by Seth Patrick
‘Will he be OK?’ asked Bob, looking at the exit door as it closed behind Jonah.
‘He’ll be fine,’ said Never. ‘Occupational hazard.’ He hurried through the exit, half expecting Jonah to be wandering off down the street, but he was waiting right outside, so visibly tense he was almost shaking.
They drove back home in silence. When Never pulled the car over by Jonah’s apartment building, he put his hand on Jonah’s shoulder.
‘It’s not your fault,’ he said. There was no reply. ‘It’s not your fault,’ he repeated.
Jonah looked up slowly. ‘I need to get inside.’ He wanted to run and hide, to get into his apartment and bolt the door. He was only just managing to hold back.
‘Look at me,’ said Never. ‘Look at me and tell me you’ll be OK.’
Jonah heard the worry in his voice. He looked at Never. ‘I’ll be OK. Please, I’ll be OK. I’ll give you a call tomorrow.’
‘Deal. But call before noon, or I’ll be round to check up on you.’
Jonah smiled a broken smile and got out of the car, feeling cold in spite of the hot summer night. He buttoned his jacket and headed for the door to safety.
* * *
Jonah opened his fridge and reached in for a beer, cursing when he realized there was none. He’d had four already in the bar, but he wasn’t in the mood to be sensible. He looked over his options: vodka, Jack Daniel’s or a bottle of wine Sam had got him for his birthday.
He grabbed a glass and poured himself a strong JD and Coke, then he went into the living room and found an old Karloff movie to watch.
His mind wasn’t so easy to settle, though. He thought back to earlier, and his choice of the Underwood revival.
Jonah had walked in for the Underwood session to see a group of people he didn’t recognize, except for one unwelcome presence. Will Barlow was there, smiling his fake smile among the unfamiliar lab staff. At the back of the room was a dark-suited man looking both bored and severe, a man he’d seen around before, but as with the lab staff he had no idea who he was.
Jonah was told he was stepping in as Barlow was on a long tail, and their other designated reviver was down with flu. Jonah read the session notes before signing, but it was sparse. Lyssa Underwood. Twenty-nine. Cardiogenic embolism; an underlying health condition had made her high risk.
‘What difficulties have you had?’ Jonah asked.
‘Something about the process makes it tough to even begin,’ Barlow said. ‘We get nowhere. We don’t know why, and until we do we’re at a loss how to proceed. Any help you can give would be useful. We’ll want you to describe in as much detail as you can what the problems are, as you see them.’
Jonah began the revival attempt. At once, he could sense difficulty, and he struggled to understand what was happening. Five minutes in, he noticed a resigned look on the man in black. Barlow’s smug face had I knew he’d fail written all over it.
But then he understood. He recognized the problem, because he’d been here before.
She feels too fresh, he realized. That’s why it had been so hard, why they’d had no success. They’d kept her too fresh, and the only person that had ever been able to bring them back so soon was …
It wasn’t coincidence. That was why he was here, surely. The illness of their other reviver was a ruse. Will Barlow probably wasn’t even on a long tail.
They had brought Jonah in because of his mother. Too fresh.
Most revivers were unable to get anywhere until an hour after death. The official minimum achieved under verifiable conditions was just shy of fifteen minutes. That terrible day, Jonah had done it within four, judging by eyewitness accounts.
Will Barlow had certainly known all about what had happened, and here they were, trying to get him to repeat it. Hoping that their problems with their preservation system were the same ones that made the time after death so important. Hoping that Jonah could point the way for them to follow.
Part of him had wanted to stop and tell them where they could go. But another part – the part that was riled by the look on Will Barlow’s face – had wanted to try.
When it was over, Barlow had wanted a full report; Jonah had explained to them what they were doing wrong.
He tried to work out how long ago the Underwood session had been. Probably eight years, the year before he transitioned from Baseline to the FRS. Eighteen years old. It seemed a lifetime ago.
