Zed woke for the first time since his death when the world was nearly gone. There was still green on the planet then, the blue of water. That's what he remembered most: the colors of life, the contrasts between them. There were even still glowing electronics and the garish attraction of advertisements. When he lived, people came in different hues, a greater swath of an earth tone palette. These people on their final exodus were all so close in tone that they might have been children of the same father. Their features varied, but the skin was the same tan.
He saw other ghosts then, maybe for the first time. His memory was not what it once was after all this time spent dead. The living saw the dead wandering confused or reenacting familiar or dying actions. From their expressions, fearful but resigned, the deceased had become a nuisance. They were so commonplace as to no longer arouse shouts. No parents clutch their children to protect them from things that could not hurt them. The dead could observe, could haunt the living. The dead were themselves haunted by an inability to comprehend this world.
At first, Zed mistook the moaning he heard for fear, but it was not human moaning. Its source, banshee keen, sang lamentations, loud enough to have lost a grounding in gender. He took it then as anguish that the world was being abandoned to the dead, a demand to know why.
When Zed rose, he thought he was alive still. He emulated the panicked purpose of those around him without knowing why. Everyone whose heart still beat -- who had a heart at all -- operated in a tamed panic, impossible not to find infectious.
Zed touched nothing, or didn't recall it. It was a while before he understood that he no longer belonged to the same species as the living. The shock of this epiphany had been almost enough to make him lose what coherence the dead retained.
In wonder, he followed a family, a father and a small girl. The girl could hear his question. That was clear. Where were they going? What was happening? Were there always ghosts? The father was either deaf to these inquiries or pretended he was. Were children more receptive to the dead, or had adults better learned to keep the dead at bay?
Around Zed, beside the living, were his kindred, almost human, pretending at life. There were wraiths, too, twisted by pain but retaining sentience. There were floating, limbless unfortunates, insubstantial blood dripping from them. Zed wanted to fear them. He wanted, at that, to feel anything. He looked to his own hands -- intact, useless illusions -- and could not at once care that he better resembled life.
Even the children who saw the most gruesome of the dead did not cry. Zed would have if his worst nightmares floated beside him, silent and slow. Even to imagine this faint existence would have welled up in his stomach a horror that only ceaseless wails could express. Had their parents lied to them, or was the truth of the dead like the immense honesties one ignores? The Earth was running out of oil. The world had grown beyond its carrying capacity. The whales were dying. The holes in the ozone layer were widening. And now, the dead walked. Each true. Each impossible to handle, and so they were invisible in plain sight, like the dead themselves.
The family entered what he took at first to be a wall, solid black and spanning as far as he could see, bisecting the world. He lay his semi-transparent hand on the... metal? Ceramic? The composition was beyond him. It filled him with the awe restrained outside centuries-old cathedrals. What was this? The other ghosts regarded it with a distant reservation. One offered a gasped "No" to him, but Zed didn't know if this was caution or approbation. When he turned to ask, the ghost had faded to nothing.
He followed this father inside the wall, his daughter still looking Zed in the eyes.
"Are you coming with us?" she asked him.
"No," her father told her. His tone betrayed that he had told her this many times. "They don't come with us. They stay here. They are happier here."
Machines -- not robots as he understood them, having no vestiges of human creation -- cut clothing from people down to their last stitches. Most had dressed in preparation for coming nakedness. It must have been warm from their lack of modesty and seeming comfort in this environment. The machines carried away these discarded fragments. Other devices palpated the people's torsos, checked their breath, pricked them for droplets of blood, ran countless colored lines of light over their bodies. It was a flurry of motion, taking place in a matter of seconds. The child did not even have time to get a good cry built in her chest.
The daughter and father were then injected several times in rapid succession. Her cry trailed off. Her body grew limp. Another pseudopod caressed her head with a gentleness that bordered on warmth, her hair gone when it came away. It stroked her father, and, in a matter of seconds, he was hairless. The machines rendered them to blankness on which a personality could be imposed, more like manikins. They had reverted to babies.
Silver and slate appendages carried out this protocol en masse, thousands of people a second stripped and shaved with all the reverence of an assembly line.
The machines carried them away, deeper into this structure. He did not follow them.
The injections meant they had passed some test. Some were not given injections and moved to an exit on omnidirectional pads. Not the same as the entrance. No, he understood those entering were not meant to see this. Knowing the punishment for imperfection would horrify them. The system would stall. The refugees all needed to believe that the glistening arms welcomed them. As much as they could be said to need anything, the machines required the living to comply.
Those who wailed at the echoing walls received injections less kindly than the father and the girl received. He followed one, a woman with a gray smock, her lack of nudity obscene. He could not deduce what made her insufficient. She was older than the father, though not by much. Her wrinkles were thin but a permanent fixture around her eyes. She moved with equal parts annoyance and dignity, understanding that profanity meant nothing to these arms and hallways. No sense wasting the breath. No reason even in cursing a god for her material failing.
