Fire blossomed inside me, hurting me this time because I’d hurt him. Pain came alive. I coughed, choking on my own tongue, my throat swollen and burning, my wrists and ankles burning, my breasts burning, between my legs a column of flame raging up inside me. I tried to apologize, but I no longer had a voice.
“You promised,” said Richie in his little boy’s voice, looking down at me.
I coughed. I could feel the power leaving me; my arms and legs were stiffening the way a body is supposed to do after death. I lifted my crippling hands as high as I could, palms up, pleading, but by that point only my elbows could bend. It was Tawanda’s last gesture.
“Don’t make a move,” said a voice. “Keep your hands on the wheel.”
We looked. A man stood just outside the car, aiming a gun at Richie through the open window.
Richie edged a hand down the wheel toward me.
“Make a move for her and I’ll shoot,” said the man. Someone else came up beside him, and he moved back, keeping his gun aimed at Richie’s head, while the other man leaned in and put handcuffs on Richie.
“That’s it,” said the first man, and he and the second man heaved huge sighs.
I lay curled on the seat, my arms bent at the elbows, my legs bent at the knees. When they pulled Richie out of the car I slipped off his lap and lay stiff, my neck bent at an angle so my head stuck up sideways. “This woman needs medical attention,” someone yelled. I listened to them freeing the woman in the back seat, and thought about the death of Tawanda and Mary.
Tawanda had lifted me out of my grave and carried me for miles. Mary had probably mostly died when Grannie cursed me and drove me out of the house. But Sheila? In a way, I had been pregnant with Sheila for years, and she was born in the grave. She was still looking out of my eyes and listening with my ears even though the rest of me was dead. Even as the pain of death faded, leaving me with clear memories of how Richie had treated me before he took that final twist around my neck, the Sheila in me was awake and feeling things.
“She’s in an advanced state of rigor,” someone said. I felt a dim pressure around one of my arms. My body slid along the seat toward the door.
“Wait,” said someone else. “I got to take pictures.”
“What are you talking about?” said another. “Ten minutes ago she was walking and talking.”
Lights flashed, but I didn’t blink.
“Are you crazy?” said the first person. “Even rapid-onset rigor doesn’t come on this fast.”
“Ask anybody, Tony. We all saw her.”
“Try feeling for a pulse. Are you sure he wasn’t just propping her up and moving her around like a puppet? But that wouldn’t explain….”
“You done with the pictures yet, Crane?” said one of the cops. Then, to me, in a light voice, “Honey, come on out of there. Don’t just lie there and let him photograph you like a corpse. You don’t know what he does with the pictures.”
“Wait till the civilians are out of here before you start making jokes,” said someone else. “Maybe she’s just in shock.”
“Sheila?” said Marti from the passenger side.
“Marti,” I whispered.
Gasps.
“Sheila, you did it. You did it.”
Did what? Let him kill me, then kill me again? Suddenly I was so angry I couldn’t rest. Anger was like the fire that had filled me before, only a lower, slower heat. I shuddered and sat up.
Another gasp from one of the men at the driver’s side door. “See?” said the one with the shock theory. One of them had a flashlight and shone it on me. I lifted my chin and stared at him, my microbraids brushing my shoulders.
“Kee-rist!”
“Oh, God!”
They fell back a step.
I sucked breath in past the swelling in my throat and said, “I need a ride. And feeling for a pulse? I think you’ll be happier if you don’t.”
Marti gave me back her jacket. I rode in her Rabbit; the cop cars and the van from the medical examiner’s office tailed us. Marti had a better idea of where she had found me than I did.
“What’s your full name?” she said when we were driving. “Is there anybody I can get in touch with for you?”
“No. I’ve been dead to them for a couple years already.”
“Are you sure? Did you ever call to check with them?”
I waited for a while, then said, “If your daughter was a hooker and dead, would you want to know?”
“Yes,” she said immediately. “Real information is much better than not knowing.”
