Death, Be Not Proud

by Jonathan Maberry

  The dead plane begins to fall.

  Roger lunges from his seat and dives for the cabin. Grabs his emergency parachute and slings it over his shoulder.

  “Brandon?” he screams, “Is that you? Where are you, Brandon?”

  “Daddy!”

  “Where are you!” Roger flings open cabinet doors, kicks open the lunch cooler. He’s running out of places to look on the small plane.

  “Help me, Daddy! I’m bleeding…! I’m dyyyyying…!”

  Tears stream down Roger’s face as he tears the cabin apart. The plane continues to plummet. He rips open a small storage cabinet—a cold sweat runs down his neck. Inside, a small iPod and speaker.

  Roger holds the small device in shaking hands. The last thing he sees, out of the small port window as the plane hurtles to the ground—all the while wondering if the voice on the iPod is even his son’s—is a dirty white van.

  A white van with a peeling bumper sticker.

  THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME!

  Margie is looking out over the water, watching the waves. The ocean is getting choppy. She shakes her head.

  “I don’t think I can do it, Ricky.” Tears draw dark lines of mascara across the sunscreen that cakes her face.

  “How many Mai Tais have you had, hon?” Ricky places his arm lovingly around his wife’s enormous girth.

  “Five.”

  Ricky laughs—his face, it’s turning blue. His neck is beginning to swell. “Then not only CAN you do it, Sweety… you already have!”

  Ron is already dead, his wife’s once orange tanning salon face now dark and bloated and nestled in his lap.

  Margie can feel her throat constricting. The rest of the lounge lizards and sun kings, they’re either dead or convulsing on the deck. Half-finished plastic glasses of suicide cocktails tipped over and spilling, rolling across the floor.

  “I only feel bad about leaving Father Bob…” Margie whispers, slumping to the deck next to her husband. “I’m sure he could’ve used some help keeping the faithful in and the crazies out of the church.” But Ricky, he doesn’t hear her—he’s already dead.

  And the END OF THE WORLD—GET OUTTA DODGE cruise, it drifts further and further out to sea.

  As the bus burns down the road, Howdy hits the brakes and slows to a crawl.

  “Look!” he cries. “Jesus Freaks!”

  A gathering of wide-eyed apocalypsts stand at the side of the highway, holding signs and waving placards.

  THE END IS HERE!

  And,

  REPENT SINNERS!

  And,

  BAPTISE YOUR DEAD!

  The bus slows and Burno, he slides down his window and hangs out to his waist. Waving his arms wildly, he makes a face and hollers, “Keep it in the church, you nutbags…!”

  An old, blue-haired lady with a SMILE, JESUS LOVES YOU sign screams back, “Fuck you, you dirty hippie…!”

  The bus erupts in hysterical laughter.

  “Ha! Holy shit! I think they’re picking up rocks,” announces Burno, eyes on the rearview.

  In the distance, a small plane falls from the sky.

  You’ve gotta be kidding me, Deb… How the hell do you expect me to be there for you if I really love you?

  My point exactly, Jones. Look, I think you need someone to talk to about this. Instead of calling my radio show, why don’t you find one of the other guys up there and—

  Rocket Jones turns off the satellite radio with a click! Glances around the cold room. The other colonists have been dead for a long time.

  They were already dead when Jones had launched the Z-Globules from remote satellites down to Earth. Already dead when he’d locked out TALBY’s authorization codes and AI nuke enthusiasm routines.

  He’d killed them the day that Debbie had fucked the Burning Man kid. And talked about it on the air.

  The other colonists, they’d listened to the show and laughed at him behind his back—and right in front of him.

  But second thoughts breed second chances. Rocket Jones has forgiveness in his heart. He unlocks the authorization codes. Restores the enthusiasm routines.

  Turns back on the radio.

  …and that’s really all I have to say about that. You are sooo low on my list of priorities, Jones. I really, just don’t have the time for you right now. So let’s see, we’ve got another ‘Three for Friday’ all queued up, and it looks like we have—

  DEAD AIR.

