Sleep Over

by H. G. Bells

  They were awarded the Order of Canada, posthumously, for their contribution to saving the lives of Canadians by tugging our heartstrings to get us to turn out our lights.

  The NPCC grid didn’t lose power once, save for those two times when we intentionally cut it to punctuate our propaganda.

  I know my plan worked as I designed it to, nay, better than that, because of my inability to soothsay the scale of death we would face. I wish I could have told you how it failed, how our power went out because of so many people sucking juice from the grid. I imagine the world would be overrun with horses right about now, if wishes were horses.

  “Cheer up cunt!”

  —Last headline of The New Zealand Herald

  After I had my car accident, I had to relearn faces. Not just who people were, but what expressions meant. What facial cues were and what they were trying to say. So many subtle social cues had to be relearned, from scratch, without the facial-recognition part of my brain functioning.

  After my accident and subsequent brain injury, microexpressions became my waypoints. Microexpressions are the split-second tells on people’s faces that give away their true intentions. They give me a better sense of what was really going on with them. People can’t hide behind fake expressions with me, because they can’t stop themselves from subconsciously exhibiting their true emotions. That split second lasts for ages for me, rolling around in my head as I piece together the true sense of the person I am looking at.

  When people get tired, microexpressions take longer. And they get much more pronounced.

  Everyone knows what tired looks like, but I got a pretty intimate look at it. People trying to cover up their emotions, their exhaustion; none of their tricks worked on me. I saw their madness before they spoke. I saw their intent to rob me before they had even made the conscious decision to do so. Once I even saw someone’s death before their eyes rolled back into their heads. So I guess if I make it into your collection, it will be as a record of what the human face truly looked like, what we look like when the world is ending, everyone around us is dying, and we are dying. For it’s not enough to say that we looked tired.

  It was like we were dead men walking. The slackness in our faces was broken through by microexpressions of extreme anguish and terror, and above all despair. Such despair that it broke my heart. Everywhere I looked, people were deeply frightened and inconsolably sad. Covering it up with their fake faces, those masks we wear to show others, and ourselves, how we want to be perceived. They couldn’t hide it from me. Even though they believed it, I couldn’t, not when the truth was so plainly written on their faces.

  The masks though, they were flawed enough as it was. Deep sunken pockets under their eyes, black from old blood pooled there from the strain of missing REM sleep, sometimes with swollen and red patches stretching out from the black. Eyes constantly veiled by drooping, puffy eyelids. Bloodshot eyes. Slow blinking. Extreme tension held in the face, just beneath the horrid skin, teeth clenched behind taut cheeks, mouths held in grim lines to keep from screaming. And those were the faces that hadn’t given up. The ones that had were all that but instead of tense they were slack; the face of living death.

  I had to stop looking at people’s faces, it was too much to take.

  Near the end, I was with a friend of mine, Gareth. Casual acquaintances and neighbors became friends in those times when we were in the trenches together, fending off the army of all things trying to kill us. Just having someone in the trenches with you gave you a leg up, I think. I was glad Gareth was there with me, but I had to stop looking at his face just like all the rest. It was too awful. His face itself was handsome enough I suppose—crisp green eyes, bold cheekbones, and a square jaw ending in a slightly cleft chin—but those were just pieces to me. I didn’t see faces as a whole any more, only what the individual parts were doing; they still tried to make a face, but not all of the bits and pieces could be assembled appropriately on time, in the correct setting, and truly his was the face of madness as World War ZZZ’s casualty count went up and up.

  And when I could still look at Gareth, it was a fascinating look at the disconnect between his subconscious facial control and the mask he wore. Jaw tensing up between words. Cheeks puffing out with the exhalation of frustrated anguish. Crisp green eyes that flashed in and out of despair and pain during every conversation we had, then softened deliberately to tame them. The blackness under them, the old blood, could make it seem I was looking at a skull.

  He couldn’t understand that this was how I saw him. He did ask me to try and explain one day, when we were outside and the sun was shining and he was smiling. We were watching a cheeky meerkat trying to get into a trunk, which we had used to transport some canned food we had found.

  The meerkat poked its nose at the seam of one of the corners of the trunk, found his efforts to get in fruitless, and moved to the next corner. And it continued around, checking corners—I suppose he wasn’t keeping track of how many he’d checked, or maybe the smells from inside were so intoxicating as to warrant a double-­check of each possible way in. The critter eventually leaped up on top of it and rolled around on the lid, perhaps in frustration, but, while its long body flip-flopped back and forth as it rolled, the light fur on its tummy puffing out, it did look rather cute.

  Gareth laughed, but that made it even more obvious how much pain he was in. Maybe not to someone who didn’t know him, someone who didn’t know what Gareth’s laugh should have sounded like. His big barrel chest should have produced this huge laugh that boomed in my ears. That hollow laugh on that sunny day was instead the laugh of pain and madness.

  “Why don’t you ever look at me?” he said after I failed to join in.

  “I can see your pain,” was all I could say.

  That evening though, as we sat inside, he asked me again.

  “Goddamnit man, I am dying, I accept it. Please, just look. Brave it, for me, my friend, I cannot bear it,” he said.

