Dearly, Departed

by Lia Habel

  I looked at the coordinates. I resisted the urge to punch the air, and instead focused on increasing the level of annoyance in my voice. “No. No, no, no. This is why I do the thinking. This is why I had to come and take over your company, before someone else got seriously hurt.” I looked down at the dead man, who regarded me with that heavy, unintelligent look so many of them have. “Our objective right now is to locate the doctor. After you guys clean up here, you’re going after him. I’m traveling with you for another day. Then I’ll return to base on my own.”

  “Sir.” Ben saluted.

  I stalked out of the van, diary in my hand. It felt like a passport to freedom. The moron couldn’t have landed in a better spot.

  I turned on the little lantern suspended from my belt and almost ran to my tent. Once there, I felt my way through the semidarkness to the trunk that sat at the foot of my cot. Inside was a warped, battered suitcase filled with an ancient assortment of radio equipment.

  My heart was hammering. I slapped at a mosquito that had managed to get inside my collar and unbuttoned my waistcoat, reaching into the long pocket sewn within. I drew out a piece of paper. Written upon it was a series of numbers. Anyone would have mistaken it for a list of betting odds, or perhaps merely dismissed it as ancient, out of hand, it being nondigital.

  All in all, I’d come out ahead that night.

  I kept telling God that if He got me out of this I would never take His name in vain again, ever, and I would go to church every Sunday like the good, good girl I was.

  And then I would find myself thinking Oh, God, again, as I made my way over to the toilet to be sick. This time it was because my brain had just registered the fact that my hands were carefully bandaged.

  It had really happened.

  The dead people had patched me up after it happened.

  Oh, God.

  They were dead. They were freaking dead. They were rotting and horrible and skulls and bare teeth and … dead. I kept closing my eyes and seeing their bones, their chalky flesh.

  Moving.

  I hauled myself back onto the narrow bed and folded my arms around my knees. I had woken up a few hours ago in a small windowless room. There was a thin blue carpet on the floor, a desk with books neatly stacked on it, the bed, a tiny bathroom, and not much else. My nightgown was stained and torn, but still on me. They hadn’t disrobed me, at least.

  There was a teddy bear with wooden button eyes at my side, so worn that his stuffing was on the verge of falling out.

  Were dead people afraid of the dark, too?

  I could hear them out in the hallway.

  “Oh my gosh, guys. If she wasn’t a pretty girl, you would not all be hanging around out here.”

  “Shut up, Chas.”

  They’d been there for the past hour or so. Three of them—two males and a female. The female’s voice was husky, and yet strangely perky. The two male voices were guttural baritones, though one sounded decidedly crankier than the other.

  “Seriously, let me talk to her when she wakes up. Girl-to-girl.”

  “No offense, Chas, but you’d scare the crap out of her.”

  “Want to say that to my face, Coalhouse?”

  “What’s left of it.”

  “This was not part of the agreement!” said a mature male voice I hadn’t heard before. “Outside! I mean it, or the deal is over!”

  “Relax, Elpinoy. She’s still out cold.”

  “Or body temperature, as the case may be.”

  “Silence! Go! Out!”

  There were sighs and protests, but slowly the other voices faded away. “Miss Dearly?” The older voice was at the door.

  I didn’t respond.

  “Miss Dearly, if you are awake, I just wanted to let you know that you are safe here. We’d … prefer it if you didn’t leave the room, but we will have breakfast for you in the morning.” There was a pause, and then the voice informed someone else, “Er, better wrap up and go see if you can find some actual food for her. Really nice things, I mean. Try Alpha Base first, only go to town if you have to. Don’t use credit, there should be money in the tin in my office.”

  “Sir.”

  “And clothes, we’ll bring you some clothes. Dr. Chase must have something. Ah, what else? I suppose that’s it. At any rate, please do not be afraid.”

  Yeah, right.

  “I’m alive, by the way. My name is Dr. Richard Elpinoy.”

  My eyes opened. Alive?

  I was across the room in half a second. The man gave a startled cry when I yanked the door open. He was a portly, dark-skinned fellow with white hair, his frame tightly wrapped in brown tweed. “Miss Dearly!”

  “Alive?” I rasped out. “The others really are dead, then?”

  He paused, and then timidly allowed, “Well, the preferred term is ‘undead.’ ”

  I slammed the door shut with a whimper and closed my eyes.

  “But they mean you no harm!” he was quick to continue. “I swear this to you. The ones who’d come for you, yes, but—”

  “They’re the bad guys.” It was the voice of the young man with the blind eyes.

  My stomach went cold as I realized—although that hadn’t been my first impression upon seeing him—that he was probably dead, too.

  And he’d touched me.

  “Go away!” I found myself yelling. “Dr. Elpinoy, make him go away!”

  “Um, you’re in my room …”

  “Bram, please. Oh, I knew this was a foolish idea …”

  “Bram, if that’s your name, please go away!” I didn’t want to deal with anything that was not strictly alive and breathing, because I was pretty sure that I was departing my ever-loving mind.

  “Look,” Bram said, exasperated. “We put you in my room because of the door. Have you even looked at it?”

