Dearly, Departed

by Lia Habel

  Nora stood on tiptoe to look up at the monitors. “And so you need him back.”

  I nodded. “Well, for this, yes … and because he’s the Zombie Party’s national hero.”

  For once, Dick was not a pompous jerk. “We all love your father, Miss Dearly,” he said. “This is not a question of politics.”

  I didn’t want to be presumptuous to the girl who had thought her father dead for over a year, but I added, “I think I speak for the undead lobby here when I say that we’d crawl through hell to get him back, vaccine or no vaccine. And if you think about it, it’s not like a vaccine’s going to help us any.”

  “This is all very touching,” Nora said, eyes still on the monitors. “But right now, he’s not my hero.” She opened her fist, revealing a mini recording cylinder, and offered it to me. “Play this.”

  “Not your …?” Elpinoy’s eyes widened and he turned on me. “Bram, what did you do?”

  I took the cylinder and popped open a tray on one of the computers to insert it. “She deserves to know what’s going on, Dick.” I shoved the tray in with my elbow as I bent down to flick the button that’d lower the lights.

  “Yes, but—”

  Dr. Dearly interrupted Elpinoy with a soft, “Hello, NoNo.”

  His face swam into focus on one of the large screens. We all fell silent. It was startling to see Victor looking so young. His round but aristocratic face had fewer lines crossing it, his sleek hair was fully black instead of salt-and-pepper, and his hooded brown eyes were clear behind his half-moon spectacles.

  Nora’s arms went slack.

  Dr. Dearly, pale and trembling, was seated in front of a green tent wall smeared with blood. Someone had obviously tried to clean it off and for some reason stopped halfway. “I’m sorry to have to do it this way, sweetheart. I swear, I don’t want to hurt you, only … I’m not sure how long I have. I have to do this before I become … inhuman.”

  “It’s really him,” Nora whispered.

  “As you can tell, something very bad has happened here. And if you get this, I did not survive it. I’m not sure how much I should tell you, because chances are the government is going to clamp down on this … they won’t let anyone know. You’re an intelligent girl, Nora, so you destroy this when you’re done watching it, all right? You destroy this cylinder. You beat it up with a hammer till it’s sparkly dust, or you throw it in the fire and you don’t say a word to anyone about it.”

  He took off his glasses and wiped his forehead. He was sweating like a racehorse. My tongue felt heavy in my mouth. I remembered sweating like that. I also remembered getting really confused around the same time.

  Suddenly, I felt like I shouldn’t be watching. The message was meant for Nora. But I couldn’t look away.

  The fact that he’d recorded anything hit really close to home.

  “You may have heard a priest, at some point in your Sunday-school-goings, say that to grow too attached to mere things is dangerous. He would not like what I am about to tell you, but he is full of poppycock.

  “Far more powerful than religion, far more powerful than money or land or even violence, are symbols. Symbols are stories. Symbols are pictures, or items, or ideas that represent something else. Human beings attach such meaning and importance to symbols that they can inspire hope, stand in for gods, or convince someone that he or she is dying.

  “There are symbols of me everywhere around you. I am in everything I have ever touched. I am in every memory you may have of me. I am in every utterance of my name. I am in every atom of your blood.”

  He looked deeply into the camera. He was crying. “I know I’m speaking in riddles, but they’re the only things that make sense right now. Darling, find me there. Find me within you. Find me within you and know that I didn’t mean to leave you. Be brave. But don’t believe those who say I am gone. I am not. It is impossible for human beings to truly die. We leave too much behind.”

  “Turn it off.” Nora was tearing up again.

  “It’s almost over,” I said, looking at the digital clock above the insertion slot. Minicylinders only had five minutes of recording time.

  “I love you, Nora,” Dr. Dearly said. He continued to stare relentlessly into the camera. “I’m sorry.”

  The screen went black. I hurriedly brought up the lights. Tears were trailing down Nora’s cheeks and she was leaning against the counter.

  “Miss Dearly—” Elpinoy began.

  “Don’t call me that,” she snapped. “Don’t call me that! I’m not related to that … that liar! He lied to me! He never told me any of this, and he always acted like we were against the world, him and me!”

