Almost Alive (The Beautiful Dead Book 3) (37 page)

“Dear child,” says my mother. “We are going to need you, now more than ever. Megan, sweetie, you’re going to serve the greatest purpose of all.”

Megan looks to me, to Ash, to Marigold, confused. “What do you mean?”

Sad fact is, my mother and I haven’t told the others. Neither has John, stony-faced as he is anyway, nor my mom. None of the others know that the stone is no more.

“Tell me,” Megan insists, her eye fierce and steely.

I brace myself for a truth I was hoping never to utter. “We are the Dead, and we are eternal.” I direct my next words to the others, Marigold and Ash. “But the Living are …
more
eternal.”

“What do you mean?” asks Ash, her face blank, her eyes blanker. Even Marigold’s expression is frozen, her hands gripping the porch banisher anxiously.

There is no easy way to tell them, so I just do. In a matter of words, I tell the Dead what we might be looking forward to: an indeterminate amount more of our Second Life before falling to dust. We may have years of time left. We may have just days. The Anima in us will return to the planet when it’s ready whether it has our permission or not.

The others are silent for a while. Then, unexpectedly, Ash smiles and, thoughtful, she says, “Y’know, in this strange way, it’s almost like being alive again. You never really know how much time you have.”

“I might be ready to become a flower,” Marigold decides, I guess comforting herself with the sweet belief that she’ll somehow come back as flora.

Megan takes the news gently, sitting on the bottom porch step and drawing shapes in the dirt with her toe as she talks. “I have to count us lucky. A part of me thought, when I sent you off on your mission, that I’d never see you or anyone again. So, I guess I got another chance.” Her Human eye meets mine, soft and kind.

“You have to tell our story, Megan.” The wind keeps pulling my hair in front of my face, so I draw it to the side so I can keep my gaze on my lifelong friend. “You have to keep our legacy alive. The world doesn’t deliver second chances, not like this, and if the future learns any lesson from our existence, I hope it’s that you—”

“You have to embrace what you have,” my mother interjects, “before reaching for more.”

I turn to my mother, studying her cool demeanor, and know with a heavy heart what her greed has cost her in both her Lives.

“You must love while you can,” utters Ash.

Yes, the lesson from the Chief, I want to say aloud. Well, from Brock, really, but perhaps everyone knows precisely for whom Ash speaks.

“You must do all you can, and be the fool,” Marigold puts in cheerily. “No one will remember you, if you give them nothing to remember.”

Smiling now, I voice my own: “The world will give you what you give it. Reciprocity.” I think of Claire as if she were sitting next to me, her head on my shoulder. “And it’s never too late to change.”

Megan takes my hands and we fall into another embrace. The tender silence of the porch holds all our promises for the future, Megan’s mission made clear. When she leaves to return to the Necropolis, she carries with her our legacies.

I hope that this burden makes her, in fact, lighter.

The last time I ever see my little grown-up Tulip, she smiles and waves at me from the North Trenton Gate. Her smile makes me see the little girl who screamed in the cages, who screamed with joy when I found her at her camp, who followed me into the Battle of Trenton and the Battle of Garden. When she disappears into the woods, I move to the gate and watch, half-hidden behind the wall. I watch as she crosses the terrain from the dead woods to the thriving woods, a gradient of black to green as she crosses back into the world of the Living, there to stay forever. May her mind always wonder. May her belly always be full. May her heart always beat.

Time is a gentle monster sometimes. I’m with Ash in the Refinery during her last moment. Marigold is fixing Brains with a new set of legs and an arm, imported from the hospital of the Necropolis, when Ash turns to the window, startled by something. Her eyes grow big, then soft, her mouth parted in awe. Ash turns to me right then as if she wants to say something, but her face falls apart too quickly, followed by the rest of her body in a mellow rainfall of dust. Marigold and I turn, our alarmed eyes meeting, and neither of us say another word.

