The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology (43 page)

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Authors: Christopher Golden

BOOK: The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology
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‘He came on to you?’ I asked, genuinely, if slightly, curious.
 
‘I suppose. He came into the bathroom when I was showering one morning and tried to get in with me.’
 
‘That’s pretty unequivocal,’ I allowed.
 
‘Pretty what?’
 
‘Clear-cut. Hard to misinterpret.’
 
‘Yeah, right. So I smacked him in the mouth with the showerhead really hard, and then I ran out.’
 
‘Naked?’
 
‘No, Nick. Not naked.’
 
‘Then you were showering in your street clothes?’
 
A pause. ‘I didn’t run out straightaway. He fell down and hit his head. I had time to grab some stuff.’
 
This was in Birmingham, Janine told me, as if I could possibly have mistaken her accent. She’d taken a bus down to London the same day, hoping to stay with a friend who was studying hairdressing and beauty at Barnet College. But the friend had acquired a boyfriend and wasn’t keen on that arrangement. She passed Janine off to another girl, whose floor she occupied for a while. Not a very long while, though: there was an argument about the rules for the use of the bathroom, and she was out on her ear again before the end of the week.
 
I was starting to see why Janine wasn’t big on washing.
 
‘So what about you, Nick?’ she asked me, when we’d been doing this for maybe a week or so. ‘What do you do for a living?’
 
‘Well,’ I said, ‘when you put it like that, Janine, the answer has to be nothing.’
 
‘I can hear you typing away up there,’ she said. ‘Are you writing a book?’
 
‘Yeah,’ I lied. ‘I’m writing a book. But it’s not to earn a living.’
 
‘How come? You’re already rich?’
 
‘I’m already dead,’ I said.
 
That remark led to a very long silence. The next time I checked on her, she was asleep.
 
In the morning, she asked me if she could see me.
 
‘The cameras only work one-way,’ I pointed out.
 
‘I don’t mean on the cameras. I mean, you know, face-to-face. ’
 
‘I’ll think about it,’ I lied.
 
But she wouldn’t leave the idea alone: she kept bringing it up last thing at night, when I was logging off and cashing in. I kept being evasive, and she kept going quiet on me, which was fucking annoying. I’d say good night, get nothing back: she went to sleep each night surrounded by a miasma of hurt silence.
 
In the end, I did it by accident - almost by accident, I should say. When I unlocked the doors one morning so I could drop off a food delivery, I flicked one switch too many. She was waiting for me as I turned the corner, leaning against the open door with her arms folded in a stubborn, take- no-prisoners kind of pose. The crazy thing is, I sort of knew on some level that I’d done it, that I’d opened the final door and removed that last degree of prophylaxis between us. I just didn’t let myself think about it until we were face-to-face and it was too late to back out.
 
She stared at me for a long time in silence. Then her face wrinkled up in a sort of slo-mo wince. ‘You look horrible,’ she said.
 
‘Thanks,’ I answered inadequately. ‘You say the sweetest fucking things.’
 
That made her laugh just a little, the sound pulled out of her almost against her will. She took a few steps toward me, then stopped again and sniffed the air cautiously.
 
‘What’s that smell?’ she wanted to know.
 
‘Which one? I have a complex bouquet.’
 
‘It’s like . . . antiseptic or something.’
 
‘Formaldehyde, probably. I’m pickled inside and out, Janine. It’s why I don’t smell of rotten meat.’
 
‘You smell of that too.’
 
I bridled at that, like some living guy accused of having bad body odor. ‘I don’t,’ I said. ‘I went to a lot of fucking effort to—’
 
She made a gesture that shut me up, kind of a pantomime of throwing up her hands in surrender, except that she only threw them up about an inch or so. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘You’re right. You don’t smell rotten. You just
look
like you should smell rotten. Your skin is all waxy and sweaty, and I can see stitches in your neck.’
 
My carotid was one of the places where I’d inserted a trocar to draw off some of my bodily fluids way back when I was fighting the war on rot. ‘Don’t get me started,’ I advised her.
 
So she didn’t.
 
‘Show me where you live,’ she suggested instead.
 
She stayed upstairs with me for an hour or so, wrapped in three coats against the cold. Then she retired back to her little dead-end corridor, home sweet home, and spent the rest of the day watching movies. Musicals, mostly: I think she was plugging herself back into the world of the living to make sure it was still there.
 
The next day I bought her a couple of hot-water bottles, and she was able to stay longer. I didn’t mind the bottles, so long as she kept them under the coats so the heat stayed right against her skin. The thermostats were still set at the same level, so the room didn’t warm up at all, and she didn’t come close enough to me for the heat to be a problem.
 
I think that was the first day I forgot to lock her in, and after I’d forgotten once, it kind of felt like going back to that state of affairs would be a slap in the face to her - a way of saying that I thought I could trust her; but then decided I didn’t, after all.
 
That thought raised all kinds of other thoughts, because it suggested that I
did
trust her. There was no reason why I should. Back when I was alive, I’d never felt more for people like her than a kind of queasy contempt, mixed with the unpleasant sensation that usually translates - by some spectacular whitewashing process - as ‘There but for the grace of God . . .’
 
But God doesn’t have any grace, and I don’t have the time or the temperament for helping lame ducks over stiles. If I meet a lame duck, generally speaking, I make
duck à l’orange
.
 