  I decided to go for it, scooting my chair a touch closer to her. “Nora, he loves you. We’ll find him.”

  “I don’t want to find him!” She stepped away, staring at me with wide, angry eyes. “I never want to see him again! You want to run off and find him? Be my guest! He’s dead to me, he’s dead, he’s dead!”

  With that she stomped off into the office and threw herself into her father’s heavy leather chair. I looked at Elpinoy, figuring I’d see loathing in his eyes—but he just looked helplessly back at me.

  “What do we do?” he asked.

  I followed her to find out.

  Nora was curled up in a tight little ball by the time I reached her side. I knelt down and asked, “What do you need us to do?”

  She didn’t respond. It seemed she drew into herself whenever she became overwhelmed. It left me feeling useless, but it was easier to deal with the silence when I could be near her. So I sat against the desk, listening to the ticking of Dearly’s old wooden clock and the warm humming of the computers as I waited.

  After twenty minutes or so of brooding, Nora turned to me. She set her chin forward in a stubborn little motion, though her voice was quiet. “Seeing as a vaccine wouldn’t help me, either, I guess that puts me in the undead lobby.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” I agreed, not quite getting it.

  “So it’s my job to help you.”

  “Okay?”

  Seeing that I was stymied, she sighed and pushed herself up. As she spoke, Elpinoy slowly entered, keeping his back to the wall. “Look,” she said, “I’m getting it. I might be a little slow on the uptake right now, but I’m getting it. And what I’m getting from it is that there’s no way I can go back to being normal after all this. Whatever I feel about him at the moment, I’m kind of like my dad now. I’m on your team. I’ve been bitten, in a way.”

  I understood. “Okay.”

  She tossed her hair out of her eyes. “So, let’s keep going. What’s next?”

  Elpinoy’s mouth dropped open like a trapdoor. “Miss Dearly, really … if you’ll make yourself comfortable in this room, you can have more time to think …”

  “If I take more time to think, I’m going to go insane,” she shot back at him. “I took last night to think. Right now I need to keep busy. Give me something to do.” She nodded, to no one. “Give me something to do.”

  “Captain Wolfe would not approve.”

  I leaned my head back. “Dick, where is Captain Wolfe?”

  “He’s still out with the troops on patrol. He’s scheduled to return at any moment. In fact, I should radio him. He said not to use the radio, lest the Grays intercept, but I could tell him that—”

  “Feel up to meeting another zombie real quick?” I asked Nora. “I promise you, he’s probably the least dangerous guy here. He can help us.”

  Elpinoy trailed off, his face souring. “What are you doing, Bram?”

  “Sure,” said Nora. “Why not?”

  I stood up and flashed Dick a smile. “I’m going to introduce her to Doc Sam and let him do Laz 101. Right this way, Nora.”

  “Don’t you dare, Bram! She is not ready to—Hey, wait up!”

  The hall was vacant this time around. I guessed that someone, maybe Samedi himself, had told everyone to get back to work. When we got to the right door, I opened it for Nora. She
looked me up and down, but stepped quickly inside. I followed, not bothering to hold it for Dick, who had to struggle to get the heavy thing open for himself.

  “Now,” I said to Nora, keeping my voice low, “prepare yourself for some real weirdness.”

  “That will make the twentieth time today,” she whispered back.

  The lab we had entered was built to the same plan as Dearly’s quarters—three rooms connected by doors. Unlike Dearly’s, however, the lab doors were heavily reinforced and fitted with electronic locks. About five or six people were currently at work on various projects, but they all stopped as they realized who had just joined them.

  One of them came rushing over, pushing up her goggles as she did. Dr. Beryl Chase was a curvy woman in her thirties, with strawberry blond hair and eyes the color of green apples. She wore a black hobble skirt and high-necked blouse beneath her white lab coat. “Oh, Miss Dearly, I’m so glad to see you!” She glanced down at Nora’s dress and laughed. “Well, I doubt you’ll grow into it, but it’ll do. You’ve a … keen fashion sense.”

