"Are you sure that they are dead?"
"What do you mean?"
"We kind of have an understanding of how the walkers and dashers work. A living human is killed by a walker. The now dead human heals up and becomes a walker. At night the walkers become dashers. When the morning comes the dashers become walkers. So where do the talkers come from?"
"I've only heard the talkers at night. So maybe they are a form of the walkers. Most walkers become dashers, but some become talkers."
"And how is that distinction come around? Why do only a few walkers become talkers at night?"
"I have to admit that I'm not a fan of the idea of something happening because of randomness. Maybe it depends on the health of the walker? Only the strongest walkers can become talkers."
"Or the talkers don't come from the walkers."
"Where do they come from? I haven't seen anything to signal that you can make a walker without first killing a person. You have to be dead to be a walker. At least that's the assumption that I'm working with."
"What I'm getting at is that maybe the talkers never died."
Dave stood up straight with shock. "Are you say that the talkers are alive?"
"That would be a way to keep our understanding consistent. The walkers and dashers swap back and forth. The talkers come from people who are alive."
"That's pretty wild."
"I'm surprised that you didn't think of it. You seemed to be trying to keep an open mind."
Dave gestured toward Charlie. "I guess that I'm a bit distracted right now."
"Are you trying to prepare yourself for later?"
"I probably would have been okay if it hadn't been for that talker last night."
"And here's me thinking that I was the most affected."
"I think that we were both a bit done in by it. So I'll keep today's goal simple."
"Nothing wrong with taking it easy."
"I wish that I could, but for some reason I feel so pushed for time."
"Purpose is like that. It's rarely a continuously shining light in the sky leading the lost to the land of plenty. Some days it's strong, other days it almost fades away. Motivation is overrated. Self-discipline is the way to go. Besides, what could you be doing that has you so down?"
"I'm going to cut Charlie's legs off."
"Oh. That would do it."
"No point delaying. Let's get right to it."
"It will take a moment to get a fire going before we can cook breakfast."
"Don't bother - I'll be skipping breakfast. I've never done anything like this before. I won't be surprised if I throw up all over the place."
* * *
Dave sat on top of the bus which made up the wall nearest to Charlie and watched Josh with interest. On the way the pair had stopped in the arts and craft store and picked up some tools. Mostly it was some basic safety equipment - an air filter mask, some protective glasses and a waterproof apron. They had even found a full sized axe, although the pair couldn't understand how such an axe could be used in the arts. Josh had fully kitted himself up with the apron, glasses and mask. He held the axe like a movie madman.
Josh glanced up at Dave. "Here we go."
"I can't believe that you agreed to this," said Dave.
"It comes down to practicality. I'm used to work that involves a manual angle, and when it comes to making observations and writing that down then clearly you're the one for that job. It's the most sensible division of labour."
Dave adjusted the notepad on his lap. "I'd love to have a camera to record this, but after we do some basic tests we'll figure out what equipment we're short on. For now we just need to start doing something."
"And how do we start?" asked Josh looking at Charlie and hefting the axe.
"Let's not get too wild. Start with Charlie's toes. I'm curious what sort of bodily fluids will come out when we remove a limb. If we did the leg straight away you could get covered in blood and who knows if that's enough to cause an infection."
"Just one toe?"
"That should be a safe start."
Josh looked at Charlie as he walked to Charlie's left. Without wasting a motion, Josh basically dropped the axe on Charlie's outermost little toe. Josh didn't do a full swing of the axe from overhead. Instead he started with as little force as he could manage with the goal of reducing the potential mess. That is, he merely dropped the axe onto Charlie's toe while holding the end of the axe handle as a pivot point.
The toe cleanly came away and rolled about thirty centimetres from where it was originally attached. Charlie had been slightly agitated by Josh being so close, but overall Charlie didn't seem to make any sign that he had noticed what happened. The axe had barely passed through Charlie's toe when Josh leapt back.
Dave hadn't expected what he saw. There was Charlie without a toe and the severed toe a noticeable distance from him. There wasn't any blood or any other kind of fluid. It was completely clean. Josh's preparations were now looking like overkill. Even his jumping back had been for nothing.
"Where's all the blood?" asked Josh.
"I have absolutely no idea. I wasn't expecting actual, living blood. Yet I was thinking that there had to be something. Nothing at all is the opposite of what should have happened. Yesterday, when I was cutting off Charlie's clothes, should have hinted at this outcome."
"What's this bullshit?" said Josh excitedly.
A strange cloud of greyish-brown enveloped the severed toe. It now wasn't out of purely safety concerns that Josh took a further step back. Another cloud appeared at the stump from where the toe had been severed. In the course of a few seconds the severed toe turned into a dirty-looking gas, and the toe then grew back from the stump.
"Grew" is probably not the most precise description. It appeared that the toe was being rebuilt from the inside out. First the toe bone appeared, muscles and tendons formed, and then the skin and toe-nail appeared. To all purposes it appeared that the severed toe had vanished and reappeared back on the foot where it had started.