I kept silent for another while, then told her my parents’ names and phone number. Ultimately, I didn’t care if the information upset them or not.
She handed me a little notebook and asked me to write it down, turning on the dome light so I could see what I was doing. The pain of scorching had left my fingers again. Holding the pen was awkward, but I managed to write out what Marti wanted. When I finished, I slipped the notebook back into her purse and turned off the light.
“It was somewhere along here,” she said half an hour later. “You have any feeling for it?”
“No.” I didn’t have a sense of my grave the way I had had a feeling for Richie. Marti’s headlights flashed on three Coke cans lying together by the road, though, and I remembered seeing a cluster like that soon after I had climbed up the slope. “Here,” I said.
She pulled over, and so did the three cars following us. Someone gave me a flashlight and I went to the edge of the slope and walked along, looking for my own footprints or anything else familiar. A broken bramble, a crushed fern, a tree with a hooked branch—I remembered them all from the afternoon. “Here,” I said, pointing down the mountainside.
“Okay. Don’t disturb anything,” said the cop named Joe. One of the others started stringing up yellow tape along the road in both directions.
“But—” I was having a feeling now, a feeling that Sheila had lived as long as she wanted. All I needed was my blanket of goofer dust, and I could go back to sleep. When Joe went back to his car to get something, I slipped over the edge and headed home.
I pushed the branches off the other two women and lay down beside their bodies, thinking about my brief life. I had helped somebody and I had hurt somebody, which I figured was as much as I’d done in my first two lives.
I pulled dirt up over me, even over my face, not blinking when it fell into my eyes; but then I thought, Marti’s going to see me sooner or later, and she’d probably like it better if my eyes were closed. So I closed my eyes.
THE DEAD
by Michael Swanwick
Michael Swanwick is the author of the novels Bones of the Earth, Griffin’s Egg, In the Drift, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, Jack Faust, Stations of the Tide, Vacuum Flowers, and The Dragons of Babel. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and in numerous anthologies, and has been collected in Cigar-Box Faust, A Geography of Unknown Lands, Gravity’s Angels, Moon Dogs, Puck Aleshire’s Abecedary, Tales of Old Earth, and The Dog Said Bow-Wow. He is the winner of numerous awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Locus, and World Fantasy awards.
This story, which was a finalist for both the Hugo and Nebula awards, first appeared in Starlight 1. Here, the zombies are not a menace but a commodity: luxury goods to be bought and sold on the free market. Besides zombies, it also features cold-blooded businessmen; it’s hard to say which is more frightening.
Three boy zombies in matching red jackets bussed our table, bringing water, lighting candles, brushing away the crumbs between courses. Their eyes were dark, attentive, lifeless; their hands and faces so white as to be faintly luminous in the hushed light. I thought it in bad taste, but “This is Manhattan,” Courtney said. “A certain studied offensiveness is fashionable here.”
The blond brought menus and waited for our order.
We both ordered pheasant. “An excellent choice,” the boy said in a clear, emotionless voice. He went aw
ay and came back a minute later with the freshly strangled birds, holding them up for our approval. He couldn’t have been more than eleven when he died and his skin was of that sort connoisseurs call “milk glass,” smooth, without blemish, and all but translucent. He must have cost a fortune.
As the boy was turning away, I impulsively touched his shoulder. He turned back. “What’s your name, son?” I asked.
“Timothy.” He might have been telling me the spécialité de maison. The boy waited a breath to see if more was expected of him, then left.
Courtney gazed after him. “How lovely he would look,” she murmured, “nude. Standing in the moonlight by a cliff. Definitely a cliff. Perhaps the very one where he met his death.”
“He wouldn’t look very lovely if he’d fallen off a cliff.”
“Oh, don’t be unpleasant.”
The wine steward brought our bottle. “Chateau La Tour ’17.” I raised an eyebrow. The steward had the sort of old and complex face that Rembrandt would have enjoyed painting. He poured with pulseless ease and then dissolved into the gloom. “Good lord, Courtney, you seduced me on cheaper.”
