Stairs, she thought. Old, dead Sylvia would never have been to negotiate the stairs the way new and improved Sylvia was, with haste and a spring in her step. She knew where Duke was taking him; he was taking him to the vaults where the others were, the desperate dead. She knew of this wing of the Foundation but had never gotten farther than the door at the bottom of the stairwell for fear that the cameras would spy her entering the forbidden corridor. She’d tried once, but she had barely got it open before Duke’s voice had come over the intercom to tell her that she was in a restricted area. Duke carried a Taser; she’d seen on the news what Tasers could do to the undead. Tasers took them offline. Sylvia never wanted to be offline again.
Still, she dreamed about infiltrating that corridor and revealing whatever dark mysteries contained within the rows of rooms—or cells—down at the far end; this would be fitting and partial payback for the way they had infiltrated the corridors of her mind and body.
She reached the bottom of the stairwell a moment before she heard the bland ring announcing the elevator’s arrival. She waited behind the door, not daring to show her face through the slim rectangle of wire-reinforced glass until she could hear their footsteps taking them farther away.
She looked down at her hand, where the scissors were now tightly clenched, at some point having slid from beneath the cuff of her blouse as she pursued her quarry down the hall. She held the scissors not by their looping grips but farther up on the blades themselves, more like she would hold a knife. She looked up and, estimating Pete and Duke to be a good distance down the corridor, chanced a peek through the window.
They were walking side by side, and had just pulled even with the rows of doors. Sylvia counted four doors on each wall, and there was another facing her at the opposite end of the hall. Light trickled from the tiny square window of this ninth door and from only two of the doors along the sides.
She knew that they were going to visit the denizen of the ninth room. She’d seen him once, his wide and staring eye blank of recognizable intelligence yet still somehow mournful even across the vast length of the corridor. She’d wondered then if he could see her, a step away from her own tiny window in case there was a camera trained there. If so, he gave no indication.
She knew the cameras would not be running. Duke wanted to prove some point to Pete, but whatever it was he would not want that point recorded.
Offline, she thought. Duke would have taken the cameras offline.
She considered flinging the door open wide and running down the hall at them, shrieking like a banshee, hoping that the surprise and shock of seeing her, the not-human, not-zombie maniac with flailing arms and flashing blades would stun them immobile, giving her a chance to harm them before Duke could get his Taser out. She realized, though, that such a plan would never work; she may have been stronger than a human girl but not as strong as either of them, and she was much, much slower. Duke had a handgun and a truncheon as well as the Taser, although that was the weapon she feared the most. She didn’t know if the Taser would affect her the same way it affected a pure zombie, but she didn’t intend to find out.
She thought that her best strategy would be to wait inside the stairwell until the elevator bell sounded again. The elevator was only about ten feet from the stairwell door, and if she timed things right, she could slip into it right behind them as the doors whisked closed and do something very similar to what had been done to her.
Maybe she could even take one or both of them offline.
Down the hall, she caught a glimpse of the last zombie when Martinsburg recoiled at his sudden and shocking appearance at the window. Even though she had only a small square of window to view him through, and the window was far down the hall, she thought he looked like the most extreme example of the scarred, wild-haired, vacantly staring variety of living dead as she’d ever seen. He seemed to be staring past Duke and Martinsburg, right at her.
She wondered if he could recognize her for what she was, and she wondered if that recognition gave him hope, the way she used to feel hopeful in the presence of Karen or Tommy.
Martinsburg turned to the side, and Duke faced him, so Sylvia shrank back from her rectangle of glass and out of their view. A couple of minutes later she could hear their footsteps approaching. She pressed herself flat against the wall in case they decided on taking the stairs for exercise instead of returning to the elevator.
They didn’t. She heard one of them—Duke probably—press the button. Pete seemed more the type to impatiently punch it a dozen times, as though each press would cause the elevator to accelerate and arrive sooner. Duke was a one-press guy, she thought.
The bell sounded, announcing the arrival of the elevator. Her grip was so tight on the scissors, she thought she could feel the closed blades biting into her skin. She heard the doors slide open, and she could hear their heavy tread on the floor of the waiting car. This, she realized, was the opportune moment.
She didn’t move.
She didn’t move until she heard the motor hum and the cables strain and the elevator begin to ascend.
She went back up the stairs two at a time, determined to make it down the hall and to her seat in the office before they returned. She didn’t know exactly why she’d held back at the end; it was a response as reflective as it had been to conceal the scissors in the first place. Something about a desire to do things right, to execute desired tasks completely and well. One thing that her studies of schematics and automobiles had taught her was that it was just as important to take care disassembling the parts as it was putting them back together.
* * *
Dr. C was killed in a car crash a week after Martinsburg’s visit to the Hunter Foundation. His vehicle had gone skidding off the road after he’d worked a long shift at the Foundation. A shift where, a somber Angela had informed her, he’d been participating in another augmentation.
“That is so sad,” Sylvia said. She hadn’t been spending much time with either Dr. C or Dr. Beck since her own augmentation process had been completed.
