The Living Dead 2

Living With The Dead by Molly Brown

British Science Fiction Award-winner Molly Brown is the author of the novels Invitation to a Funeral and Virus. Her short fiction has appeared many times in Interzone, and in the Mammoth Book anthologies: Jules Verne Adventures, New Comic Fantasy, and Future Cops. Other anthology appearances include Steampunk, Time Machines, Celebration, Villains! and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Many of these stories have been gathered in her collection Bad Timing and Other Stories. In addition to writing prose fiction, Brown has written and appeared in a several short zombie films, and some of her stories have been optioned for film and/or television.

One of the challenges of assembling an anthology of zombie fiction is deciding exactly what constitutes a “zombie” story. The term originated in the Caribbean and originally referred to recently deceased individuals who had been brought back to life through magic to serve as slave workers. After the word zombie was used in connection with the marketing of George Romero’s 1978 film Dawn of the Dead, the term has mostly been associated with masses of mindless, hungry undead who kill and convert the living. In recent years, the film 28 Days Later and the video game Left 4 Dead have depicted zombies as belligerent infected who aren’t actually undead. However, they are otherwise so similar to Romero zombies that everyone calls them that, and they can really be classified no other way.

But where do you draw the line? In this anthology series we’ve chosen to take an inclusive view and expose readers to the broadest possible spectrum of zombie fiction. Which brings us to our next story. One thing that’s been interesting to watch is how the term “zombie” has fallen into colloquial usage-i.e., we often refer to people as zombies when they’re performing mindless tasks, or planted in front of the television, or in a state of emotional detachment, even if they’re not trying to kill anyone. On this view, the defining feature of zombies is that they’re animate but not present. Our next story is a quiet tale of suburban life that explores this side of zombiehood.

I went to the park today, and for the first time in five years, Alice looked at me as if she knew me.

Alice used to be my best friend. We were in the same class at school. We used to do each other’s hair and borrow each other’s clothes until one night when we were both sixteen, and everything changed.

The details don’t matter now. All you need to know is we were at a party in a basement, and we both snorted something that we thought was cocaine, but it wasn’t.

The next thing I remember is waking up in the hospital with everyone telling me it was a miracle I was alive because the other girl was dead.

There’d been a story in the local paper a couple of months earlier about a guy who’d collapsed in the park. He was declared dead on arrival at the hospital and was taken to the hospital mortuary. A few hours later, he woke up.

No one thought much about it at the time, everyone just assumed he’d been mistakenly declared dead when he was actually in a coma. These things happen. Not often-and never before in the kind of place where nobody dies without the whole town knowing about it-but they happen.

The man hadn’t spoken once since waking; they said he just stared into space.

I remember they interviewed some expert on the news who used a lot of big words just to say sometimes it’s like that when you wake up from a coma.

Alice had been dead a little over twenty-four hours when she opened her eyes. Like the guy before her, she never spoke or reacted to anyone or anything; she just seemed to stare into the distance as if she was looking at something no one else could see.

A few weeks later they sent her home, saying there was nothing they could do.

I wasn’t that well myself-as everyone kept reminding me, I was lucky to be alive-but I went to visit Alice every day. We would sit in her room with me talking and her staring straight ahead as if I wasn’t there. And every day as I left, her mother would beg me to come back again tomorrow: “You’re her best friend. Keep talking to her; maybe you can bring her back.”

When a forty-nine-year-old man named Sam Jenkins woke up the morning after he’d died of a heart attack, people finally began to suspect that something strange was going on. This man was definitely dead, the doctors insisted. They were being especially careful about who they declared dead these days; Sam Jenkins had been repeatedly checked-and double-checked-for any signs of life, and his body had been cold when they finally allowed it to be taken to the mortuary.

Like the previous two people to wake in the hospital mortuary, Sam Jenkins never spoke. Unlike the other two, Sam Jenkins had risen naked from his mortuary slab, walked home without being noticed (it was four a.m. and the streets were empty), and got into bed beside his wife.

By the time Rosemary Harold died of cancer, they’d decided the problem must be something to do with the mortuary, so they kept her body upstairs. This didn’t make any difference; Rosemary was awake the next day.