So much had happened since. He’d found his calling, he’d made the first close friend he’d had since he was eight. The incident with Nala George was an unwelcome underscoring of what hadn’t been happening, though.
Marmite hopped onto his lap and sprawled; Karloff raised shambling zombies among the bamboo.
Jonah kept on drinking.
It wasn’t long before thoughts of that mass of contorted metal came to mind; that revival of a subject he hadn’t even been able to see. It was the thing he always fixated on when drunk and morose.
An idiot in a fast car had lost control one night, crossed the barrier into oncoming traffic and taken out a family in a station wagon before smashing into the support pillars of an overpass. Father, mother and two kids, six and two years old. Their car had gone up in flames. Witnesses had heard the family screaming for minutes, but the fire was so bad they couldn’t get to them.
Dominic Pritchard was the man who came up as the owner of the car that had lost control, and was presumably the driver. Either way, whoever had been driving that mangled wreck was obviously dead, their right arm cut off above the elbow and left on the tarmac. Their open-eyed stare was visible through the contorted metal to the crew at the scene with the help of a flashlight, but it was impossible to identify that blood-soaked face. Pritchard, though, was a serial drunk driver, habitual speeder.
But other witnesses had given inconsistent accounts; one, ahead of Pritchard and looking in his rearview mirror, had suggested that a third car had been involved, possibly shunting Pritchard’s. The possibility prompted a revival request of the dead father, and it had fallen to Jonah to make the attempt. It failed. Short of decapitation, fire was the most likely scenario to prevent revival. The man had been the least badly burned in the vehicle, but it was still too much, the heat in his hand enough to cause Jonah pain during the attempt.
The attention moved on to the driver in that twisted wreckage.
The paramedics and fire crew had known to leave the body in the vehicle, just in case. As it was, the severe injuries made revival chances very low, but extricating the corpse could have made it impossible.
It was a curious set-up. One camera took in that open-eyed stare, but that was the only angle that captured any of the subject. Jonah cautiously positioned himself in among the sharp, raw edges, able to get an arm through to take hold of the corpse’s shoulder.
An easier death, Jonah thought. Instantaneous, not the long burning the family had gone through. Getting him back proved easy, and the first task was to confirm the man’s identity as Dominic Pritchard. Then Jonah asked if another car had been involved. Pritchard took the bait, claiming he wasn’t at fault, that there had indeed been another car. That was all that Jonah needed, because he could tell Pritchard was lying. Jonah told him that he might as well come clean. Pritchard refused. They weren’t going to get the details, but it was over. Case closed.
It was what happened next that Jonah couldn’t forgive himself for.
The observing officer signed the revival off. Pritchard was still there, angry, goading Jonah, yelling that he was an abomination, a liar. Jonah was about to release him, but he paused. He asked the officer and the tech at the case to give him a moment alone. They had assumed he’d let the subject go, that he’d finished. But Jonah hadn’t.
The family’s car was thirty feet away. When he turned he could see the faces inside it, charred. He’d seen them close up, and knew those faces would stay with him. So no, he hadn’t finished. He had things to say to this man.
His hand still ached from the contac
t with the father. The cooked flesh had been doused, but had still been hot to the touch. Jonah didn’t expect there would be any blistering, but the pain served as a reminder.
A reminder of what the man before him had done.
There was no one within earshot. He had his privacy.
Pritchard was silent now, after the outburst a moment before when Jonah had again declared him a liar and the revival had officially concluded. Coming to terms, Jonah thought. The truth of the situation – the futility – sinking in.
‘You’re dead, Pritchard,’ Jonah said, measured and low. Even if someone had been standing right next to him they would have been hard-pressed to make it out, but he knew Pritchard heard. ‘And you took a family with you.’
Nothing in reply, but Jonah could sense a denial of responsibility. He longed to show this man just what he had done, show him in a way that could not be avoided.
Thoughts of his stepfather intruded, another man who had been unwilling to accept any blame, shifting attention instead to what had happened after the accident that had killed Jonah’s mother. Anger at the supposed desecration of his wife by her son.
