But I did, and I came back as me. I sat up on the morgue slab, signed myself out, collected my effects, and hit the road. Forget about statutory notice, or packing up any of the stuff from my apartment. Dead men aren’t covered by contract: my job was gone, my casa was someone else’s casa, and the landlord had probably already changed the locks. I headed straight for the Gaumont, bolted the doors, and got on with the job.
It was good timing, in a way: I’d finally gotten the air-conditioning units working properly at two degrees Celsius, and I had the place all set up to move into. Which was just as well, because it was the last moving I did for a while: the fucking rigor mortis hits you soon after you sit up and look around, and for the next twenty- four hours, it’s all you can do to roll your eyes to the heavens.
So I’m lying there, in the dark, because I didn’t get a chance to turn the lights on before my muscles seized up, and I’m running through the list in my mind.
Rancidification.
Black putrefaction.
Butyric fermentation.
Dry decay.
These, collectively, were the joys now in store for me. And every second I wasted meant more hassle later, so as soon as the rigor passed, I spat on my hands - figuratively speaking - and started taking the appropriate measures.
Rancidification, the first stage, is far and away the most dangerous. That’s when all the fluids in your body rot and go sour. The smell is fucking indescribable, but that’s not what you’ve got to worry about. The souring releases huge quantities of gas, which builds up in your body cavity wherever there’s a void for it to collect in. If you don’t do something about it, the pressure of the gas can do huge damage to your soft tissues - rip you open from the inside out. But if you make incisions to let out the gas, every hole is a problem that has to be managed at the putrefaction stage.
I got a long way with some ordinary plastic tubing, which I shoved into a great many places I’m not keen to talk about. In the end I had to make some actual incisions, but I kept them to a minimum: I was also helped by an amazing substance called Lanobase 18, which is what undertakers use to soak up the fluid leaking from your internal organs and turn it into an inert, almost plasticized slurry.
As far as the putrefaction stage went, I was already ahead of the game just by having a cold, controlled space of my own. No insects to lay their eggs in my moldering flesh; no air- or ground-borne contaminants. I used that time to start the embalming process. I needed it because by now my stink had matured into something really scary. I kept having to pour cologne onto my tongue to blitz what was left of my airway and nasal passages, because even though I wasn’t inhaling, the smell was still getting through to me somehow.
By the time I hit phase three, I was more than half pickled - and now it started to get easier. What was left of my flesh changed its consistency, over the space of a couple of weeks, into something hard and waxy. Adipocere, they call it. It’s kind of unsettling at first, because it doesn’t feel like anything even slightly organic, but it has the huge upside that it doesn’t smell of anything much. I could live with myself now.
Dry decay mainly affects your bones, through a leeching of organic compounds called diagenesis, so I just let it happen and turned my attention to other things.
Unfortunately, I’d missed a trick or two while all this was going on. I had the projection booth itself and the adjacent generator room armored up like the fucking Führer-bunker, but I hadn’t bothered with all the ground- floor doors and windows. I didn’t think I’d need to: the Gaumont had stood empty and undisturbed for so many years, who was going to pay it any attention now?
But the key word there is undisturbed. I’d had a whole lot of kit delivered when I was setting up my freezer and air-conditioning arrays, and I’d had some guys in to reinforce the upstairs walls and doors. I might as well have put out a fucking welcome mat: I was telling all the neighborhood deadbeats that the cinema was now inhabited and that it might contain something worth stealing.
In point of fact, it didn’t: everything that was valuable was locked away behind steel bulkhead doors up on the first floor. But that didn’t stop a variegated collection of scumbags from breaking in downstairs, smashing the windows, and ransacking what was left of the old furniture, looking for something they could purloin, pawn, or piss into. Some of them had even moved in and were now squatting in the auditorium or the store-rooms behind it.
First things first. I made some calls, using one of the false names and e-mail addresses I’d set up for my offshore holding company, and hired some guys from a private security firm to come in and clear out the squatters’ little rat nest. They threw everything out into the street; then they maintained a presence while I got the builders to come back in and make the place secure.
They put steel shutters on the ground- floor windows, and steel bulkhead doors over the old wooden doors, attached to I beams sunk two feet into freeway- mix concrete. I had the work team coat the windowsills and door frames with green antivandal paint, too: the losers could still sleep in the fucking doorway if they wanted to, but I wasn’t going to make it comfortable for them, and that was as far as they were going to get. As a dead man walking, I was too vulnerable: I wanted to have the freedom of the building without worrying about who I might run into. In any case, this was my retirement home now: why the hell should anyone else get the benefit of it? That’s not how life works; take it from a dead man.
Relaxing isn’t something I do all that well, but now I felt like I could finally slow down and take stock. I’d ridden out the roller coaster of physical decomposition, at least to the point where I could maintain a steady state. I had my place secured and my lines of communication laid down so that I could get what I needed from the outside world without dealing with it directly.
