by John Moralee
The man was drunk, but there were only so many insults Frost could take, even though the drunk didn’t know he was dead. So he leant across the counter, in the drunk’s face.
“I’m dead, man. You want to join us?”
“N-no. Look, man, I didn’t know. You look so -”
“Normal?”
“Yeah.”
“Except for the eyes, right?”
The tourist checked his watch. “I gotta go.”
Frost watched the man lumber towards the exit and out into the night. It gave him no pleasure to scare the American - Frost could feel no normal emotions. That was the primary difference, the reason the living feared the dead. The dead did not feel emotions. His body was unable to produce the normal reactions to environmental stimuli. Adrenaline, endorphins and hormones were things his resurrected self could not create. The chemical reactions necessary for feeling emotions did not happen in his brain. The alcohol he was drinking would have no effect on him - he merely drank it out of habit. He did have the memory of emotions, and he knew how he would have reacted to insults before his death, so he acted the same way now. It was his way of staying human, by acting like a living person. He had good reasons to drink. Today, he’d lost his job as an English teacher. Few parents wanted a dead man teaching their children. The school’s governors had agreed, half-heartedly apologising as they fired him. A dead man was not a good role model, they’d said. But losing his job was not the reason why he was drinking.
“Hey, you,” said the bartender. “I saw that, sir. You scared that bloke off. You know the rules - no dead guys sit there unless invited.”
Frost shrugged. “I have a right to sit where I want.”
“Not in here you don’t.”
Frost could have argued with the man, but he knew it would serve little purpose. The dead had no legal rights against the living. The law had not adjusted to the changes - as far as the law went you lost all of your rights once you were certified dead. He picked up his whiskey and looked for a seat. The group of dead waved him across, making a position available at their table. There were five dead men. He sat down, and thanked them.
“I’m Jason Frost,” he said, shaking cold hands with each of the dead.
The dead introduced themselves.
Daniel and Frank were in the worst condition, both having died six months before the Revival Ruling passed in the High Court. Daniel had actually been buried until his family requested his revival. Daniel’s face was sunken. His eyes were new implants bulging in the sockets like table-tennis balls. His teeth showed whether he was smiling or not. His lips had rotted away. He wore gloves, to keep his skeletal fingers from breaking up. Daniel moved slowly and awkwardly, as if he was arthritic. Frank was not quite so decayed. He had much make-up covering his skin blemishes, the thick cosmetics they used to use in mortuaries and movies. It looked like pink talcum powder on his cheeks. Eric, Charles and Stephen had all died in the last month, and had had the treatment as soon as they passed over. They didn’t look so deteriorated, but Frost noted their eyes were dead, like his own. Big, black holes. Emotional chasms. The deadneck was right, he thought, you can tell. The dead are different.
“How long have you been dead, Jason?” asked Eric. It was the standard question.
“Since the seventh of September,” Frost said. His deathday.
“F-f-f-four weeks,” Daniel said. “A monk. I mean, a month.”
“Yes, I thought I had a headache,” Frost continued. “I was wrong. It was meningitis.” He remembered the sickness, creeping up gradually, hitting hard. “I was in hospital a couple of weeks, being pumped full of antibiotics, but I died anyway. My wife Nicola held my hand the whole time. I can remember Caitlin - that’s our daughter - crying as I died. She was the one who asked for the revival. Nicola agreed and used the life insurance money. The next day I was back.”
“Expensive,” muttered Stephen.
“Yes.” Frost had been at his own funeral, an odd event. An empty coffin had been buried, and his friends and relatives had gathered around to console Nicola and Caitlin while he stood there, ignored. “Then, when I went home, they were different. Nicola was distant. And Caitlin ... she was afraid of me. I knew I had changed, that I wasn’t the same me, but I tried to be the way I was. I tried to act the same, to be a good husband and father. And yet we were strangers. Caitlin didn’t want me near her - she would run away. Nicola no longer wanted me near our daughter, either. As if I’d turned into a child-molester. Yesterday, Nicola said she wanted me out of the house. She said she couldn’t love a dead man. If I go back she’ll have me cremated.”
“It’s a common problem,” Stephen said. The rest nodded in agreement. “Nobody wants to make love to a corpse.”
“B-b-bad ship,” Daniel said.
“What?”
“Excuse Dan’s speech,” Eric said, “he lost a few brain cells rotting in his coffin. His speech was damaged. In life he was a solicitor, but he’s okay now.” Eric laughed. “You’re a good bloke, aren’t you, Dan?”
“Y-yes. I good block. Bloke.”
“Dan’s like a lot of the early revivals - a little slow at thinking - but he’s certainly not a zombie, like those deadnecks would have the living believe. Us dead guys have to stick together.”
“Damn right,” Stephen said. His breath smelt like wet leaves.
“Are you a member of any of the societies for the dead, Jason?”
“No,” he admitted. “I ... haven’t thought about it.”
“You should.” Stephen handed him a pamphlet. “This is a guide to those in London.”
“Thanks,” he said.
“Now,” Eric said, “do you know how to play three-card stud?”