‘An accident,’ said Pritchard. He was fading now, but it was the misery at his own lot that was taking him away. Not the shame of his actions.
‘Had you been drinking, Pritchard?’
‘No.’ Lying.
‘You’ve done this before.’
‘Not this.’
‘Do you have kids?’
No reply, but a terrible anguish. Then: ‘Haven’t seen them in a while. I’m … I’m…’
Jonah thought of the charred corpses in the backseat of the other car: the six-year-old boy hardly recognizable as human, the two-year-old with half his face still barely touched by the flame, his right arm raised for protection.
He felt Pritchard’s mind flinch.
Curious, Jonah thought of the younger child once more, picturing him as intensely as he could. Pritchard reacted more strongly.
‘Please … no…’
Jonah’s anger was white-hot. He pictured the family, burning, screaming in their metal cage. He pictured the two children, in unspeakable pain, clawing at the flames around them. And he pictured this man, behind the wheel of his car, veering and laughing and not giving a damn.
Pritchard shrivelled away from it, calling out for mercy; in amongst the fear, Jonah could sense shame. Just a hint. Pritchard was finally beginning to understand.
Jonah’s anger was undiminished, and now it had its purpose. He poured his horrors out – the scene replayed, over and over, of the parents and the children dying, mixed with the blackest images, the darkest feelings that Jonah had encountered in the revivals he had performed.
He heard Pritchard scream, his heart cold to the man’s cries.
It was only when he felt Pritchard fading again that Jonah realized what he was doing. He recoiled from it at last, in horror.
Jonah had let go, stepped away, and then thrown up beside the car.
That had been two years ago, the real trigger for his breakdown. He’d not told anyone what had happened, not even Never, his breakdown blamed on overwork and burnout. Perhaps that did explain his state of mind at the time. Perhaps he had not been himself.
But that was just trying to wriggle out of the guilt he felt. There were things he could pin it on, yes: stress, exhaustion and the way Pritchard’s denial had reminded Jonah of his stepfather.
Yet it had still been him, standing there, reaching through the wreckage to grip Pritchard’s shoulder. It had been him, terrorizing the dead man.
Since Jonah’s first days as a reviver, he had nurtured his ability to bring something positive to his revivals. It was not for him to act as a judge. He saw how little respect some other revivers gave to their subjects, handling everyone like just another job, treating a victim with the same callousness they’d give a killer.
In a matter of weeks, he would be presenting a talk at the International Forensic Revival Symposium. He was calling it ‘Respect for the Dead’. In it, he hoped to demonstrate that revivers who adopted a more aggressive stance during a revival showed results that were worse overall than those who took a more respectful approach.
It was about control as much as anything, Jonah thought. As such, it was very similar to emotive feedback – the emotions of the subject, passed to the reviver, amplified and returned, until the revival came to an abrupt end. Control was everything for a reviver, making careful decisions about the best strategy to coax testimony from a subject.
There was no place for retribution. With Pritchard, he had stumbled; he had let himself down badly. States with the death penalty revived all executed inmates, to obtain full and accurate testimony of the crimes committed and to determine if other crimes may not have been confessed. Of course, it was also a test of guilt itself – over 85 per cent had proved guilty, a figure that some governors had considered impressively high – and in the cases where guilt was established, the revivers involved had needed to maintain their professionalism in spite of uniformly appalling crimes and often unrepentant subjects.
Much of the evidence he would use for his presentation came from death row cases, which showed that even when retribution could be considered justified, it was detrimental to the results.
Jonah himself had not performed a death row revival, but he hoped he would be able to show the same professionalism if the need ever arose.
That professionalism meant a lot to him. Especially now, with Dominic Pritchard’s screams still ringing in his ears.
10
It was one-thirty the next day when Never called. Voicemail kicked in after five rings, and Never was starting to leave a message when Jonah picked up and answered, his voice croaking.