  Nora realized who she was before I could even open my mouth to begin an introduction. “You’re Dr. Chase. You sent me the bag of clothes and things.”

  Beryl nodded. “Yes, that’s me.”

  Nora dug up a little smile for her. “Thank you.” She worked her mouth and added, “I recognize your voice from the hall yesterday—I didn’t know who you were. I’m sorry for yelling. And I won’t cut the other dress up. I’ll pay you back.”

  Beryl waved a hand. “Don’t worry about it. And sometimes a girl just needs a good scream.”

  “Oh, such truth in so few words,” quoth the sonorous voice of Dr. Samedi.

  Nora looked in that direction.

  I waited for it.

  Nora leapt behind me. “OhmiGodohmiGodohmiGod,” she chanted below her breath, her hands gripping into my lower back.

  I stiffened. I hadn’t expected that.

  Dr. Samedi approached—a professionally attired body without a head. Around his neck, above his wing-tipped collar and blue cravat, was a thick ring of steel studded with dome-headed screws.

  “It’s all right, Miss Dearly.” Beryl glared in the direction of the body, which stopped in its tracks. “Baldwin, put your head on. You’re scaring her!”

  “Nora,” I said softly, “just watch this. It’s freaky, but you’ll appreciate it, I know it. And let go of me before you leave a mark!”

  Nora took a shaky breath and slowly peeped out around me. Her fingers gradually uncurled from my back.

  Samedi sighed. “Fine, fine.” He returned to the workstation from which he’d come, where his head was hung on a spidery brass armature, positioned so he could look down at his current project. He lifted it carefully and, with only a few alignment problems and eventually a few clicks, reattached it. He removed his goggles and blinked heavily several times. He’d been a man of young middle-age when he died, with wavy chestnut hair and expressive, almost feminine eyes. His complexion was gray now, and he had several rows of stitches and staples along his forehead and left cheek, where he’d received a deep gash. His left ear was missing.

  “There,” he said, twisting his neck a few times. “Is that better, Beryl?”

  “Much. There, Miss Dearly, all is well.”

  Nora was staring at the doctor with round eyes. “I want to go home,” she whispered to me. “Forget that last speech, I want to go home.”

  “Working on it,” I replied, before lifting my voice. “Hey, Sam, how’s it going?”

  “I want to go home now.”

  “As well as can be expected,” Samedi said, moving closer again. He smiled at Nora and bowed. “Dr. Baldwin Samedi. It is an honor to meet you, Miss Dearly.”

  Nora didn’t move to curtsy, and instead just blurted, “How can you move without your head?”

  Beryl laughed. “As usual, you’re a hit with the ladies.”

  “Are you saying that I’m a hit with you, Dr. Chase?” Samedi feigned shock, but then sobered his expression and addressed Nora. “Well, young lady, I can move without my head essentially because my brain is here now.” He tapped the metal collar. “I have implanted wireless electrodes in my skull that communicate with the collar mounted on my neck, which then feeds the information to my spinal cord and permits movement of my body. Occasionally it does misfire, but that’s why we keep Dr. Chase about—she knows how to hit the reset button, as it were.”

  Behind his back, Beryl mimed hitting Samedi with a crowbar or mallet.

  I spoke up. “Dr. Samedi and Dr. Chase are the best engineers we have working with us. They work on weapons systems, customize our equipment, and create the prostheses that some of us use.”

  “Prostheses? Like … fake arms, and things?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Better after-living through cybernetics,” Beryl said, adjusting her name tag.

  “Anyway, I wonder if you could walk us through the Laz, Sam. I’ve been trying to brief Nora as we go, but it might be good to hear it from a doctor.”

  Samedi cocked his head. “Doctor? I’m an engineer, not an epidemiologist. With Dearly gone, that’s Elpinoy’s purview.”

  Elpinoy tugged his jacket closer about his body, as if it could offer him protection. “No. I won’t do it. We’re already way out of line. Wolfe is going to be furious.”

  “I see your point,” Samedi said.

  Oops, I mouthed to Dick.

