Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 11

by Maxim Jakubowski

  The next time I met a Dead it was creepier. It was the following Monday, and I was getting home late again from school. I’d been caught selling mobile phone covers during Social Studies and had to stay behind. I remember cutting down a shadowy tree-lined avenue and seeing a guy shuffling ahead, dragging his feet. The sky was the colour of wet newspaper and it had started to rain hard. I had a hood on my jacket, but the guy was getting soaked. He hadn’t noticed that the heel of his right shoe was hanging off, but apart from that (and getting wet) I guess he looked normal, a bit like my dad. Then he turned around, and I saw that he had a toothbrush sticking out of his mouth. Maybe it was because I’d already come into contact with the unliving but this time I knew I was in the presence of a restless soul trapped in a corpse. One who still remembered how to brush his teeth.

  The figure before me was drifting more than walking, his feet barely lifting from the ground. As far as I could see in the fading light he was wearing ordinary street clothes, although they were dirty and one sleeve of his jacket was torn, and he looked like he’d been in a fight. But you often get people like that in my neighbourhood. I even wondered if maybe he was advertising a new killer-zombie videogame, but he wasn’t interesting enough to be doing that. Then I realized something; he was behaving exactly like the man on the bus, as though his brain wasn’t controlling his movements, but rather a distant memory of how to move.

  As I drew close I caught an overpowering stench of chemicals, as though he’d just heaved himself up off a mortuary slab. His face was grey and dull, the colour of old computer plastic, but his eyes were the real giveaway. They had a fixed, dry look, like a doll’s eyes, I guess because there was no fluid to lubricate them, and they were stuck in one position. The colour had faded from his pupils, so that his eyes looked like a pair of dirty peppermints. I kept pace with him as I passed, and it was then that I realized I wasn’t scared of him so much as grossed out. He opened his mouth as I passed and the toothbrush fell out. I saw that he had no teeth left.

  I kept my distance. It’s a bit like when you see a blind person coming toward you. You can either stand really still until they’ve gone past or move out of their path. You feel a bit guilty for being there at all. The same with the Deads. When someone is dangerous they give off warning signals, and if you catch the signals you know when to keep away. It’s like the older kids who hang outside the Am-La 24-Hour Grocery Store near my school. I always cross over the road when I see them standing together. You don’t need to go looking for trouble.

  But this guy was dead and there weren’t any signals good or bad, and I knew the worst thing that could happen was he could fall over and block the pavement, like a drunk tramp. The street was quiet and the few people who passed us didn’t see anything wrong. I guess in the dim rain there was nothing unusual to see except that the old guy was really getting soaked.

  I arrived at my turning and the guy just shuffled onwards into the gloom. I missed the early evening TV news but asked my mum if there had been anything about the Deads, and she made a face and said of course not, Alfie, go and clean your trainers, you’re walking mud in.

  I remembered noticing that her eyes were red and she kept touching the corners, as if she’d been crying and was trying not to let me see. I figured either she’d had another fight with my dad on the phone or she’d seen something on TV about the Deads.

  The next day I tried to discuss what had happened with friends at school but no one was interested except Simon Waters, and he believes anything so he has minus zero credibility. He thinks crop circles are made by Venusians, not a couple of sad guys with a piece of rope and a plank. He’s desperate to believe in anything less miserable than his own existence, which consists of getting beaten up all the time by “Bulldog” Jake Drummond and going home to a father who is dating a foot specialist.

  Nobody had seen anything. I might have begun to think I was imagining all of this if it hadn’t been for the man on the bus. The police wouldn’t have lied about him, would they? And there was the wet guy in the avenue, and the news item. But I had no real proof it was happening apart from a bunch of nutters on Twitter and Facebook, including the American girl who sends me Likes ten times a day and thinks there are voices in her mum’s dishwasher. Maybe I was tired when I watched the TV and had fallen asleep and dreamed it. That left the bus incident (maybe the police lied for reasons of their own) and the wet man (maybe he had been wearing contact lenses and they had steamed up, and had just forgotten about the toothbrush).

