AfterLife (5 page)

Finally, the truck came to a stop, indicating their arrival
at their final destination. Wes’s body was so stiff he couldn’t move at all.
Meri and Jordan didn’t seem to have the same problem, and stood up as the doors
at the back of the truck opened. Meri leaned over Wes, placing herself into his
line of sight and indicating she knew he wasn’t able to move.

“Don’t try to move, Wes. You’ll just damage yourself. Stay
put and we’ll take care of everything.”

A group of people boarded the truck and lifted Wes onto a
stretcher. Seeing only what was above him, Wes watched a concrete ceiling pass
as they wheeled his body through a doorway and down another corridor before he
was finally lifted off the stretcher and placed onto a table. A young woman
with curly red hair leaned over Wes and looked at him with soft hazel eyes. Her
hair was pulled back into a short ponytail. She smiled.

“You must be Wes,” she said as her eyes passed back and
forth over his face. She looked down at his left arm where his hand was missing
and then up to Meri and Jordan who had followed Wes’s body into the room. “Did
we get his hand?”

“Yes, we got it,” Jordan said.

“Good.” The woman with the red hair looked back down at Wes.
“You’re going to need a lot of work, but I think you’ll be just fine. Lucky you
kept your body in good condition while you were alive.” She gave Wes a
reassuring smile. She aligned her face with Wes’s, her eyes right over his, and
placed her hands on either side of his head. “Wes, I need you to focus on my
eyes. Stare right into them as if you’re looking through them.”

Wes looked at the woman’s eyes and for the first time in
days, everything disappeared.

I
t began with a
feeling of being lifted out of his body. It was the first sense of motion he
remembered experiencing since his death. The woman with the red hair picked him
up with her glance and he entered her eyes. He found himself walking forward
though darkness; the surroundings harbored an ambiance of nothingness. The
black void gradually faded as he advanced until he was walking along a beach.
It was night; the white sand reflected the light of a full moon shining
directly above his head. In the distance there was a long pier that stretched
out over the water, its lights mirrored in the surf below.

Wes stopped and looked at his surroundings. The waves that washed
up onto the beach were small and in the shallow water there were thousands of
bioluminescent fish of all colors and patterns flitting back and forth in the
tide. He found a place on the sand and sat down to watch the fish.

“What do you think?” a voice questioned. “It’s one of my
favorite places to visit.” Wes looked up and saw the red-headed woman
approaching from the direction of the pier. She stopped by Wes’s side. “This
will be your waiting room while we prepare your body.”

“What is this place? Am I separated from my body?” Wes was
relieved to hear he could talk.

“No, you’re still connected to your body. Severing isn’t the
topic of conversation today. I would hope it doesn’t come to that, though I…”
Her voice trailed off as she mumbled to herself.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Wes stared back
toward the fish swimming in the tide. A blue fish was courting a yellow one,
their glowing skins brushing back and forth past each other. He wondered if
their babies would be green.

“It’s normal not to understand at first,” she said. “Let’s
walk for a bit.”

Wes stood, and they started walking along the waterline down
the beach toward the pier; the soft white sand glistened in the moonlight and
the air was still.

“I haven’t introduced myself yet.” She looked over at him.
“I’m Emily.”

“Nice to meet you Emily,” Wes said.

“I’m going on 53 years dead. Fifty-three years ago at the
age of 22 I drowned right here on this beach. When I woke up, I’d already been
collected by AfterLife.”

“Fifty-three years dead? That’s impossible.” Wes stared,
dumbfounded, remembering the image of the girl that pulled him into her eyes.
He found it hard to believe she had been a corpse for as long as she claimed.

“It’s true, even though now it may seem hard to believe.
People die every day from ‘natural causes,’ and they don’t become Mortuis. One
day, their mind, or soul if you want to call it that, separates from their body
and moves on. You can die a second death, which is more than you need to know
right now. What you do need to know is that you aren’t a zombie. That would be
a misnomer for what you really are. Zombies are bodies without a soul, and such
a thing can’t really exist. Your soul still resides in your body; it’s just not
a living body as you think of one. We are called Mortuis. Dead bodies still
inhabited by a soul.”