  Samedi stepped over to a computer and typed in a command, bringing up a few rows of folders on the nearest monitor. He tapped through them until he found an image of the Lazarus prion. He hit a button, causing a hologram of it to rez over a nearby horizontal screen. Nora moved to get a better look.

  “Prion Zr-068,” he began. Samedi was the perfect man for the job. He sounded like a documentary narrator, tone clipped and humorless.

  “What’s a prion?” Nora asked.

  “It’s a protein. That’s all. It is neither alive nor dead. Just a chunk of biological building material. In fact, the great majority of us have this same protein within our bodies from the moment of conception, and it does us no harm.” He changed the image. “The difference is that a Lazarus prion folds in a different way—literally, it’s crumpled up, it’s a different shape. Once introduced to the body, this diseased protein starts replicating by telling our normal proteins to refold themselves. A sort of deadly origami. The syndrome begins to manifest. It is an incredibly fast disease—its incubation period averages six hours.”

  Nora gaped at him. “You’re dead in six hours?”

  “Dead,” Samedi confirmed, “and then not dead. The body reanimates anywhere from one second to six minutes after death. Now, the faster you ‘awaken,’ the healthier you are. The brain does not begin to die until after the heart and lungs do … it’s the lack of oxygen that kills it. So, how intact you are upon reanimation depends on how long your brain has been without oxygen. It is entirely possible to reanimate completely brain-dead.” He pursed his lips. “Those are unfortunate creatures.”

  “How can a protein be so harmful?” Nora rubbed her wrists together.

  “Prions are also responsible for such things as mad cow disease. They damage the tissues of the body—brain tissue especially. This one just happens to be incredibly virulent. Not even now do we fully understand how, or why, it works the way it does. As best we can figure, it reanimates and controls the body so that it can transmit itself to another host via the bodily fluids. You can also get it by eating the flesh of the infected, which is probably how it got started, perhaps in animals. Although in this form, it doesn’t seem to infect our fuzzy friends.”

  Samedi brought up a picture of Nora on the screen, which made her twitch a bit. “Now, the reason you are immune—congratulations, by the way—is because you are blessed with a gene variation that is incredibly resistant to diseased Zr-068. Probably the easiest way to explain it is to simply say that your proteins refuse to bend.”

  “My mother was r
ight,” Nora muttered. “Even my genes are stubborn.”

  “Your father has a slightly different but no less startling genetic variation, which resulted in so few of his proteins being destroyed at any one time that he was able to live many happy, symptom-free years, before he grew weak from an unrelated illness.”

  “Okay,” she said. “So, why’s it taking so long to make a vaccine?”

  “Well, Dr. Elpinoy will never admit it, but he suffers from performance anxiety—”

  “Oh, shut up, you old cad,” Elpinoy said, finally uncrossing his arms. “Miss Dearly, it’s difficult. The human immune system won’t attack prions, because it doesn’t see them as foreign. It thinks they’re normal proteins. That’s why I’m here. What your father and I are trying to do is to attach a Lazarus prion to a genetically altered bacterium, which the immune system will then attack. With luck, we can teach the immune system to respond to something it would otherwise ignore. But it’s tricky, and potentially dangerous. If not very carefully constructed—”

  “You might infect people by vaccinating them,” she finished. She was a fast learner.

  Samedi stared at her for a moment before mimicking the wiping away of a tear. “Never did I think I would be so impressed by the youth of today. Between you and Bram, I’m starting to feel like we’re not all doomed after all.”

  Elpinoy sighed. “Yes, quite. In addition, there’s the risk that the immune system will end up attacking all forms of the protein, good and bad. They’re technically made of the same stuff.”

  Nora continued to regard Samedi with interest muted by suspicion. “But what about the already dead?”

  “Oh, we keep the infected going,” Beryl chimed in. “We treat them with compounds that kill off microorganisms and slow decomposition … and for some reason we’ve yet to figure out, insects like flies and beetles won’t go near the infected anyway. Maybe something tells them that zombies are no good to eat. Anyway, it’s things like bugs and bacteria that are responsible for what we term ‘wet’ decomposition.”

  “Squishiness,” Samedi clarified, with a wiggle of his fingers.