*
Frost left the Finnegans Wake at 11.30 p.m. He was using his cellular phone to call a taxi when he heard footsteps behind him. He turned around to see the same American tourist. He was sober now, and he didn’t look pleased to see Frost. There were six skinheads with him. Frost could see tattoos on their muscular arms, ugly black and red symbols, like scars. They all shared the same one: a death’s-head with the black letters BLP below. In the flashing purple light of a shop-window display they looked positively evil. The BLP was the British Life Party, a fascist organisation for dispossessed and angry youths. They blamed the dead for taking jobs off the living. They also called the dead ‘meat’, and were known for extreme violence. Frost wondered if he could run fast enough to escape. There was an alley across the street. He thumbed 999 into his phone as he smiled at the American. He hoped the police would be quick. Perhaps he could slow down the -
“Here he is,” the American said. “Take him, fellas.”
They came for him. Baseball bats and flick-knives sprung out of nowhere. Frost headed for the alley, but he was hit halfway across the road, knocked tumbling and rolling. They kicked him and dragged him into the alley, where they set on him with everything they had. They swung baseball bats at his head. He put him hands up to protect himself, and heard his wrist snap and twist.
The pain was real. His nerves still sent messages; he could experience pain, though feeling it was another matter. It was an intellectual warning that something was wrong, an overload of his nervous system. His hand hung useless. He was powerless against the constant assault. He heard his ribs crack and the wet thud of a bat pounding, pounding bones. The American joined in, breaking his nose. Thick transparent biofluid splattered out like mucous. He tried to curl up into a ball, but the deadnecks were too strong and fast, too determined. A baseball bat caught the side of his head and whipped his head sideways. Biofluid filled his ears, almost deafening him. It poured out of his mouth. Biofluid was the substance keeping him functioning, without it he would die the permanent death. He could feel his thoughts slowing down as he lost the vital fluid from gaping wounds.
One skinhead plunged a knife in and out of his chest. Screaming: “Meat! Meat! Meat!”
“Open his skull, man,” the American said. His voi
ce was muffled by the biofluid. “Scoop out his brain like an oyster.”
That would kill him, Frost knew.
The skinheads, charged with adrenaline, grabbed his head and kept it still. Their leader showed a flick-knife to Frost.
The next thing was a blur. The flick-knife went flying, and suddenly the skinheads were screaming and running. He heard someone yell: “Zombies! Run!” Then the skinheads had gone. The American lay sprawled on a bed of dirty newspapers. He was unconscious, and would wake with one hell of a headache. Real blood shone wet on the red bricks behind him. Daniel and Frank guarded the alley, two ghouls no living person would want to mess with. Eric, Stephen and Charles examined Frost’s injuries. His body looked like it was wrecked. Eric told him to be still, Charles was a doctor. Charles’s fingers probed his soft wounds.
Frost could only offer a weak smile to his rescuers.
“Us dead guys should stick together,” Eric said.
Frost grunted and nodded.
*
They took him to a hospital for the dead. Unlike the living, the dead could not heal naturally. They needed repairing. Treatment was crude and uncaring; it was like a repair shop. Hundreds of dead people waited in the dank rooms of a closed-down school for help from the overworked staff. Some had probably been there for days, unable to move. Charles knew one of the doctors and used his influence to speed up the admittance process. Frost was taken by stretcher into a large room that used to be a gymnasium. About a dozen operations were going on simultaneously, half of the patients looked like vivisected animals.
Frost closed his eyes but could not sleep.
The operation lasted an hour. His broken bones were glued together, or replaced, and litres of fresh biofluid were injected into his body and head. A plastic surgeon reformed his nose and shattered cheekbones. It was like a pit-stop for a racing car, he thought, just enough to keep the machine running for a few more laps. Push it too hard and it would crash and burn.
Afterwards, he could walk again, but the experience taught him how much the living could hate the dead. The only people who could understand were the dead.
“You’ll have to disappear,” Stephen said. “That guy we knocked out will call the cops, I’m sure. He’ll say we attacked him.”
“But he attacked me.”
“Jason, you have no legal rights against a living person. The powers that be consider us no more than furniture to be used and abused.”
“Stephen’s telling the truth,” Eric said. “You’re a wanted man, now.”
“Bad sh-ship,” Daniel said.
“Yeah. I know exactly what you mean.”
Frost went with his new friends to their home. They lived in a derelict Odeon, among rats and dust, for the dead needed no creature comforts. The alienated just needed a place to hide. Nothing could disgust a dead man; it wasn’t logical. Disgust was an emotional reaction. Without emotional stimulation he was the real Mr Spock, able to see the world perhaps more clearly than when alive. Objectively.
Stephen’s prediction proved accurate - the tourist went on television and spoke to the tabloids about his encounter with ‘a bunch of crazy zombies’. Frost was the suspect, described accurately by the bartender. No mention of the skinheads reached the media. Like millions of other dead people, he had to eke out an existence as an outcast.
