Dead Stop (14 page)

I couldn’t scream or protest as agony and shock overwhelmed me, my limbs kicking out helplessly as I tried to breathe but couldn’t, my movements clumsy and drowsy and a rush, a great rush of pain and panic and I don’t know what else causing me to slip, to lose my hold on consciousness, the whole world lolling sideways and my vision fading as she tore a chunk out of my neck and let me fall to the ground.

I barely felt myself land, so overwhelming was the pain from the bite, but that was numbing now too, and the ceiling above was just a blur of white, and the last thing I was aware of was a sound of teeth chewing through tough meat, a deep gulp and, right at the end, a grunt of bestial satisfaction as I lost my grip on consciousness and life altogether.

CHAPTER TWELVE

T
HAT WAS THE
end of that. I was dead.

I guess you think this is one of those post-modern stories that thinks it’s clever to kill off the narrator.

‘Surprise! You thought we couldn’t kill this character because he was narrating in the past tense, but first person narration is just a dramatic device so we can flip that fictional construct right over, yeah?’

Well
fuck you
. This is my life and death story, and my death wasn’t just a plot twist, it happened, and was indescribably awful. As bad as it was, I still wish it had really been the end. Maybe you would prefer it to be the end too.

Well, tough. It’s my story, and I’ve been writing it, thumb-typing into the notebook on my phone, the way I want it to be read. I get plenty of time, drifting from place to place, towed by my permanent travelling companion. I find an empty seat or bench, squint at my little phone screen and do my best. I sometimes wish I’d died with pen and paper in my pocket.

I’m not sure how you, my reader or readers, are getting to read this, but to be honest I’m so far through the looking glass now I have no idea what might be possible and might not. Christ, I’m writing this on a phone, even though I’m a ghost, and presumably so is the phone.

Ghost phone, ghost writer.

Pretty weird, huh? I can’t get a signal, but I can do everything with it I could in life, including writing this, and playing Snake. I get to play a lot of Snake now.

So, my main tip for being dead, apart from ‘try to avoid it if at all possible’, is that the Pharaohs were right to have all that stuff sealed into their tombs with them—although maybe having the wives and servants thrown in was a bit on the harsh side. It’s worth getting your loved ones to bury you with your iPod or your Kindle or whatever, something that plays movies so you can have
The Third Man
on there.

That film never gets old.

I don’t know how the ghost phone works, but it does—and it never needs recharges, possibly the greatest convenience of being dead—so as we travel the world’s most famous cities, I’ve been writing this in between taking in the sights and sitting in on my companion’s meetings with sinister potential clients.

Yes, I’m finally travelling, not just the backroads but to the big cities too. Even with the limited sensation, the flatness and colourlessness of ghostly experience, I have to admit it’s pretty nice seeing these places after avoiding them for so long.

Not that this is my decision. I’m just being pulled along for the ride, by my unfinished business with my companion.

Melissa, but you probably guessed that. I’m tied to her now, and my spirit goes where she goes. I don’t
think
she can see me, at least most of the time, but I get the occasional moment where it seems that she’s sensed my presence, or caught a glimpse of me out of the corner of her eye. Maybe she’s been able to see and hear me all along, and those moments are when she lets her guard down.

I could believe that, that she’d keep up such a pretence, so relentlessly. Deception comes easy to her, especially if it’s deceiving herself.

These trips aren’t holidays, though I’ve learned she has the resources to go anywhere she wants, more or less. No, she’s out and about meeting potential buyers for the secrets she has, and these meetings take place in very public places with lots of cameras, because can you imagine what kind of people would want to buy the secret of zombification, and what things they’d be willing to do to get it for free?

As far as the negotiations are concerned, her main priority is price, but having been in all those negotiations I’ve noticed something else at work. Melissa seems very interested in the details of how the prospective clients—mainly pharmaceutical companies, as you’d expect—would manufacture the stabiliser, and how they might improve it.

It’s presented as a sideshow to the main negotiations, to haggling over the price, but it’s always there, sometimes just in the form of questioning a specific detail, and between the negotiations with different clients, Melissa is good at piecing together the supply chain for synthesising the stabiliser.

All of which ties into something else I’ve seen. While she’s capable of managing her hunger and not getting caught, I sometimes get the feeling that she’s losing herself, that the hunger is slowly building, that without some kind of extra dose or booster shot of the stabiliser, possibly even a regular dose, she’s going to revert to being your average dumbass zombie.