He watched from just before the exit. She gathered with others who had been passed over for acquisition. There were children there, soothed by adults who may have been their parents but may not have been. It was cruel that there were children, and those old enough were catatonic or apoplectic with what had happened. They were condemned more than living people thought they had any right to be. As someone dead, this institutional condemnation seemed a smaller offense. They couldn't see that yet. Some of these people might become ghosts, but they might not. It was better their lives ended here, and they did not have to consider an afterlife from his side.
The older woman brushed herself off. The immense shadow of this building caused a chill. Exposed skin prickled with goosebumps, and she hugged herself for warmth. The machines had not returned the clothing removed by metallic arms to these people. This would have been a waste of resources for people who did not matter enough to be brought to safety. In a pile of discarded clothes a hundred feet across, the woman went to find something to cover herself better.
The machines had left them a pile of bodies below a farther door. Robots did not drop them with violence, but neither was it gentle. They did no more harm than they had to, but there was no artificial caring in their placement. These people were indeed discarded. Their opinion of this process had happened was no longer relevant.
Closer to the door in which he stood were specks of hair, broken fingernails, blood. He looked down and saw another pile of bodies, no longer alive, no longer whole. They had further signs of violence done to them. A machine, one little different than the ones inside, pushed them away from the wall. When they continued to clamber to this rescue, the machines had euthanized them. He felt the warning in these.
The bodies did not disgust him any more than cicada shells or hay bales might. Still, he could conjure the story of a little girl dead on the pile, one who could not have tried to climb the wall on her own.
Beneath him, he saw a ghost wandering between the limbs, confused.
"You died," he called out.
The ghost, a small woman who had been twenty years old, considered the people looking anywhere but toward the wall. "They killed me. I tried getting back in."
"I'm sorry," he said and meant it. He offered her a hand. "Do you want to come on now? They can't hurt you anymore."
"I don't see the good of it," she said. "I wanted to live up there, not die down here. Why would I want to be dead elsewhere? It's better it was done quickly. I don't even remember dying."
"No," he replied. "I don't think we are meant to."
"What happens now?" she called.
"I don't know."
"Have you been dead long?"
He looked to the horizon, finding it so different from the one he remembered, hazily, from life. "A very long time."
"That's not reassuring."
He shook his head. "No. It isn't."
He returned inside to look around more. Other ghosts lingered in the distance. While they would sometimes look at him as he looked at them, they did not approach. Instead, they followed the living like balloons caught in a breeze.
Zed trailed one of the machines through its routine. He wanted it to take him to the daughter he had watched before. It scanned, prodded, and poked another girl, one no older than fifteen, though her posture stated that she thought of herself as an adult and expected even the machines to respect this. Even to herself, it was blustering to seem brave, and he liked her for that. In the pretense of it, she let herself be seen more clearly and came through more human for it.
She passed whatever test was contained in the minor blood sacrifice. One tendril injected her. She fell like Sleeping Beauty into the arms that transported her up and over and through a labyrinth. Other machines wove and spun in a metallic ballet. He saw no more of the living here or even the dead.
The machines brought her into a lightless room. Something gleaming in the living made visible light unnecessary for the dead. In a fluid perfection, machines raised her, massaged her pliant muscles, covered her in a shining balm, then put her to rest in a liquid cylinder. Her light dimmed like a candle flickering to its death, but it remained the merest glow. With her life quieted, he could see how once a column of other flickers innumerably vast. He could not have contrived to count them all if he had a thousand years, but he would not have that opportunity.
The floor met his feet, then knees, then belly. He was back on the ground, absented from the room. He hated the sensation of having also been rejected, having been pushed through the floor as if gagged up.
The wall was gone, and he could not understand it. He saw the rejected humans as pinpricks of light in the darkness. He searched the land for the wall, then, finding nothing but an indentation a mile deep, looked upward.
In silent unnaturalness, the wall rose into the air with all the speed of a train, inexorably held aloft.
The physics of this act was well beyond him. He understood fire, engines, thrust, jets screaming so loud that there could be no getting close-the sight of the wall's ascension bordered on the blasphemous.
Soon, the only evidence of it was the stars it blotted out as it met the heavens. He turned behind him on intuition. Stars winked and disappeared, the entire sky seeming to blink its eyes.
If he went there, he would see other rejected people, other footprints of ships that had quit the Earth.
Those left behind would surely die off in short order. They would not repopulate the planet. It would be the height of selfishness in a world that no longer belonged to humans. Could this have been the point of the shots they did receive? To sterilize them that they didn't perpetuate the horror of reproduction on a planet that could not love human life?
He wanted to see what would happen to them, to find other ships, to watch this world end, to understand this existence after death, but the energy left him.
He did not wake again for an eon.
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.