Brains only enjoys her legs for a week and a half before deciding how to finish the sentence she’s stuck on. “I am happy,” she tells me. With an innocent, childlike glow in her eyes, she leans her head on my shoulder one night when we’re all circled around the fire, and it’s there in that chair with her head on my shoulder that she, almost carefully, crumples into a pile of bony pieces.

“The reason I do it,” Jasmine explains to us one day when we’re relaxing in the old lounge of the Town Hall, the front windows lending a view of the whole Square, “is because a person oughtn’t be alone when they go. We were robbed of that opportunity with Ann, but I know she wouldn’t want Jimmy to suffer alone.” Jasmine turns to face the Square, searching for the words. “Sometimes, he’ll sing to her in the caves, hoping she hears it.” Then, she chuckles. “I guess in some respects, we’re all alone. How ironic. We’re alone … together. And I suspect that’s exactly how I’ll go: alone together with Jimmy and Ann.”

When we’re heading back to the cul-de-sac, Jasmine tells John what a strong man he’s become, both inside and out. She swears to us it’s her birthday, making us promise to throw her another epic party, as long as Marigold bakes the perfect cake. We’re still trying to decide what that perfect cake is when Jasmine bids us farewell and leaves the city again with Jimmy. We never see her return.

I hope her Final Sight was the sunrise, at long last.

The rain comes a few days later and we all stay in Jasmine’s house, listening to the torrential downpour as it pummels against every inch of the roof. Marigold, John and I share stories about Jasmine’s party back when there were so many more Undead in the world. “It was where Ann met Jimmy,” Marigold states proudly, and I try to argue, insisting that the two of them already knew each other before the party, but Marigold changes the subject to talk of the frightfully awful music that was played.

As she excitedly tells Lynx and my mother the most scandalous stories of the Undead that she can think of—and there are plenty—John and I find a spot near the kitchen, cuddled in an armchair that’s resting by the broken-down stove for no reason at all. His fingers play in my hair and I run my hand along his chest, caressing him. He kisses me once, making me smile. I stare into his dark, muddy eyes and return the kiss tenderly.

“Do you believe in fate?” he asks, his voice croaky and distant, as we likely haven’t uttered a word in hours.

I’m playing with a loose thread on his shirt when I answer. “Not really. I believe we’re given opportunities. I believe there’s as much value in missing an opportunity as there is in catching one. I think every effort and every mistake makes us better. I think …” My mind drifts away, remembering a horrible thing or two that I’ve done in one Life or the other. “I think every life is eternal.”

“Do you think our Anima will … I don’t know … find each other again?” He’s having trouble speaking, like his emotions are catching hold of his throat. I’m reminded of the night that Human John caressed me in my bed, holding me tight and crying into my back.

“I’m scared, John.”

“I know,” he whispers. “I am too.”

I turn around on the chair, lifting myself so that I can see John’s face. His handsome, chiseled jaw. His eyes that are so deep, I fall in helplessly every time. His mess of brown hair and his broad, strong nose.

“I want to see you,” I tell him, my voice trembling. “I want my last sight to be you. I don’t care about the sun or the moon or whatever’s shining above us when it happens. I’ve seen it all before. I just want to see you.”

He smiles, breaking apart all that coarseness of his face with dimples and teeth. It’s infectious, his smile, because I find myself smiling too.

“Funny,” he mumbles. “I kinda wanted my last sight to be you.”

“Well, well. We can’t both get what we want,” I jape.

With that, our faces grow close, and our lips closer. The world turns and the party of three carries on in the other room. Long after the rain has passed, we’re still in the house, unbothered by the wet world outside.

I don’t know how many days pass after the rain. It seems like an eternity that the rest of us spend our days chatting idly and entertaining ourselves with hobbies. Marigold starts another project in the pink building, but she keeps changing her mind of what she wants to build, tearing her things apart the moment they’re taking shape. I’m not sure when it happens, but the next time I check on her progress, I find only her clothes on the ground. In the pile, I see a steel-plated forearm and another blunt hunk of metal that was her other arm—a secret container in which she kept things. When I open the arm, curious, I find it full of fingernails. The project she’d left unfinished, it looks like a giant, creepy flower made out of hands.

