The Herefter Ch. 2

His eyes opened with a start. Above, he saw gray clouds in the sky above. The leafless tree tops swayed in the wind. He was cold. Damn he was cold. Slowly, he got to his feet. Was he in an accident? He didn't feel hurt. Steve – that was his name, wasn't it? - gingerly patted himself down waiting to feel something out of place. All he could remember was another car's headlights. What the fuck?

He was standing in the road. His poor truck was laying on its side in the roadway, smoke thickening as the fire grew. The fire had an odd, muted look to it. Steve had to look at it for a few second before he decided it did have some color to it, but not much. It was almost like looking at an old color film. He looked down and jumped.

He saw himself lying on the road. This he saw with vivid intensity. Deep red blood oozed from his severed left leg as people in uniforms huddled around him. These people had the same muted look the fire did. Like someone had taken twenty percent of the color out of them. Steve gasped. He could see... through them somehow. What in the fuck was going on? He looked down at his broken body. Why was he... outside himself? He looked at his own eyes. They stared blankly at the sky. Fear slowly began to grip him. He was...

“Dead,” a voice said behind him. Steve yelped and spun around. He just stared, dumbfounded.

“Griggs, is that you?” Griggs was standing there, grinning wide. His head was as bald as ever, his muscles bulging through his desert uniform. He looked as fit and whole as the day he died.

“Who the fuck you think it is? Jesus?”

Steve looked back at his body. “So I'm really dead then?”

“Ain't that some shit?”

Mike Griggs pulled him into a bear hug. “My brother of another color.”

“My brother of another color,” Steve repeated. “My God, I missed you.” Steve had served with Griggs in the Army. In desert storm, they were walking on base when a mortar round exploded nearby. Griggs caught shrapnel to the head and died instantly. Somehow, Steve didn't get a scratch. That's when his tinnitus started. Speaking of which, he was now aware he couldn't hear it, for the first time in years. The squealing in his ears was gone.

“Don't get all fuckin' sappy on me now,” Griggs said, mocking disgust.

“Yeah, yeah. How the fuck have you been?”

“Fuckin' dead.”

“So, what now? Like, what happens now? I thought there was a light or some shit,” Steve said as he watched his body being loaded onto a gurney by people he could see through. The cop cars and fire trucks were blocking traffic now, their emergency lights flashing dull red and blue.

“Naw, you see a light, you're not really dead. I don't know what it is, but it ain't death. You have a choice. You can move on. No one knows what's on the other side, but most people take it anyway. I guess once you die, you lose your fear of it. If you want to stay, though, you have to be anchored. You have to have something or someone you were attached to emotionally.”

Steve stood for a moment, watching the gurney being loaded onto an ambulance and the ghostly paramedics shutting the doors. “So why are you here, with me? Were you attached to me?”

“Hell, no, you ain't that special. I did know when you died, though. I figured I oughtta be the one to tell you what's up. Some folks die and they have no one. They can't even accept that they're dead. I'm attached to the house I grew up in. My gramps built it back in the '40s, when white folks weren't taking kindly to colored folks moving into the neighborhood. He just said fuck y'all and built it anyways. My family still lives there. I scare the shit out of my mom sometimes.” Griggs pulled a can of Copenhagen Wintergreen from his breast pocket and stuffed a pinch in his cheek.

“How – where did you get that?” Steve asked incredulously.

“I guess habits can follow you to the afterlife. I just get to wanting it and it shows up in my pocket where I always had it before.”

“Well, I'll be damned.” He felt a familiar bulge in his pocket. He pulled out his pack of smokes and lit one with the lighter he always carried. “We should probably quit this,” he said. “Shit's gonna kill us.”

Griggs laughed loudly.

“There's really nothin' I care about except my daughter, though. I could stay with her. Watch over her. I don't know where else I'd go, really. You lived a good eight hours away. How'd you get here so quick?”

“We are in a different dimension. It's like you have a page with a picture on it and you put a clear plastic page over it and draw on it. They both exist in the same space, but we're separated. Being dead. Though, we have different rules. Time and space have different meanings. There is no travel time, you're just there. The living can't see you for the most part, unless you want them to. That takes effort. You'll see. We can't eat, and that's where they get their energy to move. We have to sort of draw it from the environment around us. If it just don't have energy, it's hard to do much of anything, even travel. All the people living in my house all these years, I got plenty of energy there. I knew you died, 'cause we were so close, so I just thought it and I was here.” Griggs looked at Steve's wrecked truck, as the firefighters were dousing the last of the flames. “You still can't drive for shit.”

