Among These Bones (Book 2): When It's No Longer Night

  Contents

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Get Book 3

  Check out our other books!

  About the Author

  WHEN IT’S

  NO LONGER NIGHT

  Among These Bones - Book 2

  AMANDA LUZZADER

  Copyright © 2019 by Amanda Luzzader

  www.amandaluzzader.com

  Published by Knowledge Forest Press

  P.O. Box 6331

  Logan, UT 84341

  ISBN-13: 978-1-949078-05-3

  Cover design by Damonza.com.

  All rights reserved.

  For my husband Chadd

  Let’s experience life’s adventures

  while holding hands.

  I’ll love you always!

  CHAPTER ONE

  Sorrow is watching a person suffer; misery is knowing you’ve caused their suffering.

  I couldn’t sleep. Again.

  Moonlight poured past the bars on my bedroom window and through spaces between the bedroom curtains, illuminating the white-painted cinder blocks and lending the room an iridescent shimmer.

  Out in the front room, my husband lay on the couch, his back turned to me, as always. I had a narrow view of him through the bedroom door and the hallway beyond. I could just make out the rise and fall of his breathing, and I knew he was sleeping.

  After my reawakening and the few days it took for me to fully recover, it was his idea for us to sleep in separate rooms, his idea for him to sleep on the couch and me in the bedroom.

  “I should take the couch,” I had said. “Really. I’m the newcomer. I can’t take your bed.”

  “No,” he said, as though there were never any debate to be settled. “I insist.”

  That was over a year ago.

  At the time, I was grateful, because he really did feel like a stranger to me, and I knew I couldn’t lie in bed with him in the dark, let alone be a wife to him. I thought sleeping apart would only be temporary though. Even though it had been explained to me that I would never—could never—really remember him, I guess I thought that we would get to know each other as wife and husband again eventually, and perhaps even fall into the patterns and ways we’d shared before.

  But there he was, over a year later, his back to me, down the hall and on the couch.

  And here I was, pulling the blanket up to my chin, then my nose. The room wasn’t cold. It wasn’t freezing. The heater sighed on and then hushed, and the entire apartment maintained a constant, comfortable temperature, but I felt cold anyway. The man on the couch remained a stranger of sorts, but I wanted him to cuddle into me, or at least to add his body heat to mine beneath the blankets. I wanted someone who would share his warmth.

  More than anything, I wanted someone to touch me. I wanted to be touched, even if it was only a hand on my back, or the touching of feet down at the end of the bed.

  Maybe then I’d sleep.

  I often laid awake at night, thinking there was something I needed to see to, something urgent that needed doing. Something I needed to fix.

  But what? And where?

  Was it the knowledge that I needed to make things better for that poor guy out there lying on the couch? Maybe. Was it to atone for what I’d done? Maybe.

  What had I done?

  He was there at my reawakening, and probably when I was put to sleep, as well. He’d brought flowers—daisies—to greet me when I woke up.

  Disorienting is not the word for it. Confusing is not the word for it. To slowly awake, like a child, and then to open your eyes, remembering nothing about yourself——but to see a man smiling down at you. You don’t know who he is, but from the way he smiles at you, you know he knows you. Like when you bump into someone on the sidewalk and they know your name but you don’t know theirs—that’s the kind of awkwardness I’m talking about, but you don’t know who you are, either, and so it hardly matters whether you know the other person or not.

  “Hey, sweetheart,” he’d said. “Hey, Alison.” He was nodding. His hand lay on my shoulder.

  I blinked a few times and lay there propped on an elbow in the bed in the unknown room. I frowned up at him. My pulse and breathing quickened.

  “Try to just focus on breathing,” he’d said hastily. “You’re safe. There’s no need to be afraid or panic. Don’t try to figure it out. Not yet. Just breathe in and out.”

  My crazed gaze roamed around the room. It was mostly bare but for the few medical items you’d find in a hospital room. A blood-pressure cuff, a latex glove dispenser. Cinder block walls.

  The man, the stranger, spoke to me in a voice meant to be soothing.

  He was saying something about going home and getting things back to the way they were supposed to be, the way they’d been before. He said something about an Agency, about a project. I tried to listen and to process, but it was like drinking from a five-gallon bucket tipped up to my mouth. I only understood every few words.

  Why don’t you start with where I am, I thought. Why don’t you tell me who you are, I thought. How about who am I? Start with that.

  I went back-and-forth thinking this was a dream and knowing that it wasn’t. I couldn’t rest my glance on anything for more than an instant. My perception faded in and out of focus.

