Flesh Wounds

by Christopher Fowler

  Night After Night Of The Living Dead

  * * *

  The great thing about children is that they talk rubbish with more conviction than politicians. Lies, fantasies and half-truths are glued into a kind of surreal pudding that defies you to disbelieve your ears. I should know; at the age of the boy in this story I used to tell the kind of whoppers that could make your eyes fall out. Every adult still believes one hopelessly illogical, morbid thing from their childhood, like if you eat a sandwich you can’t go paddling for two hours or you’ll get cramps and drown. What do you still believe?

  THE BEST THING about the dead is you can’t get pregnant from sitting on a chair they’ve just been sitting on like you can with live people. When live people warm up the seat (especially the toilet seat – that’s where AIDS really comes from) and you sit on it after them and it’s still warm, the heat activates the hormones in your body and fertilises the egg, and nine months later you have a baby. But the dead don’t leave warm seats because their body temperature is about the same as winter tap water.

  The worst thing about the dead is they don’t sleep, so if you go downstairs for a glass of water in the middle of the night you’re liable to find my grandpa sitting at the kitchen table staring off into the dark, and frankly this gives me the creeps. We have the Night Of The Living Dead to thank for all this. The most interesting thing about that occasion (apart from the fact that it happened in the middle of the afternoon) is that such a cataclysmic event didn’t seem to bother many people at the time. Personally speaking I find that weird because I was only eleven when it happened and it fucked me up considerably, I can tell you.

  You probably know all about it – I mean you’d have to have been living in a monastery on the Orkney Islands for the last three years to avoid knowing – but I’ll tell you anyway, because a) it will give like a personal perspective on the whole thing and b) I’m doing this as my mid-term English essay.

  For a start, it was nothing like the movie, which was made many years before. If you saw that particular classic (I wasn’t supposed to watch it, but a kid in our street lent me the cassette – he’d relabelled it with a Winnie the Pooh sticker), you’ll remember how the dead came out of the ground and stumped about in waist-high mist with their arms stretched out like sleepwalkers. This was not exactly accurate. Think about it; when they bury someone the coffin is sealed and put in a hole that’s packed with earth and tamped down, so we’re talking about several hundred pounds of wet dirt to push up, assuming that you can get the lid of the box open in the first place – which you wouldn’t be able to do because there’s not enough depth in most coffins to give your arms the necessary leverage. The simple fact is, nobody came out of the ground. When the dead came back to life it was only the ones in the morgues and hospitals that reawoke, and if any others were lying around above ground for any reason, they would have risen too.

  They didn’t walk with their arms raised either; their hands hung limply at their sides and they didn’t really move about much, although they did fall over a lot. But the main difference from the film is that they didn’t kill people and try to eat their brains. If you think it through logically, how could they? They were dead, and that means brain dead, and wanting to eat someone else’s brains suggests conscious thought, which they don’t have. Eating a brain isn’t going to restore your own. That’s like saying if you eat part of a cow you’ll grow four stomachs. Also, if you wanted to eat someone’s brains you’d have to get their head open, which I shouldn’t think is as easy as it looks on the screen. It’s like the vampire thing in movies. You know, the biting part, when Dracula makes two holes in someone’s neck and sucks the blood out. Excuse me, but did someone just cancel the laws of physics or something? When you open a tin of condensed milk you have to make a hole on either side of the can to allow the milk to escape. So a vampire would have to make sure that his mouth only went over one of the holes, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to suck any blood out – unless he could really suck hard, in which case the person he was sucking would sort of dent inwards like a punctured football.

  So. No coming out of the ground, no eating brains. That’s the trouble with the living dead, they’re nothing like their movie counterparts. In fact, they’re really boring. These days some of them can do rudimentary root-memory things like read the Sun or hum songs from Cats, but you can’t train them any more than you can train really stupid insects or our biology teacher’s dog. You can point up in the air and they’ll follow your finger but then they’ll stay like that for hours, like chickens expecting rain. And it’s because they’re dead, end of story. I mean, dead is it, finito; after you’re dead you don’t understand the punch lines to jokes or remember to set the video, it’s all over, baby.

