Page 29 of Aftermarket Afterlife

The tent and the Ferris wheel hadn’t been the only targets. Half the midway appeared to have burned, and only the Scrambler was still moving, albeit slowly, the rotating arms swinging around in a jerky, jarring dance that seemed to be winding down even as we watched. Worst yet, the damage to the third tent had also torn down much of the canvas wall separating the carnival from the boneyard, and many of the trailers appeared to have burnt.

Antimony made a small sound of dismay and started walking faster, clearly fighting the urge to break into a jog. She bumped against Sam.

He grabbed her wrist. “No,” he said, voice low.

She shot him a vicious look. “No?” she asked.

“Annie, look.” He let her go. “I don’t see anyone moving. That doesn’t mean the Covenant’s actually gone. This could be a matter of everyone hiding while they try not to get shot with a rocket launcher. No one runs off alone.”

Annie twisted her arm free of Sam’s grasp, glaring at him, but slowed back down to pace the rest of the group. He sighed in clear relief, and we kept moving.

“Mary?” asked Alice. “Can you tell if anyone’s still alive?”

I eyed her. “I’m not a Geiger counter for the living,” I said. “No, I can’t just look around and tell you if anyone’s still alive. Shouldn’t you know that by now?”

“The rules changed so much after the crossroads went away—”

“You mean after I retconned their cosmic asses right out of our universe,” said Annie.

“—it seemed worth checking.” Alice shrugged. “We’re pretty exposed right now.”

“If anyone’s in hiding, they’d be in the food tent,” said Jane, gesturing toward the first tent. “It has space, its own generator, and supplies. Plus it’s not as tempting a target as the other two.”

“All right, we look there first,” said Alice. “Good call.”

Jane blinked, looking taken aback by her mother’s easy acceptance of her suggestion. Alice didn’t seem to notice. She was already moving toward the tent, Sam pacing her, and the rest of us followed along behind.

Walking down a carnival midway in the middle of the day can have a certain haunted-house feel to it, like you’re trespassing somewhere you’re really not meant to be, somewhere that’s not meant toexist—carnivals are things for twilight and darkness, not the blazing light of the Idaho afternoon. That feeling swept over me now, worse than it normally was, because we reallyweren’tsupposed to be here: no one was.

The authorities would eventually show up, after receiving a call from a motorist who saw the damage, or when darkness fell without the carnival lights coming on. If we were here when that happened, we were going to have a lot of deeply awkward questions to answer.

Alice was the first to reach the tent. She stopped at the closed flap, looking to Sam and nodding. He nodded back, and when she pulled the flap open, he surged into the tent, moving faster than a human would be capable of. Shouts and gasps from inside met his appearance, but no gunfire. That was a nice surprise.

More cautiously, the rest of us followed him in, blinking in the dim light. The long picnic tables were mostly full, carnies huddling together, children sitting on the floor or in the laps of their parents, all looking shell-shocked and a little shattered. Someone had turned the condiment stations along one tent wall into a sort of buffet, breakfast foods and an unusually large assortment of things they would normally have been holding back to sell after opening that night.

Not that they were going to be opening. Alice stopped near the entrance, drawing her pistols and standing at uneasy attention, while Jane and Antimony moved toward the tables.

A tall, dark-haired woman rose as they approached, and Annie embraced her, the two hanging off each other as if for dear life. Jane took a seat near an older woman, her hair streaked with white and one arm in a sling. They began to talk quietly, their voices pitched too low for me to hear. I drifted toward Alice.

“Aren’t you going to go and say hello?” I asked her.

She shook her head. “Not my place.”

“But you grew up—”

“None of these people were here when I was doing that,” she said. “Maybe the very oldest of them, but I don’t recognize them, and what am I supposed to say? ‘Sorry you had to raise my kids and get old while I ran around doing whatever the hell I wanted for fifty years’?”

“That’s not what happened.”

“Might as well have been.”

Annie and the woman let go of each other, Annie stepping back and nodding as she listened to whatever the woman was saying. Jane, meanwhile, rose, patting her conversational partner on her uninjured shoulder, and looked around the tent before heading over toward us.

Alice tensed at her daughter’s approach. I frowned.

“Yes?” she asked, once Jane was close enough.

“Clarissa says they didn’t know the people who’d been lurking around all week were Covenant,” she said. “They’ve been seeing the same trucks for days. Some of the people came to the carnival. More than once, even. The man who seemed to be in charge, he came by during setup, asked some pretty standard questions about how long they’d be staying, where they were going from here, what the best nights would be to bring a date, but he never made any threats. None of them did.”

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