Page 34 of Aftermarket Afterlife

Their proximity did matter, however. The closer they got, the easier it was for them to reliably aim downward, and they had to know we had people on the ground.

Motion from the Ferris wheel caught my eye. I glanced that way. Sam had the kids at the very top, huddled down in the swinging cars, holding as still as they possibly could. The motion was Sam, who looked like he was about to launch himself at the Covenant below. It would be a gloriously effective suicide run, and Annie would never forgive him.

Honestly, neither would I. He was family at this point, keyed into the weird network I used to track familial relations, and strange as it may seem, I’ve never actually experienced the death of someone I considered my responsibility. Fran, Enid, Alexander, and Jonathan all died when I was still a fresh ghost, more tied to the crossroads than I was to the Price-Healy family. Only Alice onward had been filed under “take care of this one” for me.

I didn’t know what kind of trauma would accompany feeling one of my people die, and I didn’t want to learn.

I started toward the carnival. Sarah paced me, giving me a curious look. “Aren’t you concerned about attracting their attention?” she asked.

“What are they going to do, shoot me?” I countered. “I’m alreadydead, Sarah. Bullets can’t bother me.”

“Ah.”

“If you’re worried, you can go—”

“I’m not worried,” she said. “Bullets require a certain adherence to mathematical constants to find their mark. I’ve had plenty of time to prepare. They won’t hit me, if their guns fire at all.”

“If you say so.”

We made an odd pair, two women, one with black hair and one with white, walking casually toward an ongoing gunfight.

“How close do you need to be to make them stop?”

“Not much closer.”

“Great.”

We were close enough now that a few of the agents had noticed us. They stopped firing as they reoriented their guns on our chests, preparing to take us out. “Stop where you are!” shouted one of them. “You can’t be here!”

“But we are,” said Sarah dreamily, her eyes starting to cloud over from the inside, like her vitreous humor was turning to ice. “We’re right here, and you’re right there, and you’re the ones who ought to stop what you’re doing.” With that, her eyes flashed white from side to side, and the gunfire abruptly stopped. The Covenant agents turned toward us, faces blank and muzzles now tilted downward.

“What do you want me to do with them?” asked Sarah, voice not fluctuating at all. She sounded like she was asking me what flavor of ice cream I wanted. “Oh, don’t be scared, Mary, I couldn’t do this to you if I wanted to. The dead are difficult to grab hold of. You’d slip through my thoughts like fog through a sieve. But I can’t hold them here forever, and I’ll have to put them somewhere eventually.”

“Can you...can you make them not be Covenant anymore?”

“Not without doing to them what I did to Artie, and I don’t want to do that,” she said, beginning to sound agitated. “I can’t change who they are that fundamentally, or I’ll break them. Breaking people is bad and wrong. I won’t break them. You can’t make me break them.”

“Can you...make them shoot each other?”

“You prove continuity of personality after death. Killing them is less mortally suspect than erasing them. Yes, I can make them shoot each other.”

Sarah cocked her head. Before she could do anything, Leonard strode the last several feet to the tent mouth and fired into the darkness, once, shouting, “Death to all monsters!”

Someone from inside answered fire, and he went down, dropping where he stood without another sound. His gun was knocked from his hand by the impact.

Someone inside the tent screamed, and then Alice was bursting into the sunlight, pistol in her hand, shooting at the frozen Covenant agents like she was at a shooting range and someone was grading her on time. She didn’t pause once to take aim, and she didn’t seem to notice that they weren’t moving. They dropped, one after the other, until the pistol was exhausted and she swapped for a smaller, more modern gun—the one she’d taken away from Jane, which apparently still worked well enough to use when shooting fish in a barrel.

As it clicked empty, she seemed to realize the Covenant agents weren’t moving, just standing there placidly letting her kill them. With a shriek of rage, she ran forward and jerked the gun away from the nearest one, slamming the butt of it into his nose. It crunched horrifically, and he went down, only for her to stomp, repeatedly, on his face.

“Alice is very angry,” said Sarah, sounding perplexed. “All she thinks is anger.”

I opened my mouth to answer her, and stopped as a horrible silence filled my thoughts, all-consuming, so loud that it drowned out absolutely everything else.

“Oh, God, no,” I said, and vanished.

Seven

“. . . oh.”

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