Emily paused as she revisited her past. “After realizing I
didn’t survive that day at the beach, it took me a while to come to terms with
the fact that I could never see my family again. I was definitely a Daddy’s
girl, and I missed my father terribly.” Emily paused. Wes could tell by the way
she stared out across the water that there was more she missed than just her
father. “With time,” she continued, “AfterLife showed me how to take care of
myself, and I learned to live again. AfterLife became my family.”

“Is that what will happen to me?” Wes looked along the beach
in the direction they’d been traveling. The pier still appeared as far away as
ever.

“That depends on what you want. You can become a member of
AfterLife if you choose. It’s a good place to be if you want purpose.”

“Well, do I really have a choice?” Wes wondered about the
alternative. What could he do as a dead person?

“Everyone has a choice. Being human is to have choices, and
we’re not here to take that away from you. In spite of what some believe, being
Mortui is still being human. I don’t know how religious you are or were before
you died, but I think you’ll slowly discover yourself becoming more spiritual
now that you’re dead.

“Don’t worry; you’ll have plenty of time to figure out who
you are, and what you want to do. Try to think of this time as a Mortui as
bonus time.”

“I don’t deserve bonus time,” Wes said, kicking at the sand.
“I had time and I threw it away when I stupidly thought about killing myself.”

“You did kill yourself.”

“I know, so why am I still stuck inside my dead body?”

“Don’t focus on that so much right now.” Emily’s voice
remained calm. “It may seem horrible, being stuck to your body when you know
you’re dead, but there are thousands of people just like you.” Emily stopped
walking to look into his eyes. “The real question is, how will you deal with
it?”

Wes nodded thoughtfully. His eyes scanned along the horizon
where the water seemed to disappear into the sky and then over at the pier that
never seemed to get any closer. The only evidence they were moving at all was
the footprints they were leaving in the sand.

“Where are we?” Wes asked again after reassessing their
progress down the beach.

“We’ve soul-synced. I’ve brought you into my mind to
entertain you while the others take care of your body. It’s a long process
where you lay in tubs of fluid while they rebuild and preserve your body. It
can be a lengthy process, and as you’ve discovered anesthesia won’t work for your
body anymore.”

“So I’m in your mind?”

“Sort of. We’re in a place where both our minds exist. It’s
kind of hard to explain. We’re both in control only you don’t realize it yet.
You’ve never been able to experience this before. It’s similar to lucid dreaming.
Now that you’re dead, you can learn to fully enjoy it.”

“So, how do I put myself in control?”

Emily’s face lit up. “I just love soul-syncing with
newcomers. I get to teach you all about it. Okay, this beach, that pier, and
everything you see was created by my mind. That’s because you didn’t know you
could have an influence on these surroundings, but you can if you want. How
would you change what you see?”

“I don’t know. It’s beautiful here.”

“I know it is. I made it and I don’t make ugly things.” She
smiled. “I may have died on this beach, but I’ve always loved it, and I still
do. When I was a young girl, I used to walk along it just to enjoy nature and
play in the sand. As I got older it was my place of escape. It still is, and I
can always visit it in my mind.

“This is my world, my creation. But since you’re here, you
have the ability to influence it if you want. All you have to do is visualize
in your mind whatever you want to add to the scene. Is there anything you would
change?”

Wes looked around. What would he change? He wasn’t really a
beach person and as far as he could tell this beach was perfect. He glanced at
the water with the fish glowing just beneath the surface leaving swirls of
colored light in the shallows. Waves might make it harder to see the fish. He
thought for a few minutes and then observed the sky. It would be nice to see
some shooting stars to wish on, he thought. Wes stared at the sky and waited to
see a shooting star. Nothing happened.