She asked Angela if she could visit the new “augmentee,” or perhaps even assist in the process, but Angela said she didn’t think that would be possible.
“Not yet, anyway,” she said. “Maybe when she is ready for her therapy.”
The evening prior, Sylvia had risked another trip down the stairwell. She’d been reading about security systems during the hours where Angela wasn’t creating busywork for her to do around the office, and she had already learned a great deal. There were so many different types of systems, and so many different ways of taking them offline.
She’d glanced at the camera. The zombie at the end of the hall was still there; he would sometimes press his pitted and scarred forehead against his window. The other lights were all extinguished. Sylvia had stared at the zombie for some minutes before returning to her room upstairs.
She wondered if the zombie possessed feelings like her own. She wondered if he had any feelings at all.
Angela sighed. “The police are saying that it could have been a mechanical failure of some sort. Brake fluid, steering fluid…”
So many fluids. “Or ice,” Sylvia said. “It is very icy outside, especially…at night.”
Angela started crying softly. Sylvia placed her hand on top of Angela’s, and she wondered if the twitch she felt beneath her cold fingers was one of disgust, the same reflex triggered by the touch of a snake. Sylvia smiled for her. Dr. C was a broken doll now, and there would be no augmentation for him, no one to reassemble his parts.
Angela was crying, and although her own tear ducts were working again, another happy result of the augmentation she’d endured, Sylvia’s were bone dry.
MY DEAD HEART
I WASN’T EXPECTING A PARADE. I arrived home from my months on the road to an empty, or nearly empty, trailer. The screen door whisked shut behind me, drawing the attention of my cat, Gamera, whose tail stopped in mid-switch as he regarded me with active disgust.
&
nbsp; “Hi, kitty,” I said, and stooped to pet him. He hissed, bearing teeth as his paw lashed out and laid open three perfectly symmetrical scratches on the back of my wrist before he bounded off into the kitchenette, probably to seek a higher perch from where he could launch a new and more devastating attack on me. And all I wanted was to make friends.
I lifted my slashed hand and waited for the blood to well up in the cuts, but of course the blood never arrived. That spring dried up months ago.
“Quite a welcome,” I said. But it was no less than I expected, no less than I deserved. A smarter person than I am would have never returned, except for holidays and birthdays. A smarter person than I am would have kept walking. But a smarter person—a dead one, anyway—wouldn’t fall in love.
I dropped my backpack on the floor and sat in the kitchen chair facing the door, slouching as though fatigued from my long trip. The truth is that the dead don’t get tired, although some have told me that their “lives” are like a constant state of being tired. I don’t feel that way. I may not move quickly, but once I’m moving I can go forever, like some relentless machine composed of dry veins and dead flesh. I can’t evade the claws of the cat, but I don’t feel any pain from the scratches I receive even though they will never heal. We are all the sum of our scars, a wise man I met on the road told me, and he was still among the living.
I’ve been on the road these past months talking to people about rights for the undead. My travels have taken me to many parts of the country, some strange, some so normal they seemed strange. I went to the nation’s capital and found sympathetic ears, and now there are a few legal rights and protections for “my” people that there weren’t before. Time will tell if any of those rights are upheld or any of those protections enforced. Already I have heard of retaliatory strikes against the dead around the country, many in places that I had visited just days before. But my part, on that larger stage, is over for the moment. I returned home because of unfinished business. I returned home for the truth. The truth, or so I am told, has the power to set you free.
I don’t know how long I sat before my mother came home; my relation to time hasn’t been the same since the car crash that killed me. My mother, Faith, is a nurse at the hospital, working all sorts of shifts. Recently she’s become a sort of midwife to the dead; she wrote me an e-mail while I was on the road telling me that the hospital has her counsel the recently returned and their grief-stricken families. It is a job she is ideally suited for.
Her eyes found me the moment she walked through the door, as though every day or night that she comes home from work she has expected to find me here. She looks as though she is seeing a ghost, but a ghost that she’s been waiting for years to arrive.
“Tommy,” she said, already crying.
Turns out I can move at nearly human speed when I put my mind to it. I tell myself that I may not be able to feel the scratches and the scars, but I can feel her hug.
* * *
The next morning I went to the Haunted House, and almost everyone else was at school. Everyone I knew, anyway. You would think I would beeline toward Phoebe, of course, but I never get proper credit for or recognition of my shyness. My unfeigned shyness, by the way. People who see me speaking on television, in front of cameras, cannot understand the difference between personal and public shyness. But there is a difference.
Takayuki is the only person that I recognized at the Haunted House. Two or three other zombies appeared during the course of our conversation, but I didn’t recognize them. One nodded, one flashed heavy metal horns in what I guess was an affirmation or tribute, and so I assumed they recognized me. The dead like to acknowledge but not necessarily meet me, I’ve noticed.
Tak was on the porch watching, vulturelike. It is as though I’ve never left, in a way. He looked up, and his hideous smile was veiled and then it wasn’t. I said his name, and he nodded in my direction. His arms were crossed on his chest, but not as though he was trying to restrain the furnace of anger I’ve known to burn within his chest; if anything he seemed at peace, almost Buddha-like in his serenity. I climbed the creaking stairs and stood before him.
