Damned If You Do (6 page)

‘What was your original termination?'

‘I can't remember it.'

He laughed. ‘I remember everything about mine. I was kicking a football around with some mates in this loading depot downtown, and the ball went under a truck, and I went in after it. And I started pissing about pretending I was trapped under the wheel – it got big laughs. Jack the bloody lad. Anyway, long story short, the truck started up, went straight into reverse, and backed over my chest.
Splat
 … Funny thing is, exactly the same thing happened to a cat I once had.'

Skirmish finished picking his teeth and climbed onto the top bunk. I removed my shoes and jacket and returned to the lower tier. We were silent for several minutes, until he leaned over the edge and said:

‘Has anyone explained why you're here?'

‘No.'

‘They haven't told you about Hades?'

I shook my head.

‘No-one has mentioned anything at all about an assistant?'

‘Not really.'

‘Typical.'

He looked at the wall with an expression of disgust before retreating to the upper bunk. Faint strains of Mozart's
Requiem
echoed across the corridor from the room opposite. I was exhausted, and confused, and ill-at-ease with my new surroundings – and I would much rather have turned over and fallen asleep – but one question wouldn't leave me alone.

‘Who's Hades?' I said.

 

 

Breakfast of the damned

I awoke feeling happy.

This was unusual. Happiness is useless in the coffin; so is despair. Emotions as a whole never really concern the dead because they are incapable of experiencing anything to any great degree. Ask a corpse how he feels and he's likely to respond:

‘What do you mean?'

Assuming he can still talk, of course.

*   *   *

The wardrobe I shared with Skirmish was stocked with a supply of clothes for six more days: a rainbow collection of T-shirts, a stack of floral boxer shorts, and half a dozen fresh pairs of socks. To reflect my mood I selected yellow socks embroidered with a dancing crab design, boxer shorts decorated with yellow roses, and a yellow shirt bearing the slogan
ZOMBIE POWER
! I was not offered a choice of suits or shoes.

After dressing, I remembered Death's instructions from the previous evening and followed the corridor to the office. My door was already unlocked. Skirmish – who had deferred answering my question about Hades to a more suitable time – was nowhere to be seen.

*   *   *

‘How are you this morning?'

The office was unoccupied except for Death, who was sitting at his desk by the door. He was opening letters with the kind of knife normally associated with a ritual sacrifice. A portable CD-player to the left of the paper column was belting out a guitar solo from the Grateful Dead's ‘Live Dead' album.

‘Happy,' I shouted.

‘Enjoy it while it lasts,' he said glumly. He turned down the volume and handed me a single sheet of blue notepaper. ‘Take a look at that.'

Written on the paper were four numbers – 7587 – and a signature.

‘What is it?'

‘Correspondence chess. My opponent has moved the knight she had on g5 to h7. She's trying to recreate one of the matches from the Ninth Correspondence Olympiad. Penrose-Vukcevic, 1982–85. Probably using a computer.'

He took the note from my hand and slipped it into a document wallet bulging with similar offerings. I seized the opportunity to ask a question which had occurred to me before.

‘Why do you play chess with the living?'

‘It's an obsession,' he said waving his arms manically. ‘I can't resist the challenge … It's like dancing – a passion and a weakness.' He smiled briefly at the thought of these twin indulgences, then assumed a serious air. ‘It's tradition too, of course. If my opponents win, their reward is to go on living. If they lose – and they invariably do – they die … I'm playing around two hundred games right now. This one's a woman, about thirty years old, and she's just had a freak heart attack. As far as she knows she may live, she may not, so I threw down the gauntlet and she picked it up. Actually,' he added dolefully, ‘she would have recovered anyway.'

I smiled in sympathy.

‘Do you play chess?' he asked.

‘I used to,' I replied laconically – and I would have added that I wasn't a bad player either, but my mind was distracted by an idea I couldn't pin down, and my cadaver's instinct for self-protection forced me to deprecate my abilities: ‘I knew the rules, but I never really explored it to any depth … Like almost everything I did, I preferred to watch.'

A typical Lifer.

Lifer, incidentally, is the term used by the dead and the undead to refer to the living. In general, Lifers are warm-blooded, agile, emotional and inquisitive. They have colourful, soft skin. They eat and excrete.

The dead – the patient mass of corpses waiting for Armageddon – are an entirely different species, and one which included
me
until very recently. They are cold-blooded, lazy, socially inept, and indifferent to almost every subject but their own security. Their skin, even when intact, is waxy and pale. They are eaten and excreted
by
other creatures.

The undead – zombies – straddle the abyss between the two. Our blood is cool and flows slowly; we can stand upright, but find it easier to fall over; we desire life and feeling, without really comprehending either; we
want
to ask questions but hardly ever find the right moment or the right words. Our skin is ashen and unyielding, but readily disguised. A zombie eats and excretes, but his diet is usually limited to living flesh.

This plays havoc with the digestion.

*   *   *

Death and I headed down the hall towards the breakfast room, the last door on the right. When we arrived Pestilence and Famine had already found places at the oval dining table, and were reading the morning newspapers. Famine was wearing black silk pyjamas with the traditional scales emblem embroidered on the jacket pocket, Pestilence was wrapped in a white quilted dressing gown. They lowered their papers to exchange brief smiles as we entered.

‘Take War's place,' Death suggested, indicating a chair between himself and Pestilence. ‘He won't be back until tomorrow.'

There were five seats in all, three unoccupied. I sat down in silence and glanced across the table towards Famine. His head was hidden by the
Guardian.
A small headline caught my eye:
Spate of grave desecrations signals ‘decline in moral standards'.
Pestilence had apparently discovered a similar story. He was reading the
Sun,
where the full-page article facing us was titled:
They Nicked My Stiff! Claims Sex-Op Vicar.
Death either didn't notice or didn't care that he was in the news – he simply clapped his hands and announced a hearty good morning. When no-one answered, his enthusiasm waned as quickly as it had waxed.