Then everyone thought maybe it was something to do with dying in the hospital, so-as much as possible-people started dying at home. Once again, no difference. They all opened their eyes within twenty-four hours.

People eventually came to the conclusion that the problem was the town-as far as anyone knew, this wasn’t happening anywhere else-so the next time someone died, the body was immediately shipped to another state. But the guy still woke up. The other state wouldn’t allow him to stay-they said it was not their taxpayers’ responsibility to support another state’s walking dead-so he was brought back here.

Soon the dead fell into a routine of spending their afternoons in the park. You’d see them there from one o’clock every day, sometimes sitting on benches with their faces tilted up to the sun, other times just standing in a kind of loose formation. And every day at dusk they would go their separate ways, returning to the homes they’d known in life.

Some, like Alice, were obviously cared for by the living. Alice’s mother always made sure that her clothes were clean and her hair was combed.

But others were not so comfortable with their dead. On finding her husband in bed with her, Sam Jenkins’ widow had at first moved into the spare room, but having a dead man in the house soon became too much for her and she changed the locks, with the result that her dead husband spent his nights standing on the front lawn. It was around this time that I first heard the word “zombie” being used.

The first thing that happens when the dead start waking is not that they go on a rampage like you see in the movies, it’s that you find out all your insurance policies are worthless. Sam Jenkins had a life insurance policy with his wife as the beneficiary, but the insurance company refused to pay out because they said Sam didn’t meet their definition of dead.

Then Alice’s mother got a huge bill from the hospital because her daughter-being officially deceased-was no longer covered by her health insurance.

The second thing that happens is property values plummet. Sam Jenkins’ widow, unable to pay the mortgage, tried putting the house up for sale. But nobody wants to buy a house with a dead man standing on the lawn. Even if-like Sam’s widow-you try to make the dead man a selling point by explaining he deters burglars.

The third thing that happens is church attendances rise. The fourth thing is they fall again as everyone comes to the conclusion there’s no point in worrying about the afterlife if you’re only going to spend it hanging around the park.

The fifth thing is all the jobs go, as businesses tend to prefer locations where the dead stay dead.

The next thing that happens is the town itself begins to die as everyone who can get away gets as far away as possible, until the only people left are the dead and those few who refuse to abandon them.

Sometimes I go to the park and watch the dead together. Despite being all different ages and backgrounds, they seem at ease in each other’s company.

The silence of the dead when faced with the living can seem awkward, but when the dead are together, their silence is a comfortable one, their blank faces not so much vacant as serene.

And though their faces are far from expressive, I was there one day as a newly deceased came to join them for the first time, and I am sure I saw recognition in their eyes.

Five years ago, there were more than three thousand people in this town. Now there are less than three hundred. As the town’s living population continues to move away, more of the dead are being left to fend for themselves.

With no one to dress them or comb their hair, some of them were getting into quite a state until a woman named Hilary Frentzen stepped in. The first thing Hilary did was to get a shelter built so the dead would have somewhere to get out of the rain. Then she set up a charitable foundation to collect donations of food and clothing, which she distributes in the park.

The dead do eat, just not a lot. Every day Hilary hands out slices of day-old bread donated by supermarkets, and watches as the dead take one or two bites and then scatter the rest on the ground for the pigeons. Of course the pigeons-being dead themselves since the town council poisoned them all a couple of years ago-are no more interested in the bread than they are. Not even the insects are that interested since the park was sprayed, so every day before she leaves, Hilary picks up the leftovers.

She’s tried giving them vegetables, but the dead won’t touch them. If you ask her, she’ll tell you that no matter how hard she tries, she cannot get the dead to eat broccoli.

Once, as an experiment, Hilary bought a dozen chocolate cakes and took them to the park. The dead didn’t leave a single crumb behind. She told me she can’t afford to do that every day, but now once every month or so, she’ll buy them some chocolate cakes as a special treat. (Even dead wasps perk up at the smell of chocolate, which is another reason she doesn’t bring it too often.)