She flushed, not happily. Courtney had a better career going than I. She outpowered me. We both knew who was smarter, better connected, more likely to end up in a corner office with the historically significant antique desk. The only edge I had was that I was a male in a seller’s market. It was enough.
“This is a business dinner, Donald,” she said, “nothing more.”
I favored her with an expression of polite disbelief I knew from experience she’d find infuriating. And, digging into my pheasant, murmured, “Of course.” We didn’t say much of consequence until dessert, when I finally asked, “So what’s Loeb-Soffner up to these days?”
“Structuring a corporate expansion. Jim’s putting together the financial side of the package, and I’m doing personnel. You’re being headhunted, Donald.” She favored me with that feral little flash of teeth she made when she saw something she wanted. Courtney wasn’t a beautiful woman, far from it. But there was that fierceness to her, that sense of something primal being held under tight and precarious control that made her hot as hot to me. “You’re talented, you’re thuggish, and you’re not too tightly nailed to your present position. Those are all qualities we’re looking for.”
She dumped her purse on the table, took out a single folded sheet of paper. “These are the terms I’m offering.” She placed it by my plate, attacked her torte with gusto.
I unfolded the paper. “This is a lateral transfer.”
“Unlimited opportunity for advancement,” she said with her mouth full, “if you’ve got the stuff.”
“Mmm.” I did a line-by-line of the benefits, all comparable to what I was getting now. My current salary to the dollar—Ms. Soffner was showing off. And the stock options. “This can’t be right. Not for a lateral.”
There was that grin again, like a glimpse of shark in murky waters. “I knew you’d like it. We’re going over the top with the options because we need your answer right away—tonight preferably. Tomorrow at the latest. No negotiations. We have to put the package together fast. There’s going to be a shitstorm of publicity when this comes out. We want to have everything nailed down, present the fundies and bleeding hearts with a fait accompli.”
“My God, Courtney, what kind of monster do you have hold of now?”
“The biggest one in the world. Bigger than Apple. Bigger than Home Virtual. Bigger than HIVac-IV,” she said with relish. “Have you ever heard of Koestler Biological?”
I put my fork down.
“Koestler? You’re peddling corpses now?”
“Please. Postanthropic biological resources.” She said it lightly, with just the right touch of irony. Still, I thought I detected a certain discomfort with the nature of her client’s product.
“There’s no money in it.” I waved a hand toward our attentive waitstaff. “These guys must be—what?—maybe two percent of the annual turnover? Zombies are luxury goods: servants, reactor cleanups, Hollywood stunt deaths, exotic services”—we both knew what I meant—“a few hundred a year, maybe, tops. There’s not the demand. The revulsion factor is too great.”
“There’s been a technological breakthrough.” Courtney leaned forward. “They can install the infrasystem and controllers and offer the product for the factory-floor cost of a new subcompact. That’s way below the economic threshold for blue-collar labor.
“Look at it from the viewpoint of a typical factory owner. He’s already downsized to the bone and labor costs are bleeding him dry. How can he compete in a dwindling consumer market? Now let’s imagine he buys into the program.” She took out her Mont Blanc and began scribbling figures on the tablecloth. “No benefits. No liability suits. No sick pay. No pilferage. We’re talking about cutting labor costs by at least two-thirds. Minimum! That’s irresistible, I don’t care how big your revulsion factor is. We project we can move five hundred thousand units in the first year.”
“Five hundred thousand,” I said. “That’s crazy. Where the hell are you going to get the raw material for—?”
“Africa.”
“Oh, God, Courtney.” I was struck wordless by the cynicism it took to even consider turning the sub-Saharan tragedy to a profit, by the sheer, raw evil of channeling hard currency to the pocket Hitlers who ran the camps. Courtney only smiled and gave that quick little flip of her head that meant she was accessing the time on an optic chip.
“I think you’re ready,” she said, “to talk with Koestler.”