  It wasn’t much to go on.

  That was when I decided to begin my Deadwatch, which is an old school notebook marked out so that I could record each dead sighting as it happened. I thought this would be a good idea because nobody could leave comments on it like they can online.

  For the first few days I had nothing to write about. Then I saw another one, not up close but at a distance. At first I thought it was a woman, but then I realized it was a bloke in a hospital gown. He was stumbling across the park behind our house. I wasn’t imagining it either because Fang (our Jack Russell terrier) started pulling at his lead and scrabbling his claws on the path, making horrible choking noises. I figured he couldn’t tell the difference between a walking dead man and a rabbit. There was a rustle of leaves as the hospital man blundered into the bushes. I ran after him, but the bushes had closed up again, and I could only see and smell earthy darkness.

  Cautiously, I moved forward, pushing the branches out of the way. Fang started to whimper and pull back. I took another step, opening the leaves and looking inside the bushes.

  There was nothing; just leaves, soil and damp.

  Suddenly a huge white face jumped up before my eyes and roared at me. I yelled and fell backwards, Fang slipped the lead and bolted, and the man vanished. I shouted “Peedy” and ran home with my heart knocking against my ribs.

  With each passing day there were more and more sightings as the Deads took to the streets. Soon I was recording as many as six or seven on a single Saturday morning (the girls liked standing up against the window of Accessorize). I stopped bothering with the book because there were too many to keep up with.

  One Saturday I was cutting through the park just as it was starting to get dark. There were dozens of Deads sitting under the rustling oak trees. They were seated in deckchairs near the bandstand with their hands in their laps, quietly waiting for the music to start. As I got to the outer perimeter I saw two of them sitting on the railings with their arms around each other like lovers, except that the railing spikes had gone right through their thighs, pinning them in place.

  It was a kind of fucked-up sight. I stopped going to the park after that.

  At the start, most Deads were in pretty good condition, I mean their jaws and ears weren’t hanging off or anything, but once in a while you’d see one in a really bad state. There was another guy in the park wearing a hospital gown, and the stitches down the front of his chest had burst open so you could see his innards move from side to side when he nearly fell over. There was no blood though, and his guts were grey-brown like piles of uncooked barbecue stuff. That was pretty gross.

  I guess the police were stopping us from going near the Deads because I kept seeing all these signs that said roads were shut. It felt like the adults had all been talking together, and had decided to keep the news from their kids in case we freaked out. You’d expect this nervousness from my mother, who had a total nuclear meltdown when I brought a dead sparrow into the house, but not from Ted, our revolting ancient next door neighbour who lost an eye in a gas explosion at work and talked about sending blacks home, even though the woman who delivered his meals was from Africa and he thought she was great. Ted was shitting himself, I could tell, because he was at the window all day, looking frightened.

  Obviously the Deads were going to stick around, so the government had to do something to hide them away. This is guesswork, but I think they probably arranged for coffins to be buried at a greater depth and for doctors to
put padlocks on the mortuary doors. Maybe scientists were looking into ways of freezing the Deads or vacuum-packing them like Tesco’s lamb shanks so that they couldn’t return. I kept a watch on online forums, but could only find rumours and nut-rants.

  I think the government’s plans must have proved too expensive, because suddenly it seemed like more and more Deads were walking around the streets every day. Either someone was letting them out or they were finding new ways to escape.

  Then I found a website called WalkingDeads.com that said the government couldn’t work out what to do about the Deads. They’d set up a team to investigate, and cut a few open to have a poke around, but the Deads were just meat that wouldn’t lie still. They had no heartbeats and dried-up blood and hardened veins and leathery skin and dry staring eyes. At first the scientists thought they were being reanimated by radiation in the atmosphere, then they thought it was a rogue virus, and finally they started to blame the EU.

