After

By Jeremy Benjamin

On a world devastated by geological calamity, a young woman comes of age in a land where nobody has a name. Awakening in captivity, she recalls hushed whispers of disappearances associated with a clandestine movement. Being groomed for a ritual that will seal her fate, she faces the ultimate challenge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wings ePress, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 1, 2006
• ISBN: 9781597050395

Book preview

Prologue

The man who had refused a name lay convulsing on the cave floor, his body practically severed in half. He felt nothing from the waist down, but he knew that his legs were twitching. He knew that his face was melting. Looking at the fountain of blinding yellow lava erupting in front of him that had not been there minutes ago, he knew that the world was ending. Tremors in the rock bed beneath him still rattled his spine—aftershocks did not aptly describe it—but the man did not tremble. The nerves in his body were all scrambled beyond accessibility, but as he breathed in deeply, he became aware of himself, not as a sentient being, but as a logical conclusion. He visualized his anatomy as pages and pages of circuit diagrams and chemical formulas, and the more he calculated, the more accessible existence became. There was something in that fountain, something arising from deep within the Earth, or deep within his delirium, or both, something he was meant to see.

His whole life had been leading up to this. He knew that now.

He couldn’t look at it. It was too bright. But he had to. His forehead was not just sweating, it was sizzling, blisters welling up and bursting like oil in a frying pan, the fluid running down his brow and stinging his eyes. He was being cooked alive, and he could not move. Lying trapped beneath boulders that had not been there minutes ago, he focused. The pain was hovering somewhere outside his body, sublimating and rising out of his pores like steam, ghosts congealing in flickers on the ceiling of the cave to taunt him. To goad him.

He focused.

He would not die down here. He knew that now.

Rivulets of the unearthly bright lava were seeping up through cracks in the rock and running towards him. Still he did not tremble.

Hours passed. Days passed. He couldn’t be sure.

He focused.

And then he saw something miraculous.

The man who had refused a name would go on to write a book.

Rebirth

One

I’ll close my eyes , she thought.

Her eyes would not close.

She felt a tickling sensation on the insides of her eyelids, and the only way to scratch it was to look down periodically. At this height, the wind was a fine spray, and it tickled not unpleasantly. The air did not exert pressure on her, but seemed to be harvesting something from her body like ants hauling off morsels of lunch from the picnic blanket. Whatever it was inside her that had killed several men, jumped out the window of a speeding train, scrambled through squalid alleyways, and raced up sixty flights of stairs over the course of the past two hours, it was escaping her a little with each shiver. That was somebody else—she could not have done those things, any more than she could summon blood to the muscles that operated her pupils. Besides, there was no reason to look down. How did she get here? It didn’t matter. She still had no name.

In the span of time it took her to catch her breath, take her shoes off and walk down an imaginary aisle to where she now stood, the plan—if she’d had one at all—ceased to matter, and an empty euphoria now filled her. This was the literal edge of the world, was it not? This was not a personal summit, not a metaphorical anything. This was it. In a moment of giddiness, she envisioned her life as a rapidly forming ocean bursting through a dam, branching into rivulets and converging again in her adolescence, eroding layers of bedrock and expanding to its full potential only to drop off into a sudden unknown. Keeping her eyes open seemed significant somehow, as though it were an act of defiance. She had already defied authority, defied any cultural or physical disadvantages associated with her sex, defied all manner of social structure, defied locked doors, defied glass windows, defied she was pretty sure gravity; the only thing left to defy was that which she was not ready to see.

The wave of emotion that had chased her through the streets and up the stairs now caught up to her in a converged flood. She wept, reduced to the question every child asks, a question of pure submission; now what? Now, she could keep her eyes open, that’s what. Jumping was not so much a viable option as a... what? An indulgence? A fantasy? A philosophy? A means to reality? Reality was down, and down did not exist so long as she did not look. Even so, seeing wouldn’t mean grasping it, grasping it didn’t mean believing it, and believing it would yield no advantage. Jumping was not so much a considerations as... she was going to jump. But not yet; her toes were numb. She would have to get some blood circulating to them.

Her lungs inflated like epicures at a feast, respiring so rapidly that her ribs ached. Her diaphragm seemed to have gotten the impression that air was illegal and the police were on their way. Standing rigidly at the tip of the unfenced concrete border, she relished a moment of self-pity, but could not find the inspiration to sustain it.