“Fuck you,” Steve said as he laughed. Steve looked at the smashed, unrecognizable Lumina. There was a kid there, standing beside his broken body as the paramedics loaded him onto a gurney. The kid looked over at the two of them with a sad sort of smile on his face and slowly faded away.

“I guess he moved on,” Griggs said. The two friends stood in silence a moment. “We need to get out of here, unless you want to be anchored here on the roadway.”

“I thought you had to have an emotional connection to be anchored.”

“You'll always have a connection to the place you died. You can mover around, though. Some people hop from place to place, visiting places or people they were connected to in life.”

“How do I go? Just think it?”

“You'll need some energy first. There's all sorts of different kinds of energy. I'm sure you remember from science class. Kinetic energy, stored energy, thermal energy, chemical energy, electric energy, all that shit. There's shit scientists don't know about or can't accept because they don't know how to measure it. There's emotional energy. Energy radiated by the emotions of living humans and animals. It gets radiated into the environment around them. Some places store that energy better than others, so it's easier for us to use it. The kind of energy you want is emotional. You can draw off electrical energy, too. Power outlets, batteries, lightning. That kind of shit. Negative emotions tend to give off more energy that positive ones.”

Steve looked around. One of the paramedics was talking to a cop next to his wrecked truck. He noticed a bright, shimmering mix of blue and green radiating from him. The cop had a dimmer gray color radiating from him.

Griggs followed his gaze. “The medic, he has some energy to him. Not too many have an energy that bright. Most people are more like the cop. Go over to him and concentrate on that energy and picture it yourself absorbing it.”

“Alright, let's see how this shit works.” Steve walked over to the paramedic. The closer he got, he could feel his body tingle from the power the paramedic emitted. He stood next to him.

“It's starting to get cooler”, the paramedic said to the cop.

“I don't know about that. I'm still fucking sweating.”

Steve closed his eyes and pictured the energy being sucked into him like water to a dry sponge. Within seconds, he felt energy coursing through his body. It felt like an electrical charge he could control, like he had a battery pack installed. He walked back to Griggs.

“Holy shit, I feel amazing! I feel, like, powerful,” he gushed.

“Looks like you're ready. Now just picture where you want to be or who you want to be with like you did when you gathered his energy. Then you'll be there. I gotta get back to haunting my house.” Griggs hugged him again. “I'll see you again. You can drop by me any time you want.”

“I don't know where you live, though.”

“That don't matter,” Griggs said. “Just think of me and you'll be with me. It's some cool shit.”

“Alright. I'll see you around, man.”

Steve closed his eyes and thought of Emily. He saw her blue eyes and her pretty face framed by her blonde hair.

* * *

He could hear Black Hole Sun playing over a small radio on her desk. Emily was sitting at her desk in her room, hunched over her history book and a worksheet. He was immediately struck by her appearance. She was translucent, like the people had been at the crash site. It didn't seem as strange then as it did now. This was his little girl. She was emitting an shimmering purple and orange aura around her he'd never seen before.

The puppy she'd had since she was a baby was laying on the carpet next to her, now an old, graying spaniel. He looked up at Steve, who was standing behind Emily. He got to his feet, eyes locked on Steve and barked.

“Shut up, Joey,” Emily said dismissively. Joey gave a low growl and laid back down, his eyes now on Steve, watchful. Steve crouched down and ran his hand down the dog's translucent back. Joey seemed to recognize him then and laid his head down and closed his eyes.

“Good boy, Joey,” Steve said softly. Joey wagged his tail gently. Steve stood and looked over Emily's shoulder. She was filling out questions about the stock market crash of '29. Holy shit, that was 65 years ago. What did time mean now that he was dead? He didn't know yet. There was a quiet knock at the door.

“Yeah?” Emily said, slightly annoyed.

Carol opened the door. “Honey? Can we talk with you?”

“Yeah, I guess”

The door opened and Carol walked in with Luke, her new husband. Carol and Luke were translucent like Emily. Carol had a yellow-orange aura tinged with black. Her eyes were wet. Luke's aura was a dim greenish color. Emily had her mom's hair.