  Anyway, none of this really touched my family or our lives. We carried on as if everything was normal. Whenever I started to raise the subject, my parents killed the conversation before it could get interesting. It was like they were afraid.

  I posted a few messages on the website, but never got any sensible replies. After a while, I lost interest. If adults and even my classmates were going to pretend there was nothing wrong, I could too. But I wanted to talk about it with someone, so I decided to talk to Track.

  My best friend Track was christened Tracy because her dad was a big fan of Thunderbirds and there’s a character on the show called Tracey (boy spelling), but it’s also a girl’s name so it could be used either way. That way he only had to bother thinking up one name when his wife got pregnant. But Tracy hated being called Tracy so she shortened it to Track, which worked as she only ever wears tracksuits. Track is pretty easy to convince about most things, so I decided to start with her.

  “I want to show you something,” I told her. “I want you to make up your own mind about this, okay?”

  I took her to see the Deads sitting in bus shelters, looking neither happy nor sad (looking like they were waiting for a bus really). I took her to shopping malls where the Deads stared vaguely at window dummies, like they wanted to make friends with them. I pointed out the multiplexes and pizzerias where the Deads stood around in a state of shock (they never ate food but enjoyed being in queues). We saw them swaying backwards and forwards watching football in PC World and sunbathing in the park even when it was raining. I felt sorry for them.

  Finally Track said the words I’d been waiting to hear all month.

  “Okay, I believe you. The dead are coming back to life. Now what?”

  I looked at her blankly. It was the first time anyone had ever really believed me about anything. “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  “I mean, it’s not like they’re doing any harm, is it?”

  But now that everyone could see that the Deads weren’t going to hurt anyone, all kinds of trouble started. For one thing, no matter how harmless they were, they tended to creep people out. It was only natural; the way they looked and smelled was kind of depressing. Track heard that the police wanted special powers to round them up, because they were always falling on to railway lines and wandering into busy traffic, but I figured people had begun protesting, arguing that because the Deads were still walking around they had human rights.

  Then the doctors began worrying that the bodies would decompose and put everyone at risk from germs, but they didn’t really rot. First they leaked a lot, then got drier and more leathery, and this was helped by the fact that it was winter and a lot of them had taken to sitting in libraries with the central heating turned up high.

  They got damaged and tattered from constantly bumping into things, and some of them lost fingers and clumps of hair, which made them even creepier-looking. One of them sitting on the train seat opposite me tore his trousers, and tugged the hole around so that the other people on the train wouldn’t have to sit facing his willy, like he remembered being embarrassed.

  So now it was all out in the open. And while TV shows and newspaper articles preached respect for the Deads, teenage gangs began going out and messing with their bodies, cutting bits off or dressing them up in crazy outfits to make them look stupid. I saw one old guy in the high street wearing a purple glitter wig, a ballet tutu and mismatched wellingtons. Sometimes if you were out with a bunch of friends and saw one shuffling along ahead of you, someone would run up and pull his trousers down, then run away laughing. Also, some companies hung advertising signs on them to sell stuff, but it didn’t look clever, just creepy. McDonald’s ran a series of really bad-taste posters on the Deads that had pictures of hamburgers and the slogan “Try some fresh meat” over them, but everyone complained so they stopped doing it.

  A few Deads travelled on public transport because they remembered how to use their Oyster cards, but they tended to fall under the trains. They fell in the river and would float about for a few days, getting run over by motorboats, but eventually they would drift to shore, climb out and begin aimlessly walking around again. Hospital crews collected the most disgusting ones and took them away somewhere.

  Track and I checked all this out together. It was great having someone to share it with. It was like having a best mate and a girlfriend rolled into one. We started keeping a proper journal about the Deads, writing everything up after each event.

  I remember we saw an old woman fall out of the back of a van and get dragged down the street on her face. I followed her just to see what would happen if her coat strap managed to disentangle itself. When the poor old love finally hauled herself to her feet, the remaining part of her face fell off like burned wallpaper, leaving her with tarmac-scraped bone and an expression of annoyance, like she’d just been short-changed in an Oxfam shop.

