Dearly, Departed

by Lia Habel

  “Old boy?” my father asked as he tried to pet the leaping animal. “My word! What have you been up to, eh?”

  “What?” Samedi asked. “You know this dog?”

  “This fellow was assigned to guard me.” My dad laughed, scratching him between the ears. “He got away the night of the explosion. Oh, I’m very glad you’re all right, chap! I …” I heard my father trail off, my face hidden in Bram’s chest.

  “Ah … I should have told you about that,” Samedi said, sounding a trifle embarrassed. Bram urged me back again and bent down to give me another peck on the lips, a calmer one. I melted into it.

  “You do realize that this is wrong?” Bram joked. I opened my eyes and found him looking at me as if he wanted to rememorize my face.

  “So, so wrong,” I agreed, reaching up to finger another new cut he’d acquired on his hairline. The skin along his right cheek was lightly singed. He was still the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

  “No, it’s all right, Samedi,” I heard Dad chuckling. “It’s all right.”

  Although the general consensus was that we should celebrate, now, it had to wait. Chas’s throat had been crushed by a falling beam in the explosion, and she’d lost her voice. Bram’d gotten the worst of the actual fire, and some of his skin was blackened and ready to come off. The meds determined they could patch them both up easily enough, but they’d have to make another trip to Z Base. We started off that afternoon.

  I stayed with Bram through as much of it as they’d let me. They replaced the skin they had to remove with a synthetic compound doctors had developed for living burn victims a few years ago, using a strong adhesive to get it to stay in place. They kicked me out when they opened him up to repair some internal injuries, though. He waved at me as I was escorted to the door. There was no need to put him under.

  Samedi was going to have to whip up an artificial voice box for Chas. Until then she communicated via a screen and a quill stylus. She told us about the explosion and how they had both come to, only to find themselves alone. They’d spent half a day digging through the rubble to find Averne and make sure he was really dead. Then they hot-wired one of Averne’s tanks and headed eastward, in the direction they’d seen some of his men fleeing.

  Bram sad he wasnt gona make teh same mistaek twice, Chas wrote slowly. Apparently, part of spoiling her had included not demanding much of her academically, smart as she obviously was. That he was gona get evry last one of em. So we spnt a few days hunting em in the jungl, once we got out of the desert and fond water an patched ourslves up. We fond sume other zombys whod made it. Then we walkd til we fond anothr base, and told em that we are good guys so they woldn’t cap us. That was hard.

  “What about the dog?” my father asked her. We’d taken to calling him Fido—original, right?—and he was currently wolfing down a huge helping of tofu. There was no meat on base, but he didn’t seem to be too picky.

  We fond him with his chain caght in sume tree rootes, she wrote, looking at me to make sure I was following along before lowering her eyes to the screen again. We thout he was dead at first, but Bram let im go, and with sum water he was fine.

  I leaned forward, hands on the desk, and kissed her temple. She gurgled, which I took as laughter. “I’m so glad you’re here, Chas. As soon as you have your voice back, we’ll have a massive party. Desert rag, the works.”

  “They’ve got you listening to that awful stuff?” Dad sniffed.

  Nooooo, she wrote out, with a pout. Party now! Dont nead to talk to party!

  “First,” Dad said, giving me a stern look, “Captain Griswold and you and I must have a little chat.”

  I batted my lashes at him, even as my cheeks heated. Chas choked, and scrawled out, You stil ow me detales! Detales!!!

  We waited until Bram was done with his various surgeries and tune-ups. He dressed in a black shirt with rolled-up sleeves and herringbone trousers, borrowed from Sam. We sat on the deck of the Black Alice, waiting for my father’s arrival. That morning Samedi’d greeted him with the news that his leg was ready to be hooked up, and he’d been in surgery in the hold all day.

  I liked the casual look on Bram, and told him so. His upper lip flattened as if a weight had been pressed to it, and he confessed, “I really don’t feel like playing soldier anymore.”

