by Nathan Allen
Miles navigated the minibus through the dense traffic, somehow managing to keep his cool when yet another driver swerved unexpectedly into his lane. Elliott and Felix were in the seats directly behind him, with the zombie family strapped safely in the back.
The journey was mostly silent, with the only discernible sound being the intermittent droplets of sweat leaking from Felix’s forehead onto the floor. It was only a fairly mild day – it was cool enough that Elliott was wearing the ugly green sweater-vest his girlfriend Amy had given him for his last birthday – but Felix’s face was dripping like a rusted faucet.
Felix was one of the more peculiar characters Miles had encountered during his time at Dead Rite – and that was saying something. Perhaps the strangest thing about Felix was that he chose to work there at all. Most of the other staff were high school dropouts, but Felix was in possession of a towering intellect and a brain that was constantly working overtime. He would probably have been more suited working at a place like NASA or Google rather than trapping zombies for a living. If he’d attended a better quality school, his intellectual gifts would likely have been recognised and he would have thrived in an accelerated learning program. Instead he was enrolled in an underfunded state school, where his teachers saw him as an undisciplined and ill-focused space cadet, and his fellow students thought he was a total weirdo.
Felix came to work at Dead Rite around the same time as Miles. While Miles was just looking for a steady income, Felix was eager to gain first-hand experience in the field of undead management and control. He was something of an amateur inventor – he was one of those people who could pull an engine apart, figure out how everything worked, then put it back together again and make it run more efficiently – and he recognised zombies as being the big growth industry for the coming decades. It was an industry he was keen to climb on board at the ground floor.
His work so far had yielded mixed results. One of his more promising inventions was his cable-gun, which allowed a worker to restrain a zombie from a distance of up to twenty metres. The device, which looked like a large metallic hair dryer, had a simple yet brilliant design. The worker would aim at the target zombie and press the fire button. Two thin cables would shoot out and wrap tightly around the zombie’s ankles, preventing it from moving. The retract button then yanked the cables back in, and the zombie would be dragged in like a fisherman hauling a massive marlin.
The Dead Rite staff were all impressed with Felix’s new contraption and eager to try it out in the field, but the authorities had other ideas. They ruled that the device had the potential to cause unnecessary trauma to the undead being, and swiftly moved to have it banned from use.
Felix’s other notable innovation was his puncture-proof body armour. He had developed a kind of synthetic fibre-mesh bodysuit that could be worn underneath clothes to guard against zombie attacks. The material was strong enough to prevent zombie bites from penetrating the skin; unfortunately, it also prevented the skin from breathing. This caused the wearer to sweat profusely, even in relatively mild conditions. So while the authorities had no issues with the protective suit and declared it acceptable for use, few people other than Felix ever bothered to wear it. The fact that it was pretty much unheard of for zombies to attack undead management and control workers meant that there was little demand for the outfits.
The minibus turned off from the highway, and they saw the processing centre in the distance ahead. It was a massive compound, occupying an area equivalent to five football fields, seemingly dropped into a vacant paddock in the middle of nowhere. Most major cities had processing centres now. This was where the crews deposited their zombies once they had been removed from the streets.
The activity outside the centre seemed particularly hectic today. Miles could sense trouble brewing as soon as he turned off from the main road and headed towards the front entrance. The protesters were out in force. Maybe it was due to the good weather, or maybe they were just killing time before the Devendra Banhart gig later on that night. Whatever the reason, it appeared more chaotic than usual.
The protesters held up their signs declaring “No Former Human Should Be Without Rights” and “Undead Rights Correct Human Wrongs”. They rocked one of the trucks back and forth as it tried to enter the compound. A few of the braver ones laid down in the truck’s path, before being dragged away by the centre’s security guards.
The guards would have loved nothing more than to crack a few heads open or unleash a canister or two of tear gas, but they were under strict instruction not to do anything that might inflame the situation. The operators of the processing centre had publicly declared that they supported their right to protest, and knew that antagonising them would only create further problems.
“This doesn’t look good,” Miles said as he watched the disorder unfolding from a distance. “Maybe we should come back later.”
The minibus had stalled twice already on the way here. The last thing Miles wanted was for it to stall again while they were trying to get inside and then find themselves surrounded by a mob of angry hippies.
They drove closer and could see just how big the crowd was. Somewhere between two and three hundred protesters in total, banging on drums and chanting through bullhorns. They usually only had to deal with about thirty or forty.
The media labelled these agitators with the pejorative term “dead-heads”, due to both their fondness for the undead, and for the way they would migrate en masse from one happening to the next, like the Grateful Dead’s army of dedicated followers.
The minibus passed the turnoff to the front entrance and remained unnoticed by the protesters. Elliott spotted a smaller entrance up ahead, one that was used mainly for staff and deliveries. “There!” he said, pointing to it.
Miles made a sharp right turn and pulled up in front of the boom gate. He flashed his Dead Rite accreditation to the guard, and they were let inside.