Think; now what? There was nowhere to go, and there was no when to go there, and neither was there anywhere or any whence to stay, and that was perfectly okay. She couldn’t remember what deity was en vogue this week, or what article of clothing was the new hype, or the current political state of the world, but at this height none of that mattered. The world before her was no less discomposed than she was; if she was preparing to jump and plummet into that world, to romantically collide with it, then it would meet her half way. The entire landscape was perched at a metaphysical cliff of its own, trembling and daring itself to dive into her. She continued to look straight ahead.

Tears flowed casually from her bloated lids, and when it got to the point of obscuring the view, the idea of looking down became more bearable. Blurred decimation was not decimation. In its present state, the ruins were not quite a landscape yet they were far from a cityscape. Ruins... yes, ruins. Viewing the panorama through a lens of either tears or sweat—she wasn’t sure anymore—she tried to picture the sensation of falling, the sights and sounds, the screeching blur of motion that could not be separated into colors and shapes, the rush of wind making her pubic hair stand on end. She tried to imagine falling so fast that there ceased to be any difference between up and down. All at once there was no jumping. It was not a question of whether there was an option of jumping; there was no such thing as jumping, just as there was no such thing as falling—these were words that had no meaning. Yet, the mental utterance of those words had the peculiar effect of stopping her lungs from taking in air. She forced herself to breathe, and the breath she took was weak and unsatisfying. Since the words no longer referred to a physical action, perhaps the mere thinking them was to fall and plummet into her own body; she shrank.

She gulped and opened her eyes. There was a beast inside her. She had been promised to a beast months ago and had evaded it, and now, there was a beast inside her gnashing its teeth that she couldn’t locate. She gulped down hard, wishing for the first time in her life that she could make herself throw up, knowing that even if she could she still could not bring herself to watch the vomit fall, a ballet of consumed breakfast cereal choreographed by the wind’s artistic temperament...

AP496XX stood on the roof of the DyneHurst Center, a building she had never set foot in before, a building that had once had running elevators, temperature control, a state-of-the-art security system and a purpose. She had selected the DyneHurst Center not because of its prestige as the last testament to commerce and the dying light of civilization, and not even because it was the tallest building in the skyline (which could only be seen in daylight). She had chosen the DyneHurst Center because it was the first arbitrary hiding spot that presented itself.

AP496XX stood at the very edge of society’s tombstone, anchored by the pleasant throbbing of her calf muscles. She held her shoes in her hand dangling by her side.

The rough granite imprinted itself on the soles of her feet, trying to convince her body that it had grown out of the concrete.

A chilled breeze teased her face, causing her to realize for the first time how hot she was beneath her ArrowCorp sweatshirt that had been handed down to her by some elder in her commune. She had never given any thought to who had worn the shirt before her, where it had been. But now that she was about to pass it onto the world, it became more than an article of clothing. The sweatshirt had been manufactured, it had been worn, and it had provided warmth to faceless people on journeys. It had absorbed conversations, it had absorbed interactions, and it had absorbed the heat of passionate embraces. It had housed lust, anger, fear... It had aged. The fabric had to be haunted, and therefore, did not belong to her.

Her sweat soaked through her tank top and dampened the dark gray cotton. She tried to imagine the invisible sweat stains of lives past that had kept her warm in the night, knowing that the shirt’s real sentimentality existed in the silk-screened ArrowCorp logo itself; ArrowCorp was the leading name in communications technology. People did not have names, but corporations did. Had, rather. Everything was past tense, now.

AP496XX was a moniker administered to her by the Core Faculties at conception. In the world of her upbringing, the custom of naming was considered impractical and antiquated. The only exception to that was an honorary title granted to exceptional individuals to recognize extraordinary achievements. In such cases, the appointed heroes, having earned a customized distinction of status, would undergo a sanctioned ritual in which their self-chosen name was permanently tattooed on the part of their body most involved in the physical act of heroism, representing their rite of passage into something that went far beyond mere adulthood. The tattoo would serve as proof of their status. That naming ceremony was the ambition of every starry-eyed youngster. AP496XX liked to think of herself as worthy of having a name, but in the eyes of the world, (at the moment, her eyes encompassed the world) she was fit only for AP496XX.

It did not strike her how hot she was until she stopped to catch her breath. Her pores were urging her to strip. Before focusing on the sweatshirt, she would have to discard the sneakers in her hand. She would have to watch them vanish into indiscernible specks and imagine them hitting the ground several seconds later, bouncing high in the air. She shuddered at the thought of some bystander on the ground shocked out of his or her stupor, looking up with curiosity. Unrestrained tears streamed down her neck and saturated her ArrowCorp sweatshirt, claiming it. She looked down at the faded logo. She would have to part with it.

But first, her shoes.