The heat of the day was enough to keep the biofluid warm and active, but at night the dead gradually cooled down and became sluggish and, if the biofluid dropped below 4oC, shutdown. The dead did not sleep, did not dream. He used this knowledge to blank out his time, by deliberately staying indoors, in the cinema. He found he could be shutdown for twenty hours a day, if he avoided heat. It was Stephen and Eric who forced him to go outside in the sun, carrying him bodily onto the street.
“You’re dead,” Stephen said. “You have to get over it. You don’t see Daniel moping around in the darkness, and he only has a tenth of the brain you have. You can be a something. You have to try.”
During the following weeks and months he attempted to become part of his adopted family, to throw off his cloak of living, to be what he really was: dead. He spent most of his time outside, warming his biofluid in the fields far from the living, contemplating what he was. All pretences of being alive were a sham, and he tried to exist with that knowledge burned in his soul. To wallow in his deadness.
But he wanted to feel again.
To be happy, sad, angry, mad.
To love, and be loved.
To be part of Nicola and Caitlin’s lives.
He wanted these things. He needed these things.
Though he found conversations with the dead occupied his time, there was something missing. Was it real emotion? It was. The dead could not laugh convincingly, and none could cry - the tear ducts did not function. He wondered if he was prejudiced against his own kind. Probably. His thoughts were plagued with past memories of his family, of Caitlin as a baby, learning to walk and talk. Of the first time he kissed Nicola. Going out. Holding hands. Making love.
His present existence was purgatory.
The living drew him like a moth to flame.
Often, he would hide in the trees outside Caitlin’s school, watching his daughter in the playground with her friends. She looked as if the joy had been stolen from her life. She no longer played hopscotch with the others, instead she just watched, hanging back from the crowd. He wanted to go up to her and hug her - and have her hug him. But the gulf between them was too wide. He was part of the unseen now, something the living shunned, a reminder of what fate lay waiting all of them once they grew old or unfortunate.
Waiting for a glimpse of Nicola, when she collected Caitlin at the end of the school day, formed a habit. He could see the way she would sweep her dark brown strands of hair away from her eyes, catching the sunlight like gossamer threads. Green eyes flashing with life and warmth. Somewhere a man could lose himself.
“You can’t live like that,” Stephen said, after he’d told him about his obsession. “Get on with your life.”
“Death, you mean?”
“You can’t turn the clock back.”
Stephen was right. The cold logic of the dead was insurmountable.
There were dead like Stephen who seemed to revel in their deadness, but there were others like himself. Eric had a living wife and two boys aged four and six. Frost wanted his family back, too.
Existence was not enough.
*
He was out sunbathing and thinking about his ex-family, when there was the fire. He returned to find the fire had gutted the Odeon, turning everything and everyone inside it to a sticky charcoal. Blackened skeletons weeping boiled biofluid lay in the bricks and wood. Five bodies were pulled out in a non-recoverable status. He was alone, truly alone.
A petrol can was found in the remains.
*
The worst thing about losing his dead friends was that he could not feel the loss. He could think about them, memories looping around and around his biofluid-saturated brain, neurones firing in response in their millions, but the detachment was always present, as a dark cloud blocking the sun. A layer of perception was gone. It was the difference between being human and being a computer pretending to be human. He knew the difference. There were only two things that mattered to him: Nicola and Caitlin.
He had to see them.
*
“Hi,” he said, “it’s me.”
“You’re not meant to call,” Nicola said coldly.
“I know, but I had to.” He was standing under the mock-Victorian lamp post across the road. He had a clear view of the house and the rose-gardens and the uncut lawn. Mowing the lawn had been his Sunday morning routine, but without him it was beginning to look ragged. He could see Nicola through the bay windows. She was fidgety and looking around, probably suspecting him of spying on her like a stalker. The telephone cord followed her movements like a white snake. Frost ducked behind a parked car when she approached the windows. “I want to see t
he both of you.”
“No, Jason. I was watching TV the other day. There was a description of a dead man who’d attacked a tourist. It was you, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, but -”
“Christ, you’re a wanted man!”
“Forget that. The guy’s lying. Besides, he doesn’t know my name.”
“He says you beat him up and stole his wallet.”
“Lies, Nicola. Lies. You know me. The American will be going back to the States soon, so the police will lose interest. There isn’t a story in the world that runs for a week.”
“Jason, exactly why are you calling?”
“I’m the same man you married. I need to see you. A lot’s happened and I -”
“Jesus! Why won’t you listen? I hoped it would work out between us. I tried! Heaven knows I tried! I can’t handle it, Jason. My Jason is dead. You’re something ... something else. You’re dead.”
He could see her crying. “I’m not asking to move back in. I just want to be part of your life. And Caitlin needs a father.”
“She has a mother, too,” she said. “I count as well. I want to go on living, and I can’t if you try to make me feel guilty for being alive.”
He decided to change the subject. “What about Caitlin?”
“What about her?”
“How’s she coping?”
“Fine,” she said. Fine was not good.
“Does she miss me?”
“Of course she misses you,” Nicola said, sighing. “I miss you.”
“Let me come back, please.”
He saw her shaking her head, chewing her bottom lip.