Miles, Elliott and Felix leapt out of the minibus, then turned the zombie family over to the centre’s handlers. The zombies were then led away to another area where they would be stripped, hosed down, examined, photographed and assigned a number, then have a drip attached to feed them artificial blood. The blood contained a type of sedative which made them docile and easier to control. They would be outfitted in orange boilersuits and taken to their cells, where they would wait to be shipped off to a holding facility at a later date. These holding facilities were giant, sprawling prisons, located somewhere in the middle of the desert, and it was where every zombie eventually ended up. As to what happened to them after that – well, the government wasn’t divulging too much about that. As far as anyone could tell they were being held indefinitely, left in limbo and with no clear future.
Felix completed the paperwork, and Dead Rite received their payment. This job netted them $2000, or $500 per head.
Across on the other side of the centre, one of the trucks finally made it past the dead-heads and inside the main entrance. Two workers jumped out and began unloading the zombies.
They were from Z-Pro, and they were Dead Rite’s main (and now only) rival in the undead management and control business. Instead of driving around in a clapped-out old minibus, Z-Pro had several huge trucks that were painted jet black with massive company logos airbrushed along the sides. This made the vehicles instantly recognisable; it also made Dead Rite fairly inconspicuous by comparison, and allowed them to slip in and out of the processing centre without drawing unwanted attention to themselves.
“Look who it is,” Miles said, nodding in the direction of the truck. One of the Z-Pro workers, a lanky guy with long hair and a Jesus beard, was helping to unload the reanimated cargo. “Our old friend, Dwayne Marks.”
Elliott looked across to the truck. “Who’s Dwayne Marks?”
“He used to work with us,” Felix replied. “You’re his replacement.”
Up until a month ago, Dwayne Marks was a member of the Dead Rite team. But then Z-Pro made him an offer, and Dwayne
wasted no time in accepting it. His defection to the rival UMC crew meant that a vacancy had opened up, which Elliott now occupied.
Z-Pro had poached many of Dead Rite’s staff over the past couple of years, and with a generous salary and job security they usually didn’t need too much coercion to switch sides.
Dead Rite may have been struggling financially, but Z-Pro were going from strength to strength. This was evident by the amount of zombies being unloaded from their truck. There had to be at least thirty in total. It made Dead Rite’s haul of four look paltry by comparison. The difference between the two companies was vast; Z-Pro was like a massive fishing trawler, and Dead Rite was a two-man dinghy with a couple of rods over the side.
Miles stood back and watched for a moment, experiencing just the slightest twinge of jealousy.
Dead Rite and Z-Pro were undead management and control (UMC) firms that had sprung up in the aftermath of the zombie uprising. The military were initially deployed to handle the bulk of the zombie hordes, but as skilled and as thorough as they were it was impossible to account for each and every last zombie loose in society. The government decided to outsource this task to private contractors; service providers who could be called in if a stray zombie found its way into your neighbourhood.
Dead Rite was initially a pest control business that Adam had inherited from his uncle. When he first met Steve, the business was in disarray. They were losing clients, haemorrhaging money, and it was sending Adam broke. Steve was working in the finance industry at the time, and he offered to help out to see if he could turn Dead Rite’s fortunes around.
It was Steve’s idea to branch out into the burgeoning field of undead management and control. He wasn’t the only one – the bounty of $500 per zombie brought a multitude of shonks and charlatans from out of the woodwork, eager to make a quick buck and have the taxpayer pick up the tab.
The early days were good. A typical day saw Dead Rite bringing in twenty to thirty zombies, or about as much revenue as they got from a month of killing rats and trapping possums. Steve quit his job and joined Dead Rite full time. They took on more staff, about thirty in total, and relocated to newer, bigger premises.
But the good times didn’t last. The zombie population soon dwindled, attacks became less frequent, and most of the UMC startups went under. And if it wasn’t the lack of zombies that sent businesses to the wall, it was Z-Pro’s market dominance that was the final nail in the coffin.
Dead Rite was the only other UMC business to survive. It seemed fitting that they started off in pest control; Jack Houston, the owner of Z-Pro, thought they were like cockroaches that simply refused to die. They had only just managed to stay afloat, though. They had to lay off most of their staff, and the few that remained had to make do on a significantly reduced wage.
The only reason the business hadn’t gone under yet was due to the tenacity of its two leaders. Steve and Adam were a formidable duo; Steve had the brains and financial nous, while Adam had the practical experience in the field. Personality-wise, they were complete opposites. Steve was serious and soft-spoken, and not obviously gay. Any time he ventured into a bar it wouldn’t be long before middle-aged divorcées noticed his lack of a wedding ring and homed in on him.
Adam, on the other hand, was outgoing and flamboyant, a certified Kinsey six. If he was a fictional character on a TV sitcom, GLAAD would call for a boycott of the show for perpetrating outdated stereotypes of homosexual men.
Strangely enough, despite the two of them being in a relationship for years now, no one ever made any jokes about their names. They were always referred to as “Steve and Adam”, never “Adam and Steve”. Perhaps the “Adam and Steve” jokes were so obvious that everyone assumed they’d heard them a thousand times already.
