Dead Mann Walking

THE END OF THE TUNNEL

“Do you really think we might die there?”

“Well, you might. Me? Been there. Done that.”

“Of course. Personal question, but . . . what’s it like to be dead?”

I gave him a look, right in his baby blue contacts. “I’m starting to understand why you don’t have any friends.”

I don’t usually talk like that to a client, but I already had two envelopes full of his cash, and I wasn’t very happy about being out here at night.

“I don’t mean now, Mann. I meant before . . . when you were dead.”

“Oh, then. There was a bright, warm golden light at the end of a long tunnel and all my deceased loved ones were on the other side, beckoning me forward to everlasting joy.”

“Really?”

“No.”

Copyright © Stefan Petrucha, 2011

All rights reserved

For Sarah,

because she liked this

even though she’s not particularly into zombies

Back to back,

Belly to belly,

Well, I don’t give a damn

’Cause I’m stone dead already.

—“Zombie Jamboree”

by Conrad Eugene Mauge Jr., 1953

1

Sixteen pieces.

That’s how many chunks the newslady said Colin Wilson was cut into. He was scattered across the desert like bits of burger wrapping and leftover fries. The cops found all the bits. Except the head. That’s unusual, seeing as how the police don’t tend to get involved with Wilson’s type, no matter how many pieces they’re in.

Of course, the news didn’t play it like a murder. To the livebloods, it’s more about litter. Lousy so-and-sos always leaving their body parts around, making the living waste their time picking up after them. The candy-blond anchor shrugged. Must’ve been an accident. Wilson’s type are always getting into accidents. Cut to deodorant commercial. At times like this, you want to smell nice.

Accident, my ass. One or two pieces, maybe, and they would have found the head. Seeing as how there’s no middle ground between accident and design, that meant something weirder: He was cut up on purpose. That’s a lot of work. First, you have to get Colin Wilson into a position where he can’t disagree, and then you have to do all that cutting. Human bone, too. Probably needed special tools. It’s sure as hell not the kind of thing you do on a whim, or even out of anger. The reasons would have to run dark and deep.

And then there was the head.

I tried not to think about it, to focus on something else, but I didn’t have a lot going on. I stared at my desktop, the stains looking like a faded Jackson Pollock. I tried to make animal shapes out of the Goodwill shirts piled on the floor, or see a tree in the cracks on the door.

By the time the news came back on, a late-afternoon light, the dying kind, had intruded from the broken window, making the TV hard to see. It didn’t help. I couldn’t get Colin Wilson’s head out of mine; images of it were crawling around my brain like freshly hatched baby spiders. I didn’t know Wilson from a punched hole in the wall, but I kept seeing his severed head in some coyote’s mouth, an eye socket pinched between two strong canines, its saliva slapping the skull. Colin’s good eye opens and he realizes where he is.

Cut to deodorant commercial.

It didn’t make sense. What would a coyote do with a head? Not much meat on that bone. What bugged me made less sense: What if Colin Wilson’s brain really was still thinking? What if it knew what happened, understood that it was a lot shorter and less mobile than it used to be?

Weirder things are true. The official line is that decapitation ends it, but they don’t know shit. Calling my memory bad is a compliment, but I do remember the strangest shit, like how I read somewhere that back when they used the guillotine, a French scientist asked a condemned murderer to blink twenty times after his execution, if he could. He did. When the scientist called his name, the head opened its eyes and looked at him. True story, true as anything.

And that’s the living. Wilson wasn’t of that persuasion. His functions wouldn’t necessarily ever stop. So maybe he’s still out there.

These days there are so many things worse than death that it’s not even high on the list. Thousands of years we look for eternal life and what do we get? Fucking zombies. First I ever saw was in Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Scared the crap out of me. These days all I have to do is look in a mirror. Yeah, I’m one of those, too. Me, Colin Wilson, a hundred thousand or so others. Livebloods call us chakz—a mangled version of charqui, or, en ingles, jerky—dried meat. If we’re still oozing, which is pretty rare, they call us gleets or juicers. Then there are danglers, but I’ll leave that definition to the imagination.

It’s not like the movies. We don’t eat human flesh unless we go feral, and then it’s more like we’ll eat anything. We are tough to destroy, which is why I was so obsessed about that head. Cut off an arm or a leg, shoot us in the chest—we’ll keep coming.

Then there’s burning. Now, there’s another great thought—watching your flesh curl until the heat takes your eyes away. Brr. But that begs the question, Who bothered giving Colin Wilson such special treatment? If they wanted to make sure he was gone, why not just incinerate him?

With all the love we get, why bring us back? Mostly because some idiots figured out how. Mammalian life is based on cellular metabolism, right? Ten years ago, the boffins at ChemBet’s research labs came up with an