I took a day off. Watched some movies on cable. Opened a bottle of Pauillac and sniffed the wine-breath, since drinking it without any digestive enzymes was an idiot’s game.
It was half a day, actually. Half a day off. By the afternoon I was restless, worried about what I might be missing. I fired up the computers - three of them, each registered with a different ISP and apparently logged on in a different time zone - and put some of my money back into play on the New York Exchange.
That was a good afternoon and an even better evening. Stress couldn’t touch me now - look, Ma, no glands - I couldn’t get tired, and I didn’t need to take bathroom breaks, so I kept going steadily through a fourteen-hour session, not logging off until the exchange closed.
Then I switched to the Nikkei Dow and did the same for another five hours.
Man, I thought, this is . . . you know . . . liberating. Death means never having to wipe your ass again, never getting pulled out of the zone by your body’s needs or by someone else blabbing in your ear like they’ve got something to say. It means you can keep going forever, if you want to.
Of course, forever is a long time. A long, long, long fucking time.
On day three, the deadbeats broke in again. They’d actually sneaked back while the concrete was still setting and pushed one of the steel plates up out of line so they could work it loose later with a crowbar. I could hear them doing the same thing with the door of the projection room - my fucking holy of holies.
Yeah, dream on, you verminous little bastards. That door and the wall it was set in were about as porous as a bank vault: Not needing to breathe meant not having to cut corners where personal security was concerned. All the same, I couldn’t stop thinking about what would have happened if the door had been open - if I’d been down on the ground floor picking up my mail or something. I couldn’t take that risk again.
This time I thought it through properly: defence in depth was what I needed, not one big-ass door with one big-ass bolt on it. I had the builders - none of whom ever met me in person, of course - completely redesign the ground floor, replacing all the existing walls with steel bulkheads and at the same time putting in a whole lot of new ones. I took my inspi
ration from the crusader forts of the late Middle Ages, turning the Gaumont into three separate keeps, one inside the other. Only a single vault door connected the outer keep with the middle one, and the middle keep with the inner one. Other doors were devoid of bolts, locks, or handles: they were all independently lockable via a computer-controlled system, and the first thing I did was to slave the whole damn thing to the main server up in the projection booth. I put the closed-circuit (CCTV) cameras in, too - dozens of them, set up so there were no dead angles. I could check out any given stretch of corridor, any given room, and make sure it was clear before I opened the doors and cleared myself a route.
What? This sounds like overkill? No, genius, it wasn’t. I was thinking things through, that’s all. Every fortress can turn into a trap, so every fortress needs a back door. And this particular fortress needed a mail slot too, because for some of the things I was doing online I still needed physical documents, physical certification, actual rather than digital signatures. It’s stupid, but it’s true: some parts of the world haven’t started surfing the electron tide yet, and they only believe in what they can hold in their hands. Hah. Maybe not so stupid, when you think about it.
So now I could swing back into top gear, stop watching my back. And I did. Believe me, I did.
To tell you the truth, I got lost in it. I must have spent a week or more at a time just bouncing from one exchange to another in an endless, breakneck rhythm. You know those velodromes, where the racers ride their bikes almost horizontally on the canted walls? Well, that’s what I was like. The only thing that kept me touching the ground at all was my unthinkable velocity. Which is fine, so long as you never slow down.
But I did.
It was subtle at first, subtle enough that I didn’t even realize it was happening. I missed a spike here, came in slow on a deal there - not big things and not connected. I was still coming out ahead and still in control. It took me a couple of days to realize that I was too much in control, that I was going through the motions without feeling them and making conscious decisions instead of letting instinct play through me.
I tied down, cashed in, and logged off. Sat there in silence for a while, staring at the screens. A wave of grief swept through me, and I don’t care if that sounds stupid - a sense of bereavement. Nicky Heath was dead. I hadn’t really gotten that fact into my head until then.
If you stop, you never start again - my own golden rule. But I didn’t feel like I could touch the keyboard right then. I was afraid of screwing up, afraid of hitting some rock I would have seen a mile off back when I had a functioning endocrine system. Look, Ma, no glands.
I think I must have been hearing the noises in the walls for a while before that - bangs and scrapes and scuffles, muffled not by distance but by the thickness of the brickwork and the layers of steel plating. But now I let myself listen to them. Jumbled, discontinuous, slightly different each time. It wasn’t the freezer unit or the big electrical generator downstairs. The only things that made noises like that were living things. People. Animals. Members of the big but still exclusive club of entities-with-a-pulse.
