Almost Alive (The Beautiful Dead Book 3) Read Free Page B

floorboards.
    We’re out of the Refinery the next second, and I’m powerwalking down the main drag, determined to get out of Trenton as fast as possible. I officially have the creeps. My first roommate was a cockroach and I’d grown quite comfortable around them. I’m not certain what’s changed except for the fact that this ghost town version of Trenton is scaring me, cockroach or no. With a broken John hanging in my arms, I opt not to run; I can’t promise he won’t accidentally lose a foot or a finger or a face.
    “Going already?” he asks.
    “Most decidedly.” We reach the gates. We pass the gates. We’re pushing through the vibrant green forest now and nothing can touch us, not even the wind.
    “Oh.” He peers past my arm, watching as Trenton vanishes in the distance behind us, I presume. “Where was everyone else?”
    I don’t answer his question and just keep putting one foot in front of the other. I have no idea where I’m going. A strange, uncomfortable panic has settled into my chest and I’m struggling not to cry—which is stupid, because I literally have no tears and, as an Undead, am physically incapable. Still, regardless of knowing this, I feel very, very capable of tears. Very, very capable of panic.
    Somewhere in me, deep beneath the rot and the immortality and the whatever, there still lives a Human girl who once was named Claire Westbrook … a girl who hated everything and everyone.
    Where are all my friends? Why is Trenton completely abandoned? For some reason I can’t seem to think of where else everyone might be. I worry humorlessly that maybe I’ve lost all memory of my own Second Life. Maybe I need another Waking Dream to remember the horrors I experienced in Garden that day.
    I’d give anything to forget it. I’d give just about anything to pretend it never happened and to go back to the way things were before …
    “How old are you?”
    The question catches me by surprise. I discover that my thoughts have brought my hurried pace down to a crawl. “I was nineteen when I died.”
    “You’re dead too,” he says, as if to remind himself.
    “Yes. We all are. Everyone is, almost.”
    “Okay. And … And I was once alive, too?”
    Oh, the questions. These are not the questions I was hoping to answer so soon. I wanted to be able to take him to the Refinery just as I was taken there, to be made back up into a person, to feel whole again. I didn’t realize it at the time, despite how snarky and self-loathing I was on my first day, but the process I was put through welcomed me into this world. Helena and her blunt words, her guidance, despite my rude way of thanking her. Marigold and her cheery work on mending my body and the icecap irises she gave me. It was all part of a … post-life grieving process, a necessary comfort. I took it all for granted.
    Still, somehow, John seems positively unfazed by his lack of welcome. He’s perfectly happy, one might say. Downright chipper, even.
    “Yes,” I finally answer. “You were … You were very, very alive.”
    “How old am I?”
    I remember that moment long ago in my house when he first told me how old he was. I was surprised and he was amused. “Twenty-two.”
    “And I had a life, too?”
    “Yes.” I’m really not ready to answer these questions. I need Helena to take over. I need Marigold to swoop in and perform her duties, but deep in my unbeating heart, I worry whether any of them still exist. I feel like the whole world’s gone on an all-expenses-paid vacation and we were left behind.
    “Why don’t I remember any of it?”
    “You will someday.” And with it, you’ll remember me. You’ll remember what we had … and you’ll wonder why I didn’t say anything when our eyes first met in this totally-lame-so-far Second Life of yours. “It’s called a Waking Dream and when you have it, you’ll remember everything.”
    “That sounds scary.” He stares ahead without another word for a while, watching as we pass