  Jones watches the fireworks on Earth through Tranquility II’s viewing window.

  The Bombs are exploding—flickering lights all over the once-blue planet. Lighting it up like the Rapture.

  Love—true love—comes only once in a lifetime.

  And it’s beautiful...

  * * *

  Scott Christian Carr has been a radio talk show host, editor of a flying saucer magazine, fishmonger, spelunker, journalist, TV producer, and author. In 1999, he was awarded The Hunter S. Thompson Award for Outstanding Journalism. He is the author of the novels Champion Mountain, Hiram Grange and the Twelve Little Hitlers, and the forthcoming illustrated novel Matthew’s Memories. His fiction has appeared in dozens of magazines, publications and anthologies, including Shroud Magazine, GUD, Pulp Eternity, Horror Quarterly, The Dream People Literary Magazine, The MUFON Journal, Withersin, Weird New Jersey and the Bram Stoker nominated Beneath the Surface. His short novel A Helmet Full of Hair was recently translated and reprinted in the prestigious French quarterly, Galaxies La Revue de Référence de la Science Fiction. Scott is currently hard at work on his latest novel [PAUSE], as well as the next chapter in the Hiram Grange series, Hiram Grange in Al Qaeda’s Cave. But his most satisfying and rewarding job is that of “Dad.” He lives in a home once owned by George Hansburg (inventor of the pogo stick) on a secluded mountaintop in New York’s Hudson Valley with his wife and two children. He writes every day.

  Visit him at: www.scottchristiancarr.com

  THE DEAD MAN AND THE SEA

  David Dunwoody

  Things inside him were moving with the rhythm of the ocean. John Green pressed a hand to his abdomen. It was the rot, he knew, and he bore down on the throttle. The yacht’s engines growled underfoot.

  Ninety miles of open water between John Green and the island of Cuba. Somewhere out there, adrift, the last remnants of his life.

  It was earlier in the week when Maberly told Green about the rot. “The test results came back late last night,” Maberly said as he painted warm tones over the man’s cold flesh.

  Green was reclined in his office chair, yellowed eyes watching the sunrise over Miami. He didn’t blink as Maberly applied blue lenses to his eyes, and he opened his mouth to accept his dentures before saying, “You didn’t call.”

  “I thought it could wait until morning. I didn’t want to wake you.”

  “I’ve stopped sleeping.” Green looked up at his assistant and smacked his lips. “You know that.”

  “I didn’t want you to spend the night worrying,” Maberly said. He gestured for Green to stand and began peeling damp bandages from his torso. Non-functioning organs had been replaced with artificial bladders that secreted a pleasant spice. As with so many things, Green had drawn inspiration from the Pharaohs in cultivating the new look of his executive team. It was a dignified look, fresh wrappings beneath a crisp suit. Maberly opened a new case of bandages and rewrapped Green from his feet to his neck. The process had been streamlined to about forty-five minutes. When finished, Maberly stepped back and allowed Green to walk a few laps around the room. Once the wrappings felt comfortable, Maberly helped him put on his pants.

  “So it’s rot.” Green pulled on his shirt and jacket.

  “The lower tract,” Maberly told him, holding out two power ties for his consideration. “It can all be pulled out and replaced.”

  “By the Japanese, you mean,” Green said. Maberly didn’t respond.

  “I’m not going to put a competitor’s cosmetic guts in my body.” Green took the blood-red tie from Maberly’s
left hand.

  “Sir, the rot will spread. It’s like cancer.”

  It had been his people who’d coined that term, in fact–“the new cancer”–and his people were hard at work on both replacement systems and necro-preservation treatments. They were making fast progress. He could wait. He had to.

  His body was in decent shape–he’d had access to the best technology from the very beginning. Prime had been one of the first corporations in any country or industry to tear down and “resurrect” their entire business model for the benefit of the new flesh, and Green had become more than Prime’s CEO–he was one of the faces of a global movement. Death was the new life.

