Page 3 of Aftermarket Afterlife

“You need me or you wouldn’t be putting on this little performance. Agree that my family comes first, or I won’t do it.”

The figure sighed, looking as put-upon as a shape without a face could look. “Fine, then. You will keep our secrets, and when we call you, you will negotiate on the behalf of the petitioners who come before us. You will keep things ‘fair.’ And in exchange, we will return you to your father, and you will be able to go to him when he needs you, to interact with him as the living do, and not be bound to come to us immediately.”

“My family,” said Mary staunchly. “Not my father, my family.”

“We weren’t aware—”

“They’re not in Buckley.”

“Fine. Your family.” The figure extended one void-filled hand. “Do we have a bargain?”

Mary hesitated for a moment, then reached out to grasp the offered hand and shook. “We do,” she said.

“Excellent,” replied the crossroads, and pulled her closer. “Oh, we’re going to have such fun together.”

As alien thoughts and ideas began pouring into her mind, Mary learned two things at once: even the dead could suffer, and some pain was too great to allow the person who experienced it to scream.

Eventually, she blacked out again.

So far, being dead was no more pleasant than being alive had been, and a hell of a lot more confusing.

• • •

Mary opened her eyes in the scraggly, untended corn field to the side of Old Logger’s Road. Nothing hurt, and the sky above was still late afternoon trending toward evening. She sat up with a gasp, feeling her torso with both hands. She felt as solid as she had ever been. She scrambled to her feet and ran for the road, once again not looking back.

She already knew what she would see.

Upon reaching Old Logger’s Road, Mary stopped for a moment, turning to look toward town. Alien knowledge still cluttered her mind; she knew exactly what she had agreed to do, and that when the time came, she wouldn’t have a choice. But for the moment, she was here, and even if she wasn’t alive, her daddy needed her.

Mary broke into a run, heading for home as fast as her legs could carry her. The sky continued to darken overhead, but she ran all the way home.

She got there before her father, and had dinner hot and ready for him when he came in the door. “You’re a good girl, Mary,” he rumbled, and kissed her forehead before he sat down to eat. She didn’t join him. She wasn’t hungry. She hadn’t been winded by the run home.

After the leftovers were packed away and the dishes were done, she went to bed, and lay there in the dark and quiet, staring at the ceiling. She wasn’t tired. She didn’t sleep.

Mary Dunlavy was dead.

One

“Dead people who hang around after they die are people too, and that means they’re not a monolith. Some of them are awful. Some of them are pretty good neighbors. None of them like a shotgun full of rock salt to the face.”

—Enid Healy

A small survivalist compound about an hour’s drive east of Portland, Oregon

Now

THE HOUSE WAS QUIET.That was pretty normal before eight in the morning, thanks to layers of religious prohibition keeping the mice from starting their daily exaltations before everyone was out of bed. Things wouldn’t stay quiet for long. They never did. Each person who woke up would each add their specific flavor of chaos to the environment, until we were operating at standard levels. It could have been worse. We were currently operating well below a full house, with only Kevin, Evelyn, Annie, James, and Sam in residence—well, them, and several hundred talking mice who were frustratingly prone to religious mania, which could break out at literally any moment.

At this point, there’s no one in the family who’s been around the mice longer than I have, and even I can’t always predict when a massive, ongoing, and worst of all, loud celebration is going to start up somewhere in the house. Kevin had started trying to put together a fully comprehensive calendar of their observances when he was just a kid, and Evelyn took over maintaining it after they were married, after she noticed he was missing several of the rituals specifically centered around childbirth, menstruation (human family members only, as the mice don’t menstruate, and let’s all pause to be grateful for that, shall we?), and, oddly enough, dusting. There are apparently things the Aeslin aren’t comfortable sharing with their gods, but will happily divulge to a priestess.

Their ideas of gender roles are a little outdated, and it can color a lot of things you might think would be safe from sexism. Life—or death—with the mice is nothing if not endlessly surprising.

But anyway, Evelyn maintained the master calendar, and even she sometimes got surprised by festivals that only happened when the circumstances were right, and thus hadn’t been observed in two or three or four generations. The rest of us were basically playing guess-the-ritual all the time, and inevitably getting things wrong.

If I hadn’t known for sixty years and counting that Aeslin mice couldn’t lie, I would have started to suspect them of inventing new traditions just to keep the rest of us on our toes.

But I digress. It was about half past seven, and the sun was up, but nobody else seemed to be. One of the wild roosters in the woods behind the compound had been crowing its head off for almost half an hour, which was a good illustration of why wild roosters never lasted long in the woods. If the coyotes didn’t get it, one of the house residents would go out and shut it up sooner or later. Silence before coffee was pretty well enforced most of the time.

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