  I opened my eyes. The door was studded with a variety of locks.

  “Ten,” he said, as if he could see what I was seeing. “Fasten them all up, if you’re scared. None of them extend out here, so it’s not like we have the keys or anything.”

  I quickly did so, thrusting bars and setting chains. I stepped away from the door, instinctively expecting him to try and test it. He didn’t.

  We were all quiet for a few moments before I broke the silence by saying, in my best sweet upper-crust-girls’-school voice, “I am sure that all of you are really just suffering from some horrible disease, and that I should feel nothing but pity for you. If you let me go, I will organize a charity function that you will not believe. It will be, as our ancestors used to say, ‘epic.’ ”

  There was some furious whispering before Bram responded with, “Ah, thank you, miss, but we’re already dead.”

  I bit my lip. I was starting to crumble.

  “And we can’t just let you go. If we do, the others will come after you again. You don’t understand …”

  At that I tuned him out, returned to the bed, and allowed myself to fall to pieces.

  “Little one, I was so gloomy,

  Felt that life sure would undo me,

  Till, one day, you happened to me,

  My little one.

  Little one, no controversy,

  You’re my downfall, you’re my Circe.

  I’m a good guy, show me mercy,

  My little one.”

  The second time I awoke it was to the voice of Bing Crosby, an old singer I remembered from a holo in history class.

  I wondered if there was a crazy person’s license you had to apply for, some seminar you had to attend, or if you could just walk out of the house one day and get started.

  I sat up and rubbed at my sore eyes. The room was the same. The only thing that was different was the music—and a piece of paper lying on the floor near the door.

  Slipping from the bed, I padded over and picked up the note. Before unfolding it, I paused to listen. I could hear the scratchy sound of a predigital recording being played, but there was also someone singing along, voice quiet. It was Bram. He mus
t have been appointed guard duty or something.

  The note was from him.

  Miss Dearly: I’ll be outside, if you don’t want to open the door. But when you’re ready, I’d like to play a game with you. Ask me any question you like, and I’ll answer truthfully. If the answer makes you feel a little safer, reward me by undoing one of the locks. I play to get my room back, you play for the confidence to be able to leave it.

  Oh, by the way: Could you wind my alarm clock?

  —Captain Abraham Griswold

  The music switched over to “Pennies from Heaven.” Bram sang on without missing a beat. He was kind of good.

  I really didn’t want to think about the fact that the dead guy had a nice voice.

  “You like this music?” I asked, hoping he would turn it off.

  There was a pause before he asked, “Is that your first question?”

  “Sure.” I was a little slaphappy at this point. I was cried out, I was tired, my hands hurt, and I was beginning to believe that this was all one big wicked hallucination.

  “Yes. The world’ll never have anyone like Bing Crosby again, or Fred Astaire, or Johnny Mathis. If anyone should have had life after death, it was them. But mostly I sing along to keep my vocal cords stretched out. It’s the quiet sorts who end up grunting and groaning.”

  He shut off the music, and the silence loomed large. I answered it by undoing one of the chain locks. He’d gotten that one for free; now, I supposed, I had leave to ask some meatier questions. I cut to the chase. “If you’re dead, how is it that we are having this conversation right now?”

  I could hear his clothes rustling as he physically settled in for that answer. I slowly sat down on the floor myself.

  “It’s caused by an illness. Your father called it the Lazarus syndrome, which is what most of us prefer. Little more dignified than some names I’ve heard. Some call it the Z.”

  My brow knit in confusion. “You mean … my father discovered it?”

  “Named it, at least.” Bram sighed, and said, “Give me a moment, this is complicated.”

  I let him collect his thoughts, my stomach churning again at the idea that my father could have had anything to do with all of this.

  He began.

  “I guess the first case happened about eight years ago now.” Bram’s voice was slow and rough, the way it had been outside my house, under the gas lamps of the Fields. “It started out normally enough. Punks got too close to the border, royals—er, Victorians—sent them packing. It was close fighting, hand-to-hand. I guess during debriefing the soldiers said that some of the Punks’d been particularly vicious, biting and clawing, but it’s not like violence is considered out of the ordinary during a battle.

  “One soldier’d been chewed up real good, though. He was rushed to the field hospital. By all accounts he was cheerful through it all, a good trooper … but some sort of blazingly fast infection appeared to set in. Your dad was traveling with his unit at the time, so they called him in. He did all he could, but the soldier died in terrible pain just a few hours later.

  “Five minutes after the official time of death, as your father was turning off the vitals monitor and preparing to draw the sheet over him, the soldier sat up. He was uncoordinated, convulsing, and obviously suffering from some sort of brain damage. How severe, permanent or not, Dr. Dearly couldn’t say. But hey, the guy was alive!

  “As your father and all the staff gathered around to witness this miracle, relieved, amazed … he decided to make a meal out of your father’s arm.”

  I covered my mouth with my hand, willing myself not to be sick. All I could think of was the monster hooked on the trellis below me, savoring my blood.