  Maberly checked his watch. He had been converted at the age of sixty-two and was showing a lot of wear, but he seemed spry as ever. He probably had more plates and screws in him than Green did, who had been forced to replace most of the bones in his right leg after he fell off a bike while practicing for a photo op. Maberly also retained his sense of smell, and complimented Green on the new cocktail of spices he’d had put in. Green had actually helped develop the scent himself, and christened it “JG” as a high-end addition to Prime’s growing spice line. It was most important that the living realize death meant no end to vice, including vanity. There was an appeal in that.

  “They’ll be expecting you in twenty minutes,” Maberly said.

  “Nothing wrong with showing up a little early,” Green said. He didn’t need every last second to primp himself, and he didn’t need the board thinking that either.

  When he entered the conference room, he wasn’t surprised to see O’Bannon there. The PR guru curled his upper lip to offer an eerily white smile. Green didn’t return it. Instead, he sat at the head of the table and said to the dozen dead men and women before him, “Let’s get right into it.”

  “O’Bannon needs to start us off,” Lorraine Russo said.

  O’Bannon, the only one standing, moved to the end of the table opposite Green and slapped a thick folder down on the mahogany. Here we go, Green thought. He already knew what it was about.

  “The David Lester story broke,” O’Bannon muttered, opening the folder to produce the front page of the Herald. MIAMI CLINIC’S TOP MAN COMMITTED SUICIDE.

  “Why don’t you have a seat?” Green invited.

  “I’d prefer to stand,” O’Bannon retorted sharply. “I want you all to see what they’re saying out there.” And he held up papers from New York and D.C., their headlines screaming the truth of David Lester’s end.

  “We knew it would come out,” Green said. “He had a lot of personal problems.”

  “He did it at the clinic,” O’Bannon protested. “And they’re making inferences from that alone. The press, the Ferriers, everyone.”

  “Forget the Ferriers.” Green shifted in his seat. It was because of the pervading numbness in his buttocks, but O’Bannon took it as discomfort over his words and went in for the kill. “It’s about more than that. It’s about the regular people out there, alive and dead. They’re seeing this.” O’Bannon softened his tone, to make it as condescending, as his frayed vocal cords would allow. “Listen. The math is simple. You put your brother-in-law in charge of Prime’s first death clinic. He killed himself in his office. This is going to affect more than your next quarter. We’re talking about key legislation.”

  “We’re not legislators here,” Green said. He looked at the faces of the others. Some were sallow, others tight; he couldn’t read any of their expressions anymore, nor their body language, not with death’s effects. And O’Bannon’s artificiality—his coiffed toupee and polished porcelain teeth and manicured press-ons–was unnerving Green now. “Would you sit down?” he repeated.

  “No!” O’Bannon yelled. “And you shouldn’t be sitting either–I had my fluids drained in March and I still get mottling just from riding in the town car. These are the sort of little things you ought to be thinking about–simply covering it all with mummy-wrap sends the wrong message to stockholders. They don’t see the great Pharaoh, John, they see a museum relic. I’ve got numbers on this—”

  “Get back to your damn point,” Green spat.

  “The Taylor Amendment is faltering in the Senate,” O’Bannon said to the room. “David Lester might be the final nail in its coffin unless John does something that wakes the world up.”

  Green felt anger rising in him. He had taken O’Bannon aside after the last shareholder meeting and told him never to bring that up again. But the son-of-a-bitch was going there, despite the look on Green’s face, which was unmistakable no matter how dead he was. The son-of-a-bitch was going to say it.

  “I’m talking about your wife and son.”

  Green clenched his false teeth and rose from his chair. O’Bannon stood his ground. The others watched in silence.

  “They aren’t part of my world anymore,” Green said, and his trembling voice became a snarl. “If they want to live, I’m not going to interfere.”

  “That not only flies in the face of Prime’s mission statement, but the Taylor Amendment.”

  “I don’t give a fuck about the Taylor Amendment!” Green retched and turned away, pressing a fist to his mouth. Something cold and slimy receded into his throat.