  What was really weird, though, was the reaction of the adults. They didn’t think about the basic absurdity of the situation. They didn’t wonder how the whole thing could be physically possible. They weren’t interested in the mechanics of the dead returning to life. They just completely freaked, screaming the place down every time they saw one, and stopped us from going near them or even looking. You’d expect this from my mother, who has a nuclear meltdown when I so much as bring a dead sparrow into the house, but not from Ted, our revolting old next-door neighbour who lost an eye in the war and talks about stringing up darkies to our West Indian milkman.

  I don’t specifically remember much about the night it happened except that it was a Wednesday, it was raining hard and I was late home from school. I’d been caught unravelling the elastic inside a golf ball during social studies and had been made to stay behind for detention. I remember walking home and seeing one of the dead shuffling ahead, a man of about fifty. My first sighting. It was a weird experience, as though I’d been waiting all of my admittedly short life to see something like this, and now that I had it made sense of everything else.

  The figure before me was drifting more than walking, his feet barely rising from the ground. As far as I could see in the fading light, he was dressed in normal street clothes, although they were dirty and one jacket sleeve was torn, as though he’d been in a fight. His head was lowered a little but he was staring forward and seemed to know where he was going. As I drew abreast of him I caught an overpowering stench of chemicals, formaldehyde I supposed, as though he had just heaved himself up from the mortuary slab. His face was grey and speckled, the texture of my Dad’s IBM slipcase, but his eyes were the real giveaway. They had this fixed dry look, like doll’s eyes, I guess because there was no fluid to lubricate them, and they were stuck in one position. They looked like a pair of jammed roll-on deodorant balls. I kept pace with him as I passed, and it was then that I realised I wasn’t really scared.

  When someone is dangerous they give off warning signals, and if you’re receptive to the signals you back away. But this guy was just dead and there weren’t any signals good or bad, and I instinctively knew that the worst thing that could happen was he could fall over and land on top of me. The street was pretty empty, and the few people who passed us didn’t seem to see anything wrong. I guess in the rain-hazed dimness there was nothing unusual to see beyond the fact that the old man didn’t have a raincoat on and was getting pretty soaked. Finally I arrived at my turning, and the dead bloke just shuffled onwards into the gloom. I watched him go for a while, then headed home.

  I missed the early evening TV news but asked my mother if there had been anything about the dead coming back to life and she made a face and said of course not. I remembered noticing that her eyes were puffy and red, as if she’d been crying about something and was trying not to let me see. Later, on the portable in my room, the footage appeared. There, right in front of me, live on some crappy Sky channel, the anchorwoman was awkwardly reading a report that several cadavers from a hospital morgue in Leeds had been found walking along the corridors of the building. She said that similar phenomena were being reported all over the world, although I don’t think she believed a word of it. Then some ecosys
tems guy who looked like he’d just got out of bed kept patting down his hair and saying it was all to do with the ozone layer, and I thought As if. I mean, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that there’s no link between the depletion of the ozone layer and the reanimation of dead tissue. That’s like saying Nintendo games give you rabies or something. Get a grip.

  I retuned the TV to CNN because they repeat the same stories over and over when they’re not quoting Iowa wheat prices, and there it was, actual footage of ZOMBIES lumbering along roads and bumping into walls and generally looking thick. I rang my friend Joey ‘Boner’ Mahoney to tell him to turn on the TV but his dog stepmother answered and told me it was too late to talk to him.

  The next day I attempted to discuss what was happening with my friends at school, but no one was that interested except Simon Waters. Unfortunately Simon believes that crop circles are made by Venusians, not by a couple of sad guys with a piece of rope and a plank, and is desperate to believe in any scenario that’s more interesting than his own miserable existence, which consists of getting lousy marks at school and going home to a father who is having an affair with a foot specialist. That was when I began my Deadwatch, which is a notebook marked out so that I can record each dead sighting as it happens.

