21st Century Dead

by Christopher Golden

  The first Novocain stab was always the worst, even all hopped up on Sufenta. She inserted the needle between the big toe and second toe and pressed the plunger. After waiting five minutes she gave the toe a good snap. There was a bite of pain, but she’d deal with it.

  She took the cable cutter and placed the open jaws around her second toe.

  Two feedings a day seemed to get Cedric through. The first day it had been her ears.

  Eight days.

  All that remained of her digits was the big toe on each foot, and her index fingers and thumbs. She wondered where his next feeding would come from. A big toe would really mess up her balance, but any of her remaining fingers would leave her helpless.

  She figured she’d cross that bridge when she got to it.

  On the count of three, she slapped her hands together over the handles of the cable cutter. With a loud snap that sent tremors through her body, her toe fell to the plate below. The pain was immense, but she clenched her teeth and inhaled slowly, counting each breath. For Cedric she could handle it. For her baby.

  DOWN AND OUT IN DEAD TOWN

  Simon R. Green

  WHY DON’T the dead lie still?

  * * *

  I suppose everyone remembers where they were, and what they were doing, the day the dead came back. Mostly, I still remember it as the day I got laid off. It came out of nowhere, just like the newly risen dead. The boss called me into his office and told me I didn’t have a job anymore. The company was sending all our jobs abroad, where they wouldn’t cost as much. And that was that. One minute I had a job and a regular wage, a future and prospects, and the next my whole life was over. I went home early, because nobody cared anymore, and watched the dead walk on television. Just like everyone else.

  It was pretty scary at first. We all gathered together in front of the set, the whole family, to watch blurred pictures of dead people stumbling around, with blank faces and outstretched arms, trying to eat people. Luckily, that didn’t last long. Just a few last hungers and instincts firing in damaged brains, the experts said. The dead calmed down soon enough, as they forgot the last vestiges of who and what they had been. They stopped being scary and just stood around looking sad and pitiful, hanging around on street corners with nowhere to go.

  At first, their families were only too happy to reclaim them, to have their lost parents and children and husbands and wives back again, and take them home. But that didn’t last long. They soon found out you couldn’t talk to the dead. Or you could, but they would never answer. They were just bodies; nobody home. They didn’t know anyone or remember anything. Didn’t want to say anything or do anything. And they smelled bad, so bad.…

  Soon enough the dead started turning up on the streets again, put out by their horrified and terribly disappointed families, and the government had to do something. They couldn’t just leave the dead standing around, stinking up the place, getting in everyone’s way. And so they built the dead towns, thrown up quickly, as far away from the rest of us as they could get, and put the dead there. And the world … just went on with business as normal.

  I didn’t. I had experience and qualifications and a good attitude; it never even occurred to me I wouldn’t walk right into another job. But it turned out we were in a recession, or a depression, or whatever it is when there just aren’t enough jobs to go around. There was a glut on the market for people with my experience and qualifications, and apparently I was too old and overqualified for what entrance-level jobs there were. And every time I turned up for an interview my clothes were just that little bit shabbier, and my manner was just that little bit too desperate, and after a while no one would see me anymore.

  My savings ran out, I lost my house, my wife went back to live with her parents and took the kids with her, and almost before I knew it, I was living on the streets. With all the other people who’d lost everything. It’s a lesson you should never forget. It doesn’t matter how hard you work or how much you have, there’s nothing you’ve got that the world can’t take away. The only thing standing between people like you and people like me is one really bad day.

  It’s not so bad, really, living on the streets. It comes as something of a relief, finally, when you realize you can stop struggling, stop fighting. That it’s all over. You don’t have to worry about your job or paying the bills. No need to look after your family or make decisions. No more responsibilities, no more lying awake in the early hours of the morning, worrying about the future. On the streets, everything comes down to what’s right in front of you: finding something to eat and drink, something to keep the warmth in and the rain out, and locating somewhere reasonably safe to sleep. You don’t have to worry about yesterday or tomorrow, because you know they’re going to be exactly like today.