  “Mandatory life-to-death transition is the future of this corporation!” O’Bannon snapped. There were murmurs of agreement. Green whirled on them, the wrappings of his fist unraveling.

  “My family is free to live.”

  “If they made the transition, this business about David Lester–your wife’s brother–will go away.”

  O’Bannon placed a hand on Green’s shoulder. “The living and the dead can’t co-exist. The hunger is too strong. You know that. Making meat from cattle and bean curd and even stem cells hasn’t changed that. The hunger is still there, as long as there are still living people.”

  When the pandemic began, humanity’s undead had grown to outnumber the living in a matter of weeks. The evangelists had been the first to accept it, rewriting their doctrine to serve the new flesh. Then the politicians. It had taken ten years before someone had the guts to propose an amendment imposing the transition on everyone, but it was here. And John Green, who had only wanted acceptance–to integrate his company and his people into a living society–, realized he had become the face of pro-death.

  Britain’s mixed-mortality Parliament was in a shambles. China had descended into a feeding frenzy. He’d known this day was coming for America, deep down inside, where the rot was eating him.

  “John. You aren’t even legally separated,” O’Bannon said. “That’s a decision you both made. For your son, of course. And this is just as much about him. Please talk to Diane.”

  Green did not respond, just slumped wearily into his chair and stared at his hands. O’Bannon told the others it was probably best to pick things up at another time. Soon Green was alone, save for Maberly, who stood by and said nothing, even as Green sobbed and dug the heels of his palms into his dry eyes.

  As the Ramesses II knifed through the water, its twin engines roaring, Green tried the radio again. “Zach? Diane!” He waited several seconds, then tried again, practically screaming over the engines. There was no response.

  The radio he’d given the boy must have gone over the side, dropped by Zach when he uttered that last terrible exclamation. So stupid of him to send them off in that little boat. But they wouldn’t have gotten past the maritime patrols unnoticed in anything larger than the outboard dinghy. Damn it, I should have taken them myself—this yacht would have cut any patrol boat in half. I could’ve had Maberly cover for me back at Prime, at least long enough for me to get them there. So maybe I wouldn’t have made it back. I’m already dead.

  He’d covered half the distance to Cuba. What if I’ve passed them? They couldn’t give me their position. Oh, God!

  Again, in his mind he heard the last words his son had screamed, before the radio went silent. His fourteen-year-old had sounded as he did ten years before, when he first saw his tran
sformed father at the threshold of their once-home.

  “Shark! Shark! It’s—MOM—”

  He’d gotten the call just as he was being driven into the garage beneath the Prime Tower. “It’s David Lester, at the clinic. He’s got a gun.”

  The Ferriers had gone ballistic when they saw his car pulling up at the clinic. Uniformed guards pushed them back. They didn’t know what was unfolding inside, but they were in enough of a fit already–thrusting signs at Green that read LIFE IS FOR THE LIVING and FEAR—EMPOWER—BECOME. Lorraine Russo was waiting at the door and pulled him inside. “Go bury yourselves!” she snapped at the protesters before the doors whisked shut.

  The so-called Ferriers were under investigation for running underground euthanasia operations, offering “a proper end” to their fellow undead. How their numbers stayed so strong when they were intent on killing themselves off, Green didn’t know. But he supposed the movement’s leaders were like those of any other, and did not subscribe to their own admonitions.

  The clinic’s lobby was filled with new dead and staff. Those who had just been transitioned were slumped in wheelchairs. They had been moved from their beds upstairs when Lester’s secretary called Prime. Green was silently thankful she hadn’t phoned the police instead.

  A doctor led him to the corner office at the end of the administrative wing. He receded as Green rapped quietly on the door. “Dave? It’s Johnny.”

  “It’s unlocked.”

  Green opened the door and saw his brother-in-law seated behind his desk, clearly agitated, one leg bouncing, his right index finger tapping the barrel of the pistol resting beside his mouse.