total drunkenness, ready to greet her return with intoxicated joviality. And then the next day would be calling in sick from work while his foreman tried to pretend he didn’t realize that Benjamin Dunlavy was more hung over than actually unwell, and the day after that would be the household fund dropping by the value of a new bottle of bourbon.

No. Mary needed to hurry. She needed to get home in time to prevent a sadly predictable and all-too-familiar sequence of events from playing out yet again, making everyone’s life just a little harder.

She was focusing so hard on where she was going that she never bothered to look behind herself at where she’d been. She didn’t notice the truck that came rolling down Old Logger’s Road, bouncing with the frequent potholes that constituted half the surface of the road itself, dug deep into the gravel.

Mary was sticking close to the shoulder, only about a foot or so from the dry brown late-season corn. There should have been plenty of room for both of them to pass, and at first, it seemed like that was going to happen.

The truck was about to catch up to her when it hit a particularly nasty pothole and bounced hard, rocking to the side. The front end struck Mary in the hip and sent her flying into the corn, a sharp spike of pain driving its way all the way through her body, making what felt like every bone in her skeleton light up electric white and agonizing. The impact knocked the air out of her; she didn’t have a chance to scream.

Mary hit the ground hard, and the truck kept rolling on, driving off down Old Logger’s Road, never slowing down. If the driver realized that what they’d hit was a human girl and not a deer, it wasn’t enough to take their foot off the gas.

They just kept going, and in her own way, Mary went, too.

• • •

Mary woke up under a hazy yellow sky, with the corn waving all around her. Somehow it had gone from brown and broken, picked clean by crows and hungry deer, to tall and green and heavy with unplucked ears. Nothing hurt as she pushed herself off the ground, staggering to her feet. The world was silent, and the air tasted like ozone, like a tornado was putting itself together somewhere just off the horizon, ready to come crashing through at any moment. The sun was a flat disk behind the layers of yellow dust clinging to the air, distant and burnished like a penny, but somehow blunted enough that she could look directly at it.

Conscious of the pain she was sure would soon be coming, Mary began picking her way through the corn, heading for where she presumed she’d find the street. And kept walking as the corn, which had been growing unattended in this semi-abandoned field since the last farmers had moved away from Old Logger’s Road, stretched endlessly out in front of her. She paused, the first real inkling of something being genuinely wrong working its way through the panic over how she had clearly been unconscious in a cornfield overnight and far enough into the next day for the sun to be all the way into the sky. Her father would have gone without dinner, and then gone off to work without breakfast. She didn’t know if he’d have been sober enough by that point to pack himself a lunch. If she’d been home, none of this would have happened. If she’d been home...if her mother hadn’t died...if everything were different, none of this would have happened.

The corn was lush and green, each stalk so heavy with ripe ears that it looked like it should topple under its own weight, and that wasn’t right either, was it? She distinctly remembered the corn being withered and dead as she walked alongside it, almost the color of that storm-warning sky overhead, and the few ears that had managed to survive the wildlife had been small and stunted, not full-sized and inviting. It was like she’d landed in someone else’s cornfield.

Someone else’s cornfield that went the hell on forever. Mary turned to the nearest stalk and wrenched an ear off in frustration, preparing to hurl it away into the rolling waves of corn, and paused as it squished in her hand, soft and yielding within its layers of green husk. She focused more closely on the ear, peeling back the top layers of husk, only to cry out in disgust and dismay and drop it to the ground at her feet.

The corn inside the husk was a mass of fungus, rot, and crawling parasites, attractive and enticing, but entirely inedible.

Mary glanced around. Every ear of corn was suddenly ominous, a lurking horror wrapped in placid green. Still unsure as to what was going on, she broke into a run, pushing her way toward the field, heading for the road.

After far too long, she finally broke out of the corn and onto a wide gravel road she had never seen before. Mary froze, then turned slowly, trying to get her bearings back. This wasn’t possible. Unless someone had moved her while she was knocked out, this wasn’t possible. She had grown up in Buckley. She knew every inch of the town and the fields around it. Put her in the woods and she’d be lost in an instant, but here, on an open road near farmland, abandoned or not, there was just no way.

As the thought formed, the land around her seemed to flicker, like she was standing in the heart of the Galway Wood, surrounded by reaching trees and unseen horrors. Then it was gone, and she was back on the side of the road, corn behind her, yellow sky overhead.

“This isn’t funny,” said Mary. The landscape flickered again, corn become brambles, sky becoming dark. Then the corn returned, lush and green and terrible. She balled her hands into fists, and yelled, with more strength, “I said,this isn’t funny. Whatever you’re trying to do, whoever you are, stop.”

“And why should we?” asked a voice next to her ear. It was curious, almost polite, and distorted by an ominous humming noise, like the sound she’d heard an old radio tube make right before it exploded.

Mary whipped around. There was no one there.

“Because it isn’t nice,” she said.

“No one said we had to be,” said the voice, which now sounded like it was directly in front of her.

Mary turned slowly back to the street. There was no one there, of course, but the street itself had changed. Rather than a long expanse of gravel, it was a short stretch of hard-packed earth leading to a four-way crossing, with no signposts in sight.

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