  Then he kissed me on the top of my head before I had a chance to flinch away. I would definitely have pulled away if I hadn’t been so befuddled. And it wasn’t his disfigured face that I’d have pulled away from, though that had something to do with it. It was more because I was lost, floating. I knew I was in a “bed.” I knew this must be some kind of “hospital.” I knew that if someone would just hand me a hair-tie, I’d pull my brown hair back into a ponytail to get it out of my face and that would help me calm down a bit and sort this out. Because I knew that I knew things. I could think and speak and put words to objects.

  But I didn’t know this man. And I didn’t find his tone comforting. Not at all. If anything, his purring and cooing did more to worry me than waking up in a strange room without any immediate recollection of how I’d gotten there.

  So, he kissed my head before I could react and then he left the room at a purposeful, though limping, half-jog.

  “I’ll go down and get a wheelchair,” he said. “Won’t be a minute.”

  That’s when I realized there was another person in the room. A nurse. She was tall and broad-shouldered. I got the impression she might have been selected to assist the man in case I needed to be restrained.

  “Where am I?” I asked. “Why can’t I remember anything?”

  She gave me an understanding but unfriendly nod and from the look on her face I knew she’d been asked this before. “You’ll be briefed,” she said impassively. “Really, you should just try to focus on breathing and not going into panic mode.”

  Interestingly, her unconcerned tone was more comforting than the man’s urgent attempts to keep me calm. She was icy, but she was in control, and that was maybe what I wanted to know—that someone was in charge. I took a breath.

  “What happened to him?” I asked the nurse, with a gesture to my face to indicate the scars and droopiness of his.

  She turned away from me to make notes on a sheaf of papers. Without facing me again, she shook her head. “Be still,” she said in a firm tone. “You’ll be told everything.”

  I exhaled again, loudly this time. “What is this?” I demanded. “Am I being detained? You can’t detain me. Why won’t you tell me anything?

  The nurse turned and took a step or two toward the bed until she loomed over me. Then she shot a glance at the door as if judging when the man might return.

  I thought she was going to hit me. I drew back.

  “You really want to know what happened to him?” she said, her voice acid.

  There were so many other things I really needed to know more, but I looked out the open door too. And then I nodded.

  “You did,” she hissed. Her fists were balled up. “You did that to him. You betrayed him, betrayed us all. And he paid for it. And here he is anyway. To take care of you.” All at once she frowned and glanced at the door and then turned away from me again.

  I lay down on the bed and drew up my knees. What was this place, I thought. What was happening?
/>
  “Who is he?” I asked in a quiet voice.

  She sighed wearily. She turned her head and over her shoulder she said, “His name is Gary. Gary Gosford. You’re his wife.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  In the days that followed, I was told everything that had happened. Officers from the Agency came to brief me. They told me about the worldwide viral plague that almost wiped out all of us. They told me about how, in the rebuilding of society, memories were now almost a kind of privilege, and how some people who struggled to contribute to society were kept in a perpetual state of forgetting until they could improve. It was for their own good. The Starting Zones they called them, mere camps really—depopulated residential neighborhoods that had been walled off. These neighborhoods were where the Genpop, the general population, were kept. The Agency officers explained how those in the Zones were watched and screened and tested for moral rectitude and ethics and even physical stamina and strength.

  “Whenever there is a crisis, there is also an opportunity,” Gary told me. “If we have to rise from the ashes of a catastrophe, we may as well make a good start of it, don’t you think? In fact, not doing so would only lead to a future downfall.”

  Then Gary told me of how terrorists and assassins had infiltrated the Zones and even the Agency, and a small group of them had managed to make contact with me and had somehow corrupted me or tuned me to do their will. I’d somehow been forced into betraying the Agency. There was a battle, and I had detonated a bomb that had killed dozens of men. The blast had nearly killed Gary.

  “It was a tremendous setback,” said Gary. “I don’t mean because I was hurt, and I’m not even necessarily talking about the people we lost. We lost good people, and I was hurt, but the worst part was that it stopped our momentum. I can’t tell you how infuriating it is. We’re trying to make things better for everyone, and certain people just want to stop it, to ruin it. There’ve been other security problems, other insurgents. So now half our time and effort are wasted on investigations and security and rooting them out.”

  He stopped and looked at me. His eyes were narrowed and his jaw was clenched. He held the look for a few moments, and then his expression softened.

  “We’ll be back on track, eventually. We’re playing the long game here. We’ll get back on track.”

  Gary told me that he wasn’t supposed to tell me any of this, that those who had their memories confiscated were supposed to wake up and start fresh, but the nurse knew who I was, who I had been, and she let her loyalty and commitment to the Agency get the better of her.

  “Susan’s good at her job,” said Gary. “I shouldn’t have left you two alone. She was reprimanded—quite severely if what I heard is accurate,” Gary said. “The point is, she contaminated your new start. I feel like you have to know the whole story now. Just don’t let anyone know we had this talk. I could get into even more trouble.”