  I knew I owed him that much. We hadn’t been close in our years of being neighbors, but we were still friends. Friends enough for me to force myself to look at his face and see his true self. The face of pain and anguish. He had a smile stretched across his lips, as though it could hide the truth from me.

  But I’m glad I looked. It meant I was there for him when he died, and when his face relaxed and was finally free of all that pain, I saw it. I saw a few others later on, and it was more of the same. Our bodies were shutting down and our faces could not hide it.

  “Prions can survive cremation! Don’t burn the bodies! What if it’s prions!?”

  —Final headline of The New York Times

  No one was prepared for this amount of bodies. Sure, things got sloppy; some of the records aren’t exactly perfect. But what do you expect us to do, when there’s a body in the street and there’s no ID on it? It wasn’t optimal, but it’s no fault of ours that so many went unidentified. We simply didn’t have the manpower or the resources. We were just glad to get them off of the streets. Shàntóu had five million people and shrinking; we had to dispose of the dead as fast as possible, to keep the living safe.

  All over the world, the death toll was rising, and how we treated the dead would continue to affect the scope of the disaster. There was an outbreak of gastroenteritis in Jakarta from all the bodies near their water supply; the horror of rabies swept across India from the animals growing ever aggressive and competitive for the corpses in the streets. But by far the greatest danger posed by the dead is psychological; in fact it is a myth that bodies spread disease. If they had a pathogenic disease in life, in death they could spread it. But when they were otherwise healthy, and had died of insomnia? Something everyone already had? The threat the dead posed was to our psyches.

  Coupled with the growing number of domestic attacks, opportunistic skirmishes between governments clashing over supplies, or enacting operations they’d had planned out for years, the instability of life translated into the horrific degradation of ho
w we handled the dead among us.

  Everyone had their own way of dealing with it. Some have attributed the high rate of suicide in certain cities to the mass pyres, or the “death carts” that they brought around, actually calling for people to bring out their dead. It was the Dark Ages all over again. Such foolishness! So cruel!

  We, my team and I, the whole city of Shàntóu, took a different tack, trying to be quiet about it. The dead were ushered away silently, respectfully, in exchange for a form that we hastily drew up so there was at least some record of our duty.

  Mass graves were convenient. So savage we had become that it didn’t matter to us that we were literally dumping our loved ones into pits like garbage. We were just lucky to be getting them out of the city, away from people, away from the aquifer. We were grateful to have access to a stockpile of lime, which we put to good use. The smells of decomposition—putrescine, cadaverine, and the lime we sprinkled over piles of bodies were a cocktail of smells that punctuated the worst times in our history. It was savage, but it kept the horror out of sight.

  Can you imagine if some disease, other than the insomnia, managed to take hold, adapting in our severely weakened state? Certainly there were local outbreaks, but a global pandemic would have been the end of us; accidentally, incidentally, intentionally—it didn’t matter. One maniac with a vial of Ebola, one dreamer letting out the infected research animals, one misguided mass experiment, one military coup using biological agents. Our drawbridge was down and any old something could have wandered into the sacked city that was the human immune system. I think we very narrowly escaped extinction, not because we survived the insomnia, but because no disease stepped up to the plate to take us out while we were at our most vulnerable. It would have been an easy massacre.

  As it was, there were dead aplenty. At first it wasn’t so many. More than normal, sure, but it was manageable with the systems we had in place.

  I’m sure if you asked the general public to list what they thought the “essential services” are, you’d get a pretty consistent answer. The big three of course: hospitals, firefighters, police. And then those which are perhaps even more essential but less obvious when they’re working as they should: running water, electricity, sanitation. Everyone notices when the garbage men go on strike, but no one thinks of the coroners. But when garbage men don’t exist and there are bodies in the street? Whose job is that?

  This is one time when we were essential, no doubt about it. And we are not squeamish around death, and in our actions we created a sort of ripple effect wherever we went. We gained many among our ranks during that time, people that found they had what it takes to be able to take a body out of someone’s home and have them thank you for it.

  It was built right into our anthem: As the Chinese nation has arrived at its most perilous time / Every person is forced to expel their very last roar. We banded together and would fight to keep our country together. Keeping the coroners’ services together was my last roar. I think it was loud enough to save the city.

  We get our fair share of weirdos too, though. I mean, you have to expect that we’d attract some nutjobs. Certainly during those times it brought out the best in people, but also the worst—those ugly, dark parts of us that we keep covered up to be able to function in society. But when that facade is no longer needed? When things are crumbling all around you? When people started dying, really started dying, all bets were off.

  I’m sad to say that Jeff Zhang Li was one of us from the start. He had been a coroner for even longer than I. Perhaps it was his tenure that blinded us to what he was doing. We didn’t see how off his rocker he’d gotten; he was actually quite a dedicated member of the team. He had a suave way with people and would help ease the trauma of taking the dead away from their loved ones with some simple words, a gentle hand on the shoulder, sometimes a sad smile. He even had premium incense to light at people’s shrines during his visits.