“Emily, honey... something's happened.” Carol looked at Luke, who just looked down at his feet.

Emily looked worried. “What is it, mom?”

“There's been a... an accident. A car accident. Your dad didn't pick you up because he as in an accident. Oh, honey-” she choked. “Honey, he didn't make it.”

“He didn't... what?” Emily said in a small voice, her aura darkening.

“Honey, he died in the accident.”

Emily said nothing, she just looked at her mom as tears filled her eyes. The next moment, Carol was holding her daughter as she balled. Luke looked uncomfortable and stared into the corner of the room. Joey got to his feet and nudged Emily's leg.

Steve wanted to go to his daughter and hold her. He couldn't though, so he just watched. Occasionally Joey would look up at him and whimper. Both Emily and Carol's auras were darkening, and radiating further out. He went closer to them and he could feel the emotional energy wafting off them like an electric bonfire. He closed his eyes and felt the energy surge through his body.

“Hey, are you new here?”

For the second time that day, Steve yelped and spun around. An old woman with long, wispy silver hair was standing next to Emily's bed. She wore an old, frilly white nightgown.

“Oh, uh, hi. Yeah, I guess I'm new here. Emily's my daughter.”

“Oh, that's nice. Well, not for poor Emily.” His daughter was sobbing softly behind him. “Did ya die today?”

“Yeah. It was a car wreck.”

“Oh that's too bad. I died in 1886. I slipped on the stairs. My hips didn't work a lick. Ever since though, I've felt like a twenty year old again. Name's Mabel. Mabel McGuire,” she said in her thick southern accent.

“I'm Steve Hinds. I noticed my tinnitus is gone.”

“Pleased ta meet ya. What the hell is tinnitus?”

“Oh, it's when you hear to much loud stuff, like an explosion and you hear a tiny squeal in your ears.”

“Oh, yes. My son complained about that when he came back from the war. He didn't like the quiet much.”

“So, you, uh, you haunt my daughter's house?”

“Well I don't call it haunting. I just live here. My cabin used to be here. They tore it down a while back, though and built this brick job. I've always thought brick was ugly, but it's somethin' I guess. Oh my, but I was in a state when they took my house! They went through three crews of men trying to take her down. Money wills out though. That's what my pappy always said. When rich folks want somethin', they mean to have it come hell or high water.” She looked at him strangely. “Sonny, has anyone showed you anything? About bein' dead?”

“A friend of mine showed up after I died. He kind of gave me a run down on what to expect.”

“My Jeb met me when I passed. I lived alone, after my poor Jeb died. I believe he moved on when he passed. He died in the war, over in Pea Ridge. He was in the 4th Arkansas Regiment.” She gave a start. “Look at me ramblin'. Sorry, I don't get much chance to talk. It's just me here and that dark fellow in the master closet. I don't care for him much.”

“The dark fellow?” he asked.

“Yes, in the master closet. I don't like him,” she said, shivering. “I don't see him much. He stays to himself mostly.” She fell silent and contemplative.

“Who is he? Does he have a name?” Carole was leading Emily out of the room for hot coco.

“He's never told me a name. But he is angry. Frightful angry.”

“Does he bother the family?”

“No, not directly. His hate sometimes leeches out to them, like too much ink from a quill seeping through to the next page. It makes them angry, especially the man.”

“Luke?”

“Yes, it has a terrible effect on him sometimes.”

Steve looked out into the hallway. He could almost feel the anger, like heat from a distant inferno radiating from the room down the hall. He looked back at Mabel, but she was gone.

* * *

Later that night, Steve looked on as Emily laid on her bed, crying softly. When she was little, when she was upset, he would hold her as she cried on his shoulder. How he wished he could do it now, tell her everything will be okay. He felt ghostly tears falling down his face.

He sat down on the bed beside her and froze when the bed moved with his weight. Emily looked over and saw his imprint on her flowered comforter. He reached over slowly and tried to wipe the tears from her cheek. She closed her eyes and smiled sadly. “I miss you, daddy.”

She laid her head on her pillow. Steve leaned over, kissed her forehead, and whispered, “I love you,” in her ear. She smiled and fell into sleep.