  “More trouble?” I asked. “What do you mean ‘more’ trouble?”

  “Some of my superiors didn’t understand my”—he paused for a second and pressed his lips into a tight line—”my approach. I was accused of putting people in danger. Long-story-short, I was transferred. Lost my job as Zone supervisor.”

  “Because of me. Because of what I did.”

  Gary shrugged faintly. Then he shook his head.

  “I don’t know. It was them. It was me. I should have dealt with them differently from the start.”

  “If I was one of them,” I said, “then why didn’t they throw me in prison? Or worse? Is there a worse?”

  “You weren’t one of them. You were never one of them. I convinced them to allow you to stay if—well, everything’s arranged now.”

  “If what?”

  “Doesn’t matter. It’s all arranged now. You’re here and we’re still together and—”

  “If you stepped down.”

  Gary didn’t say more, but I knew that was it. He’d given up the position he cherished to make sure I wasn’t kicked out into the Zones or put in prison.

  I think it was Gary’s disfigurement and scars that made him sleep always facing away from me. He often spoke to me and others with his face turned away. He didn’t want to be seen, by me least of all. He didn’t want anyone to see the parts of him that were damaged—the parts that I had damaged. But that of course wasn’t everything. Even so, it was nearly impossible to know to what degree he held me responsible. He theorized at times that the terrorists had threatened me or blackmailed me into playing my treacherous role. With my memories of the whole affair now gone forever, it was difficult to say if I were really to blame or not. I thought about it for weeks without ever arriving at any conclusion except that Gary’s injuries weighed him down so deeply that I wondered if he’d ever be well.

  “You know, it doesn’t bother me—the scars, the injuries.” That is what I wanted to say to him. That his disfigurements, the way he looked, did not matter to me. In addition to Gary’s face, the right side of which was pitted with the shiny wrinkles of burn scar tissue, his right arm was shriveled and useless, and he shuffled when he walked, favoring his right leg. He’d evidently angled his right side in the direction of the explosion, as though his own uprightness would be enough to stop it.

  I’m sure the same could be said of the other survivors of Gary’s team, the men who’d survived my treachery. They saw past the scars, too. Some of them had lost hands and arms. One of them was blind. They visited Gary sometimes and you could tell they still looked up to him, despite his dismissal and demotion.

  But that didn’t matter to Gary. His injuries seemed to run deeper than his pink puckered skin and ruined limbs. He’d been kind to me when he first brought me to our apartment, and for a week or two he’d been consumed with the nervous energy of new beginnings. He talked of things we might do, like picnics or hikes, and earning a house. Soon after, however, Gary turned quiet, sullen, and even resentful. He’d lie on the couch for hours, or he would sit on the steps outside watching the crows in the courtyard.

  Gary provided for me. He took care of my needs. Aside from his breezy, downcast neglect, he never mistreated me. But we barely spoke, and when I spoke to him, he was nearly always turned away.

  And underneath it all was the nagging and ever-present certainty that all of this was my fault. No matter that I couldn’t remember even the faintest impression of what had happened. No matter that I had to take Gary’s word on all of it. It was my fault, and the fact that I couldn’t remember it made it impossible to ever resolve the situation.

  “Oh my god. I am so sorry,” I’d said to Gary when he told me the stories.

  “You weren’t then,” he said without the slightest hint of irony.

  “I can’t imagine ever wanting to hurt you,” I said, “or anyone else.”

  He nodded, but in his face was disappointment. Gary was the husband I didn’t know, couldn’t remember. He was the husband I had ruined, the one I betrayed. I should have loved him, but I didn’t.

  I knew Gary didn’t love me either, or I thought I knew. I often wondered what had really happened. Because every story is colored by its teller, and certainly someone as wrecked as Gary would have certain biases. Moreover, did he love me before I betrayed him? Did I love him? Could he forgive me?

  At night, our Agency dormitory was terrifyingly quiet. I tried so many things to sleep—herbal teas, soothing sleep tapes, exercise, reading. But night after night, sleep didn’t just evade me, it mocked me.

  If I rose from my bed and opened the curtains, I could stare at the moon. But bars crossed the windows—for our protection, Gary said, to keep out those living down in the Starting Zones that sprawled in the shadow of the immense Agency housing blocks like a garbage dump inhabited by phantoms. The bars protected us from those phantoms who occasionally rose up in their muddled rage to hurt us.

  Most maddening of all, I knew what I needed to sleep. I knew what would bring me peace and sleep, and it wasn’t tea or recorded sounds or an unobstructed view of the sky.

  I needed to talk.

  As strange as it sounds, the thing I knew would put me straight to sleep was companionship. Human voices, human laughter. I needed to speak with people and be spoken to.