  It’s interesting that you don’t call us “homeless” anymore. Just “street people.” Like the street is where we chose to be; that the street is where we belong. You don’t call us homeless because that might imply that someone should give us a home. If you came across a stray dog in the street, wet and shivering and hungry, you’d take it home with you, wouldn’t you? Give it food and drink and a blanket in front of the fire. Been many a cold night I’d settle for that. But no, you just walk straight past, ignoring our outstretched hands and handwritten signs, careful not to make eye contact because then you’d have to admit that we are real, and our suffering is real.

  We’re dead to you.

  I don’t know why I left the city. No particular reason. Just started walking one morning and didn’t stop. Walked till I ran out of streets and just kept going. Are you still a street person if there aren’t any streets? The countryside was pretty, and entirely unforgiving. The elements are just that much closer and more pressing; you miss the company of people. Eventually, I came to a dead town. I stopped to look it over. There aren’t any fences around a dead town, no gates or barbed wire. Nothing to keep the dead in, because they don’t want to go anywhere. They have no purpose, no ambition, no curiosity. They’re dead. They don’t want or care about anything anymore. Just bodies, called up out of their graves and given a bit of a push to set them going. We put them in dead towns because they had to be somewhere, and that’s where they stay.

  I’d never been inside a dead town, so I went in. Just to see what there was to see.

  The dead took no notice of me, looked right through me as though I weren’t even there. But I was used to that. Wasn’t much of a town, just blocky houses in straight rows on either side of a dirt street. No lights, no amenities, no comforts. Because the dead don’t need them. They didn’t even walk, just stood around, looking at nothing. A few still stumbled or staggered from one place to another, driven by some vague impulse, some last dying memory of something left undone. Their clothes were rotten and ragged, but most of the bodies persevered. They didn’t acknowledge one another or the world around them. Their brains were dead in their heads, bereft of reason or meaning.

  Their town was a mess and so were they. The dead don’t care about appearances. They didn’t smell that bad, so far from their graves, just a dry dusty presence, like autumn leaves in the wind. I was used to the stench of people who live on the streets. Life smells worse than death ever will. I walked down the dirt street, picking my way carefully among the dead. Not because I was afraid of them but because I didn’t want to be noticed. I still half expected someone to come up and tell me to leave, that I didn’t belong there, that I had no place in a dead town. But no one looked at me as I passed, or reacted to the sound of my footsteps in the quiet street. The dead had this much in common with the living: they didn’t give a damn that I was there.

  I never saw the dead make much use of the houses they’d been given. Sometimes they might lie down on a bed for a while—though of course they didn’t sleep—as though that was something they remembered doing, even if they no longer knew why. And sometimes they would walk in and out of a door, over and over. Presumably for the same reason. I never really saw them do much
of anything. Mostly they just stood around waiting for something. As though they felt there was somewhere they should be, something they should be doing, but no longer knew what, or why.

  I found a bed, in a room in a house that was still reasonably intact. I barricaded the door so I wouldn’t be disturbed and got some sleep. Even a damp and dusty bed can be the height of comfort when you’re used to shop doorways and cardboard boxes. The dark didn’t bother me, or the dead outside. In the morning I went looking for food and drink, but of course there wasn’t any. I walked up and down and back and forth, but there were only the dead and the houses they didn’t need.

  I watched one dead man just fall over for no obvious reason. None of the other dead noticed. I went over to him, and crouched down a cautious distance away. His face was empty and his eyes saw nothing. He was gone, now. Nobody home. I could tell. His boots looked to be much the same size as mine, and in much better condition, so I took them. Good footwear is important when you do a lot of walking.