Hilary used to get very annoyed when tourists turned up with portable sound systems playing Thriller at full blast, or shouting: “They don’t want bread, they want brainzzz!” but that kind of thing has been happening less and less since the state barricaded the highway and put up all of those “Quarantine” signs.

And there’s hardly been a single crime since the day a guy who was stripping the lead off a dead person’s roof slipped and fell, breaking his neck. He’s been in the park ever since, walking sideways with his head twisted over one shoulder.

I don’t think the dead feel any pain. When I used to visit Alice in her room, I’d always ask her: “Do you feel any pain? Do you feel anything?”

But she’d never answer.

Then one day as we sat with me talking and her staring into space, I picked up a pin and jabbed it, hard, into her arm.

She moved her head slightly, just enough to look down at the pin.

“You felt that, didn’t you?” I said. “Does it hurt?”

She went back to staring into space.

When she stood up to leave for the park, the pin was still protruding from her arm.

I reached up and pulled it out; she didn’t notice.

The dead don’t seem to age, either. Eating only a few bites of bread a day-plus one piece of chocolate cake a month-they’ve all lost a bit of weight, but otherwise they haven’t changed.

I’d kind of expected their hair to keep growing, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Which is probably just as well because the dead’s hair is invariably a mess. Someone living always has to comb it for them because for some reason they will not do it themselves.

The one exception to this is Rosemary Harold, who died without a single hair on her body-not even an eyelash-because she’d been in the middle of chemotherapy.

Alice is one of the few dead people in the park who hasn’t been reduced to wearing hand-me-downs thanks to her mother, who still buys her new clothes when she needs them.

The first couple of years, she used to take her to the mall, which wasn’t easy since the sales people didn’t like serving the dead and wouldn’t let her try anything on, and there was one guard who’d obviously seen Dawn of the Dead on television and would always follow them around, scowling, from the minute they arrived. But Alice’s mother persevered because she said it was the one time Alice actually seemed to know where she was and why she was there. She even claimed Alice would invariably head straight for the most expensive thing in the shop, just like she did when she was alive.

Not that it matters now the mall is shut.

At one time this town had five churches, four cafes, six bars, two auto dealerships, three banks, two primary schools, a high school, a motel, a funeral parlour, and a meat-packing plant (which closed the day after a calf’s head on a shelf in the freezer room was seen blinking). All of them are boarded up now. So are most of the houses.

The streets are full of abandoned dogs and cats. It’s the live ones you’ve got to watch out for, because they’re nervous.

My next door neighbour adopted a dead dog. When I asked her why, she said, “Why not? He’s no trouble and he doesn’t bark.”

Five years ago, they said it was a miracle I was still alive. Three weeks ago they told me the miracle was coming to an end; my organs were shutting down one by one. All because of one stupid thing I did one night when I was sixteen.

People told me my only hope was to get out of this town before I died. They told me it only happens here; if I die somewhere else, I won’t wake up. I won’t end up with those zombies in the park.

I’m sure all those people were right, but I knew something they didn’t know.

I’ve been going to the same doctor since I was a kid-he’s the only doctor in town these days-and the last time I saw him, he said he was going to tell me a secret.

Remember I told you about when it all first started, and how they shipped a man’s body to another state to see if he would wake up, and he did?

It turns out my doctor was sent along to accompany the body. He was there when the man woke up, and he’d asked him: “What was it like being dead? Do you remember any of it?”

And to his amazement, the man had answered him.

“He spoke?” I said.

My doctor nodded. “Only that one time, and never again. Considering what he said, I thought it was best to keep quiet about it.”

“Why? What did he say?”

“All you need to know is: there are a lot worse places a person could end up,” my doctor said as I left his office that last time, “than in the park.”

I went to the park today and saw a dead man sitting on a bench with Hilary Frentzen combing his hair.

What is it about the dead that they refuse to comb their own hair? For five years I had been telling myself that I would be the exception. I would be the one who speaks, who dresses herself, who eats vegetables, who continues to do simple things like comb her own hair… but with every moment that passed, these things seemed less and less important.

The next thing I knew, I was standing face to face with Alice. And for the first time in five years, she looked at me as if she knew me.