So what the fuck was going on here, anyway?
 
At first, I justified it to myself by counting up my market winnings. Janine could make me feel things again, as though my endocrine system was pumping away like it did in the old days - and that gave me a lot of my wonted edge back. But plausible as that explanation was, it was ultimately bullshit. After a week or so, I was spending more time talking to her than I was in managing my portfolios. A week after that, I wasn’t even bothering to log on.
 
At this point I was even making a loss on the deal, because I kept buying her stuff. It wasn’t even stuff she needed to live any more: it was chocolates and beer and doughnuts and even - I swear to God - a fucking hat.
 
You’re probably thinking that there was some kind of a sexual dynamic going on. Janine certainly thought so. When I presented her with the final little chachka - the straw that broke the camel’s neck, so to speak - she stared at it for a long time without reaching out to take it. She looked unhappy.
 
‘What?’ I demanded. ‘What’s the matter? It’s just a necklace. See, it’s got a
J
on it, for Janine. Those are diamonds, you realize. Little ones, but still . . .’
 
She looked me squarely in the eye - no coyness, no pissing around. ‘Do I have to blow you to sit at the fire?’ she asked.
 
I thought about that. I wasn’t insulted: it was a fair question, I assumed, given the way she lived outside on the streets. I also wondered for a split second if she might be offended if she realized how far I was from being attracted to her. She was dirty, she was as skinny as a stick, and she had bad skin. Back when I had a pulse, I would have sooner fucked a greased oven glove.
 
‘There is no fire,’ I reminded her.
 
She nodded slowly. ‘Okay, then,’ she said, and took the necklace.
 
But the writing was on the wall, because once I figured out what it wasn’t, I couldn’t hide any more from what it was.
 
That shitty old poem: it’s not ‘lame ducks over stiles.’ It’s ‘lame
dogs
’.
 
I watched her sleep that night, and I knew. I let myself see it instead of hiding from it. Fuck, it was nice, you know - watching ghost expressions chase themselves across her face. Hearing her breathe.
 
The next morning I gave her a roll of notes - maybe twenty grand, maybe a little more - and told her to get lost.
 
She cried and she asked me what she’d done to hurt me. I told her she’d figure it out if she thought about it long enough. When she asked about the money, I said it was a one-time payment: she should use it to get the hell away from here, and not talk about me to anyone she knew on the street, or else I’d have all the homeless schmucks in Walthamstow climbing up my drainpipes.
 
She cried some more, and I knew she didn’t buy it. It didn’t matter, though: that was all the explanation I was prepared to give her. I walked her down the stairs, through the maze, all the way to the door. I unlocked it for her. She stepped across the threshold then turned to stare at me.
 
Neither of us said anything for the space of three heartbeats. Maybe four: my memory isn’t reliable in that respect.
 
‘Imagine if the necklace had been a collar,’ I said.
 
She nodded. ‘I get it,’ she said.
 
‘And if I fitted a little leash to it. Took you out for walkies.’
 
‘I said I get it, Nicky. I don’t think it was like that.’
 
But I knew she was wrong. Old ladies have their cushion dogs, their ugly little pugs and Pekes and Chihuahuas. Dead guys have homeless women.
 
‘Thanks,’ Janine said, ‘for the money. It’s more than I ever had in my life.’
 
‘You’re welcome,’ I said. ‘Rent a flat. With a bath or a shower or something.’
 
She refused to be insulted: she just gave me a slow, sad smile.
 
‘It’s not good for you here,’ she said.
 
‘It’s great for me here. Two above freezing. Low humidity. A perfectly controlled environment.’
 
‘Stay in the world, Nicky,’ she murmured, her eyes still brimming in a really unsettling, organic way.
 
‘Is that the same as the street?’ I countered. ‘I’ll pass, thanks.’
 
She made like she was going to hug me, but I raised a hand to ward her off, and she got the point: no body heat or radiated thermic energy, by request.
 
‘Bye, then,’ she said, with a slight tremor in her voice.
 
‘Bye, Janine,’ I said.
 
‘Is it okay if I write to you?’
 
‘Why not? So long as you make sure there’s adequate postage.’
 
She turned and ran, pretty much, across the parking lot and out of sight around the corner of the building. That was the last I saw of her.
 
I waited to see if she’d come back: it seemed quite likely that she might do that, think of one last thing to say or ask if she could stay one more night or something. I gave her ten minutes, in the end, despite getting that prickly feeling again from having real, unfiltered air flow across my flesh. Finally I shut the front door, did a quick round of the outer circle to make sure I hadn’t taken on any more unwanted passengers, then went back upstairs and locked myself in again.
 
It was really quiet. Quiet as the tomb, like they say, except for the freezer units humming away behind the far wall. I thought about going down and grabbing one of her DVDs, but they were all feel-good shit that would make me want to hawk.
 
I didn’t really feel like going online: the vibe was wrong, which meant the best I could hope for was adequate. But finally, around about midnight, I fired up my digital engines of destruction and got back in the hot seat for a few hours of Far-Eastern mayhem. Because, it’s still true, you know? Still gospel, in my book:
 
The guys who stop never start again.
 
CLOSURE, LIMITED
 
A Story of World War Z
 
BY MAX BROOKS

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