“You have to visualize it,” Emily said, interrupting his
thoughts. “Don’t just think about what you want to change. See what you want to
change. Oh, don’t tell me either, I want to see if I can guess what you’re
doing.”

Wes stared at the sky and saw a shooting star in his mind.
Suddenly, one shot across the sky. Emily was still looking around and missed it
so he tried it a second time and added a few more stars.

“Shooting stars!” Emily lightly rubbed Wes’s arm. “Very
good. Use some imagination now. What else can you do with the sky?”

Wes continued watching the shooting stars he sent streaking
across the sky. He began adding color to different stars, and the sky lit up
with an array of colored lights. How could he make the scene bigger? Almost as
soon as the idea came to him, a giant bioluminescent blue whale breached the
surface of the water a few hundred feet off the shore and fell on its side,
creating a giant splash. He didn’t know if whales even existed near the beach
Emily had created, but he didn’t care. He wanted to see one jump. He looked
over at Emily to see if she approved. She smiled back at him giving him the
reassurance he needed to continue with something bigger.

Wes looked out at the sea and in his mind saw the horizon
begin to fill with the warming hues of a sunrise’s first rays. The sky gradually
filled with warmer colors as the reds, oranges, and yellows grew brighter and
pushed the darkness farther and farther away from where the two of them stood.
Finally, the sun rose out of the water on the near horizon. He had created his
first sunrise.

“That was gorgeous, Wes,” Emily said softly, touching his
arm. “I couldn’t have created a more fantastic sunrise myself. You must truly
love and appreciate beautiful things.”

“Yeah, I guess I do. At least, I’ve always appreciated a
good sunrise and sunset.” He thought about some of the sunrises he’d seen over
the years. Once on a road trip, while passing though South Dakota, he’d stopped
just to watch the sun set over the stretches of grassland on either side of the
freeway. Even the one he’d seen the night he died had been beautiful. It had
been the last beautiful thing he’d seen. He remembered how bad his vision had
become in the few days since his death. In this place where his and Emily’s
minds were coexisting he could see fine, but in reality his vision was like
looking through a dirty window. “Will I ever be able to really see a sunset
again?”

“Of course you will. That’s one thing you will definitely be
able to do. Your vision will be as good as new once your body is processed.
Your eyes were probably full of all sorts of crap when you arrived. You don’t
produce tears like an antemort. Before we found you, you were dead for a few
days, right?” Emily looked up at Wes as he nodded. “That’s normal. You weren’t
able to naturally flush out your eyes with tears, and that made your vision
worse.

“I should warn you though, you will notice a lot of
differences in the way you experience things now that you’re dead. You’re still
connected to your body, but you’ll relate to the world around you differently.
You won’t be able to taste, smell, or touch like you used to.” Emily sat down
on the sand still watching the sun as it rose. She patted the sand next to her
and Wes sat as well. “I’m teaching you calculus without starting with the
basics of algebra. There’s a lot to learn and you won’t understand it all right
away, but I’ll give you a broad overview to get you started. Once we begin the
training process, it will start to click. I promise. Let’s see, we’ll start
with something simple.

“When you’re alive, the mind and body are so intertwined
that it’s hard to consider that one might exist without the other. The body
needs the mind to live and operate even though, when broken down to its
simplest functions, the body is just a machine. It takes in fuel and processes
it into energy to operate. A living machine is much more complex than a
non-living machine.

“Your body is now a non-living machine and so its functions
will be decreased. You’re still in control of it just as you were when you were
alive, but it will be more like moving your body in a virtual reality machine.
You can move it around, see what it sees, and hear what it hears but the other
senses will be greatly reduced.

“The rebirth process will help. We are slowly replacing the
fluids in your body with ones of our own design. We call them “animal spirits.”
They’ll help your body exist for longer periods of time without recharging.
We’ll talk about charging and feeding later, but just as any machine needs an
energy source to work, so will you. You’re no longer able to make your own
energy through metabolism, so you’ll have to get what you need from others.”