"Okay," said Dave. "I'm not a scientist but I'm sure that just violated all the physical laws of the universe."
"I was dreading the idea of cutting this guy's leg off but somehow this just took the damn cake. What the hell just happened?"
"I've got no idea. So let's do that again."
Josh looked up at Dave. Josh suddenly appreciated that Dave's course of action wasn't a trivial one. This was a path where the discovery of the pure and uncensored truth would lead to madness. This was no bland discovery in a safe laboratory somewhere in some whitewashed building. This was a raw truth that cared nothing for the minds of whoever encountered it.
Stepping forward, Josh approached Charlie's left and again dropped the axe on Charlie's little toe. The toe rolled a distance from Charlie's foot. There were no fluids. No mess. It was a throughly clean separation. And yet such a mess-less separation caused a growing sense of abhorrence to the point of causing both Josh and Dave to grimly grit their teeth.
In a few seconds the toe had vanished and was again attached back on Charlie's foot. It was incomprehensible. If these dead had some sort healing mechanism then Dave expected to see the mechanism itself. Maybe some tentacles reaching out from the surface of the cut, to reach out and seek the other surface on the severed limb, to connect then pull together. But this was too much.
"I didn't see this originally," said Dave almost thinking out loud. "Let's try adjusting the distance. Cut the toe off but keep it close to the foot. Maybe we'll see something different."
Josh nodded and severed the toe again. This time Josh used the blade of the axe to tap the toe back towards Charlie so that it was about a centimetre from where it came from. Dave had to squint but he could now see the severed toe sliding towards the toe stump as if pulled by some magnetic force. There was an abrupt motion and the toe snapped back in place. In a moment the cut mark itself was gone.
"Did you see anything?" asked Dave.
"What do you mean?"
"Al
l I saw was a toe sliding back towards the foot. Did you see anything reaching out to the toe to actually pull it back into place?"
"I didn't see anything at all. There wasn't even that weird looking cloud."
"Try it again but with the toe about five centimetres from the stump."
Josh rapidly repeated the last steps and made care that the toe was the requested distance away away from the stump. The toe quivered a little and then repeated the last approach. In seconds it reattached itself by sliding along the ground towards the foot that it came from.
"Was it me," said Dave, "or did that take longer?"
"Want me to try ten centimetres?"
Dave nodded. "Yep."
Josh chopped off the toe and used to axe to push the severed toe until it was about ten centimetres from the foot where it came from.
Dave frowned. "I'm not seeing anything."
"Look! It's starting to vibrate. It's definitely slower."
As the pair watched the toe slowly slide back to the foot and reattached itself.
"Let's go back to less than five centimetres," suggested Dave. "I just want to check that the slowdown of the reattachment is because of distance and not because Charlie is losing the ability to heal himself.
Josh nodded and quickly followed Dave's request. The severed toe promptly reattached itself in a much faster way than with their ten centimetre test.
"Now try about fifteen centimetres," said Dave.
The steps might appear tedious but Dave was just being meticulous. Josh chopped off Charlie's little toe and regathered it with the axe. Together, Josh and Dave watched the toe fade into a misty cloud and reform on the severed location making Charlie's foot whole again.
"Somewhere between ten and fifteen centimetres the process goes from using attraction to using teleportation."
"Teleportation? I don't think this is how it worked in the movies."
"This is the problem with seeing new phenomena, it can be a challenge to find ways to describe it that makes sense. 'Teleportation' is a word that's clearly not up to the task as the process implies that there is machinery involved - that is the teleporter. I go with that for now but I'll probably change it latter."
"I'm fucking stunned by this."
Dave looked thoughtful. "Me too. But reality is reality. We just have to accept it. Give me a moment to write this up. At this early stage, we shouldn't confuse speculation with observation."
Josh looked up at Dave with admiration - Dave was clearly more calm about this in a way that Josh didn't feel at all. Had Josh been alone with this knowledge he might have simply screamed uncontrollably. How Dave was maintaining his grip on reality was impressive.
While Dave scratched down some observations in his notepad, Josh looked back at Charlie. Charlie bared his teeth at Josh. Josh admired Charlie's seemingly blissful unawareness of the revelations that his body was offering up. Josh pressed the axe head against Charlie's chest causing Charlie to hiss slightly.
"Fuck," said Josh to himself.
* * *
A few days had passed, during which Dave and Josh had made a plodding progress. Improvements were made to the new defensive walls to make it harder for walkers to get through them. Charlie suffered through various experiments involving losing his feet and legs. Dave had written observation after observation inside his notepads. And every night a talker would visit but Dave and Josh had gotten so used to it that they just sleep through the nights with increasing calmness. The witnesses of madness had become mad themselves.
It was lunchtime and the pair were on the roof of the supermarket eating some warmed up soup.
"This never gets old," said Josh grimacing at his can of soup.
"Consider ourself lucky to have so much food," said Dave. "Water on the other hand is a bit of an issue."
"Don't worry about it. I'm getting the hang of fetching water from the river, filtering it and boiling it. In a few days we can stop using bottled water completely and save it for emergencies."
