AFTERLIFE Read online

  PRAISE FOR MARCUS SAKEY’S NOVELS

  “Stunning.”

  Publishers Weekly

  “Genius.”

  Chicago Tribune

  “Brilliant.”

  Huffington Post

  “Awesome.”

  Kirkus Reviews

  “Gripping.”

  io9

  “Surprising.”

  Library Journal

  “Triumphant.”

  Examiner

  “Compelling.”

  Booklist

  “Tour-de-force.”

  Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “It’s depth and intelligence and passion and emotion that sets Sakey apart.”

  Lee Child

  “Epic, compulsively readable, and thought-provoking to the very last sentence.”

  Blake Crouch

  “Sakey is the master of the mindful page turner. Thrilling and funny and disturbing and sharp as hell.”

  Gillian Flynn

  “Sakey can flat-out write.”

  Don Winslow

  OTHER TITLES BY MARCUS SAKEY

  The Brilliance Trilogy

  Brilliance

  A Better World

  Written in Fire

  The Blade Itself

  Accelerant

  Good People

  The Amateurs

  The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes

  Scar Tissue (short stories)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Marcus Sakey

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477848470 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1477848479 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781477848401 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1477848401 (paperback)

  Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

  First edition

  It’s a joy and a privilege to make my living spinning stories.

  And so beloved reader, fellow dreamer:

  This book is for you, with gratitude.

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  FORTY-SEVEN

  FORTY-EIGHT

  FORTY-NINE

  FIFTY

  FIFTY-ONE

  FIFTY-TWO

  FIFTY-THREE

  I have been . . .

  FIFTY-FOUR

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  READER GROUP QUESTIONS FOR MARCUS SAKEY’S AFTERLIFE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ONE

  He was born into cramped alleys and foul air, fish-stink and garbage and the Bellman’s call—Remember the clocks, look well to your locks. London, in the year of their Lord 1532. Father in the wind, mother barely remembered, he grew on the streets, working when there was work, begging and stealing and renting himself when not, and when he first saw Persephone bobbing in a halo of sun on a cloudy day, he thought her a promise someone should have made him.

  He was thin and pale and restless of mind, unclear why some were born to silks and some to slavery, and unwilling to let things lie. Edmund watched the caravel unload, watched the sailors stagger to land. Amongst them he saw an apprentice no older than himself, and he followed as they laughed their way to a filthy alehouse with a sign in the shape of an anchor, where they drank watered beer by the gallon. When the boy went for a piss in the alley, Edmund buried a blade in the nape of his neck, sliding it up and twisting.

  The next morning Persephone sailed with a new apprentice. Edmund worked himself raw and always had a joke, and the men liked him, taught him the ways of salt and sail. He slept on the deck, woke to kicks and curses, to clean air and sunshine, and for the first time knew what it meant to be happy. He learned his knots and took his lashes, ate salt beef and dry ship’s biscuit infested with weevils, saw the New World and found it less than he had hoped, just land and trees and brown men.

  The storm caught them two weeks into the return voyage. The sky was black and the sea was foam, and they journeyed not across the waves but up them, rising to the peaks of moving mountains, hanging for a heartbeat before plummeting into the canyons beyond. Edmund heard Persephone scream, watched the boatswain swept overboard along with the main mast, and as a wave high as London’s Tower blotted out the world, he lashed himself to the foredeck and thought of praying but didn’t see the point.

  He woke to a world scoured clean. The sun burned fierce and the sea lay smooth, and the ship rode low and crippled, masts and sails and most of her crew stripped away. Of clean rainwater there was plenty, but the hold had been torn open and cargo and provisions lost.

  The captain, his chest crushed in the storm, lingered in fever for two days, crying out to the Lord; and perhaps the Lord heard him, for on the morning of the third he was dead. The seven remaining men looked at one another, each harboring the same thought but unwilling to speak it.

  The rats that had once fouled their food became their food. But soon the rats were gone.

  After two more days of hunger, the barber and the cook broke down the captain’s body. All of them ate, though no man looked at the others as he did so.

  But Edmund, unwilling to let things lie, knew that with a split hull and no sails, any voyage to land would be a long one. A full belly made his mind sharp, and he saw that there was plenty of meat to be taken if a man had the will.

  The barber was discovered in the hold, razor in his hand and throat open. A mortal sin, all agreed. This time there was no delay in eating, though still the men did not look at one another.

  Persephone drifted, at the mercy of current and Christ.

  When a sailor’s drowned body was found tangled in lines over the port side, the men agreed he must have fallen overboard in the night. They said a rough prayer, and the cook went to work.

  And still there was no land. The sun burned furious and the wind did not blow.

  In accident and suicide, one by one the crew fell, until at last there were only two. The cook declared it was punishment from God, that they were to wander forever to pay for the crime of eating another man’s flesh.