‘Hello, Never.’
‘You said you’d call.’
‘You woke me.’
‘You OK, though?’
Jonah sat up, too hungover to consider himself OK, but that wasn’t what Never was driving at. ‘Fine.’
‘You don’t sound great. You didn’t keep drinking when you got home, did you?’
‘Half a bottle of bourbon. So I’m not quite up yet.’
‘That’s one way to take things easy, but don’t mention it to your doctor.’
‘Shit.’ Jonah rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘I won’t if you won’t.’ He paused. ‘Did you hear anything about Nala? Was she all right?’
‘Ray Johnson emailed me. She downed a few and they took her home. She’s fine, more or less.’
More or less, Jonah thought. Give her a few more days, and maybe she would be.
‘You’re off to Baltimore to see Stephanie Graves tomorrow, right?’ said Never. ‘You want me to go with you? I could drive. I’m sure Sam would give me the time off.’
‘Thanks, but I’d rather go alone. I’ll be OK by tomorrow. And believe me, I’m doing nothing this evening.’
‘Look, are you really OK? I was worried last night.’
Jonah thought for a moment. ‘Yeah. I’m still spooked by the Decker revival, and whatever the hell happened with Nikki Wood, but I’ll get a handle on it. I’ll feel better after seeing Graves.’
‘So what are your plans for the rest of your enforced vacation?’
‘I’ll read, watch some movies, play some games. Eat. Drink. Lie in the bath.’ Put like that, he thought, it doesn’t sound too bad.
‘I get the idea. No talking to the dead, then?’
‘I’ll leave that to all of you. I’m also planning to restrict talking to the living to a minimum.’
‘I guess you earned it,’ said Never. ‘But Tuesday night is Sam’s retirement bash, so you have a little more conversation to endure before you become a shut-in.’
‘I’ll be there,’ said Jonah, knowing he’d have to show his face at least. It didn’t have to be for long, though. Shut-in. It carried a certain appeal.
* * *
‘Just stare at the cross, Jonah. Relax.’
He was e
ncased in four tonnes of metal and plastic, being bombarded with a combination of X-rays and intense, high-frequency oscillating magnetic fields while the rapid loud thumping of the machine was hurting his ears. Of course I’ll relax, he thought.
He lay flat, on thinly padded metal, his skull held in place with a tight-fitting neck brace. When he’d first seen the slab he’d been asked to lie on, he thought of a mortuary table. As he’d been strapped down and pushed into the cramped heart of the medical imager, he thought of a coffin.
‘Keep staring at the middle of the cross, Jonah,’ said Dr Stephanie Graves. She was trying to reassure him. Directly above Jonah’s face was a small screen, a plus sign filling the projected image. He stared.
When Jonah had first come to Baseline, Stephanie Graves had been one of the people he had seen most of. Then, she had been studying the physiology of revivers, attempting to hunt down common biometric traits, seeking the reasons behind the mental and physical toll of revival. She and Sam had been close friends for a while; Jonah knew it had soured, and there had been rumours of an affair, but nothing he’d believed. When Baseline disbanded five years ago, Stephanie Graves had found a position at Johns Hopkins University. She still specialized in revival research, and her expertise in the longer-term health implications made her the doctor of choice for those private revivers who could afford to pay for the use of the imager.
And so here he was, staring at the cross.
‘OK, Jonah, don’t be alarmed, but the images will begin to change now. They’ll flash. Please keep staring at the middle of the cross. If you begin to feel sick, say so.’
‘OK.’
The screen began to cycle through a range of colours, the rate of change accelerating gradually. Then each quadrant of the cross began to change independently. He kept staring and began to feel disoriented. His mind became blank, whatever he tried to think about. The flashing became more rapid, and he felt like he was plummeting. His stomach lurched.
‘Feeling sick,’ he said, and shut his eyes. The sensation of tumbling was extreme. He ground his teeth until it passed. When he opened his eyes again, the screen above him was blank.