That night, we sit in that same circle, another fire going, but of the ten chairs we had set out long ago, only four are occupied now. Lynx is poking the fire with a stick when he stares up through the hole in the tent and drops his jaw. “No,” he breathes, disbelieving. Suddenly he ditches the stick and takes off running. “No,” he grunts under his breath, running away. We watch as he runs, chased by an invisible beast, and somewhere between Jasmine’s house and the horizon, Lynx’s legs fall apart beneath him, and the wind carries the rest of him away.

“It was a necessary sacrifice,” my mother reassures me as the three of us sit on the roof of the hospital, staring into the silvery sky and wondering when it will turn blue for one of us. “You did the right thing.”

“I’m watching each of my friends die.”

“No, sweetheart. We’re already dead. We’ve been dead. Julianne and Claire have lived. You and I …”

“Then what is this?” I ask, my eyes terrified of the endless silver above me, terrified of the man at my side who will, at any moment, leave me, terrified at my mom and her sudden impermanence. “What is the purpose of our Second Lives? Why are we here?”

“One Life wasn’t enough, so the world gave us two. The Living needed the Dead for a purpose,” my mother insists. “You decide what that purpose is. Sweetheart, I’ll never leave your side. We are, all of us, forever alive.”

“Forever alive,” I agree, liking the words.

And then my mother bolts up, her eyes to the sky. As fast as the panic sets in, it releases, and she’s smiling so broadly my heart breaks in half. “Oh,” she mutters, her eyes detaching from the sky and, instead, staring ahead at something. “Why, of course.”

I follow her eyes. Perched on the edge of the roof is a tiny ruffled blackbird.

“Mom, I’m not ready,” I tell her, clinging to her hand.

Her eyes meet mine, gentle and present and aware. “You, my sweet, dear Claire, are the greatest thing I ever accomplished.” The hand upon which she’d propped herself up gives away, crumbling, and she finishes her words on her back. “Mom’s with you forever, baby. Forever and ever and ever and—”

Her face vanishes and I shut my eyes, capturing that last image of her in my mind, refusing to acknowledge her demise. I feel John’s arms wrap around me, holding me tight, knowing I need him to. His strong arms support me while I scream. He doesn’t let me get away. He doesn’t let me fall apart. He embraces me protectively while I scream until my voice breaks and until Mother Nature herself hears that I have given in, that it has won.

When I’ve finished screaming, John is still holding me and the world is still there. Isn’t that the point? Isn’t that why I did the stupid thing I did? Isn’t that why I destroyed the Undead power … because the Living deserve to live? Because we almost destroyed the planet? Because without us, this world is better off?

“There’s … nothing more unnatural … than a second chance,” I finally get out.

John nuzzles his face into my neck. The ashes that became of my mother dance in the wind, and when I finally dare to turn my head, the stupid blackbird is gone.

“This is so dumb,” John mumbles into my ear.

I turn, looking him in the face. “What do you mean?”

“This is so dumb, all of this. Why are we suffering?” He gets to his feet, pulls me up onto mine. “Come.”

“Where are we going?” I ask.

“Who cares,” he says, a smile playing on his face. “Wherever it is, I’ll race you there.”

Then, to my surprise, he’s running. The horrors and the heaviness and the pain drop from me in an instant, and I chase after John, exhilarated.

Across the Square, we run. I’ve caught up to him now and, side by side, hands gripped, we race through the ghost town of Trenton. The gates find us bolting through them laughing, and as the dead woods surround us, we say goodbye to Trenton forever.

The woods give way to sparser woods and we never stop running. “I know where we’re headed,” I confess to John.

“Into the sky,” he agrees, laughing.

When the trees have fallen behind us, the all-too-familiar edge of the cliff looms. The two of us fall to the ground, resting at the edge of the cliff. On our backs, our arms touching, I listen to the world as it breathes.

“What’s your biggest regret?” I ask, curious.