Page 12 (1/2)

BY MIKE CAREY

Here&039;s rant you, the transition to being a stiff is a shock to the syste, and you feel like shit - death war rapidly toward background ambient You feel for a pulse - not verifiably present But is that because it&039;s not there, or because you&039;re a klutz and you can&039;t take a pulse?

Okay, you can&039;t feel a heartbeat, either That&039;s o scared by this ti, not parked at the curb with the hand brake on

You draw a ragged, stressy breathand it just stays there Nowhere to go Your body isn&039;t en any ed from the board The pressure doesn&039;t build You could keep that breath pent up behind your teeth for ato feel the slightest need to let it out again

The sign on the door just flipped, from OPEN to CLOSED This is it Grammatically, you can never start a sentence with &039;I aain It&039;s &039;was/not-was&039;, all the way

But that&039;s no reason to let up, is what I&039; Too many people use death as an excuse, and I&039; it The world&039;s still out there, people It&039;s not going away The rules of the gae because you croaked and, like they say, if you don&039;t get back in the saddle, you&039;re gonna end up trampled and covered in horseshit Your choice

I used to be a stockbroker, which is probably what killedthe kind of obsessive edge that took me to the top of the NASDAQ whiletheir teeth and picking out a tie that , don&039;ta bunch of DAX-listed stor a tri your T+3s so tight there&039;s no skin left on your fingertips, it&039;s a bit like riding a log flu under you, behind you, and you know damn well if you lose the flow and try to stop it before it&039;s ready, you&039;ll go down and never see daylight

So, yeah, there&039;s a certain level of stress that you live with I won&039;t say &039;thrive on&039;, because that&039;s e is pleasant for about a half an hour, tops After that your body starts shaking itself to pieces and you&039;re sing heartburn A day in the dealing roohter house: you come out of it with other people&039;s blood and sweetmeats spattered on your shirt, and that&039;s if you&039;ve done okay If you&039;ve fucked up, it&039;s your own

I had my first heart attack when I enty-six I usually tell the story so it happened on my actual birthday, but in fact it was the day after I&039;d been out all night, flying high on wings of coke and frozen Stolichnaya, then I showered, popped a few dexies, and went back to work The two guys I ith, they did the sa,- sneaked off to the rooement lays on for quitters, to keep the crash at bay with a snatched half hour of sleep I kept right on going, because I was on one of those flux- and you can squeeze the shit fro on a price you already know is falling Too good to et a reverb onWell, okay, what the fuck? I don&039;t need to hear properly to see the nu, I&039; those Tokyo asswipes breathe ood fresh air

And then I was on the ground with a couple of invisible sue, I thought, as I blacked out

Three days at the Portland Clinic on caviar and tenecteplase Back in the saddle, clip-clop, clip-clop Because the guys who stop never start again, and that&039;s the gospel truth I&039;ve seen it enough times to know that it&039;s a natural law

The second attack caught : I ith a wo with to denote the act of coitus Norood at sex; I can reach a plateau and stay there for as long as I like until my partner of choice is ready to join me for the final pull toward the summit On this particular occasion, however, the lady had to struggle out froency services I&039;d been wearing her panties as a party hat, and I still hen I woke up - not at the Portland but at the Royal Free Fucking paramedics They ripped off my diamond cufflinks, too, but how the hell do you prove it? When you&039;re unconscious, people can take all the liberties they like

So that o, and the doctors said I should expect strike three to coe up and get myself some Zen-like calm I didn&039;t waste any time on that prescription: I aths

So I looked death square in his poker face, I sahat he was holding, and I i, okay? I don&039;t need to impress a Z-list shmuck like you, and in any case, it&039;s basic Basic stuff Anyone with any sense can take the te in

The dead started coo now, around the turn of the new millennium Actually, it probably started a whole lot earlier than that, but that hen the trickle turned into a flood Some of them come back in the spirit, some in the body An acquaintance ofas an exorcist says it&039;s all the sa to their own dead flesh out of fear or stubbornness or sheer habit, and they learn by trial and error how to get things hosts ra a little forcible redecorating &039;Formative causation&039;, they call it, or some other bullshit periphrasis: You look like what you think you should look like, at least most of the time But the animal soul is still in there with you, and when you&039;re at your weakest, it will try and slip out from under That, the so-called experts tell us, is olves are

Ghost, zo at, assuht&039; like soly, in between strike two and strike three I had a shed- load of ainst a retire to live to enjoy Now I put soh first of all I set up a Celtic knot of offshore- registered shelf coally own jackshit, but corporations are iht a lot of real estate, because the property bubble had finally burst around about then, and you could pick up sofor a place where I could set up poste and invisible - standing on its own grounds, because nosy neighbors would be the last thing I needed