“Congratulations,” he said, and in his greeting lay the essential conflict between him and me; where others say thank you, he congratulates me, every syllable laden with sarcasm. Others assume that my deeds are about them; Tak assumes they are about me.
“Thank you,” I replied, because there is nothing to be gained in arguing the point. I knew from the moment I met him that Takayuki Niharu and Thomas Williams were opposite sides of the same coin, and for me to debate minor semantic points is to debase us both. He knows the value of what I accomplished; I know where my accomplishments have fallen short.
“Thank you,” I repeated, in case he had doubts about my sincerity, “and thank you for what you did for Karen.”
The dead don’t flinch, and Tak is the deadest of us all. But I saw that the mere mention of her name hurts him, causes him actual pain, and I am embarrassed for the both of us. His feeling for her is something I’ve often suspected but never witnessed; the shadow that crosses his gray face is all I need to know. Phoebe had sent me a message detailing what had happened to Karen in my absence, and the risks Tak took to help her.
“You…weren’t…here,” he told me, which is as close to admission of weakness I’ve ever heard from Tak, but at the same time there is pride; pride and defiance. I can only nod. I owe him a debt, one that I am unlikely to be able to repay. I too would die another dozen times for Karen.
“Mal?” I asked him. He focuses his attention on me, eager to banish the too-bright specter of Karen from his mind.
“Mal is still…beneath…the Oxoboxo,” he said, and I have the sense that he is being purposeful with his speech pauses, as though he needs to remind me of just how dead we are. “Many…think…he awaits…you.”
I nodded, not wishing to address the implied insult. “Colette?”
“On…tour,” he said, showing me his teeth. “She…fell in…love…in your…absence,” he said.
Many did, I thought. I was nothing but happy for her.
“Kevin?” I ask. “Tayshawn?”
“In…school,” he replies. He almost looked confused when he says this, and for a moment I imagine that his hatred for me is tempered by a warped form of gratitude. I’ve never hated Takayuki, but after learning what he tried to do for Karen I can’t even dislike him.
“Popeye, too.”
“Popeye is in school? At Oakvale?”
I couldn’t help but laugh, and although the result is somewhat grotesque, I think the attempt brings an authentic smile to Takayuki’s ruined face as well.
“Well then,” I said. I could ask him if he is planning on attending school as well but I already know the answer. I turn; no need for good-byes. I will go back to school and see if they will have me back.
“Wait,” he said. “There is something…I think you…should see.”
* * *
I followed him through the woods. We walked for miles and I knew I wouldn’t be getting home until near dark, because as yet the dead have not learned the art of teleportation. We exchanged maybe two dozen words during the hours that we were traveling; when I grew tired of staring at the back of his head and at his long hair brushing along the silver-studded shoulder pads of his leather jacket, I looked around us into the woods. Spring was coming; green had begun to mix in with the grays and browns. New growth was budding at the tips of the thin branches of birches that stretch toward us as we made our way; skunk cabbage, ferns, and other ground-level greenery brushed my sneakers and his boots as we walked. I imagined the air that I no longer have to breathe as having a rich, loamy smell.
Squirrels danced away from us, weaving in and out of the holes in a crumbling rock wall half-hidden behind a veil of brambles. Their play became headlong flight, and I wondered if they were spooked by my dead companion and me or the echoes of gunfire that I could hear in the near distance.
My fa
ther had never been a hunter, and I had no idea if it was a legal hunting season or not; but I’m also guessing that the gun-bearing citizenry of Oakvale wouldn’t let minor quibbles like legality keep them from blasting creatures that offended them from the face of the earth. The dead have moved to Oakvale in droves since the high school reopened its doors to them; my efforts in Washington may have helped create conditions making it illegal to reterminate us, but very few states other than Connecticut took the next obvious step by granting any basic freedoms or rights, like the ability to attend school, to the dead.
See what happens when I’m given a few moments to think? Do I linger long over the beauty of new life emerging from the ground, do I stop and smell the roses (roses, at least, are typically pungent enough for even my dulled senses to recognize), as it were, or do my thoughts immediately return to how easily that new life is denied or destroyed?
There must be something deeply wrong with me, I decided.
I actually laughed out loud, just two short but loud barklike sounds. Tak looked back at me over his shoulder, and at first glance I thought he was sharing my sudden change of humor; but then I realized he wasn’t smiling at all—the missing half of his cheek just made it look that way. He turned back without saying a word.
In life I had terrible pollen and mold allergies. I was briefly thankful that I no longer had to deal with them, but given too much time to think, I realized that I missed sneezing, even, and I wished that we would arrive at our mysterious destination.
But we walked at least another two miles before that wish was granted. The sound of gunfire was very close, and I couldn’t help but recall how a single bullet ended the life of my friend Adam, ending along with it any possible chance of happiness for me. There was a smaller popping sound even closer than that of the gunfire, and I realized that I’d balled my hands into fists and the sound I’d heard was that of my knuckles dryly protesting the tension I’d put upon them.
Generation Dead: Stitches Page 5