  “He bit three different staff members as they tried to subdue him. He seemed to lose his mind, just go nuts—like a berserker. Do you know what a berserker is? A soldier who just goes completely blind with rage and power and adrenaline and lashes out at anything you put in front of him, heedless of his own safety? That’s what it was like. They hit him, even got a tranq in him at one point, but he wouldn’t go down. Eventually they got smart and shot him. Of course, it wasn’t till they shot him in the head that that worked, either. Took out both his knees and one of his arms, and he was still crawling toward them, until they got the head.

  “Within eight hours the three staff members who’d been bitten were dead—and then alive. Dr. Dearly, thank goodness, is an observant man, and he shot them all the moment they started twitching again. Which varied. One sat right back up, one took a couple minutes.”

  “What about his bite?” I asked, wrapping my arms around my shoulders. I was suddenly cold. I pressed my lips together so hard it hurt.

  Bram ignored my question. “The Victorians,” he continued, “realized that this wasn’t something that should be ignored. The Department of Military Health was assigned the task of finding out what was causing it, and your father demanded to be included on the team. Ten months later he managed to identify and isolate the agent that he believed was the cause. The Prime Minister came down to get a personal glimpse of this achievement …”

  “And that’s when the Punks attacked again, and Dad saved him?” My brain made the connection without telling me, the words flying out of my mouth.

  “Right.”

  I tried to force my rapid thoughts to slow down. I had a million questions, but I knew that if I got a million answers all at once, I’d go crazy. “Okay. I get the Lazarus reference, but why ‘the Z’?”

  “Well, because what we’re enduring seems awfully similar to ancient descriptions of creatures known as zombies.” My silence was the equivalent of a blank look. Bram asked, “You’ve heard of zombies, right?”

  “No, but my father was big into mythology and stories.” I thought longingly of the figures carved into the ceilings of our house, the carefully chosen paintings.

  “The living dead? Walking dead?”

  I was quiet again for a moment before trying, “Okay?”

  Bram sighed. “Moving on. Your dad convinced the PM, after being offered all those cushy positions, to make him head of the DoMH—we call it the Doom around here—and let him research it. Said if he was Surgeon General, or something like that, he’d be under too much political scrutiny. The PM agreed that the public did not need to know about it. With any luck they’d find a cure before the whole thing blew open.

  “Meanwhile, even the Punks were starting to get freaked out. Whatever it was, it wasn’t something they knew anything about. The public will never be told about this, either, but there are areas along the border where the royals and Punks are now banded together in an effort to control the monsters. Little truces, all over the place.”

  I stared at the door without seeing it. What? “That’s not true. I saw on the news that the Punks are …” I trailed off as I realized what they were. They weren’t angry.

  They were scared.

  Or sick.

  Oh, God.

  “Well, most Punks think that the roy—Victorians, sorry—engineered the Lazarus to kill them off, and that’s why they’re suddenly fighting back so violently, yeah. But not all of them. Some are united in fighting the evil dead. Have been for about … five years now. It’s not a wide-ranging truce, and it’s pretty uneasy at times, but … there’s a bigger threat out there. One that has to be kept under wraps. Can you imagine how the people on both sides’d freak out if they knew? The panic?”

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  “Anyway, the sickness kick-starts the brain, reanimates the body after death. I could go into more detail, but you know, we have all these great visual aids out here, which would really help me out …”

  “Nice try.”

  I heard him chuckle. I willed myself not to like the sound.

  And I undid one of the locks.

  I lowered my hand slowly to my lap and leaned my head back against the wall. “How can I be convinced that you’re a ‘good guy,’ then? You’re talking about corpses that app
arently like to … eat people?” I hoped he wouldn’t confirm that.

  “Yeah, we seem to be naturally cannibalistic,” he said, so casually that it chilled me to the bone. “But that’s what I meant when I told you that your father saved my life. In his research, he recognized that some of us were coming back more … intact than others. Memories, personality. Some of the new undead his men encountered seemed to be wandering, lost, overwhelmed—not necessarily looking for their next meal or anything. And so his mission became … well, in the absence of a cure, helping us to deal with our illness.”

  I felt as if someone had thonked a brick between my eyes. Suddenly it made perfect sense. My father had truly seen monsters, an old tale sprung to life—moving, thirsting before his eyes. It would have been the same if he’d discovered a dragon. He would have tried to tame it.

  “It’s like … look, as a living human being,” Bram went on, “you have things you need. You need food, water. If you don’t have these things, no matter how civilized you might think you are, you’ll regress. You’ll go insane without them. You’ll kill others, trick others for them. It’s simple animal instinct. It’s hard to remember how to be nice when you are in agonizing pain from hunger.

  “Well, I have things I need, too. I instinctively crave fluids, because I’m drying out. I crave protein because I’m damaging my body’s tissues every time I move, even though I can’t use that protein to rebuild them anymore. And the prions living in my brain crave new hosts and tell my synapses to make me a little nippy. In short, I’m newly rewired with a burning desire for a nice, warm body. You know, like every other teenage boy.”

  I rocketed away from the door to the other side of the room. “Shut up! Shut up!”

  He must have heard my voice retreating, because he called out, “Miss Dearly, you’re still locked in! Geez, it’s okay! Just listen, all right?”