I settled on a disused cine, despite having a Cecil Masey facade and s still intact It was 1930s vintage and had never been either burned out or turned into a bingo hall It had been a porno theater, briefly, but I wasn&039;t too worried about sticky carpets In fact, I wasn&039;t worried about the auditorium at all I stripped out the projection booth and fitted it with a bespoke arrange and freezer units Te to be key

Somewhere around then hen my personal extinction event happened RIP, Nicholas Heath - no flowers or known grasses, by request But I&039;d been expecting it It was, you know, a bu oing to be, and I&039;d made sure that the funeral parlor would hold off on the burial for at least a week, to give the other shoe a chance to drop

To be honest with you, I don&039;t like to talk about that part of it Sohts, heavenlyBut I did have the sense of not being co scared me I mean, for all I knew, it could be a lottery Maybe you didn&039;t get to choose which way the ball would bounce Ilike Casper the friendly fuckwit, or Lassie, or in so Nothing at all Not all the dead come back, even now

But I did, and I caned et about statutory notice, or packing up any of the stuff from my apartone, my casa was someone else&039;s casa, and the landlord had probably already changed the locks I headed straight for the Gauood ti units working properly at two degrees Celsius, and I had the place all set up to move into Which was just as well, because it was the last or mortis hits you soon after you sit up and look around, and for the next twenty- four hours, it&039;s all you can do to roll your eyes to the heavens

So I&039;et a chance to turn the lights on before h the list in my mind

Rancidification

Black putrefaction

Butyric fermentation

Dry decay

These, collectively, were the joys now in store for me And every second I wasted or passed, I spat onthe appropriate e, is far and away the erous That&039;s when all the fluids in your body rot and go sour The s indescribable, but that&039;s not what you&039;ve got to worry about The souring releases huge quantities of gas, which builds up in your body cavity wherever there&039;s a void for it to collect in If you don&039;t do soe to your soft tissues - rip you open froas, every hole is a probleot a long ith soreat many places I&039;m not keen to talk about In the end I had to make some actual incisions, but I kept the substance called Lanobase 18, which is what undertakers use to soak up the fluid leaking froans and turn it into an inert, ale went, I was already ahead of the ga a cold, controlled space offlesh; no air- or ground-borne conta process I needed it because by nowreally scary I kept having to pour cologne onto es, because even though I wasn&039;t inhaling, the sh to me somehow

By the time I hit phase three, I was et easier What was left of ed its consistency, over the space of a couple of weeks, into so hard and waxy Adipocere, they call it It&039;s kind of unsettling at first, because it doesn&039;t feel like anything even slightly organic, but it has the huge upside that it doesn&039;t s much I could live with h a leeching of organic coenesis, so I just let it happen and turned s

Unfortunately, I&039;don I had the projection booth itself and the adjacent generator roo Fuhrer-bunker, but I hadn&039;t bothered with all the ground- floor doors and s I didn&039;t think I&039;d need to: the Gaumont had stood e to pay it any attention now?

But the key word there is undisturbed I&039;d had a whole lot of kit delivered when I was setting uparrays, and I&039;d had soht as well have put out a fucking welcohborhood deadbeats that the cine worth stealing

In point of fact, it didn&039;t: everything that was valuable was locked away behind steel bulkhead doors up on the first floor But that didn&039;t stop a variegated collection of scu the s, and ransacking as left of the old furniture, looking for so they could purloin, pawn, or piss into So in the auditorius first Ione of the false names and e- couys from a private security firm to come in and clear out the squatters&039; little rat nest They threw everything out into the street; then they ot the builders to come back in and round- floor s, and steel bulkhead doors over the old wooden doors, attached to I beams sunk two feet into freeway- mix concrete I had the work teareen antivandal paint, too: the losers could still sleep in the fucking doorway if they wanted to, but I wasn&039;t going to make it co to get As a dead , I was too vulnerable: I wanted to have the freedoht run into In any case, this was et the benefit of it? That&039;s not how life works; take it fro I do all that well, but now I felt like I could finally slon and take stock I&039;d ridden out the roller coaster of physical decomposition, at least to the point where I could maintain a steady state I had my place secured and et what I needed fro with it directly

I took a day off Watched some movies on cable Opened a bottle of Pauillac and sniffed the wine-breath, since drinking it without any digestive enzyame

It was half a day, actually Half a day off By the afternoon I was restless, worried about what II fired up the coistered with a different ISP and apparently logged on in a different time zone - and put soe

That was a good afternoon and an even better evening Stress couldn&039;t touch et tired, and I didn&039;t need to take bathrooh a fourteen-hour session, not logging off until the exchange closed

Then I switched to the Nikkei Dow and did the saht, this isyou knowliberating Deathpulled out of the zone by your body&039;s needs or by soot so forever, if you want to

