The Whispers (19 page)

“I don’t?” Mari looks at me, confused. “I … I don’t?”

“She’ll be going with you,” finishes the professor, “and you
will
be monitored. Consider your actions and the antics
of your ‘well-meaning’ friends, Jennifer. Remember the statements you signed,” he says, his eyes narrowing, which always sits so oddly on his face, what with the eyebrows missing. “It would be a shame for anyone else to disappear much in the same way that your ‘abductor’ Dana did. Am I made perfectly clear?”

My teeth clatter within my skull. I’m out of options;
that
much is clear. “Yes,” I say quietly.

He turns then and opens the door, intending to leave.

I rise, swelling with a passion that I can’t ignore any longer. “You knew about it the whole time.” I’m ripe with the curiosity of years of research and
yearning
that I will soon be made to shelve permanently. “Professor, please. Tell me why you didn’t stop me sooner, why you let me learn so much, only to silence me when I find the answers I’ve been seeking. You owe me that, at the very least.”

He stops in the doorway, his head turned halfway in my direction. He wears a smirk of amusement, the closest thing I’ll ever get to a smile from the cold and stoic Praun.

“Oh, how I’ve always admired your hunger.” He turns a bit more to meet my eyes. “May you always be hungry, and never know the true emptiness of death.”

The door is left open when he departs, leaving Mari and I in a quiet soup of mystery and wonder.

“Today is the first day of the rest of your Second Life,” I tell my friend days later, after she’s all packed for our weeklong trip to my home. I had to help her pick through her things for hours, seeing as she had no idea what she owned. “You ready to go on an adventure?”

The light returns to my roommate’s eyes, which had been somewhat lacking the past few days. Mari, the
real
Mari, she’s still in there somewhere. I’ll coax her out a little bit each day. But until she’s fully back—and until she’s had that Waking Dream that the fuzzy-haired Mayor Damn went on about—I’ll take the little flicker of light in her eyes to be all the answer I need.

John doesn’t start classes until the next term, which gives him the perfect excuse to come with us too. He has nothing to fill his days with but time and research, so I borrowed six different books from the Skymark Library on Engineering for him. He’s read three pages so far. “I’m more of a
hands
-
on
kind of guy,” he explained to me when I teased him about how little he’d read, and that innuendo of his turned into a tease that ended with our clothes on the floor. It was a very nice day.

“I’ll meet you by the shuttle!” exclaims Mari, carrying her bag outside and letting the door shut behind her.

John comes out of our room right then and sets his heavy bag on the couch. Then his deep, rich eyes run up and down my figure, as if seeing me for the first time.

“You look nice,” he tells me in that gruff, barbaric way of his, bringing his stubbly face to mine for a kiss. It feels more like a bite with all the aggression he puts into it.

I pull away with a chuckle, just to get a good look at his face. Our adventure has brought us so much closer together. Something’s built between us that I’m not sure was there before. A bridge of trust, maybe. We depended on one another in that dangerous realm—you know, the one that totally doesn’t have walking dead things in it.

And maybe one day, he’ll say he loves me. And maybe he never will. Maybe he’ll never need to, always showing it in his own rough, brooding, John-like way.

“Your heart’s racing,” he observes, our bodies pressed against one another. “Am I doing that to you?”

“No,” I assure him. “It’s just a strange sort of awful symptom of being alive. I think you’re afflicted with this most troublesome condition, too. See?” I put a hand to his chest, my palm enjoying John’s strong, healthy pulse.

He clasps my hand, a twisty smirk finding his lip—that signature
John
sort of smile. “I think it’s just a symptom of being near each other.”

“Then we better prepare for our hearts to race a lot.”

“Every day,” he breathes as his lips rush to meet mine.

I want to say this trip is going to heal us. I want to believe that I’m not really a symptom of the end of the world. I want to think that we can truly put the Beautiful Dead behind us, that it’s all over with.

But I fear it’s only just begun.

The Whispers are silent today, and the Winter girl’s totally-not-made-of-steel device flickers in my bony hands, its last breath of life shuddering within it. It must be alive, this strange artifact, because I’m witnessing it die before my eyes.