  “You’re preaching to the choir here.”

  He smiled, and reached over to twist one of my curls. I turned my head slightly, but his lips were on my cheek before I could look at him. He slid his thumb over my chin and pressed his forehead to mine. I adored it. I wanted him this close to me always.

  “I kept having moments out there,” he whispered to me, “where I’d look at you and realize, ‘Wait, she’s not afraid. She wants this as much as I do. Maybe this could work.’ And then something else would happen to knock the truth back into my head—that there were just too many horrible things that could happen, to either one of us.”

  I kissed his stitched-up lower lip and replied, “Me, too. But I still think that can happen to anyone. And when I thought you were gone … I don’t even want to remember what that felt like.”

  “There will still be obstacles,” he said.

  “I don’t want to talk about them right now.”

  “We have to. We have to talk about them every day. No matter what we might feel, this isn’t normal.”

  I sighed. “Fine. Like the fact that I’m a walking meal?”

  He laughed. “Or the fact that I’m a walking corpse?”

  “No, no points for that one, it’s too unoriginal. Oh, I know, I know. Social stigma!”

  “The fact that we can never, ever imagine … forever?”

  I lightly touched his cheek. “I don’t want forever. I want now.”

  He smiled. “You take after your father.”

  “Pardon me,” my father said. We rocketed apart and I put my hands in my lap and assumed my very best “unassailable, innocent princess” pose. Bram stood up and bowed, but my father just waved him down again. “Oh, stop it, Bram.”

  “Hey, the leg looks good,” Bram said.

  I stood up to get a look, and Dad pulled up his trouser leg a little, showing it off. The machinery that controlled the cybernetic leg was half hidden behind a brass casing. Very pretty. Samedi was a wizard.

  “What do you think?” he asked of me.

  I mulled over my response before going with the truth. “You’re a zombie cyborg, Dad.” I started to giggle and had to sit down, because I couldn’t get myself to stop.

  He shrugged. “I’ve been called worse things in my life.” He took a seat on the ship railing. Bram reached over to thump me between the shoulders. “Now. Bram, you are a good friend and an upstanding young man, but I’m afraid that tradition dictates I now attempt to scare you within an inch of your unlife.”

  “Understood,” Bram said, taking his arm back as I got myself under control.

  My father is a gentle-looking man. Thus, why I started laughing again as he attempted to look stern. “What are your intentions concerning my daughter?”

  Bram cast a look my way, laughing himself, before clearing his throat and doing his best to look scared. “Why, to care for and protect her until I rot away, sir.”

  I coughed, and spoke up. “I mean, we’ve only really just met each other. Granted, we’ve killed and battled and laughed and survived together, which makes it all seem rather accelerated, but …” I let the sentence fade. I didn’t know what else to say.

  Dad nodded. “I’m glad you can see that.” He looked off into the trees. “You’re both intelligent young people, so I’m sure you’ve already imagined all the colorful ways such a courtship could go wrong.”

  We both nodded. We had.

  “And you’re willing to accept that nothing will ever change that?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Absolutely,” Bram agreed.

  My father eyed him and chuckled, tipping his head back. “I’m not about to say a thing either way. If
there’s one thing I know about my daughter, it’s that she likes to work things out for herself.” He smiled softly at me. “I trust you.”

  I loved the sound of those words. “Thank you.”

  Dad sat forward again. “So, where do we go from here?”

  Bram looked at me. “I’d like to arrange for my discharge, if possible. I’ve had my fill. I mean, the fact that they set out to destroy us … and the innocent man that we killed at Averne’s base …” I reached out and found his hand. Dad had told me what happened.

  My father frowned. “I’d only known him a few days, but Henry Macumba was a good man. I don’t think I can ever forgive myself for that. There’s so much for which I can never forgive myself. Perhaps they should have killed all the zombies years ago. Perhaps they were right. I can look at you, and my daughter, and see they were wrong, but … perhaps they were right.” He sighed and returned his attention to Bram. “What do you intend to do, then?”

