Almost Alive (The Beautiful Dead Book 3) (3 page)

What am I doing? Of course he doesn’t. Why am I clinging to the worthless hope that he does?

Helena, my closest friend and Reaper, I wish you were here to guide me. I can’t do this alone. But the Whispers have given me exactly what I asked for—John’s Second Life—and it would be rude and irresponsible of me not to accept it.

I have to accept it.

“You need a name,” I finally decide. Just hearing myself say those words, it’s like I’ve truly accepted that John’s First Life—and his memory of what we had—is gone. “I’ll call you …” I look into his eyes, the brown one and the ghost-grey. My unbeating heart swells so big, it pushes against the bars of my ribcage, a prisoner. “John.”

The panic releases from his eyes.

The power of a name.

“John,” he says.

I gasp. He speaks. He speaks and he sounds the same. John’s voice. I’m trembling. Have I done it right?

“John,” I agree. “John. Hi. M-My name is Winter.”

“Winter,” he repeats, as if feeling the name on his tongue. “W … Winter.” He looks away, his gaze drifting to the left, then to the right. “Where am I?”

I want to hear him say my name a thousand times. “The Whispers. Harvesting Grounds. Or—sorry—the Haunted Waste. It has many names, no one can decide what to call it.” I reach for his hand. Touching it, his gaze snaps back to me, startled. “You’re safe. I’m going to take you to … to the, um …” What was it called? Oh, right. “The Refinery. You’ll meet some friendly faces there.”

“Refinery?” His voice is small, trapped, quivery. This helpless version of John … I’d never thought I’d see such fragility in my strong, brooding John. How strange that it took his dying to unlock it. “Th-That sounds horrible.”

“It’s … They … You’ll get fixed up a bit. Though, to be honest, you look really well as is.” I smile gently.

His left ear falls off.

“You said your name’s Winter?” he asks, oblivious to the body part he just lost. “Like … Like the season?”

“Yes.” I’m speaking tragically to the ear. “Though, hopefully not as cold.”

“And I’m John?” he mutters, as if to make sure … and the right side of his face slowly begins to sag. Oh no.

“The one and only.” Should I reach up and press his face back on? Should I ignore it and pretend not to notice?

“Okay,” he says, taking it all in. He peers down at his hands as if suddenly discovering them. “My hands … My hands aren’t working.” He shrugs, his arms hanging limp. He shrugs again, this time with a grunt. “They were just working a moment ago. Why aren’t my hands—?”

“It’s quite alright,” I assure him, stealthily swiping up his fallen ear and hoping he doesn’t notice. “That’s what the Refinery’s for. To get your body, uh … working.”

“Yes,” he seems to agree, though his face now appears twisted into a permanent grimace, what with half of it falling off. To avoid any further decay, I lift him hurriedly to his feet, only to discover that nearly all his clothing has fallen away. He’s completely naked except for a scrap of fabric hanging conveniently at his waist, which were once long ago a pair of pants. His lazy eyes staring out at the world, confused, the ghost-grey one and the brown, he doesn’t seem to notice.

“One foot in front of the other,” I encourage him.

Still staring curiously at the sky, he only shuffles, his legs not moving properly. Not wasting a second’s time, I put his arm over my shoulder and help him across the Haunted Waste. His right foot seems to work, but his left just drags along. It’s a good thing we Undead don’t regard weight the way Humans do; John basically weighs nothing to me. Either that, or we’re incredibly strong, despite how ridiculously brittle we can be at times. I still haven’t quite figured out all the mysteries of the obviously conflicting and paradoxical physics of our kind and, quite frankly, I plan never to.

“The sky is completely grey,” he complains, his voice lilting worriedly. “Is it about to rain?”