  I knew why he’d fallen over, why he’d stopped moving. It meant the last living person who knew or cared about him was gone. Nobody remembered him, so there was no one to hold him here anymore. That is why the dead came back, after all. Because we just couldn’t let them go. Because we all had this selfish need to hang on to our loved ones, even after their time was up. We thought of our friends and families and loved ones as ours, our possessions, and we wanted them back so much that we called them back up out of their graves. Unfortunately, the part we cared about, the personalities, or souls, had passed on to wherever personalities or souls go. Beyond our reach. All we could bring back were their bodies.

  I’d seen people try to talk to the dead, speaking earnestly and emotionally to blank faces, trying to reach someone who wasn’t there anymore. Heard people raise their voices, in anger and anguish, trying to force or cajole a reaction of some kind from their returned loved ones. Sometimes the living even hit the dead, and screamed abuse at them. For not being what the living wanted them to be. The dead didn’t react. The dead didn’t care.

  I didn’t stay long in dead town. I had some thought of bringing other street people here, to make use of the empty homes. It was a lot safer in the dead town than it was in the city. The dead had no reason to attack us or insult us or steal from us. But I left, because even as far down as I had fallen, I was still better than the dead. I still had hope, and dreams, and somewhere to go. My life wasn’t over till I said it was.

  I went back to the city and the people I knew. Because even if people like you won’t admit we exist, street people still have one another.

  DEVIL DUST

  Caitlin Kittredge

  THE LIGHT ON THE HOSPITAL CEILING buzzed like a hummingbird’s heartbeat, like it was alive. Lizzie asked, “Am I dead?”

  “Not hardly,” the doctor assured her, and Lizzie’s eyes roamed to the machine wires and tubes running to and from her body.

  She didn’t believe him.

  “Where’s Stephen?” she said, and the doctor’s face told her everything she needed to know.

  * * *

  There was a funeral, which Lizzie was too weak to attend. A parade of well-meaning deputies and their wives. Even Dickie Bonner, the sheriff himself, came in and sat with her and quoted passages from the Bible, as if that’d somehow make her feel all right, more than the morphine.

  An investigator from the Louisiana State Police, Detective LaRochelle, came by after a few weeks, or months. Time bled together when you were dead, Lizzie was learning.

  The detective was unsmiling and smelled like cigarettes and rose-scented body spray. “I hear you don’t remember anything,” she said.

  Lizzie nodded. Sometimes she swore the steel plate in her head picked up the buzzing light fixtures, until her skull was full of nothing but the hum.

  “I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” Detective LaRochelle said, “but without your testimony it’s a pretty shaky case. Mostly circumstantial. Y’all live so far off the beaten track we don’t have any witnesses, and Dewey Proctor and his buddies have the best beer-soaked alibis a twenty-four-pack can buy.”

  “Sorry,” Lizzie said, and turned over to face the wall.

  * * *

  Dewey Proctor had the eyes of a bird, something that eats dead flesh on the side of the road. Lizzie saw him only once, coming out of the Winn-Dixie on 119, and she sat patiently until he’d loaded his beer and groceries into his lifted truck and driven away.

  She rented a trailer on the opposite side of the bayou from the house. It was on the market, and Stephen’s life insurance was paying the mortgage, but Lizzie let the lawyer handle most of it.

  After a month, the grief counselor who’d dogged her endlessly in the hospital came by. Lizzie had no idea how the woman had even found out where she was living, but she sat down like she belonged there.

  “Lonnie Thibodeaux is going to be released from prison,” said the woman. “He’s asked to meet with you, to make amends.”

  Lizzie stayed quiet. She’d found that people tended to assume you were either prostrate with grief or taking them seriously if you just shut your mouth.

  “I know what he did to you was unforgivable,” said the woman. “But he’s sober and I think it would be a good idea for both of you. For closure.”

  “If you think so,” Lizzie said, and the woman blinked at her, eyelids heavy with purple shadow. She looked a lot like Lizzie had just after she’d woken up, black-and-blue from head to toe.

  “Well, great, honey,” she said. “We’ll set up a time at the halfway house.”