I’ve been touching its face, learning the ways of its inner workings. I made its face change several times. It’s an odd little thing, this metal creature that belonged to Winter, to Jennifer, to whatever her name is and was. The face became an image of a man in a beige suit. The face became an array of words I couldn’t understand. It turned into many things before my eyes, just with the swipe of my long, bony finger … this odd, chrome chameleon.

My sister took off with the rest of the Dead that she gathered. So heartbroken at the Jenny-Winter woman’s departure, she didn’t even have the heart to face me. Poor sister. She will hunt for the blood until the end of time.

I push my finger at the chrome chameleon, and then it plays its worst trick of all. Its face turns into hers. Upon its flickering, dying face, it shows Jennifer and her beautiful white hair. Completely unmoving, the image of Jennifer stares at me, her eyes sharp as icicles. I bring the face closer to mine, mesmerized by it. All around her, the shimmer of colors that play in most candles kisses my eyes. What a wonderful and terrible thing to do to me, this evil chrome chameleon … to torture me with its last breath.

Then, it turns to darkness. The little metal creature dies. No life left. It didn’t even bleed. Does it have any? I bite at the thing, chewing its corner. I gnaw and I chomp, unsuccessful in puncturing its hard, metal skin.

No life left.

Nothing.

Until the end of time.

I walk the Whispers for as long as my legs will take me. The mists never again greet me, and I’m certain they never will. The Whispers care so little for us Dead. They bring us here, the mists and the hisses and the screams, but they abandon us too. Humans are so foolish at times, feeling they’ve nothing to live for. What I wouldn’t give for a taste of that life again … that life I can’t remember.

How cruel, to have had my Waking Dream so long ago that I can’t even remember what I’d … remembered.

It’s then that I see the blemish in the endless waste of the Whispers. A mysterious thing that catches my eye. I move quicker now, rushing to meet the strange anomaly that I have found in the Whispers.

I drop to my knees, hearing the cracking of my bones. I pluck the curious treasure off the ground, examining it in my gritty, grey palm.

It is a shining, emerald-green stone that now rests in my hand. A gift from the Whispers, I suppose. A message to the Dead. A challenge, perhaps …

And to that pretty green stone, I offer a faint smile and one little word—whispered, of course: “
Anima
.”

The end.

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The Whispers?

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The Beautiful Dead

An excerpt from the first book in the original
Beautiful Dead Trilogy
by Daryl Banner

Prologue

It’s so cold. It’s so, so cold.

What you should know is, the first time a dead man opened his eyes, the twenty-seven doctors in the room screamed. The dead man did not bite them or foam at the mouth. He didn’t claw at them with his dirty nails nor did he grunt and moan like the dead were expected to do.

The dead man just opened his tiny mouth and asked, “Where am I?”

I’m so cold, but let me assure you, it was a quiet end. That’s what you should know above all else. Even with bombs all over the news. Mushroom clouds and calmly-reporting reporters. Debris snowing from the heavens, like winter. Bombs here, bombs there, bombs in your backyard and your neighbor’s living room. Smoke and liquid fire ate up the cities, the forests, the children.

No one knew exactly what was happening, and by the time they did, it was over.

And they were dead. All of them. Fire and smoke still covered the land like a blanket long after they were gone, the last of leaves and tree trunks burning on. The final blink of mother nature’s eye before she retired for a long, long sleep. Sweet dreams.

I’m not sure where I was when all this happened. I may have died already, but it doesn’t matter. None of us were going to survive.

At least, not completely.

If time were an endless plain, this event is the chasm cut deep in the earth, its yawn spanning far beyond what light can reach. This awesome rift, we will never know for sure how wide it is. But on the other side, as sure as we are that there is another side, that’s where my story begins. Not when the world ended, but long after.

After the trees have all but expired.

After oceans burn and mountains fall.

After the sky.

It’s so, so cold, but before my life is gone … before I forget my mother’s face or my favorite flower or my name, I need to explain something, and it’s crucial that you pay attention. I’m so cold, but just let me say this one last thing to you before I’m dead, before I’m

before I’m

before I’m

Are you paying attention?