Afterlife of Alanna Miller Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Part 3

  Part 4

  Part 5

  Part 6

  Part 7

  Part 8

  Part 9

  Part 10

  Part 11

  Part 12

  Part 13

  Part 14

  Part 15

  Part 16

  Part 17

  Part 18

  Part 19

  Part 20

  Part 21

  Part 22

  Part 23

  Part 24

  Part 25

  Part 26

  Part 27

  Part 28

  Part 29

  Part 30

  Part 31

  Part 32

  Part 33

  Part 34

  Part 35

  Part 36

  Part 37

  Part 38

  Part 39

  Part 40

  Part 41

  Part 42

  Part 43

  Part 44

  Part 45

  Part 46

  Part 47

  Part 48

  Part 49

  Part 50

  Part 51

  Part 52

  Part 53

  Part 54

  Part 55

  Part 56

  Part 57

  Part 58

  Part 59

  Part 60

  Part 61

  Part 62

  Part 63

  Part 64

  Part 65

  Part 66

  Part 67

  Part 68

  Part 69

  Part 70

  Part 71

  Author's Note

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Part 3

  Part 4

  Part 5

  Part 6

  Part 7

  Updates

  About the Author

  Afterlife

  of

  Alanna Miller

  Demelza Carlton

  This book is dedicated to Dad.

  Twenty years ago, who’d have believed I’d ever publish this?

  Not even me.

  Copyright © 2015 Demelza Carlton

  Lost Plot Press

  All rights reserved.

  ONE

  In the end, somehow you end up thinking about the beginning.

  "Sabrina called again last night. So did Emma," Alanna said, panting a little as we hurried up the steps. "Then there was someone called Suzette..."

  I laughed. "You remember their names better than I can. I'm not sure I could tell you which was which in a line-up. They were all pretty, eager and giggly, until they had their clothes off, when they became about as responsive as a blow-up doll or a cadaver. Would you want to have sex with someone who reminded you of a cadaver?"

  Alanna screwed her face up. "I've dissected more of them than you have, but only you could think of messing with one. You're seriously messed up, Nathan. I'm going to get you a blow-up doll for your birthday, if only to keep you away from cadavers and girls whose calls you won't answer. I wonder if they have zombie ones..."

  "There are worse things to think about during a cadaver dissection," I replied, hitching the strap of my backpack higher on my shoulder.

  Alanna snorted. "Like which of the female med students hasn't buttoned her lab coat up properly over her low-cut dress? I saw you staring at Danielle last week..."

  I lost track of what she was saying, her words drowned out by an excited giggle behind us. The dark-haired girl in the same low-cut dress I remembered from last week charged up the stairs, overtaking us and continuing up. Her skirt was so short I could see that she wasn't wearing any underwear – or not much, anyway. Maybe a g-string, I guessed.

  A vice clamped onto my shoulder. God, Alanna had a strong grip for a girl. "So I'll be giving Danielle excuses as to why you're not returning her calls next week?"

  I shrugged, rubbing my shoulder as she let go. "I haven't slept with her yet."

  Alanna's signet ring caught on my shirt, so she yanked it free, the rosy stone catching the light for just a moment. "I bet she'd agree to do it on the necropsy lab table if you asked her today," Alanna retorted. "You'll be in her skimpy knickers before the weekend's over, for sure."

  "I could resist if I wanted to," I protested.

  "The day that happens, I'll die of shock," she replied. "I can't wait to meet the girl who tells you to fuck off instead of asking you to fuck her." She jerked her bag further up her arm. "Don't wait for me. I'll make my own way home."

  "Where are you going?" I asked, dropping my bag so I could button my lab coat.

  "Shopping. I might even get your birthday present if I find a sex shop that does inflatable zombies." She winked and strode off.

  I stashed my bag in the rack and pulled out my dissection kit. I knew I needed some more scalpel blades, but I hoped I still had one or two left. Clutching the kit and my file, I shouldered open the door.

