Page 56 of Aftermarket Afterlife

“They candothat?”

“They can do a lot of things with heat-protective casing and miniaturization these days,” said Sam, grimly.

“They don’t have a fix on our location yet,” said Annie. “Theydohave Megan, but we can worry about that in a little while. Leonard wanted me to know that they’d have a location on us within the hour, and if I wanted to get my family out of range of the airstrike, I needed to start moving.”

I turned to stare in horror at Jane’s body, serene and silent on the table.

“An hour isn’t enough time to get everyone out of here,” I said. “The mice alone...”

“I know. Sohow much can you lift?”

Her meaning suddenly came clear. This was how I could help my family, even without the crossroads bolstering my natural capabilities as one of the unquiet dead. I lunged for Jane, jerking her body into an upright position and wrapping my arms around her torso in a parody of an embrace.

“Baby, I’m sorry,” I said, and blinked out of the world of the living, pulling her with me into the realms of the dead.

Eleven

“Sooner or later, we all say goodbye. Sometimes it’s just a matter of timing your exit so it feels natural, and not like a crime against the universe.”

—Laura Campbell

Dropping into the twilight, arms around a dead woman, because that’s a normal thing to do

ROAD GHOSTS LIKEROSEspend their time skipping between the twilight and the daylight like it’s no big deal, crossing the boundary so regularly that they’re effectively dual citizens, equally at home in both places. That has never been an accurate description of me.

Oh, I’ve always hadaccessto the twilight—every ghost does—but when the crossroads were still around, if I passed through the veil, I would usually find myself in an endless field of corn, the sky above me the gray-white colorlessness of the dead of winter. I always hated that sky. Even void would have been better. At least the void would have been honest about its desire to swallow me whole.

Of course, that sky’s still with me. It’s in my eyes. Everyone who looks at them tells me they’re a different color, usually something that isn’t a color at all. The most complimentary descriptions tell me I have graveyard eyes. The least say that looking at me is like looking at a hundred miles of empty highway, with nothing pleasant waiting at the end.

Either way, that space is gone now, taken over and transformed by the anima mundi, who has yet to invite me over for a chat, thank Persephone. I never want to go back there. Bad enough that I carry the sky with me.

Instead, when I pulled Jane into the twilight, we landed in the middle of a seemingly endless forest, with no signs of the barn or the compound around it. I didn’t know the names for most of the trees around me—we had different trees in Michigan, where I was young and innocent enough to care about things like the naming conventions of trees—but I knew they were very old and had been cut down long ago.

Longer even than when Kevin bought and cleared the land for the compound. These were the trees that had been loved here before the Europeans came to America, before itwasAmerica, when this land had gone by other names, and the future had been nothing but a dire and distant dream. I eased Jane’s body to the mossy ground, panting from the effort of yanking her so far, and straightened to take a look around me.

We hadn’t traveled backward through time. The sky was wrong, for one thing; it was banded in colors like a piece of fordite, blue and red, silver and green. The sun bobbed in the middle of it all, a smiling cartoon disk. Literally smiling: it had a face, eyes wide and eager to study the land below, mouth stretched in a broad smile. I gave it a wary look. At least this iteration of the twilight sun seemed to be a friendly one. They’re not, always.

Rose likes to say that everything we see reflected in the twilight is something that was loved long enough to be grieved for, once upon a time. The forest around us was probably the lingering grief of the native people of Oregon, possibly mixed with the broken hearts of a few settlers who’d been less interested in destroying the natural world for the sake of their own comfort and ease. This long after the primal forest’s death, there was no easy way for me to tell.

A zeppelin drifted lazily by overhead, above a flock of passenger pigeons, their wings a smudge against the smiling sun. The twilight can get a little weird sometimes.

Jane’s body lay motionless in the green, as inert as any dead thing. That was a bit of a relief. I’ve carried corpses through the twilight before, when I didn’t have a better option, and none of them have ever reanimated, but I’m always afraid they will. My limits are simple, straightforward, and annoying:

I can take anything I can lift, and I can’t take anything living. We know from past tests that if I try, bad things will happen. Living things wind up dead, and when I pretend to be a power lifter, I can seriously hurt myself. What does injury look like for a ghost? Nothing great. Fading, loss of control...disapparition, if I push it far enough. I’ve always stopped before I reached that point, and hopefully the survival of the world will never depend on my ability to lift an anvil. Jane was right up on the edge of what’s easily possible for me, and worked only because Icouldlift her. Just not very high, and not for long.

I certainly wasn’t going to be able to move her again.

Hoping there were no phantom predators around here waiting to come and make a nice snack of tasty, tasty dead girl, I smoothed her top, straightened her arms, and turned to walk away, heading in the direction that seemed most likely to have people in it. There might not be anyone haunting this specific stretch of forest just yet, but Oregon was pretty big. It was almost certainly haunted.

Distance can get sort of squishy in the twilight, as the land adjusts to the desires of the people in it. I’ve never really loved long walks, and so I reached the forest’s edge long before I felt I should have, stepping out onto the edge of a sleek black river of asphalt running from one end of the horizon to the other. This was I-5 as she saw herself, the mighty interstate highway of the West Coast, younger sister and pale second to the Ocean Lady. She was almost a thousand miles shorter than the Lady had been in her prime, and more, she wasn’t revered the way the Lady had been. Still, people loved her, people lived and died on her body and bled out on her banks, and she was remembered in story and in song. One day she might claw her way to godhood.

If that happened, I would hopefully be well away from her as it was going down, outside the reach of her nascent divinity. In the moment, I was wildly grateful to see her, because if the I-5 was here, that meant I was within shouting distance of Portland. Oh, in the daylight, it would have meant no such thing, but like I said, distance gets squishy in the afterlife.

I stepped onto the road, relieved when it held my weight and didn’t suck me down into its tar-choked depths, and started walking in the direction of the city. I tucked my hands into the pockets of my high school letter jacket as I walked, keeping myself from making any sort of gesture that could be interpreted as hailing a ride. I’m not a road ghost. The road is always hungry, and the fact that I didn’t belong to it wouldn’t stop it for flagging me as its next meal if I attracted its attention too directly.

It felt weird, walking away from one of my kids—and Jane would always be one of my kids, no matter how dead she was; she would have been one of my kids at ninety, while I was technically babysitting her great-grandchildren—when they were defenseless. It was arguable whether Jane really needed me anymore, but her body was in the twilight because I’d yanked it here, and that meant it was my responsibility to make sure it got back to the daylight in one piece.

Still, helping her meant getting someone who could helpme, and that meant getting somewhere that I could find people. Other ghosts or the various sort of human magic-user who could move through the lands of the dead, it didn’t entirely matter anymore. Beggars can’t be choosers, right?

---