Hereafter. Tara Hudson

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СКАЧАТЬ power of smell, taste, even touch. Then, how to describe the way I felt when I realized my only physical sensations occurred in the nightmares through which I reexperienced my death?

      Or, alternately, how to describe the touch of a hand on my cheek after so long?

      Not only was the touch itself extraordinary, but it had also opened some sort of floodgate of sensations.

      In the two days following the accident, and at the strangest moments, I would feel things from the living world. Such as the rough bark of the blackjack oak tree against which I’d leaned, or a tiny drop of rain when a brief shower had passed over the river. These feelings came and went quickly, outside of my control.

      Yet I found I could control one of them: the little thrill in my veins each time I thought of his skin. This thrill bore a haunting similarity to a quickened pulse in my wrists and neck, so I sought ways to replicate it as often as I could.

      I was thinking of his skin again when another flash occurred. Without warning, a scent overwhelmed me, capturing me completely. I froze where I stood, smelling a cluster of late-summer blackberries that clung to a bramble along the tree line. I leaned closer to them, breathing in their smell, tart and overripe under the noonday sun. Although the scent soon vanished and the numbness began to creep back over me, I laughed aloud.

      This was the second laugh of my afterlife, and I wanted more of them. Without another thought, I dashed up the steep, grassy embankment to the bridge.

      Bounding tall hills in a single breath. Or no breath at all. Super Dead Girl. I laughed again, feeling giddy as I arrived at the top of the hill and began to stride across the grass.

      When I crossed the shoulder to the road, however, I froze, one bare foot on the pavement and one on the grass, arms out in an imitation of a trapeze artist.

      High Bridge Road.

      The words whispered like a threat in my mind, and I immediately had an urgent desire to get away from this place. I could feel a gnawing at the back of my mind, an itch creeping up and down my skin.

      Did I sense the stirrings of another nightmare? No, this felt like an entirely different kind of foreboding, one I’d never before experienced.

      I shook my head. I was being ridiculous. After all, I was dead. What could be scarier than me?

      I forced one foot off the grass and the other farther onto the pavement. My legs moved almost involuntarily, and each step along the shoulder of the road sent unpleasant tingles up my spine.

      This is stupid, I thought. I straightened my back. I refused to skulk on the side of the road like a dog with its hair on end.

      “Move it,” I commanded myself aloud. I strode forward with purpose, albeit still a little stiffly. Each step unnerved me further, but I didn’t slow until I made it almost halfway across the bridge.

      I only stopped when I reached the jagged gap in the waist-high metal railing to my right. Yellow police tape and a few wooden sawhorses stood between the gap and the road, ready and willing to keep absolutely nothing from plummeting off the bridge. The torn railing hung out over the edge of the bridge on both sides of the gap, swaying lightly in the breeze. His—Joshua’s—car had torn a hole at least six feet wide into the railing before flying into the river.

      I shivered from the very idea of the crash as well as from the sound of his name in my head. Wrapping my arms around my body, I spared a timid glance at the ground. Streaks of black rubber crisscrossed the pavement where his tires had made a futile attempt to keep him from going over the edge.

      It was then I heard the scream, a terrible, pealing sound that shrieked from behind me.

      I actually jumped up in the air. An expletive, one I didn’t even know I knew, flew out of my mouth as I turned to face the sound.

      Only then did I see that the horrible noise hadn’t been a scream after all. It had been the sound of tires squealing to a sudden stop. Only ten feet away from me, a black car parked, and the door opened.

      Without thinking, I relaxed. My ghostly instincts kicked in and told me there was no need to run, no need to fear anything. Because if it drove a car, it couldn’t hurt me. It couldn’t even see me.

      But, obviously, my instincts had forgotten the one exception to this rule, even if my heart hadn’t.

      A boy climbed out of the driver’s side of the car and slammed the door shut. From his profile I could see he had full lips and a fine nose with just the slightest curve in it, as though it had been broken once but set well. He had almost black hair and large, dark eyes. When he cast those eyes on me, I absently mused that he was a much healthier color than when I’d last seen him.

      “You! It’s you!” he cried, pointing right at me.

      Without another thought, I turned and ran.

      Chapter

       FOUR

      I was just full of foolish impulses lately. There he stood, the boy about whom I’d been thinking—obsessing, really—for the past two days. Yet I ran, as fast as I could, in the opposite direction. Had any of my adrenaline still existed, it would have burned in my legs as I fled.

      Apparently, and as I’d suspected, my ghostly instincts had become as strong as my living ones had been. Ghosts weren’t meant to be seen, no matter how much they wanted to be. Anything to the contrary was cause enough to run away, and fast.

      At least those would have been my thoughts were I capable of any. But at that moment I was only capable of blind terror. Fear buzzed in my brain, and it nearly blocked the voice that rang out from behind me.

      “Stop! Come on, stop! Please.”

      It was the quality of the voice that did it—low, and still a little hoarse from the river water he’d swallowed. Hearing the break in it, I felt a little ache right in the middle of my chest. Just a small, inconspicuous, and completely incapacitating ache.

      I skidded to a stop, almost at the other end of the bridge. Ever so slowly, I turned around to face him.

      “Thanks,” he called out roughly, settling back on his heels. From his stance he looked as if he’d just been about to take off after me.

      I gave him one tense nod. There was a noticeable pause, and then he asked, “So, will you come back here?”

      I shook my head. No way.

      Even this far apart I could hear him sigh.

      “O-kay.” He dragged out the sound of the O as if he was taking the seconds of extra pronunciation to deal calmly with a frustrating puzzle. “Then … can I come over there to you?”

      I frowned, not indicating an answer one way or another. I guess he took my indecision as a yes, because he began to walk toward me. He kept his steps intentionally slow, and he held his hands in front of his body in the universal gesture of “I won’t СКАЧАТЬ