I’ve stopped dreaming since I died.
Or, I guess to be more specific, my dreams have all been replaced with nothing. When I sleep, I descend into a vast and empty blackness that stretches out in all directions. There is a spotlight over me, the only light in the world, and I spend the night huddled in its thin puddle of light, staring out at an ocean as black as void, and I wait.
I don’t know what I’m waiting for. I only know that, after so many hours, I open my eyes and take in the first deep rattling breaths of the day and listen to the sluggish, intermittent timing of my heart’s lazy beat and I come back to life. Each morning is its own resurrection.
A tiny miracle, except I’ve stopped believing in miracles.
“Randy?” I reach across the bed, my fingers searching for him, but he’s gone. The sheets are cold and rumpled, the pillow a vague lump under the blanket. Randy’s been sleeping over more nights than not these past few weeks, but he’s rarely here come morning. I haven’t gotten used to it yet. Not his being here, and not his absence.
I never meant to hook up with him, much less date him — if that’s even what we’re doing. He won’t put a label on it. It’s not a thing we talk about. We’re just a couple dead guys trying to figure out what all of this means, I guess.
I groan and roll out of bed, feeling my joints ache and creak and give off the dull, wood-splintered sound of dry bones being forced to move. Every time I swing my long legs over the side of the bed and stand up, I worry that the bones will snap with the effort, that I’ll pitch forward onto my knees and feel my limbs dissolving beneath me, the stress just too much for dead bones to handle.
This has never happened, but I worry about it anyway.
There’s noise coming from down the hall, movement and voices. I frown. There’s an odor, too, and I’m so far removed from hunger that I don’t recognize it at first. But then I hear the sizzle, and I can place the scent: bacon.
There was a time when my stomach would have rolled in anticipation, when my mouth might have watered at the salt-fat odor of the sizzling meat, but none of those systems work anymore. I died with a steering column jammed into my torso, and my guts rearranged themselves and came back up through my throat once I was up — not great circumstances for eating.
On the bright side, the Undead don’t need to eat, anyway.
I don’t know what it is that keeps us moving. Electricity, I guess. I’m not a biologist. I just know that my heart beats when it wants to, that my blood sludges and sluices through my veins, that I breathe when I remember or when I need to talk. I’m like an old-school animatronic, all hydraulics and creaking joints. But my brain’s still up there, still intact, doing what brains do. Keeping me awake and aware and with a head crammed full of memories.
Past that? All those other organs and systems, all those pieces that handle digestion and nutrient absorption and waste removal and filtration? As far as I know they’re all just jostling around in there, useless and redundant as an appendix. Whichever ones are left, anyway, the ones I haven’t coughed out in pieces.
Undeath is nothing if not efficient, I guess.
I find pants and shuffle out into the hall, my socks stirring up static on the carpet. I don’t bother with a shirt. My bare torso is all weird bumps and angles, the faded but ever-present bruises, the places where ribs have broken or organs have gone missing. There are places Randy helped me stitch up when I was freshly dead, the jagged edges of skin still puckered with black thread and weeping some kind of clear fluid. I guess they’ll always ooze a little. Small price to pay for keeping your guts inside.
“Zoe?” I call, squinting down the hall to the kitchen.
Zoe is my sister. She’s just shy of 17 and has accomplished more with her life than most anyone I know, even considering that Los Ojos, New Mexico grades on a curve when it comes to lifetime achievements. She’s finishing up her high school through online classes, which gives her plenty of free time to pursue her real passion as a YouTuber — excuse me, citizen journalist. She’s turned her bedroom into a one-person TV station, green screen and all, and she covers news about the Undead.
“In here,” she calls back from down the hall.
There’s a rattle of pots and pans, the clang of metal on a burner, and I reflexively pick up speed. Zoe’s not especially well-known for her culinary skills. She’s more like the type to get distracted chasing theories or yelling at the news while things boil over and catch fire on the stove. I shuffle into the kitchen half-envisioning another grease fire incident like the one that left the little splatter of pock-marks burned down into the linoleum.
But it’s not Zoe standing at the stove — it’s Randy, his pale skin practically glowing under the overhead light. He’s wearing a pair of my boxers and not much else. They’re too long in the leg, hanging down almost like shorts, and they cling precariously on the points of his hips.
His hair, a shade of pink best described as “bubblegum,” is extra tousled, jutting up in all directions.
“Morning, Davin,” he says, with an air of theatric formality.
“What are you doing?”
“Making breakfast.”
“In your underwear?”
“No, in your underwear.” He has a skillet in one hand and is staring down at it with great concentration. A mess of eggs and cheese is spread over the pan, an attempt at an omelet, and from the way it’s crumpled it looks like he tried to flip it and managed instead just to make it mad.
Zoe sits at the kitchen bar, elbows propped up, watching with interest as he wrestles with the eggs. She’s looking much more put-together than either of us; I guess she’s been awake for a while. Her wild black curls are held back in barrettes, and her glasses are clean and smudge-free for a change. She’s wearing a low-cut top that, had our father been here, she most certainly would not be allowed to leave the house in.