I turned on the CCTV monitors and did the rounds of the cameras. She wasn’t hard to find, once I started looking: she was in the outer keep, way down on the ground floor, in a blind stretch of corridor between two of my self-locking doors - nowhere near the big steel portal that led through into the middle zone.
It was still a nasty shock, though. Sort of like scratching your balls and coming up with a louse.
From what I could see, she had to be one of the homeless people - probably in her early twenties but looking a damn sight older, huddled in way too many layers of clothes in a corner made by the angle of wall and door. She had dirty blonde hair and a sullen, hangdog face. Hard to tell anything else, because she was folded down into herself, knees hugged to her chest and head down. It was probably cold down there, in spite of all the layers.
Where the hell had she come from? She couldn’t have been in there since the last invasion, because I wouldn’t have missed her, and in any case, she’d be dead by now. There wasn’t anything to eat or drink, and she clearly hadn’t brought anything in with her that she couldn’t carry in her pockets.
I backtracked with the cameras until I found the smoking gun - a large vent pipe for one of the freezer units that had been run through the outer wall of the building. She’d just hit it with something - a hammer or a rock - again and again until the flimsy metal bent back on itself far enough for her to squeeze through. That had let her into a part of the building that was on the route I used when I went down to collect the mail. She must have scooted through a door or two that was unlocked when I came through, and then got caught in the dead-end stretch of corridor when I made the return journey and locked up again.
She’d tried to get out: those were the sounds I’d heard. She’d hammered and clawed at the door and probably screamed for help, but only faint echoes had come up to the projection room, and I’d been too absorbed in what I was doing to decipher them.
Now she looked to be in a bad way. The monitor only resolved in black and white, but there were dark patches on her hands, which I assumed were probably blood - her fingernails damaged from trying to pull on the edge of the doorjamb - and when she briefly came out of her huddle to grab a gulp of air, I saw that her lips were swollen in a way that suggested dehydration.
I got up and paced around the room, trying to think it through. I wasn’t capable of panic, but I felt a dull, blunt volume of unhappiness expand inside me, like the intestinal gases back in the first stage of decay.
I could just let her die was the first thought that came to mind.
I could open up the doors to let her back out the way she’d come, but she might be too weak to move. She might die anyway.
If I opened the doors, someone else could get in. Safer just to leave her.
But someone could have seen her climbing inside and not come out again. Someone might be looking for her right now or calling the police or crawling through that hole with torches and crowbars and . . .
No, nobody else had found the hole. The CCTV cameras didn’t show anyone else, either in the room where the vent let out or anywhere else in the outer keep. I should have put more sophisticated alarms in, I thought irrelevantly - movement sensors, or infrared scanners, or something. I shouldn’t have let this happen. Now here I was, already guilty of false imprisonment or some such bullshit, with the police probably searching the goddamned neighborhood and Christ only knows what kind of trouble to look forward to if she was found here, alive or dead or anywhere in between.
I stopped pacing because I’d come up hard against a wall. I wanted to punch it, but that would have been a really stupid thing to do - no blood flow, so no scabbing, no skin repair. Any wound I opened in my own flesh would stay open unless I sewed it shut.
I stared at the wall for maybe five minutes, galloping through the same rat-runs inside my head. When I’d done it enough times to be sure they always ended up in the same place, I got moving again.
I had no choice. I had to bring the dumb bitch up to good-as-new spec before I cut her loose. I had to make sure there was no harm and no foul, whatever that took.
I found a bucket the builders had left behind and a washbasin in what had once been a cleaner’s cupboard behind the projection booth. I cleaned the bucket out as far as I could, then filled it with cold water. I flicked some switches on the main board, releasing the locks on all but one of the doors between me and the woman - leaving just the door that she was leaning against.
Then I went down, let myself out through the inner and middle keeps, and made my way around to her stretch of corridor. She must have heard me coming, because when I turned the last bend, I caught the sound of her fists banging on the other side of the door, and her voice, muffled through the thick wood, telling me she was stuck.
I left the bucket of water right in front of the door and went back up to the projection booth. I watched
the woman on the CCTV hook-up: she was still hammering and shouting, pushing at the door, thinking or at least hoping that someone could hear her.
I relocked all the other doors before opening just that one. Since she was leaning her weight against it, she just tumbled through when it opened. She saw the bucket, stared at it with big incredulous eyes, and finally cupped her hands and drank from it. She coughed up a storm and vomited a little, too, but she was alive at least. That was a good start.
Food was more of a problem, because unless there were a few hardy rats down in the basement somewhere, there was nothing edible in the entire building. I got around that by going to the Ocado Web site, whose online order form allows you to specify exactly where you want the food to be dropped off. I specified the mailbox, which was actually a double-doored receptacle like the ones post offices use - big enough to take thick bundles of legal papers, and, as it turned out, big enough for a bag of groceries too.
The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology Page 29