  Edmund agreed, and together th
ey prayed forgiveness.

  He killed the man with the same blade he’d used to buy passage on Persephone. Edmund had watched as the cook had broken down the bodies of their companions, and though it was his first time, he thought he did well. He salted and smoked the meat, and ate his grisly rations staring at the horizon.

  Weeks it had been since the storm broke them, and weeks more did Edmund drift.

  And then one morning, long out of food, scorched delirious by the sun, he raised his head from the deck and saw land.

  He wasn’t more than a mile from it when he died.

  It weren’t really so different.

  Edmund splashed to shore, wobbly on steady land. Stood looking. Waiting for judgment. Prepared, after weeks of naught but sun and sea and the twisting emptiness of his belly, for either angelic choir or wine-taloned demon.

  Neither appeared, nor any other soul beside. Water lapped the coast. The breeze stirred trees grown freakish tall. A shallow creek trickled into the sand.

  Red berries adorned the bushes.

  Edmund threw himself on them, devoured fruit by the sticky handful. After, he lay on his belly to suckle the seep of icy water. When he’d had his fill he flopped on his back and reflected that the priests hadn’t known so much. A hundred times he’d eaten on their charity, promising his soul for a crust of bread, and always considered himself to have gotten the better of the bargain. Here now was proof of it.

  Eventually, he set to walking.

  Salt on one side, forest the other, but the sea he knew and the trees he feared. A child of London, he’d never seen anything like it. Green grown so tall and tight that the space beneath was coolest shadow. Each breath of wind through the leaves seemed a whisper, a call to come lose himself, let dirt fill his mouth and roots grow through his chest.

  The sky changed constantly yet stayed the same, the sun never more than a paler spot edging from horizon to horizon. No gulls soared the wind, no insects hummed in the long grasses. Alone, he wandered the dominion of death. At night thick clouds hid stars and moon, pouring down darkness so complete a man could hide from himself. He slept on shore, shivering in piles of needles and leaves.

  After some days he came upon a broad river emptying slowly into the sea, and alongside it a circle of domed huts covered in brush. Neither smoke nor sound rose from the village. It were as if abandoned; as if some forgotten race had built this thing as a monument to their own vanishing. Edmund watched from behind a cluster of boulders the whole of the afternoon, but saw no others.

  The huts were clever constructions of wood bent and lashed, of grasses woven into roofs. They were filled with the savages’ possessions, clay pots and garments of animal hide and strange many-seeded plants. He imagined the hut alive, a woman preparing food, child slung at her breast. He could almost see her pause in the pounding of her grain; could imagine her squinting at the place he stood, wondering why her hands had grown clumsy and the nipple had tugged from a squalling mouth.

  Edmund took dried fish from the rafters and sat in the doorway, watching the sky dim. Thinking of the stories he had heard of the world that came after life and pondering why any man believed them. For only one who had made the journey could speak; and even he could not be certain, for who knew if this pale and clouded place were the end? Them that claimed knowledge were fools or profiteers, and neither could be depended upon, for surely Edmund must be damned for all he had done, and yet this seemed no punishment.

  He slept beneath a deerskin cloak on a mat of reeds, and knew he was not alone in the bed. Though he could not see them, could not feel or smell them, surely a man and woman rested there too. He wondered if their dreams were troubled.

  He awoke in Hell.

  A demon leered above him, man-shaped but for the quills and feathers sprouting from its head and the sounds that ushered from its mouth, guttural grunts and clicks of flashing teeth. Edmund lurched back and saw that behind the creature there was another, naked from the waist up with heavy brown dugs dangling. The man-demon raised a spear, and it were only luck that Edmund managed to get the deerskin onto it, the weight of the hide dragging down the shaft and allowing him space to leap forward and put his knife in the devil’s chest.

  Blood sprayed, and in that hot baptism, Edmund was reborn.

  He lived as an Unalachtigo of the tortoise totem. Ran the forests with the other children, gaming and quarrelling, learning the ways of trap and net, fowl and fish.

  As he grew, he watched the women plant maize and pumpkin, and yearned—and saw his stare returned.

  By flickering firelight, he touched his new wife, the musk of her neck, the sweat of her belly, the clutch as he entered her.

  In a swirl of cold clean snow, he held his tiny son in both hands, and wondered at the greatness of the Creator.

  Reeking ferocious, the bear was hate and heat, a blow from one paw tearing open his woman even as he charged to her, claws and teeth and dank breath, a ripping of himself, like tearing the oily flesh from a bird’s bone—

  Edmund stood in the wigwam. Himself, again. The meat of the man he had been fell to the floor. The woman he’d known as wife stared in horror.

  This time, when she spoke her strange clicking tongue, he understood it.

  She was cursing him.