  "Oops!" the girl without knickers said as her forceps tinkled to the floor. She doubled over to pick them up, showing her bare, skinny arse.

  I wondered how Alanna could think of anything but sex in the cadaver labs. With death so close, how could I not want to get a piece of that sweet-looking arse?

  Professor White cleared his throat grumpily as he entered the lab, his coat flaring as he strode over. "Miller, uncover today's cadaver. Today, your task is to discover the cause of death. You'll be assessed."

  No-Knickers had half her lab coat buttons undone again so I could see her pushed-up cleavage. I grabbed the edge of the sheet and pulled, not looking at the corpse.

  "Miller, tell us your first impressions," Professor White instructed.

  Her tits are too small, but they'll make a nice handful. I wonder if she gives a good blowjob?

  I glanced at the faceless body. "Young, with no white hair or regrowth." My eyes travelled further down. "Lacerations and abrasions to skin on torso and arms. Extensive trauma to wrists and hands. Deep incisions on thighs with further abrasions. Widespread bruising...I would say cause of death is blood loss when some of those incisions pierced veins." I swallowed, trying not to breathe in too much formaldehyde.

  "Wrong," Alanna said. "You did this. You didn't protect me. You let them do this to me. You killed me..." No longer faceless, her corpse sat up, reaching for me with twisted, broken fingers.

  I sat up, too, panting with panic as cold sweat trickled down my skin in the dark. Fuck. The nightmares were getting worse. If I slept in pyjamas like I had as a kid, they'd have been drenched. As it was, I just wiped myself down with a towel I kept by the bed for just this purpose and lay down again.

  Tears rolled down my cheeks as I reached for the sleeping pills, shaking two into my palm. Without Caitlin, sleep eluded me. One look at her sleeping form beside me would be enough reassurance to get me to relax. But it'd been five years since I'd seen her – five long, lonely years since she disappeared.

  I grabbed my water bottle and gulped down the tablets. I wouldn't get sleep any other way when I dreamed about Alanna as a zombie, because she was right. I'd killed her six years ago by not protecting her.

  I lay down, waiting for the pills to take effect, hoping my sleep would be dreamless, dreading the endless nightmares when it wasn't, and all the time wondering...was Caitlin alive or dead?

  TWO

  Living in witness protection is like living someone else's afterlife. Everything from your past life, including your own name, is dead...but you're still alive, forging the future as someone else.

  Of course, t
here'll be times you forget your new name. It was never really yours to begin with.

  "Um, that's you," a voice behind me whispered.

  Disoriented, I blinked back into the present, lifting my eyes as I ascended to the stage. Barely hesitating, I shook the Chancellor's hand and summoned a genuine smile as she whispered, "Congratulations, doctor." I beamed at the photographer for the obligatory flash before she released me and I escaped to the offstage anonymity I usually enjoyed.

  No one knew who I was. Just another graduate with a medical degree, the ink barely dry. I slipped into my seat and invisibility once more.

  But to one person, I'd never be invisible.

  "I still can't believe it." Dad was waiting for me in the foyer, wiping tears from his eyes. "My little girl is old enough to be a doctor."

  I waited until he enveloped me in his arms before I whispered, "You know I'm not. If you'd put the right dates on my school enrolment forms when I first started kindergarten, you wouldn't be here until next year."

  "I blame the stress. I was supposed to bring two girls home, not just one." He pulled away and hooked his arm through mine. "She would have been so proud of you today. Let's take the official photos and then go back to my hotel. I think I need to tell you about your mother."

  We posed for the photographers, I got to hand back the hideous black graduation gown that made me look like one of the black-draped cocktail tables, and we were free.

  We crossed the hotel lobby and Dad jerked his head at the restaurant. "Do you want to go in there or would you prefer if we get room service upstairs?" As I watched, his eyes strayed back to the restaurant.

  "Is that the one with the really good seafood you were telling me about?" I hid my smile as he looked at me guiltily. "I haven't had lobster in a while. Let's do dinner at the restaurant."