  * * *

  Lizzie drove to the hunting camp Stephen and his father had used, before Doug’s heart attack and Stephen’s promotion to sergeant. The smell tickled her nose as soon as she got out, but there was nobody else for miles. You could go for hours through the delta and not find anything besides gators and meth labs. Dewey Proctor had counted on it, and now so did she.

  She put on her mask and coveralls and went in, checking on the levels before she scraped some of the long, pinkish crystals into a baggie and crushed it up under the heel of her hand.

  You could learn how to make street meth on the Internet. Any moron could do it. Dewey Proctor was living proof of that.

  But this required some finesse, something extra. When she could sit up in the hospital, she spent the time figuring out how to get the plants into the country and where she’d put the batch togther. When she was out, in physical therapy six days a week, she worked on setting up accounts to order the supplies she needed. The St. Bernard Parish Alternative Day School had a fully stocked chemistry lab, courtesy of Lizzie’s teacher’s license. Pretty good for a one-room schoolhouse.

  She looked at the dilapidated little shack that smelled of cat piss and laughed before she shut the door.

  * * *

  Lonnie Thibodeaux had put on weight, and his eyes bugged when she walked into the dayroom. Lizzie sat across from him and didn’t speak. Lonnie pushed the cap back on his head, Confederate flag and NASCAR flag crossed, embroidered on the bill.

  “Well, reckon I should just get this out. I’m sorry as hell for what happened, Miss Dodge. I weren’t in my right mind, and, well. When Dewey Proctor tells you to do somethin’, there’s no good way to say no. Scary son of a bitch.”

  Lizzie didn’t speak. Lonnie swallowed, and his brown teeth clicked. “They showed me the photos of you and Sergeant Dodge, when they arrested me. That was what snapped me out of it. I knew I could never go back from that. Dewey … he told me to do it and I was so out of my mind I just…” He sniffed, wetly. It ate your sinuses away and went into your brain if you smoked enough of it. “Just tell me what I gotta do so I can close my eyes at night, Miss Dodge,” Lonnie said. “All I see is you and your husband. Lyin’ on that kitchen floor…”

  Lizzie took the baggie from her purse and slid it across the table. She moved her hand like a magic trick. “Take it.”

  Lonnie stared at the baggie, then at her. �
�Miss Dodge, I don’t…”

  “You want to ease your pain? You want to stop thinking about the man you killed? Then you smoke that shit down to the burn marks, Lonnie. That’s what you do.” Lizzie stood up. “And it’s Mrs. Dodge, no thanks to you.”

  She left Lonnie crying in the dayroom, sobbing even as he tucked the baggie into his shirt quicker than you could blink, and went to her car, and waited.

  * * *

  Lonnie waited until dark. He went to a 7-Eleven and bought a pack of disposable lighters, and used an empty soda can in the alley behind it to smoke up.

  Lizzie waited until he was sprawled on the ground, until he might as well have been dead, and then went to him and kicked him in the stomach. “Wake up, asshole.”

  Lonnie’s eyes flew open. He tried to breathe, but nothing happened.

  “Here’s how it works,” Lizzie said. “You might think this is a bad dream, but it’s not. You’re under my control, and you’re going to tell me what I want.” She crouched, using her small flashlight to light up Lonnie’s pale, deceased face. “You can’t refuse me. What’s in you now will burn out in a few hours, and then you’ll die for good. But before you do, answer me.”

  Lonnie nodded, and the panic in his eyes was absolute. The panic of a man looking into the light and not liking what he saw.

  “Where does Dewey Proctor run his labs?”

  He tried not to talk. She saw his throat working. “I … don’t … know.…”

  “No,” Lizzie said. “A junkie like you who runs his errands in exchange for dope knows. If only to have something to give to the cops when they get caught.” She grabbed his chin. “Answer me, Lonnie. Where’s the lab?”

  “House … house … in his Mom’s … name,” Lonnie gasped. “Back on … Route 17.”

  Lizzie stood up and brushed off her pants. “Go walk into traffic, Lonnie. I don’t want that bitch wife of yours having an open casket.”