  A life, in an instant. A story gulped down like meat. Edmund was flush with it, filled with it, lit from within.

  He looked at the woman and remembered sliding into the heat of her. And remembered the times stronger men had taken their pleasure of him, sometimes paying and others not.

  The woman must have seen his thoughts. She bolted, bare brown feet flashing.

  He smiled, and pursued her down the hunting trail toward the forest he no longer feared.

  If this were Hell, he’d make a home of it.

  TWO

  Chicago had gone strange.

  Instead of blasting down the street with his foot to the floor, Brody should have been driving in jerking intervals, honking at taxis and cursing cyclists.

  The sidewalks should have been packed with commuters and tourists and students. Crowds should have overspilled the corners, heads bobbing to earbuds. The nannies pushing strollers, the homeless rattling cups. Gaudy shopping bags and little dogs on leashes and Do you have a minute for Greenpeace?

  But the sidewalks were forsaken. The crosswalks abandoned.

  The few pedestrians moved erratically, heads up, trying to stare in every direction at once. When Brody’s tires squealed, a woman in a business suit dropped prone on the concrete, her hands covering her head.

  He blew past the Shell station on Jackson. Massive blue tarps enclosed the whole structure, the plastic rippling in the October wind. Most of the gas stations had done that, wrapped themselves like Christmas presents from mental patients.

  Two blocks farther, an Orange Line train rattled into the platform above the avenue. No one got off. No one got on. The doors closed, and the El rumbled north.

  As an elementary school blurred past, he spotted a military Humvee parked on the sidewalk. Men with buzz cuts and bulletproof vests stood guard, automatic rifles pointing downward. The playground equipment was abandoned. The swings stirred in the wind as though ridden by ghosts.

  He held the accelerator down, the engine’s roar counterpointing sirens screaming in from every direction. Chicago PD had been working to refine the roadblocks, dropping a net of concentric circles around any attack. It was a good idea in theory, but he hated the reactive nature of it, the implied surrender—

  There.

  The intersection was broad and generic: a bank, a Starbucks, a hotel. The northwest corner was a Mariano’s, one of the grocery stores thrown up in the last few years to provide for all the new West Loop lofts.

  Brody lived in one of the new West Loop lofts, and knew the store well. Three stories of glass and white brick, most of the street level given over to a parking lot, covered but open walled. The blue lights of a squad car parked in the middle of a lane cast garish sh
adows. He jerked to a stop behind it. A dozen people milled in a ring, skittish as cats. They kept swiveling their heads from the bright daylight to the shape at the center of the circle.

  “Move!”

  In the midst of the bystanders lay a woman. She was on her back, one leg awkwardly crumpled. Her chest was a mass of gore. A cop knelt astride her, trying to put pressure on the wound as he leaned in to blow air into her lungs. She’d dropped her bags, and her groceries were strewn around her, apples and bananas and coffee and a frozen pizza and a container of vanilla ice cream that had broken open on impact.

  Number seventeen.

  The shot had been precise. One moment she’d been walking from the grocery store, eco-conscious canvas bags on her shoulder, car keys in hand. Then her chest had exploded.

  Had she been considering what to cook for dinner? Looking forward to seeing her husband or child? Remembering a favorite scene from a movie?

  She was probably thinking of the man about to kill her.

  Everyone knew that Chicago was a big city, and that the odds of being targeted were tiny. But on a gut level, everyone was certain that they were. That’s what terror did. Terror shut down the higher impulses, love and thought and creativity, and supplanted them with brain-stem fear. It turned human beings into field mice skittering for cover, expecting the hawk’s shadow and the pinch of talons.

  The degradation made Brody almost as angry as the murders.

  “Who are you?” The cop was a big guy, his belly straining below his bulletproof vest. His name badge read J. SOKOLOFSKY. He had his sidearm out.

  “Will Brody, FBI.” He fished for his ID with his left hand. “You the first on scene?”

  “We’d just stopped for coffee.” Sokolofsky started to gesture at the Starbucks with his gun. Brody caught it, said, “Whoa. Put that away.”

  “What?” The cop flushed, holstered the pistol. “Right.”

  “Did you see anything?”

  “No. Just heard it, came running.”

  Brody turned to the city around him. Gauging sight lines, looking for bright flashes in dark windows. Not staring at any particular thing, just running his eyes over the world to see if anything stuck out. It was a way of seeing he’d developed on deployment, where everything had to be assessed in terms of potential threat. Minarets weren’t graceful towers raised in praise of Allah; they were sniper nests. Winding streets weren’t evidence of a picturesque history; they were death traps where bullets rode the walls and the barrel of an AK could jut from any window. As sirens screamed in and helicopter rotors whapped closer, Chicago felt more like Fallujah than like the home he’d known his whole life.