  With each passing day there were more and more sightings as the walking dead took to the streets. Soon I was recording as many as ten or fifteen on a single Saturday morning (the women are particularly fond of milling around the trolley collection point outside Sainsbury’s), and I stopped bothering with the book because there were too many to keep up with. To begin with, most of these ambulatory cadavers were in pretty good condition. I mean their jaws and ears weren’t hanging off or anything, but once in a while you’d see one in a really bad state. There was a guy on the bus in a hospital gown, and the stitches down the front of his chest had burst open so that his intestines were hanging out and rolling from side to side as the bus turned corners. There was no blood and his guts were blue-grey, like piles of old school sausages. That was pretty gross. But in the early days most of the corpses seemed to stay in one piece.

  You see, it wasn’t just a Night Of The Living Dead, as we had thought at first. It was Night After Night. The effects of whatever had revived them were sticking around, so the authorities had to come up with some kind of legislation to cope with the problem. They simply arranged for bodies to be buried at a new standard depth and for mortuary doors to be kept locked. There was talk of freezing and vacuum packing for a while, but I guess it seemed too disrespectful, bowing out like a pork chop. Still, an awful lot of Deadies seemed to be walking around, more every day, so either someone was letting them out (which I’d seen a Right-To-Life group doing on the news) or they were finding ways to escape prior to burial.

  The government couldn’t settle on a reason for what was happening, and still haven’t come up with a satisfactory cause to this day. They set up an independent enquiry to investigate what was going on, i.e., cut open some corpses and had a poke around, but found nothing conclusive. The corpses were just inert organisms that wouldn’t lie still. They had no heartbeats and coagulated blood and hardened veins and leathery skin and dry staring eyes. At first the scientists thought it was radiation in the atmosphere, then Rogue Viral DNA, but I knew they really didn’t have a clue when everyone started to blame the French.

  Anyway, none of this really touched my family or our lives. We continued to see the dead sitting in bus shelters looking neither happy nor sad (looking like they were waiting for a bus really). We saw them in gents’ outfitters staring vaguely at the shelves. We saw them standing shell-shocked outside cinemas and pizza parlours (they weren’t allowed near food but they seemed to enjoy being in queues). We saw them watching football through the windows of TV rental stores, their foreheads pressed against the glass. We saw them sunbathing in park deckchairs with newspapers over their faces, and the only way you could tell they were dead was because it was raining.

  I guess this was about a month after the actual NOTLD, and now that everyone could see the dead weren’t going to hurt anybody, all kinds of trouble started. For one thing, no matter how harmless they were, the dead tended to creep people out. It was only natural; the way they looked and smelled was depressing to say the least. The police wanted special powers to round them up because they were always falling onto railway lines and wandering into busy traffic, but all kinds of groups began protesting, arguing that because the dead were walking around they still had souls and therefore had human rights.

  Then doctors began worrying that the bodies would decompose and put everyone at risk from germs, but the corpses didn’t really rot. Because the newly dead leaked so much they slowly got drier and more leathery, and this was helped by the fact that it was winter and a lot of them had taken to sitting in libraries where the central heating caused an arid atmosphere.

  They got damaged and tatty from constantly bumping into things, and some of them lost fingers and clumps of hair, which made them even creepier looking. (Oddly enough, they managed to keep a natural sense of propriety. If one of them tore his trousers he would tug the hole around so that people on the tube wouldn’t have to sit facing his willy.) While television shows and newspaper articles preached respect for the dead, teenage gangs began going out and tampering with the bodies, cutting bits off or dressing them in inappropriate clothes to make them look silly. My friend Joey once saw an old man in the high street wearing a glitter wig and a ballet tutu. Sometimes if you were out with a bunch of friends and saw one shuffling along ahead of you, you’d run up and pull his trousers down, then all run away laughing. Also, some unscrupulous entrepreneurs hung advertising on them, but most people disapproved of this.