  In the grand scope of everything that was happening, people were trying to keep things functioning on such a basic level, that, once someone was dead, it’s not like they mattered. I mean they do, of course, you have to keep up the pretense that the dead matter, but here, after, when I’m not standing in front of the recently deceased’s family, I can tell you: the dead do not matter. Not really. Oh god, can I be worse at this? Explaining this, I mean. The dead matter to their loved ones, but as an idea. It’s not like when we ineloquently bump them against a corner it’s a problem. We try and shoot for a certain amount of dignity, but that standard falls away once you hit a certain tipping point. We had to get them out of there, out of houses, away from people. The living. The living matter.

  Though, it’s not entirely true, is it, that the dead didn’t matter? When people became too exhausted to deal with their dead? When they became a psychological horror, the horror of being proximal to someone you loved after they die and remain uncared for? Sometimes people were lucky to get them out of the house and into the street. The dead mattered; they mattered differently in those times. They became a monstrosity, a foe, a growing horror.

  Bodies would have been everywhere. As it was, The Ones Who Went Away were everywhere, standing in the streets, staring. The Ones Who See were everywhere too, dreaming their false realities, running or screaming. But the dead, no, we could at least handle that.

  One of the warning signs had been when our teams were out in the city, making the daily sweep for the dead. I had a sector of the grid that neighbored the one Jeff Zhang Li was working. We each had a helper, to assist us with the hopefully dignified-looking maneuvering of the dead into our carts. Covered carts, with official insignia on them, each with a small flagpole and our flag flying. No rickety open-topped wagon would be ferrying away the dead of China.

  My assistant, Tzu, and I were bringing our cart to the main load, a large truck which amassed all we brought it until it was full and another took its place, when we spotted Lam, Jeff Zhang Li’s assistant. He was pulling his cart on his own, and struggling. We asked him where Li was, and he frowned and said something about Li attending to something else for a moment. His gaze darted down one of the streets in the sector he was sweeping, and I nodded and took off to find him.

  I saw Jeff Zhang Li come out of a ground floor café. Its windows were boarded up. I asked him what he was doing, and he told me he was saving them for later. Saving who? I went past him and opened the door to the café. Inside were five Ones Who Went Away, standing still in the dark, staring.

  I frowned, but could hardly argue. They would be standing out in the elements otherwise. And we did have the Gatherers, a sort of volunteer organization that was picking them up and putting them in places to care for them.

  “Do you want to call the Gatherers, or should I?” he asked. He asked. So normal. So caring.

  I gestured for him to call. He smiled and accompanied me back to the main cart to help unload the finds of our sweep.

  His smile told me there must be more. He’d never mentioned finding Ones Who Went Away. I asked his assistant.

  “He’s been putting them safely away for pickup, more and more,” he told me. “Yesterday he called in more than a dozen.”

  I called the Gatherers. A harried sounding woman answered, out of breath and flustered.

  No, they had received no calls that day for our sector. The day before? No. And if they had, they wouldn’t even be able to pick them up until tomorrow, or the day after.

  No, I didn’t know anyone that wanted to join the Gatherers.

  After I hung up, I lamented that gathering up the dead was going to last longer than gathering up the living.

  Tzu and I took a gun and followed him that night. You don’t really take a gun unless you’re sure, but then, you want to be sure. I knew I was getting addlebrained. I knew I could just as easily have been inventing insanity in another, where my own was growing. I had to be careful. My assistant would hopefully be a second voice; surely both of us would be able to see what was going on without inventi
ng the same madness. So we went together, silent dread overtaking the slightest of hopes that it would not be as terrible as we feared, that his madness was something we could tolerate, that he was a monster we could let be.

  The factory Jeff Zhang Li claimed as his own had been halfway completed before construction halted on it. There were ample building materials around the site, and a mostly finished storehouse that was several stories tall and waiting for finishing touches. There was even spare fuel with a backup generator. We followed Jeff Zhang Li at a discrete distance; he led us to the storehouse and pulled open the metal doors, on smooth sliders that we couldn’t even hear over the buzz of flies. When he went inside, we crept to the doors and looked at the scope of his madness.

  Tzu and I watched from the doors as Li went to another part of the storehouse, sliding open another set of steel doors that opened up the whole other end of the half-finished factory. We followed him inside as quietly as we could, skirting the edge of the building, staying away from the perimeter of horror that stretched out in a puddle under the trees. When we peered across the threshold at the next room, any movement that would have betrayed us, and even the horrified moan that let slip from my gaping mouth was covered by the noise of his creation.

  It’s not as though all of them were still alive; he had chosen them because they were so far gone that they were easy to handle, easy to string up. Mostly it was Ones Who Went Away. There were a few Ones Who See, moaning and, from one man, terrible screaming that sounded out intermittently as he thrashed, trying to bat something away from his face.

  There were six “trees,” constructed out of the abandoned building materials. The trunks were steel girders that had beams of wood attached to them, branching out and out, some suspended by cables hanging from the roof. Covered in people. He said in his journals that they were an offering to the god of nightmares, that he was being tested to see if he could rival what the god of nightmares could do in our sleep.