Holding them by her face, she looked closely at the dark brown soles so that she could see nothing else. As she examined the dirt caked in the machined furrows with which she had tread over the past two years of her life, the landscape below took on a surreal beauty that she had never before allowed it; it was only capable of beauty as a background.

It was only beautiful when she was not looking at it.

Her eyes followed the sinuous Ravine of Fire from where it intersected the now disjoint highway just below her, from where she could make out individual knots in the network of ropes bridging the half-mile-wide river of swelling magma. From high above it gave the impression of an iridescent fire preserved in colloid form—many people claimed to have looked down at the ravine and seen the eyes of demons flicker at them for a bone-chilling instant that robbed them of all sleep the following night. Her gaze followed the ravine through all its meandering tendrils of destruction—fragments of uprooted houses, public buildings and indecipherable human structures lingered messily at the lips of the great divide like particles of food on a monster’s lips. She followed it until it was a glowing streak of zero thickness raging through distant wildernesses where trees and boulders and waterfalls were devoured as mercilessly as the entrails of urbanization upon which she stood; followed it until it faded into the horizon, an extension of the sunset etched into the land. Her eyes surveyed the Ravine of Fire like a hand slowly and systematically caressing the body of one’s lover, working its way from extremity to extremity, tingling with the seismic unpredictability of lust, yet reined in by the rehearsed ritual. The Ravine of Fire was a wound that would never scab over.

It’s now or never seemed an appropriate sentiment if there was one. She lowered the shoes to her side, inhaled slowly and tossed them. She did not watch. Her fingertips tingled as the air reintroduced itself to her calluses. Her shoes were the wind’s shoes now. If she looked down, their paths would be untraceable to the eyes, each forging its own destiny, making their own names for themselves.

A small counterweight inside her was released along with them, leaving her slightly off balance standing in her bare feet and shredded jeans and sweatshirt, inches from the edge. She knew with the sort of knowledge that belongs more to the flesh than to the intellect that at the instant her calloused feet parted with the platform they adhered to, she would forever cease to be AP496XX.

The sweatshirt was next. Her hands were neurotically kneading and stretching it.

A maxim occurred to her. Like the sweatshirt itself, the maxim’s value lay not in whom she had heard it from, but purely in its relevance to her right then. The maxim went, Hesitation is food for weakness. It is the very substance of a quitter’s convalescence back to loserdom from a fluke brush with heroic potential. As she pulled the shirt up over her head, she paused.

She paused, and she remembered.

"Open your eyes..."

The Turnover was the historical texts’ name for it. It was something that predated her birth, something that the entire planet was still reeling from. It was a term nobody had a clear explanation for, but it was universally understood that The Turnover was the cause of anything that seemed mysterious or contradictory or disturbing. The Ravine of Fire? Product of The Turnover. Cracks in the pavement? Product of The Turnover. Fluid black rock formations rising out of the wreckage of what used to be blocks of suburbia? Product of The Turnover. The eerie, unnatural desertion in the streets? Product of The Turnover. The intangible feeling of unease that keeps you awake at night? Product of The Turnover. Mass confusion? The Turnover. New deities every week? The Turnover. The look of unutterable sadness, the hopeless longing in the eyes of everybody over the age of forty? The Turnover.

What she now gazed upon from the top of the DyneHurst Center? The Turnover.

She stopped crying. Her abdominal muscles tensed up beneath her scar. It started just below her left breast and stretched down over her ribcage and tapered to a point that was impossibly narrow: sharper than the blade that inflicted it, sharper than the resolve of the hand that wielded it, sharper than a strand of hair belonging to whatever deity represented war this week. Her muscles clenched around the fading pink scar tissue like elongated jaws seizing prey, no longer muscles but vertebrae of the scar itself. Holding the sweatshirt in one hand, she slid the other hand under her shirt, slithered over her diaphragm and clutched the soft, firm flesh surrounding her scar. She ran her eyes again over the macrocosmic, awe-inspiring, myth-inspiring, cult-inspiring gash in the Earth’s surface as her fingertips glided over the scar tissue and remembered her last moments of innocence and fear.

Monster Mongers was what they called them. Strange disappearances? That would be the Monster Mongers—m&m’s for short. Don’t go out at night—Monster Mongers. Don’t talk to strangers—Monster Mongers. They looked just like normal people. Nobody offered a clear explanation of what the Monster Mongers were, only that they were to be feared. Be good or the Monster Mongers will get you. She scoffed at such mollifying propaganda.

She was fourteen on the day she was abducted.

They were cannibals, cave-dwelling cannibals. Or were they vampires? That depended on whom you talked to. The Monster Mongers were a tribe built around