“No, no,” I assure him. “To us, the sky is always … Well, our kind can’t really see the—”

He loses his grip on my shoulder and tumbles to the ground with a sickly grunt. After a moment of hands and legs and awkward mumbles, I end up taking John’s body in my arms like he’s my damsel in distress, and when I’ve lifted him off the earth, I’m struck suddenly by the dark, heavy memory of carrying him halfway across the world. Of course, when I’d carried him then, he was dead. The John in my arms is not dead, but not quite alive either. Something in between, I guess. Just like me.

There is something about carrying him in my arms that roots me immediately. I feel a surge of pleasure, even despite the morbid circumstance. With John pressed into my body again, in my arms, I’m swelling inside with a love I’ve been waiting for
so long
to feel again. This man in my arms, I’ve crossed a world for. This man in my arms, he’s the only man I ever want to love, dead or alive.

John stares at me, legs dangling, arms dangling. He lifts one blunt brow. “You’re strong,” he observes. I can almost hear humor in his voice.
Humor.

I smile lamely. “You will be, too.”

The Haunted Waste whispers cruel things at our backs as we depart. The wind hangs on my limbs, dancing around my legs, but I hold John firmly in my arms and carry him toward the Dead Wood, a wall of barren, dying trees that surround my hometown of—

I stop at the mouth of the woods. My eyes grow and my jaw might literally fall off. What once was a spread of dying trees is now a webbed, overgrown thicket of green. I literally can’t believe the sight my eyes are lending me. Even the soil at the foot of the Haunted Waste where the trees abruptly end bears brave, healthy sprouts of grass.

Trapped here by my own astonishment, I’m forced to wonder once again a most pressing question:
how the hell long was I waiting for John to Rise from the earth??

“Something wrong?” he asks.

“No.” I continue my stroll into the woods, undaunted.

Just before entering, my foot kicks into something. With a glance downward, I see a giant, detached spider leg. Promptly paying no mind to said dead appendage, I step over the vile thing and carry on. The illusory shadows of trees gently brush over us, the subtle streaks of silver light tickling our hair, and I enjoy my embrace of John’s body. I peer through the web of trees, wondering if a sun has dared to show its face to me after all this time of being dead. But alas, the sky is still a permanent turmoil of greyness, and the shadows and the light I think I see are just another of this world’s ample illusions.

Like life, like death.

As I cross through the forest—and being thankful as ever that the way to Trenton is a simple straight-shot down the path, as these woods have become otherwise entirely unrecognizable—I realize that my innocent footfalls are not killing the grass as they used to. Anything natural—like water or, say, tulips—is usually repelled or killed utterly by the presence of an Undead. Even touching a piece of fruit would cause it to rot instantly.

Perhaps Earth has, at long last, decided to embrace the Risen Dead. The mere thought lifts my spirits at once.

Smiling, I dare a glance at John. He’s looking around curiously as if he were just a baby taking in the sights of the world for the first time. I
know
it’s him. It’s the man I love. But I also see the First Life vanished from his eyes, and I have to wonder, is John really in there … or has he gone away forever?

“What’s that?” he asks curiously.

I look ahead. What I see before me does not inspire a jolt of happiness. The gates of Trenton are opened and bent inward as if bashed by some giant’s fist, hanging desperately off their hinges. As I slowly pass through the gates, I find the streets littered with paper, with broken glass, with filth. Tiny sprouts and weeds poke through the shattered cement and stone roads. Thick vines crawl up the faces of buildings like great green serpents, and the broken windows of nearby storefronts give the buildings an eerie disposition, as if they each have eyes, and they are all dead … dead eyes staring me cold in the face.

I resist a sudden, stupid urge to call out for someone. Something tells me there isn’t a soul here at all and hasn’t been for quite some time. My only tiny comfort is how amazing it feels to hold the love of my unlife in my arms.

“Is this your hometown?” he asks.

“Used to be.” I don’t know anything anymore. I don’t know a single damn thing.

“Which one’s your house?”

“None of them.” It’s nearly impossible to step another foot into this nightmare. My hometown, Trenton, now a home only to the howls of winds. A home to nothing. Overgrown by nature, consumed as though the green fingers of the planet are slowly pulling the town down into its earthy, sodden mouth. A ring of purple flowers grows on a fallen lamppost like crumbs on a chin.