"You've really settled into this really well."
"That pretty much describes how I worked before this happened. I'm not the impressive one. Look at you and your experiments. I can't understand how my head hasn't exploded by all that we've learnt recently. I'm perplexed how we've remained approximately sane."
Dave looked down at Charlie. "It's all thanks to Charlie."
Josh also looked at Charlie. "Do you think he minds what we're doing to him?"
"Honestly, I have no idea. I can observe his behaviour, but I can't determine what his inner motivations might be."
"Does he have a soul?" as Josh looking thoughtful.
"This went really philosophical fast."
"I'm not a religious person but there's something about being alive. Besides being able to move about and do the basics, people have something extra. I call that extra piece the 'soul' for want of a better term."
Dave rubbed his chin with the back of his hand. "I once thought in a simple manner. If you were alive then you moved. If you stopped moving then you were dead. But Charlie can clearly move and yet there's something missing. Or maybe we just can't see it. Because we can't communicate with the walkers we come away thinking that they lack a soul."
"So what about animals? They live. They move. They don't talk and yet the animals that I've met give me the feeling that they have a soul. How can you not play with a dog and not see the soul within?"
Dave look straight at Josh. "I'm an atheist and I've always being bugged by the concept of the 'soul'. It always seemed like a magical concept that was outside the description of science. To me, it always seems that people use the soul as a shortcut. If science can't describe something then that's where the soul exists."
"So what the formula for consciousness?" asked Josh.
"What?" said a startled Dave.
"Science uses mathematical formulas to describe things that it understands, so what's the formula for consciousness or intelligence or creativity? I'd say that we are both conscious but yet there is no science that actually describes what that is."
Dave understood where Josh was coming from. "Science is currently incomplete, so there are things that we've not yet successfully explained. I find it odd that whenever a scientist claims to not know everything that there's someone who is happy to come forward and say that they do. And nearly always these people can't provide an explanation of their own, and instead defer to some invisible god."
A loud metallic crashing noise reached Dave and Josh who froze in place. In a moment they crouched down and snuck over to the table near the barbecue and put their spoons and now empty soup cans there. Josh pointed to the south when another metallic rattle came to them. Keeping below the half-walls that surrounded the roof-top, the pair snuck over the eastern side of the supermarket's roof.
They were debating if they should take a peek when they heard talking.
"This is new."
"We didn't make this."
"This was where we had our trucks parked so that we could escape if things got out of hand. It was clear from here to the river."
"I'm surprised by how we managed to escape. That was such a mess."
Dave carefully peeked over the half-wall and saw two army men standing in front of the entrance to the shopping centre. They were looking about comparing the various changes that Dave and Josh had been working on through the last few days. The important point was that these were people. Living people.
Dave stood up. "Hi."
The two army men stopped their conversation and looked up at Dave. The younger army man started struggling with his rifle. Dave noticed that the young soldier was nervous and seemed to fumble with the rifle. Was the younger Army man a new recruit? pondered Dave to himself.
"Stop it," said the older Army man to the younger. The older man then looked up at Dave. "Sorry. We're not used to encountering people out here."
Dave noticed an assumption in the Army man's statement that Dave stored away for latter contempl
ation. "Do you have time to talk?"
The two Army men looked at each other and the older spoke: "Sure."
"Then it's best that we don't yell to each other. How about coming up here and we'll have a quiet chat?"
Although there was a clear tone of suspicion, the older Army man nodded. "Do we come through the supermarket?"
"Come in through the front door. I think it's unlocked at the moment. Remember to close the door once you're through. Then walk to the storage room at the back. We'll be waiting at the top of a ladder reaching up here."
"Got it."
Dave watched the two Army men walk to the front of the supermarket. He could hear a door being opened. Dave walked over to the hatch and opened it. Josh followed him over. Together they looked down the ladder and waited. It wasn't long before he saw the Army men climbing the ladder in turn. Dave and Josh made space for the Army men to get onto the roof. There was a moment of awkwardness.
"It's always like this," said Dave. "Whenever strangers meet there's an initial phase where everyone is tense."
The older Army man looked at Dave and Josh. "I guess people just need time to get acquainted."
Dave extended his right hand. "Let's get started then. I'm Dave, and this here is my friend Josh."
The older Army man reached out with his own hand and shook Dave's. "I'm Trevor and this is Holden."
For a moment people reached back and forth shaking hands.
"So," said Josh drawing out the trailing vowel. "No ranks?"
An annoyed expression flickered over Trevor's face. "We have no rank. Well not an officer rank. Before we were just ordinary infantry men. In fact Holden only just joined and is still going through his initial training. So far we've yet to find any officers of any sort who survived. We haven't even got any NCOs. At the moment we sort of use age as a rank."
Dave frowned. "So it's chaos?"
"Actually," said Trevor, "things aren't bad in our camp. We've got a few political types who cause some issues, but overall things are oddly calm. Which is probably odd when you consider what we've been through."
"The people that I've met," said Dave, "haven't so much been calm as suffering from shock. They could almost be in coma."
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