Of course, forever is a long ti tiain They&039;d actually sneaked back while the concrete was still setting and pushed one of the steel plates up out of line so they could work it loose later with a crowbar I could hear the with the door of the projection roo holy of holies

Yeah, dream on, you verminous little bastards That door and the wall it was set in were about as porous as a bank vault: Not needing to breatheto cut corners where personal security was concerned All the sa about ould have happened if the door had been open - if I&039;d been down on the ground floor picking up ain

This tih properly: defence in depth hat I needed, not one big-ass door with one big-ass bolt on it I had the builders - none of whoround floor, replacing all the existing walls with steel bulkheads and at the sa in a whole lot of new ones I took es, turning the Gaumont into three separate keeps, one inside the other Only a single vault door connected the outer keep with the middle one, and the middle keep with the inner one Other doors were devoid of bolts, locks, or handles: they were all independently lockable via a co I did was to slave the whole da to the main server up in the projection booth I put the closed-circuit (CCTV) cameras in, too - dozens of theles I could check out any given stretch of corridor, any given room, and make sure it was clear before I opened the doors and cleared enius, it wasn&039;t I was thinking things through, that&039;s all Every fortress can turn into a trap, so every fortress needs a back door And this particular fortress needed aonline I still needed physical docunatures It&039;s stupid, but it&039;s true: so the electron tide yet, and they only believe in what they can hold in their hands Hah Maybe not so stupid, when you think about it

So now I could swing back into top gear, stop watching my back And I did Believe ot lost in it Ifroe to another in an endless, breakneck rhythm You know those velodromes, where the racers ride their bikes almost horizontally on the canted walls? Well, that&039;s what I was like The only thing that kept round at all wasas you never slon

But I did

It was subtle at first, subtle enough that I didn&039;t even realize it was happening Ithings and not connected I was still co out ahead and still in control It took me a couple of days to realize that I was too h theconscious decisions instead of letting instinct play through ed off Sat there in silence for a while, staring at the screens A wave of grief swept through me, and I don&039;t care if that sounds stupid - a sense of bereaveotten that fact into ain - olden rule But I didn&039;t feel like I could touch the keyboard right then I was afraid of screwing up, afraid of hitting some rock I would have seen aendocrine syste the noises in the walls for a while before that - bangs and scrapes and scuffles, muffled not by distance but by the thickness of the brickwork and the layers of steel plating But now I let htly different each tienerator downstairs The only things that s People Ani but still exclusive club of entities-with-a-pulse

I turned on the CCTV monitors and did the rounds of the ca: she was in the outer keep, way down on the ground floor, in a blind stretch of corridor between two ofsteel portal that led through into the h Sort of like scratching your balls and co up with a louse

From what I could see, she had to be one of the ho a daht older, huddled in way too le of wall and door She had dirty blonde hair and a sullen, hangdog face Hard to tell anything else, because she was folded down into herself, knees hugged to her chest and head down It was probably cold down there, in spite of all the layers

Where the hell had she come from? She couldn&039;t have been in there since the last invasion, because I wouldn&039;t have missed her, and in any case, she&039;d be dead by now There wasn&039;t anything to eat or drink, and she clearly hadn&039;t brought anything in with her that she couldn&039;t carry in her pockets

I backtracked with the cae vent pipe for one of the freezer units that had been run through the outer wall of the building She&039;d just hit it with soain until the flih for her to squeeze through That had let her into a part of the building that was on the route I used when I went down to collect the h a door or two that was unlocked when I caht in the dead-end stretch of corridor when I ain

She&039;d tried to get out: those were the sounds I&039;d heard She&039;d hammered and clawed at the door and probably screamed for help, but only faint echoes had come up to the projection roo to decipher them

Now she looked to be in a bad way The monitor only resolved in black and white, but there were dark patches on her hands, which I assu to pull on the edge of the doorjaulp of air, I saw that her lips were swollen in a way that suggested dehydration

I got up and paced around the rooh I wasn&039;t capable of panic, but I felt a dull, blunt voluases back in the first stage of decay

I could just let her die was the first thought that came to mind

I could open up the doors to let her back out the way she&039;d coht die anyway

If I opened the doors, soet in Safer just to leave her

But soain So the police or crawling through that hole with torches and crowbars and

No, nobody else had found the hole The CCTV cameras didn&039;t show anyone else, either in the room where the vent let out or anywhere else in the outer keep I should have put ht irrelevantly -I shouldn&039;t have let this happen Now here I was, already guilty of false imprison the goddahborhood and Christ only knohat kind of trouble to look forward to if she was found here, alive or dead or anywhere in between

I stopped pacing because I&039;d coainst a wall I wanted to punch it, but that would have been a really stupid thing to do - no blood flow, so no scabbing, no skin repair Any wound I opened in my own flesh would stay open unless I sewed it shut

