Page 59 of Aftermarket Afterlife

“Which one died?” he asked.

“Jane.”

Saying her name here, in this haunted hotel, made me wish all over again that she hadn’t been quite so quick to head into whatever comes after. This would have been easier if she’d been with me, if she’d been able to help me ask these men to move her body.

“That’s a real pity,” he said. “She was kind to my Abilene after I died, when not enough folks were. I can help you move her wherever you need her to be, if you can carry a message to Aby.”

“I can do that,” I agreed. Carrying messages for the dead who’ve lingered but don’t have an easy time manifesting in the physical world is one of the easiest forms of currency we have. “If any of the rest of you have messages, I can take those down, too, once we have them. For now, though, I need to get her body to whatever this town has for a doctor. She has a tracking device inside her, and we need to take it out.”

There was no way I was abandoning Jane’s body somewhere when I could take her home for a decent burial if I could just get the bullet out. If I’d been thinking more clearly, I would have asked Annie to grab a scalpel before I moved the whole body, but panic had been in charge in that moment, and I was committed now.

“So you want us to go with you, fetch the body, bring it back here, get the tracker out, and take her back to the woods so you can put her back wherever you stole her from?” asked the short one.

I nodded.

“We can do that,” he said, looking to the other lumberjacks. All of them nodded. “It’s something to do, anyway, and not something we did yesterday or the day before, which makes it more interesting than standing around here drinking. How far away is she?”

“A ways down the road,” I said. “Past one of those big logging houses with a creepy old guy inside. He came out with a rake when he saw me walking by.”

“Ah, you met old man Miller,” said one of the lumberjacks, as the whole group began moving toward the door. Their social gravity carried me with them; I followed almost without intending to, and we were in the street before I knew it. “He employed a few of us, before we died. His whole place burned down around, what, eighteen eighty something? And then his kids sold off the land and split for the hills. Not sure he knows he’s dead, really.”

“We live out in the woods,” said another lumberjack. That’s pretty common, ghosts in the twilight saying they live one place or another; we don’t have the language to say “exist and have experiences that lead us to grow and change without actually being alive.” Talking around it is awkward and annoying. We use “haunt” in the daylight, but in the twilight, it’s infinitely easier just to use the words we already know. “There’s about eighty of us, all told. A few move up and down the coast, visiting the other lumber camps, but we’re usually around here.”

“Huh.” That explained why some people insisted the trees between Portland and the compound were haunted. Enough ghosts gathering there without the living distraction of a city would inevitably become something people noticed, heavy enough to distort the daylight. “You just...like haunting the woods?”

“Most of us weren’t what you’d call the social sort,” said one of them. The others snorted and chuckled, agreeing with him. “John and his Abilene is about the only word you’ll hear of a romance, and they were doomed from the start—she was a Sasquatch lady, and they don’t get the same afterlife the human ghosts do. But when we died, we kept our axes, and we kept our trees. Even got a few we’d already chopped down back, and we can cut them down every night if that’s what we want to do. They come right back in the morning. It’s something to do. Keeps us from getting bored, or thinking too hard about what comes next.”

“Elwood started asking a bunch of questions about whether this was heaven or hell or purgatory, and then one day he just looked off into the woods like he saw something the rest of us couldn’t, and dropped his axe and walked away,” said another lumberjack. “He vanished before he was more’n ten feet gone, and we’ve never seen him again.”

“Sounds like he got tired of lingering in the twilight and decided to move along,” I said. The city was falling behind us now, a brief detour that had served its purpose, and we were walking along the smooth black back of the Rainbow Road. The lumberjacks, I noticed, stayed well away from the edges, walking straight down the middle like the whole thing had only ever been intended for pedestrian use. It was odd, but I didn’t comment on it, only watched them and tried to understand without asking.

Then I realized the trees we passed were moving. Their branches twitched and sometimes coiled back, tense as the striking arms of a praying mantis. I stepped closer to the nearest lumberjack, who glanced over, picking up on my tension.

“Oh, that’s normal,” he said. “These aren’t the trees we worked while we were alive. Those trees know us, and know we were always respectful, even though our lives were spent ending theirs. They don’t blame us for what we had to do. These trees, though, they just see men with axes, and they don’t want to be cut down again.”

“Huh,” I said.

“So we stay out of reach, or else they give us a pretty good thumping, and we’re in a hurry.”

Indeed, that hurry was translating, again, to the contraction of the space around us, and in less time than it had taken Carl to drive this stretch of road, we were passing Mr. Miller’s homestead, the old homesteader himself coming out onto the porch to glare menacingly as we walked by. I-5 wasn’t just a nascent goddess in this part of the state; she was a safe passage through potentially hostile spaces. She was going to reach godhood on the back of grateful ghosts alone, with no aid from the routewitches.

I wondered whether she would ever be able to challenge the Ocean Lady. Would she rival her sister sufficiently in power to get a Queen of her own, a strange division of rulership to split the continent in two? Did the restless dead gods of the twilight care about that sort of thing? It really didn’t matter, but it was something to think about as I signaled the lumberjacks to slow and reduced my own speed to match theirs.

“There,” I said. “I came out of the woods there.”

“You’re sure?”

My heart was in my throat as I nodded. “One of my kids is that way. I’m sure.”

“Then we’ll be right back,” said John, settling a heavy hand briefly on my shoulder. “You stay here. You don’t need to see this.”

I wanted to argue with him. I couldn’t find the words. Because he was right—I didn’t need to see this. This was the nightmare that had been haunting me since the day Alice was old enough to run off into the woods under her own power, and while I had always known that it was lurking, I had started to foolishly believe that I might be able to keep putting it off forever. That I might see my kids die safe in their beds, taken away by extreme old age.

That my punishment for serving the crossroads as long as I had was never actually going to come due.

The lumberjacks trooped into the woods, and only a few of the trees waved their branches at the group of broad-shouldered men, and I stayed where I was, arms wrapped around myself, alone on the road. I hated everything about this. I hated it as they walked away, and I kept hating it when I heard them coming back. I dropped my arms and strained to catch a glimpse of them, rising up onto my toes and only dropping back down when John emerged from the trees with Jane in his arms, cradled close against his chest. Her arms dangled, but he was supporting her head, and that helped keep me from feeling too uncomfortable seeing her carried that way.

“This is a little weird,” he said, walking back over to me. “I’ve been dead alongtime, but I think this is the first time I’ve touched a dead body, unless you count the time before I toppled out of my own.”

---