At her gesture, the zombie boys erected projector lamps about us, fussed with the settings, turned them on. Interference patterns moiréd, clashed, meshed. Walls of darkness erected themselves about us. Courtney took out her flat and set it up on the table. Three taps of her nailed fingers and the round and hairless face of Marvin Koestler appeared on the screen. “Ah, Courtney!” he said in a pleased voice. “You’re in—New York, yes? The San Moritz. With Donald.” The slightest pause with each accessed bit of information. “Did you have the antelope medallions?” When we shook our heads, he kissed his fingertips. “Magnificent! They’re ever so lightly braised and then smothered in buffalo mozzarella. Nobody makes them better. I had the same dish in Florence the other day, and there was simply no comparison.”
I cleared my throat. “Is that where you are? Italy?”
“Let’s leave out where I am.” He made a dismissive gesture, as if it were a trifle. But Courtney’s face darkened. Corporate kidnapping being the growth industry it is, I’d gaffed badly. “The question is—what do you think of my offer?”
“It’s… interesting. For a lateral.”
“It’s the start-up costs. We’re leveraged up to our asses as it is. You’ll make out better this way in the long run.” He favored me with a sudden grin that went mean around the edges. Very much the financial buccaneer. Then he leaned forward, lowered his voice, maintained firm eye contact. Classic people-handling techniques. “You’re not sold. You know you can trust Courtney to have checked out the finances. Still, you think: It won’t work. To work, the product has to be irresistible, and it’s not. It can’t be.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Succinctly put.”
He nodded to Courtney. “Let’s sell this young man.” And to me, “My stretch is downstairs.”
He winked out.
Koestler was waiting for us in the limo, a ghostly pink presence. His holo, rather, a genial if somewhat coarse-grained ghost afloat in golden light. He waved an expansive and insubstantial arm to take in the interior of the car and said, “Make yourselves at home.”
The chauffeur wore combat-grade photomultipliers. They gave him a buggish, inhuman look. I wasn’t sure if he was dead or not. “Take us to Heaven,” Koestler said.
The doorman stepped out into the street, looked both ways, nodded to the chauffeur. Robot guns tracked our progress down the block.
“Courtney tells me you’re getting the raw materials from A
frica.”
“Distasteful, but necessary. To begin with. We have to sell the idea first—no reason to make things rough on ourselves. Down the line, though, I don’t see why we can’t go domestic. Something along the lines of a reverse mortgage, perhaps, life insurance that pays off while you’re still alive. It’d be a step towards getting the poor off our backs at last. Fuck ’em. They’ve been getting a goddamn free ride for too long; the least they can do is to die and provide us with servants.”
I was pretty sure Koestler was joking. But I smiled and ducked my head, so I’d be covered in either case. “What’s Heaven?” I asked, to move the conversation onto safer territory.
“A proving ground,” Koestler said with great satisfaction, “for the future. Have you ever witnessed bare-knuckles fisticuffs?”
“No.”
“Ah, now there’s a sport for gentlemen! The sweet science at its sweetest. No rounds, no rules, no holds barred. It gives you the real measure of a man—not just of his strength but his character. How he handles himself, whether he keeps cool under pressure—how he stands up to pain. Security won’t let me go to the clubs in person, but I’ve made arrangements.”
Heaven was a converted movie theater in a rundown neighborhood in Queens. The chauffeur got out, disappeared briefly around the back, and returned with two zombie bodyguards. It was like a conjurer’s trick. “You had these guys stashed in the trunk?” I asked as he opened the door for us.
“It’s a new world,” Courtney said. “Get used to it.”
The place was mobbed. Two, maybe three hundred seats, standing room only. A mixed crowd, blacks and Irish and Koreans mostly, but with a smattering of uptown customers as well. You didn’t have to be poor to need the occasional taste of vicarious potency. Nobody paid us any particular notice. We’d come in just as the fighters were being presented.
“Weighing two-five-oh, in black trunks with a red stripe,” the ref was bawling, “tha gang-bang gangsta, tha bare-knuckle brawla, tha man with tha—”
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