Breakfast was already served. I'd been given a bowl of cereal, a glass of orange juice and a banana. Pestilence appeared to be eating a selection of mouldy cheeses and a rotten apple. Death had a bell-shaped metal cage containing three live mice. Famine's plate was empty.

‘Aren't you hungry?' I asked him.

‘Always,' he said.

I glanced down at the table with a vague feeling of embarrassment. The napkins were black, decorated with waving white skeletons. The crockery was bordered with a miniature coffin motif. The cutlery had bone handles.

I heard a squeak, and looked up to see Death opening the cage door. He plucked one of the mice from its prison, broke its neck swiftly, and slipped the entire body into his mouth with a quick slurp. After some energetic and prolonged chewing, he spat out a tiny white skull and swallowed the rest. The remaining two mice scurried around the cage excitedly. I pushed my bowl away.

‘Would you like a bite?' asked Pestilence. I turned and saw that he was offering me what appeared to be a wedge of Brie that had been left in a warm, damp room for three months.

Before I could answer, Death intercepted: ‘Leave him alone.'

‘Why not let him try?' Pestilence persisted.

‘Because it's not why he's here.'

‘You are
so
protective.'

‘And you are a meddler.'

‘D'you think you could stop arguing?' Famine interrupted. ‘You're ruining my appetite.'

*   *   *

The white walls of the dining room were bare apart from four framed slogans beneath four pictures. The slogans read:
A MEASURE OF WHEAT FOR A DAY'S WAGES; HE WENT FORTH CONQUERING, AND TO CONQUER; POWER WAS GIVEN TO HIM TO TAKE PEACE FROM THE EARTH
; and (less impressively)
MOVE WITH THE TIMES
. Three of the pictures were obvious likenesses of Famine, Pestilence and Death, but they sported ostentatious fancy dress, carried rather gruesome weapons and rode horses of varying colours. Accompanying Death in his portrait was a short, squat, flabby man astride a disgruntled donkey – I wondered briefly who this could be, but didn't like to ask. The final picture showed a red-faced giant against a backdrop of violent combat. I took this to be War.

‘Aren't
you
hungry?' Famine threw my own question back at me. Although everyone else had finished, I had barely touched my breakfast.

‘Yes,' I told him.

He stared, expecting more. I stared back, adding nothing.

Skirmish appeared from the adjoining kitchen wearing a natural cotton pinafore and pink Marigold gloves. He gathered the plates, the bowl and the cage (which now contained a solitary white mouse skull), then retreated through the saloon doors. After a brief clash of crockery he came back.

‘Did you put them in the dishwasher?' Death asked.

Skirmish went back into the kitchen with an expression of extreme ill humour. We heard the rattle of further crockery collisions and the slither of sliding drawers before he returned.

‘Did you switch it on?' Famine continued.

Skirmish repeated his previous manoeuvre, this time with even less grace, and reappeared to the sound of a low, mechanical hum. He ripped off his gloves and tossed them onto the table, before settling into the remaining unoccupied chair. He pointedly, and irritatedly, clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

‘Is there something wrong?' said Pestilence.

The Lab

After breakfast, I accompanied Death and Pestilence to the first-floor landing. They bickered all the way up the stairs and paused only when we reached the last door on the right. It was made of polished steel studded with rivets, and featured a large, plastic plaque at eye level:
WARNING
!
DISEASE
!
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
.

‘Ignore the sign,' Pestilence reassured me. ‘It's just a little joke.' I failed to see the humour in it, and felt a fish-out-of-water feeling wriggle through me. ‘Now. Who's got the keys?'

‘Don't look at me,' Death said. ‘I thought you had them.'

‘If I had them I wouldn't be asking,' Pestilence replied.

‘If you had them you wouldn't need to.'

‘Well I don't have them and I
am
asking.'

‘And I'm telling you I haven't got them.'

‘Well who
has
got them?'

‘I
don't know,
' Death said in resignation. ‘But Skirmish should have a spare set. Unless he's thrown them down a drain.' He retreated, and I realized that he was about to leave me alone with Pestilence.

‘I'll come with you,' I offered.

‘No. You stay here. I'm sure Pes will be happy to discuss today's schedule.'

He disappeared down the stairs. When I turned around Pestilence was already opening his dressing gown.

‘It's bigger than yesterday,' he boasted.

He needn't have said anything. I could see for myself that the sunflower bruise had doubled in size. The black heart now spanned almost his entire torso from neck to navel, and from nipple to nipple. The yellow circumference extended to the elasticated waist of his white pyjama bottoms, curved around his back and under his armpits, and illuminated his chin like the reflection from a bunch of buttercups.

‘Is it painful?' I asked.

He smiled, his thin mouth framed by a ring of cold sores.

‘
Everything
is painful.'

He adjusted the gown until the bruise, and his rashes of budding pimples, ripe boils and erupted pustules, were no longer visible.

‘You know, you're very lucky,' he added. ‘We're only allowed to release a radical new disease every few decades. The Chief has the final say – but it's a rare event.'

‘Uh-huh.'

‘This one is particularly interesting. Once the client has ingested the first batch – that's where you come in, by the way – it mutates into a viral infection transmitted by direct physical contact. However,' his hands moulded into fists and he focused on a point to the right of my head, ‘the most fascinating part occurs pre-contact. The virus acts in such a way that it
encourages
the host to approach potential targets, and continues to promote positive signals until a physical connection has been established.'