  A few weeks after this, one wet Saturday afternoon, my grandpa died. He had lived in the house with us for years even though my mother had never liked him, and at first nobody even realized that he had died. He just stayed in his armchair all day staring at the TV, but I knew something was wrong because he would normally start shouting at the screen when the football came on, but today he didn’t. And he was still there watching Strictly Come Dancing later, which he hated. He did make himself a cup of tea, but he left the teabag and spoon in the cup, drank it scalding hot and immediately peed it all back on to the floor, which was gross.

  My father wouldn’t let my mother call the hospital and they had a huge row. It was decided that grandpa could stay for a while so long as he didn’t get in anyone’s way. My mother refused to change his clothes, but Dad argued that they didn’t need changing very often because his sweat glands were no longer working.

  The best thing about the Deads is that if you sit on a chair they’ve just been sitting on, it still feels cold. When a living person has been sitting on a seat for a while and you sit on it after them it’s still warm, and feels kind of creepy. A toilet seat is the worst because someone has been sitting on it with a bare butt and that feels disgusting. But the Deads don’t leave warm seats because their body temperature is about the same as winter tap water.

  The worst thing about the Deads is that they don’t sleep. So if I went downstairs for a glass of water in the middle of the night I was likely to find my grandpa sitting at the kitchen table with the light off, and this gave me the creeps.

  Still, it was difficult to break the old geezer out of his tea-drinking habit. I guess when you’ve been making thirty-five cups of PG Tips every day for sixty years it becomes a ritual you can’t break. Grandpa wasn’t allowed out by himself because he had a tendency not to come back and we would have to go looking for him, so my dad came over and made a fake bus-stop out of painted wood and put it outside the house, and Grandpa would go and stand by it, patiently waiting for a bus that never came, until we brought him back in. Sometimes he got away, though.

  A few days later I took Grandpa to the cinema. I guess it was an odd thing to do, bu
t I was supposed to be looking after him (we took turns) and there was a film that I really wanted to see, a supernatural PG-13, which meant it would be creepy but not very gory. I managed to pass myself off as over thirteen and pass Grandpa off as alive, but the woman on the counter watched us suspiciously.

  Halfway through the film, just when the star had gone to the cellar to look for her cat even though she knew there was a maniac loose, I turned to find Grandpa staring at me with wide eyes. He wasn’t breathing of course, and his mouth hung open to reveal a thick dry tongue that looked like a slice of boiled ham. What bothered me most was the way he repeated something he used to do when he was alive, tilting his head to look at me with narrowed eyes, so that for a moment I couldn’t tell if he was really a Dead. It was just the illusion of life, of course, but an unsettling one.

  A few weeks later, Grandpa somehow managed to sit down on the top of the electric cooker while the burners were on, and branded himself. My mum threatened to leave us if my dad didn’t arrange for him to be put somewhere. The next morning I stood on the doorstep and waved goodbye to Grandpa as he stared sightlessly back and stumbled off across the flowerbeds, led away by a hospital porter.

  Two days after he left, I was walking home from school late, and took a short cut past the backs of the houses a few streets away from where we lived. Ahead, only half visible in the grey fading light, a Dead was standing with his head tilted to the sky, staring at something. As I drew closer he sat down with a thud, as if his legs had suddenly given way, and I realized that it was Grandpa. He’d come back.

  It looked as if something had been eating him, cats perhaps, or foxes. There were little bite marks all over his face and neck, and one of his arms had hardly any skin left on it. Then I realized where we were, and what he had been looking at.

  He’d slipped out of the hospital and come back to the house he had shared with Grandma when they were first married. I could tell he’d been hoping to see her pass the windows. But she had died long ago. He was standing before the glowing kitchen windows of his youth, staring up through half-remembered dreams of a happier past. Old people often talk about the past, which is boring because you weren’t there. But he was remembering something from a past life.