Diddums. If she goes rabid and gets gunned down by the cops, that’ll suit me fine, and hopefully give me the closure that will allow me to move on. If Melissa’s ghost gets booted from her zombie body again and has to watch herself get mown down, then I’ll go into the light laughing every step of the way.

Until then, I’m dragged along with Melissa in her travels. I fill the time writing this down as best I can. As you’re reading this, I obviously succeeded in getting the word out there somehow.

As well as writing, I’ve been talking. Not to the living—I haven’t encountered any psychics yet, if there are any more like me out there, and if they’re like me they’ll be keen to avoid any conversations anyway—but to the dead, to the ghosts I meet in Vienna and Venice and everywhere else.

I haven’t had much luck so far. Aside from the language barriers, most of the spirits I meet seem to be beyond help, too lost in undead delirium to talk any sense. But if Melissa and I can stay lucid after death, I have to believe that others can, and that I can keep helping the recently deceased from losing their minds, and maybe even talk some of the older ones back to sanity.

Do you know how many more dead people than living ones there are? Even if only a tiny percentage of the dead go on to be ghosts, we are legion.

Sorry, that was a bit pretentious. I get like that sometimes.

Let’s just say there are loads of us.

Loads.
It used to terrify me, the thought of all those ghosts being out there, the armies of the dead ranked shoulder to shoulder, crowding the living, but now it’s a comfort, and a potential source of strength.

Alone, lost in grieving over ourselves, we are nothing, insubstantial. But together, if we could pool whatever will has kept us from dissipating into the void, I’m sure we could do something. I don’t know what, but I’m sure we can. We’ve all heard of poltergeists, temperature drops, all of that. What would it take to do that stuff for real?

None of this sounds like the David you’ve been reading about, I realise that. Travelling, talking to the dead, getting angry, getting organised. Death has changed me, and not just in the obvious ways.

I remember, when I talked to Melissa about her death, the rage and intensity she had exhibited, and how I couldn’t relate to that. I’d spent my whole life trying to keep my situation under control, to keep a lid on things, and there was this passion I couldn’t imagine. I really couldn’t.

I can imagine it now. My death has made me angry; even as I’ve lost all physical feeling, I feel things more deeply than I once allowed myself to. There’s no risk, no threat now, you see? The worst has happened. The rainy day has come. Having been so afraid, I have nothing to fear.

No restraints, no fear. Just fury.

I learned that from Melissa. I saw it in her, then she inadvertently instilled that fury in me, killing me as Gregson did her, but more competently, more thoroughly.

Gregson was out of control, just took a bite out of her.

While I blacked out after the first bite and didn’t form as a ghost until some hours later, I’m fairly sure Melissa had her fill. That bite on my bottom lip should have been a warning. The hunger was already growing. I can’t imagine what she did to me to sate that.

So I have my rage, and we have unfinished business, her and me, the partially cured zombie and the ghost following in her footsteps.

After all, she did hire me to kill her, back when we first met.

One day, and I don’t know how yet, I’ll get around to finishing the job.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Clapham
has been writing professionally for 15 years, which probably counts as a career. He has written novels for the Warhammer 40,000 and Doctor Who book ranges, and lots of other things that you can find out about at the modestly named www.markclapham.com. He lives in Exeter with his wife, the writer Mags L Halliday, and his daughter, but prefers to vacation in Raccoon City.

A VAMPIRE IN ZOMBIELAND

Coburn’s been dead now for close to a century, but seeing as how he’s a vampire and all, it doesn’t much bother him. Or at least it didn’t, not until he awoke from a forced five-year slumber to discover that most of human civilization was now dead—but not dead like him, oh no.

See, Coburn likes blood. The rest of the walking dead, they like flesh. He’s smart. Them, not so much. But they outnumber him by about a million to one. And the clotted blood of the walking dead cannot sustain him. Now he’s starving. And on the run. And more pissed-off than a beestung rattlesnake. The vampire not only has to find human survivors (with their sweet, sweet blood), but now he has to transition from predator to protector—after all, a man has to look after his food supply.

“Wendig is ferociously inventive and effortlessly sharp”

– Richard Dansky, author of
Beloved of the Dead
and
Firefly Rain