  “Well, I’d like to continue to study under you,” he admitted. “But I realize that might be impossible if I leave the army. I can’t go home. Maybe there’s something for me in New London. From what Samedi’s told me, they’re allowing the healthy dead to return to their families there.” He laughed. “I never would have thought, a few weeks ago, that the living and the dead’d be coexisting.”

  “I just want to stay with Bram,” I said, realizing … that’s mainly what I did want. One of the top ten things, at least.

  Dad looked at me pointedly and said, “You’re still in school, young lady, and you will finish up there. You haven’t got a choice.” He fixed his eyes on the canopy of leaves above. “But I might have an idea of my own.”

  “What?” I asked.

  His mouth curled into a smile. “Oh, let me keep it a surprise.”

  I glared at him. “No. No more surprises. No more secrets. Or so help me, I will rip off your own leg and beat you with it.”

  Bram’s chest started shaking with laughter. “I think we’re back to normal.”

  “As normal as we’re ever going to get,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest and staring at my father. He started laughing as well.

  Hmph.

  EPILOGUE NORA

  Old habits die hard.

  Back in our sylvan hiding place, where the ancient trees had dwarfed us all, I’d dared to imagine that we were on the cusp of something great. I had my father again; I had Bram back. We were a newly fashioned crew of soldiers and inventors and cheeky teenagers, armed with an airship and plenty of guns. We could, in theory, pack it all in if we wanted to, and strike out for parts unknown. Colonize some little forgotten island, somewhere, and continue our adventures. Live generously; die gloriously.

  I knew we wouldn’t. Still, I dreamed about it.

  In reality, we cautiously returned to New London in late February, shortly after the government decided that the vaccine was safe enough to be deployed. Papa, Salvez, and Elpinoy were all nerves. While the government’s best scientists had subjected countless generations of computer-model mammals to the vaccine—the days of actual animal testing were long gone—there was still enough room for doubt. The world itself would be the drug’s proving ground. To those in the know, that idea was downright scary.

  Still, given what was going on in New London, there was no choice.

  The city was disorganized. New London had been facing an unceasing tide of undead immigrants since the end of the quarantine, as zombies sought medical help and strength in numbers. The military was a constant presence as well. Debate still raged over the existence of the walking dead. The infected and their allies argued that they posed no threat so long as they still had their wits about them; their opponents argued that they ought to be killed, imprisoned, or moved somewhere else.

  Just like the Punks.

  It was dangerous for a dead man to walk alone at night. It was nothing like what the undead were facing in the Punk territories, though. We heard stories about the fires still burning down south, the lynch mobs, the public executions.

  Everyone hoped that once the living were rendered immune to the Laz, or at least thought they were immune, they’d calm down.

  But I began to doubt my own judgment.

  It was miraculous that our house even survived. The houses to either side of ours were totaled; workers had yet to haul the burnt-out carriages off our street. And yet, in the midst of the devastation, my home was nearly untouched. When we arrived there I raced through the halls, laughing, amazed to find everything almost exactly as I’d left it—including Alencar and Matilda. They’d locked themselves in the basement, subsisting on canned vegetables and Papa’s wine collection for the duration of the lockdown and the Siege. Matilda vowed that she would never drink, or date, again.

  From them, we learned that Aunt Gene was missing.

  While my father concentrated on making inquiries into her whereabouts, I took over management of the house. We fit everyone in. Medical and scientific equipment filled the celestial parlor; men bunked on cots in my father’s study. Chas and her mother got Aunt Gene’s room, and its luxury, I think, reminded them of their roots; they couldn’t have been happier.

  In an effort to tread carefully until the vaccine had been proven beyond a doubt to work, we implemented Protocol D and kept the belongings of the living and the dead separate. Beryl, it turned out, enjoyed calligraphy, and spent her free time creating fancy signs that spelled out the house rules. Dead folks use plastic! When in doubt, throw it out! Please use the bathroom appointed for your gender and mortality!