I have to be sure there’s nothing left.

I force myself to make way down the main drag that leads to the Square where the pink building called the Refinery squats patiently. Nothing that makes sound or breath finds us, save the wind. When I lay my eyes on the Refinery, I find it not so pink anymore. Boarded up, silent as a tomb, the building stares back at me with the same dead eyes as the others.

Pushing through its creaky door, a ghastly curtain of dust and death brushes past our faces. When I move into the room, I find the exam table missing, the table upon which
I
was laid when it was my first day and I required a fixing up. The cabinets are all open and empty. It’s like someone scavenged the place of all valuables. Even the enormous machine that Marigold would use to create fake flesh is gone. It’s like she … It’s like they all …

“Moved out,” I finish under stolen breath.

John leans his head against my arm, as if snuggling. I squint down at him, meeting his eyes, and he grins. With half his face sagging, the effect is not cute. “It’s dark in here,” he complains.

He’s pretending to be alive. Already, hardly minutes out of the grave and he’s already a Pretender. “Our eyes don’t regard light in the same way the Living’s do. You’ll never fear the darkness again,” I say, feeling prolific. Then I spot a cockroach scuttling toward my feet and lose all composure, screaming, just as it slips through a crack in the floorboards.

We’re out of the Refinery the next second, and I’m powerwalking down the main drag, determined to get out of Trenton as fast as possible. I officially have the creeps. My first roommate was a cockroach and I’d grown quite comfortable around them. I’m not certain what’s changed except for the fact that this ghost town version of Trenton is scaring me, cockroach or no. With a broken John hanging in my arms, I opt not to run; I can’t promise he won’t accidentally lose a foot or a finger or a face.

“Going already?” he asks.

“Most decidedly.” We reach the gates. We pass the gates. We’re pushing through the vibrant green forest now and nothing can touch us, not even the wind.

“Oh.” He peers past my arm, watching as Trenton vanishes in the distance behind us, I presume. “Where was everyone else?”

I don’t answer his question and just keep putting one foot in front of the other. I have no idea where I’m going. A strange, uncomfortable panic has settled into my chest and I’m struggling not to cry—which is stupid, because I literally have no tears and, as an Undead, am physically incapable. Still, regardless of knowing this, I feel very, very capable of tears. Very, very capable of panic.

Somewhere in me, deep beneath the rot and the immortality and the whatever, there still lives a Human girl who once was named Claire Westbrook … a girl who hated everything and everyone.

Where are all my friends? Why is Trenton completely abandoned? For some reason I can’t seem to think of where else everyone might be. I worry humorlessly that maybe I’ve lost all memory of my own Second Life. Maybe I need another Waking Dream to remember the horrors I experienced in Garden that day.

I’d give anything to forget it. I’d give just about anything to pretend it never happened and to go back to the way things were before …

“How old are you?”

The question catches me by surprise. I discover that my thoughts have brought my hurried pace down to a crawl. “I was nineteen when I died.”

“You’re dead too,” he says, as if to remind himself.

“Yes. We all are. Everyone is, almost.”

“Okay. And … And I was once alive, too?”

Oh, the questions. These are not the questions I was hoping to answer so soon. I wanted to be able to take him to the Refinery just as I was taken there, to be made back up into a person, to feel
whole
again. I didn’t realize it at the time, despite how snarky and self-loathing I was on my first day, but the process I was put through
welcomed
me into this world. Helena and her blunt words, her guidance, despite my rude way of thanking her. Marigold and her cheery work on mending my body and the icecap irises she gave me. It was all part of a … post-life grieving process, a necessary comfort. I took it all for granted.

Still, somehow, John seems positively unfazed by his lack of welcome. He’s perfectly happy, one might say. Downright chipper, even.

“Yes,” I finally answer. “You were … You were very, very alive.”