  Given how late it was, the place was pretty empty, so the hostess offered us our choice of tables. Dad pointed to one tucked into a corner and that's where we sat.

  I waited impatiently as we ordered and our drinks were served, but Dad didn't say anything. I took a sip of my wine and finally said, "Okay. You've waited for almost twenty years and now you've dropped a hint, you won't say any more?"

  He gulped his beer and set it down. "It hurts, sweetheart. The last time I saw her was twenty-three years ago when she was pregnant with you. Barely showing, but her face was aglow. When I returned for my girls, she was cold and buried in a grave I couldn't even visit and you stared at me with her eyes, but you didn't know me." He sighed. "You know, I met your mother at a university. You see in the news about Islamic countries where women aren't allowed to be educated, but she was. She was a graduate student, doing her PhD in chemistry. I never even found out if she finished it. Anyway, we'd found what we thought were some significant gas reserves, but the samples went missing on the way to the lab and by the time we managed to get the survey vessel back to take more, the whole lab had been turned into a crater. We don't know who blew it up – the Americans or the Iraqis – but it didn't really matter. We had a fresh set of rock samples and I got volunteered for lab duty. Someone arranged a lab for me in a university – don't ask me its name, because I couldn't pronounce it then and I don't remember it now – and I was working late into the night, every night, to get all of the samples analysed.

  "One night I must have fallen asleep on one of the benches and I woke up to a furious argument I didn't understand a word of. Probably a good thing, too, because I learned later that I'd been called all sorts of things, including an ass." He laughed.

  "Koon," I said slowly, nodding.

  Dad looked surprised for a moment, but he recovered and continued, "Anyway, eventually the shouting ended and the man left, leaving a woman clad entirely in black. You know, from her head to her toes, like a nun, but covering her face, too."

  "You mean a niqab?" I asked.

  "Yeah, that. She turned to face me and told me to get out of her lap. Not lab, lap. All of her covered except her eyes and they were furious. But I couldn't stop staring at her eyes. She had eyes like yours – huge and dark and deep enough to drown in. It took me a minute to understand what she said because she had me absolutely mesmerised, but when I did, I burst out laughing. The wrong thing to do, I learned because she absolutely let rip. Your mother's voice was amazing. She abandoned English, or at least that's what it sounded like, but the message was clear. I was intruding and I needed to leave and ...by the time this tiny, veiled woman was done shouting at me in Farsi, I felt like I was this high." He held up his finger and thumb, barely an inch apart. "I backed away from her, hands up in surrender, and called my boss. I told him there was a crazy woman in my lab who looked like she wanted to kill me and could he please find another facility if he wanted me to survive to finish this analysis. I heard the door close before I ended the call and she must have left, because she wasn't in the lab when I looked around again. Before she came back, I raced around the room, packing everything up in preparation for a move.

  "The call never came. Every day I'd have to unpack more of it, and every day she ignored me. I could hear her on the other side of the lab, but whenever I looked at her, she'd either glare at me or turn her back. She never left – didn't even break for lunch.

  "And then one day, I heard her come in and then this weird sound, like when you whip a tablecloth off the table. So I turned around and she'd taken off that ghastly habit-thing. And underneath she was dressed...normally. Well, she still had a scarf over her hair and she had a long skirt and long sleeves and...it was odd. The only skin she revealed was her face, but it seemed like so much more. And she was beautiful, so beautiful...I don't know if I've ever told you, but you look just like her."

  No, he'd never said it, but I'd seen the strange sadness in his eyes when he looked at me sometimes. It was the same look he'd always gotten whenever I'd asked questions about my mother. I knew. I nodded, not wanting to interrupt the flow of his tale.

  "I couldn't stop staring at her and she got that same hard look in her eyes I knew from the day I'd met her. She told me if I was going to look at her like the other men did, then she'd put her niqab back on and never take it off again. She asked me if I'd never seen a woman's face before where I was from. I apologised and told her I couldn't stop staring because she was so beautiful. Then I introduced myself and apologised again for invading her lab, telling her I'd leave as soon as my company found me somewhere else or I finished testing all the samples. She told me her name was Fatima and not to be afraid because she didn't really want to kill me. I was so embarrassed, but then she smiled and...I think I fell in love with her then and there. A bit stupid really, like something in a book. Falling in love with someone because they told you they didn't want to kill you."