  I loved those signs, silly as they were. They told me that I had a family again. A huge, weird, twisted, incredible family.

  I no longer wanted to be on my own.

  The twenty-ninth of March was a dreary, rainy day, but that didn’t discourage the crowd gathering to witness the execution of Captain James Wolfe.

  Of our entire social circle, the Roes were the only ones who’d declined to come. I’d spoken to Pamela on the phone that morning, and when Dr. Evola joined us on the green slopes of Dahlia Park, he confirmed that they were all at home. He’d been rooming with the Roes since the Siege, helping the zombies in their neighborhood and enduring long shifts on the hospital ships.

  “Said they would wait for the news on television, but they’d rather not see it,” Charles said as he took his place beneath Sam’s umbrella. “When I left they were recapping the trial.”

  “I don’t really blame them,” I said. I wrapped my arms around myself. I was wearing a new dress of dark red and green plaid satin, and it wasn’t all that warm, even beneath my black coat and Bram’s umbrella. Seeing this, Bram took off his scarf and looped it around my neck. He smiled at me encouragingly and leaned forward to brush my forehead briefly with his chin. I loved his touch, and hated the fact that it didn’t make me feel any better.

  Several yards off sat a collapsible gallows of ribbed steel. Normally, it would have been set up for a hanging—the accepted form of execution in the Territories—but given that zombies didn’t need to breathe, they’d erected three walls of bulletproof glass around it to outfit it for a firing squad. Police barricades had been set up on all sides of us, and protestors of different stripes were marching behind them. There had been protests every day since our return to the city. Generally it was the living protesting against the dead or against the government for covering everything up for so long, although occasionally a group of zombies would get together and march for equal treatment when it came to housing or medical care, or against some act of anti-zombie violence. Chas went to one of them, and came home disappointed that she hadn’t been able to chant along with the catchy protest slogans. Sam was still working on her new voice box.

  I didn’t want to be there.

  And yet I had to see it. I had to see this through to the end, had to see him fall.

  I didn’t want to see another person die—far from it. Life was not a holo documentary. But the man who would meet his end today had harmed m
y father, threatened to kill Bram and me, and put an entire city in danger. He had started all of this.

  So far the vaccine appeared to be working, which gave the living some confidence. There’d been no further zombie attacks. The Punks, despite the madness of their methods, had killed off many of the dangerous wild packs. And the army had given up Wolfe, tried and condemned him, as a gesture of atonement for everything they’d hidden.

  And so, I told myself that this was the end. When this man was dead, my life could resume something like a normal flow.

  I looked back. My father was leaning upon his cane, watching the scene dispassionately—though his eyes were active. I wondered what he was thinking. Bram, I knew, felt much as I did. He was still touching me, his hand on my shoulder, and I sent my fingers up in search of his. I wanted to be there for him. He’d known the man far longer than I had, and endured far more of his evil.

  “Are you okay?” I asked him.

  “Yeah.”

  People were giving us disgusted looks. I couldn’t immediately label them mortalists—in truth, even if Bram were alive, he shouldn’t be touching me in public. Still, I felt myself shrink against him, ever so slightly. “Do you think it’s sick that after all that’s happened, I’m choosing to watch yet another man die?” I asked softly.

  “No. Given what he did to you and your father? I’d be more worried if you didn’t want to watch it.” Bram stroked my hair. “Besides, if you’re sick, I’m on life support. As wrong as that joke is.”

  When the appointed hour rang out from the Cathedral of Our Mother, the crowd hushed. The protests went on, a few voices rising—zombies calling for Wolfe to be let go, for mercy to be shown to the dead. An announcer in front yelled something that I couldn’t hear, through the mutterings of those around us and the endless tip-tap of fat raindrops on the umbrella above me.