  The dead weren’t supposed to travel on the tubes because they never bought tickets, but one or two always managed to get through the barriers, only to spend the entire day trying to open the drawers on the platform’s chocolate machines. They never made much noise, I think their vocal chords sort of dried out over time, but God, the older ones started to look awful. The problem was, even if they fell into the river and floated about for a few days being run over by motorboats, they would eventually drift to the shore, only to climb out and begin aimlessly walking around again. Hospital crews collected the most disgusting ones and took them away somewhere.

  Around this time I remember seeing an old woman fall off a Routemaster bus and get dragged around the block on her face. I followed her just to see what would happen if her coat strap managed to disentangle itself from the pole. When the poor old love finally hauled herself to her feet (nobody was willing to help her – the dead are kind of ignored now, like the homeless) the remaining part of her face fell off like torched wallpaper, leaving her with tarmac-scraped bone and an expression of annoyed surprise. It was not a pleasant sight.

  A few weeks after this, one wet Saturday afternoon, my grandpa died. He had lived in the house with us for years even though my mother had never liked him, and at first nobody even realised that he had died. He just stayed in his armchair all day staring at the television, but I knew something was wrong because he would normally start shouting at the screen when the wrestling came on and today he didn’t. He did make himself a cup of tea, but he left the teabag in the mug, drank it scalding and immediately peed it back out onto the floor. My father wouldn’t let my mother call the hospital and they had a huge row, after which it was decided that Grandpa could stay for a while so long as he didn’t get in anyone’s way. My mother refused to change his clothes, but Dad argued that they wouldn’t need changing very often as he no longer had operative sweat glands. Still, it was difficult to break the old geezer of his tea-making habit. I guess when you’ve been making ten cups of Brooke Bond a day for sixty years you don’t need motor neurons.

  Grandpa wasn’t allowed out by himself because he had a tendency not to come back and we would have to go looking for him. Once I was allowed to go on a grandpa hunt with my dad and we had to sear
ch the park just as it was starting to get dark. There were dozens of them – Deadies – sitting motionless beneath the rustling plane trees. They were seated in deckchairs around the bandstand with their hands in their laps, quietly waiting for the music to start. Two of them were sitting on the enclosure railings with their arms around each other like lovers, except that the railing spikes had gone through their thighs. It was a strange sight. I stopped going to the park after that.

  A few days later I took Grandpa to the cinema. I guess it was an odd thing to do, but I was supposed to be looking after him and there was a film I really wanted to see, one of those slasher films with music that creeps up on you, and I managed to pass Grandpa off as alive, although the usherette looked at us suspiciously. Halfway through the film, just when the heroine had gone to the cellar to look for her cat even though she knew there was a homicidal maniac loose, I turned to find the old man staring at me with wide, flat eyes. He wasn’t breathing of course, and his mouth hung open to reveal a thick dry tongue that looked as if it had been carved out of Spam. What bothered me most was the way he repeated one of his living mannerisms, tilting his head slightly to look at me, so that for a moment I couldn’t tell if he was really dead. It was just the illusion of life, of course, but an unsettling one.

  A few weeks after that, Grandpa took it upon himself to revive another root memory and peel some potatoes. He remembered the peeler but unfortunately forgot to use it in conjunction with a vegetable and succeeded in removing most of the skin from his fingers before I came home from school and found him staring at a set of bony protrusions that looked like badly sharpened pencils. The very next day he sat down on the stove while the burners were lit and branded his trousers. My mother threatened to leave us if my father didn’t arrange for him to be put somewhere, so the following morning found me standing on the doorstep waving goodbye to Grandpa as he stared sightlessly back and stumbled off across the flowerbeds, led away by a disinterested hospital porter smoking a joint.