  Nathan. Nathan had said something similar – that he'd never wanted to hurt me. Not that I'd fallen in love with him at the time, given the circumstances, but it was the first glimmer of trust that had led me to love him later. Of course, he'd thrown that back in my face when he'd chosen his career over me, but he'd made his choices and he was the one who had to live with them. I wondered if he ever regretted letting me go.

  "Sweetheart? Do you think I'm crazy? Or have you heard enough?"

  I shook my head, both to clear it and to answer him. "No, please, I want to hear it. And we all have our crazy moments. Love's supposed to make you at least a little bit crazy." I looked up to find him staring at me. "What?"

  "You sound like you have personal experience. Do I get to meet him?"

  I couldn't help it. I laughed. "Dad, I'm twenty-three and I'm not completely innocent any more, but I would tell you if there were someone in my life I needed you to meet."

  He squinted at me. "Who was it? Was it that creepy Jason, Jo's brother? You know, I heard on the news that he got arrested in Sydney for having an orgy in a convertible. Him and three girls. You weren't one of them, were you?"

  I gave a most unladylike snort. "Shit, no. Even the thought of Jason naked makes me lose my appet
ite. Why don't you tell me about you and...Mum, instead?" I couldn't remember if I'd ever called her that. I didn't know what I'd called her if I'd even been able to talk.

  "Oh look, here comes dinner," Dad said, smiling at the waitress as she served our order.

  Choking down the desire to ask a million more questions, I concentrated on finishing my food so Dad would tell me more. Why had he decided to unburden himself now, of all nights? A chill crept over me as I feared the worst.

  THREE

  Dad gulped the last of his beer and ordered a third. I nursed my glass of water and shook my head at the waiter's enquiry. I didn't want any more alcohol. Even if I wasn't driving, I had to work tomorrow and a hangover wouldn't help me concentrate.

  "If you don't want to hear it, you don't have to. You can go home. I'll get the concierge to call you a cab." Dad's voice broke into my reverie.

  "No. I need to hear this. Please, continue," I replied.

  "Well, from that day, whenever I left the lab to get a coffee or some food, I invited her to come with me and when she wouldn't, I offered to bring something back for her. She'd just smile, shake her head and go back to work. We did talk a little occasionally – like when we were waiting for the spectrometer or washing up the used lab equipment – but that's it. She didn't wear her veil in the lab any more, either. Every day I'd ask her out to coffee or lunch and every day she refused, but she looked wistful, like she wanted to. So I kept asking, long after I should have stopped.

  "One evening, she left without saying good night – she always said good night – and I wondered what I'd done to annoy her. I figured my persistence might have pissed her off. Feeling a bit sad, I promised myself I'd back off the next day, but I'd go home early that day and have a drink from my small stash of illegal alcohol.

  "I stepped out of the lab and ran straight into her. Well, into a short woman dressed all in black, but I knew it was her, even if I could only see her eyes. I apologised, feeling even worse, but she laughed and pulled me into the office across the corridor. She told me it was finally Eid, at the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, and she wanted to celebrate it with me, too, so she'd brought me some traditional sweets. And from under that dress she pulled out a dish full of...well, heaps of things, all covered in powdered sugar. More than two people could eat, I'm sure, but I tried. God, they were sweet. And then she explained to me that every day I'd tempted her with food and coffee when she wasn't allowed either of them, but tomorrow she could and if I asked her, she'd love to join me for coffee or lunch. She said they weren't supposed to even think about sex when they were fasting for Ramadan. And one thing led to another and...she kissed me. I was shocked. I mean, it wasn't as if she'd ripped our clothes off and had her way with me on the desk...well, at least not that night, but – "