Miles joined Dead Rite in those heady early days. He needed a steady source of income after his parents died. He and Shae had received a small compensation payout, but it was only enough to last them a few months. So when he heard of how much money could be made as a UMC worker, he immediately applied for a position.
He earned some decent cash early on, but then the downturn happened. He could have quit, but instead remained a loyal employee. These days his typical pay packet was only slightly higher than the minimum wage, but he had fallen into a comfortable rut. He couldn’t really be bothered searching for another job, and resigned himself to the fact that this was his life for the foreseeable future.
Chapter 6
Dead Rite’s headquarters was a small rented warehouse located in an industrial part of the city. In a curious twist of fate, the building was previously used by a coffin manufacturer. In a post-zombie world, the coffin business had gone much the same way as Kodak and Encyclopedia Britannica had in a post-digital world. That is, it was now largely redundant. After the events of the past three years, few people wanted to risk having their loved ones making an unexpected reappearance during their own funeral, and so ninety-five percent of people now opted for cremation over a traditional burial.
Steve was still kicking himself that he didn’t see that one coming. Crematoriums were the growth industry they should have expanded into rather than undead management and control.
Miles, Elliott and Felix had returned from the processing centre and were now filling in time before their next call-out. Felix always made productive use of this downtime, tinkering away in the small workshop out back on whatever his next big invention was. Elliott was on the phone with his girlfriend Amy, while Miles ate his dinner in the break room. On the way back from the processing centre, he had stopped by an Aqua Bar outlet to pick up a chicken caesar wrap and organic orange juice.
He was midway through his dinner when he heard a familiar voice on the TV.
He spun his chair around and saw his housemate being interviewed by a reporter from the front lines of the rally. She was leading the protest against the court decision handed down to the four men convicted of killing a zombie.
“We’re here to make a stand!” Clea declared, exercising her right to be righteous. “We’re here to send a message to politicians, to the media, and to those who still think it’s okay to use former humans as punching bags and target practice. We want to stop the violence. Stop the hatred. It’s time we all moved forward as one to create a better society!”
Clea’s idealistic words and calls for peace were juxtaposed with vision from the rally. Viewers were treated to scenes of protesters decapitating an effigy of Bernard Marlowe, the outspoken anti-zombie crusader and aspiring Prime Minister. Another protester squirted lighter fluid over the effigy as if he was urinating on it, then set it alight in front of a cheering crowd.
As far as Clea’s rallies went, this was par for the course. They would usually start out with the best of intentions, but it wasn’t long until the situation descended into shambles and mob rule took over. Different protest groups that had little or nothing to do with undead issues (and often had opposing agendas) would begin shouting over one another, and the whole thing quickly became farcical. The Anti-GM Foods group struggled to be heard over the Legalise Drugs group, while the Save the Oceans group jostled for airtime with the Cancel the Debt group.
Meanwhile, a feminist collective paraded topless to highlight the issue of gender inequality and sexual harassment in society. They certainly received plenty of attention from the media, but it was debatable as to whether their intended message got through or not.
Clea’s protests often ended this way, having the opposite effect of what she had intended. A previous rally targeting large corporations and the undemocratic influence they exerted over government policy quickly became a riot, resulting in dozens of small independent businesses being trashed.
Before that, at a protest meant to highlight the alarming levels of environmental degradation in the modern world, a large bonfire was started which the protestors continued to fuel by tossing on garbage, old shoes, clothes, street signs, wooden benches and whatever else they could find. It was estimated that th
e carbon emissions created by the fire was the equivalent of what ten thousand cars produced in one year.
Worst of all were the peace marches. These almost always ended in violence.
It was all too easy for the mainstream media to mock and belittle these people, and for viewers to dismiss them as a bunch of loony activists with too much spare time on their hands. This particular news report showed only a short three-second sound bite from a human rights lawyer, but it did allow a man in a bear costume riding a unicycle a full thirty seconds to air his somewhat unique view of the world.
Meanwhile, in another part of the country, Bernard Marlowe appeared at his carefully stage-managed press conference to denounce the appalling behaviour of the protesters. He maintained that while the undead needed to be protected, people came first and the laws shouldn’t be used to turn honest, hardworking, upstanding citizens into criminals. He reiterated that the current legislation had gone too far in favour of the undead, and promised to repeal the laws should he win office at the forthcoming election.
He added that his thoughts and prayers were with the families of the four men sentenced to prison for the unprovoked killing of a zombie. He made no mention of the still-living family of that zombie, who witnessed their son getting torn to shreds by a pack of bored, bloodthirsty thugs.
Even though it was now illegal to commit an act of violence against an undead being, there were still those in society who refused to abide by the law and insisted on taking matters into their own hands. They viewed these creatures as a threat, and many still harboured a great deal of resentment towards zombies after what they had previously witnessed during the initial outbreak. They believed that “the only good zombie was a dead zombie”, a slogan they proudly proclaimed on their bumper stickers (apparently unaware that zombies were already dead). Others simply wanted to try out the high-powered weaponry they had purchased during the outbreak but never got the chance to use.