I stared at the wall for h the sah tiotthe duood-as-new spec before I cut her loose I had to make sure there was no harm and no foul, whatever that took

I found a bucket the builders had left behind and a washbasin in what had once been a cleaner&039;s cupboard behind the projection booth I cleaned the bucket out as far as I could, then filled it with cold water I flicked so the locks on all but one of the doors betweenagainst

Then I went down, let h the inner and middle keeps, and made my way around to her stretch of corridor She , because when I turned the last bend, I caught the sound of her fists banging on the other side of the door, and her voice,ht in front of the door and went back up to the projection booth I watched the wo, pushing at the door, thinking or at least hoping that someone could hear her

I relocked all the other doors before opening just that one Since she was leaning her weight against it, she just tuh when it opened She saw the bucket, stared at it with big incredulous eyes, and finally cupped her hands and drank frohed up a storm and voood start

Food was more of a problem, because unless there were a few hardy rats down in the base edible in the entire building I got around that by going to the Ocado Web site, whose online order form allows you to specify exactly where you want the food to be dropped off I specified the mailbox, which was actually a double-doored receptacle like the ones post offices use - big enough to take thick bundles of legal papers, and, as it turned out, big enough for a bag of groceries too

I ordered stuff she could eat cold, to keep things si of ready-cut carrot slices, soe juice, and then on an impulse, a bar of Cadbury&039;s dairy milk

This time I had to approach her froh the door to get to the water bucket and was now on the other side of the door It didn&039;t matter: from the master board up in the projection booth, I could open up any route I liked and make absolutely sure of where she was before I ain to the booth and the CCTV , she went scooting back through the door like one of Pavlov&039;s dogs

She wolfed the food down like she hadn&039;t seen bread since the Thatcher years It was a fucking unedifying sight, so I turned off the CCTV and left her to it for a while

The next time I checked, she was done The floor was strerappers, apple cores, a crumpled juice carton The woh she expected it to start talking to her Actually, it could do that if I wanted it to: the cameras each ca I wanted to say to her: I just wanted her to eat, drink, wash, fix herself up, and fuck off out of there

Wash Okay I ordered soroceries and added soap and shampoo to the list, not to mention another bucket The next ti water and ater, but she didn&039;t take the hint, maybe because the water was cold Too bad I didn&039;t have any way of heating it up, and I wasn&039;t running a fucking guesthouse

I spent about three days plues and antiseptic for her fingers, which she ignored, just like the ater On the third day I esture with some clean clothes, ordered online in the same way from the ASDA superstore at Brentwood

Okay, so iene, even on a theoretical level I don&039;t know, maybe the dirt acts like insulation out on the street, and et welded to your privates past the point where you can take the to piss soh, I realized it was probably a good thing that the cameras had such crappy resolution I could see the corner she was using as a latrine, now that I looked for it, and I sure as hell didn&039;t want to see it any clearer

Well, the botto no worse than when she caation toher how to get back to the vent pipe, and left it with the food Then I threw the lock on the door behind her and all the other locks leading back to the outer wall and her exit point

She examined the map as she ate her breakfast, which was croissant and apricot jam She&039;d shown a real taste for pastries by this time and none at all for fresh fruit or cereal

But after she&039;d finished, she didn&039;t make a move to step over the threshold She just wiped her mouth on the napkin provided, dropped it into the water bucket - which always drove ain - and settled back down against the wall

What was she playing at? She had to realize I was allowing her to leave

&039;Come on!&039; I shouted at the monitor &039;Get out of there You&039;re free as a bird Go!&039;

She settled into her characteristic, head-bowed huddle

Impulsively, I flicked the microphone switch on the CCTV board I&039;d never used it before, so I had no idea if it even worked, but a light flashed on the board and the woh she&039;d just heard so - a click, maybe, or else a little feedback flutter from the speaker

&039;Hey,&039; I said &039;What do you think you&039;re doing? Tio, lady&039;

She blinked twice, her face full of coh, and when she did it was kind of a non sequitur

&039;Who are you?&039; she demanded

&039;The owner,&039; I said, and then, not to be put off, I repeated, &039;Tiet out of here&039;

She shook her head

I blinked &039;What do you mean, no?&039; I asked, too incredulous even to be pissed off &039;This is my place, sweetheart Not yours You&039;re not wanted here&039;

The woed &039;But I like it here&039;

The way she said it o down there and up-end the water bucket on her head She sounded like a little kid asking if she could stay a bit longer at the beach

&039;How can you like it?&039; I de corridor You like sleeping on concrete?&039;

&039;That&039;s what I was doing outside,&039; she said, calh &039;And at least here I don&039;t have hoe me a blow job for a place by the fire&039;

&039;Because there is no fire&039;