“Well, can you maybe not play naked chef in front of my sister?”
“If you don’t want me here, say the word and I’m gone.”
“That’s not what I meant. You know it’s not…” I glance over at Zoe, irritated that she’s here watching, irritated that he’s playing this game. I let the rancid air out of my dead lungs, an exaggerated sigh, and move past the kitchen to the back door. “I need a smoke.”
There’s a battered picnic table on the back porch, and I sit on it, knees folded up, and light up a cigarette. It’s cool out, the morning brisk with the promise of fall. The trees haven’t decided whether to turn their leaves yet, but the seasons are shy in New Mexico. Up in the mountains, you get the dramatic shift, the bright gold of the shivering aspens and the deep red of the oakbrush. But down in the valley, the cottonwoods are capricious. Sometimes fall skips over Los Ojos entirely, trees shifting from green to dead without lingering on the beautiful in-between.
The back door opens and I spare a glance over my shoulder, lifting a brow at Randy as he approaches. He’s still in nothing but my boxers, his nipples stiff in the cold, his skin almost bluish. The livid purple-black bruise around his throat, the reminder of his suicide, is impossible to ignore.
You don’t ask people how they died, but the story usually comes out one way or another. What I know is that Randy committed suicide by hanging. His neck didn’t break; he strangled to death, slowly, all alone, and went for a long time undiscovered. When he came back as Undead, he was still hanging, still alone. I can only imagine how it must have been. I can imagine him desperately kicking, his feet thrashing for some kind of foothold, unable to call out or get loose, unable even to just let himself die.
Eventually, the maid found him and cut him down.
And his father, a rich and influential man who could hardly bear the shame of a gay son, much less a dead one, made arrangements to ship him out to New Mexico with a sports car and a savings account.
I know all of this because Randy told me, but I don’t know if he remembers doing it. We were in a dark place at the time, suffering the bitter withdrawals of the drug we’d been relying on to feel alive. Going off Lazarus is like dying all over again, but with more nightmares. We found each other in the darkness, reaching and grasping, and huddled together like the last survivors of a disaster, and we shared things that night, things neither of us have mentioned or addressed since.
It’s better that way, I think. Probably.
But worse, too, because now I don’t know how to talk to him. That’s the thing with relationships born out of a tragedy, I guess: once the disaster is over, once that immediate rush of emotion is gone, what can you possibly have left to talk about?
So now we look at each other in the backyard, and neither of us say anything. I have things I want to say, but I don’t, maybe because a part of me is afraid he’ll leave if I let him get too close; like a delicate hot-house flower, too much handling would cause him to wilt.
“I’ll head out,” he says, coming close but not quite touching.
“You don’t have to.”
He gives a wry smile. “Nah. Wouldn’t want to overstay my welcome. And,” he adds, lifting a finger before I can interrupt, “I’ve got things to do today, anyway. It’s cool.”
What things? I narrow my eyes. The cigarette cherry has gone gray, smoldering out from neglect. I can’t tell whether Randy’s being vague to irritate me or if he’s doing something he doesn’t want me knowing about.
In a former life — hah — Randy was at the epicenter of an Undead drug ring. Most Undead exist under the watchful eye of The Coalition, a government-sponsored healthcare and public safety organization created to keep tabs on the freshly deceased. There are laws in place to keep everyone accounted for: mandatory registration, monthly required doctor visits, government-mandated treatment programs. These days, the Undead are mostly housed in treatment facilities, Lazarus Houses where they’re kept medicated on the drug that’s supposed to keep them on an even keel and protect them from losing their humanity and going on a rampage.
The rest of us — The Underground, the Undead who live under the government’s radar and try to pass for Breathers — were skating by on stolen drugs, and Randy was the hookup for the greater Los Ojos area. He’d offered me a job as a way to pay back the favor of finding me on the side of the highway, freshly Undead, and introducing me to The Underground.
But the off-the-books Lazarus supply dried up, forcing us into withdrawal. And, unlike what the official government statements would have you believe, the withdrawal didn’t leave us as mindless killing machines. In fact, once we got through a torturous three days of symp, we came out on the other side feeling…well, dead. But mostly fine. More tired than we’d been on the drug, more filled with the bitter ache of occupying a body you can feel actively decaying around you…but mostly fine.
“What kind of stuff?” I ask, not expecting a straight answer.
He shrugs. His dark eyes glitter. “Wouldn’t you like to know. A man must keep his secrets.”
As if as an afterthought, he leans in for a kiss, and his lips have brushed past mine and pulled away before I even have a moment to react. He’s retreated into the house before I catch up with the lingering sensation of his touch.
***
When I go back inside, Zoe is ignoring a plate of mostly untouched eggs. Instead, she’s on her phone, leaning her chair back on two legs and rocking it gently back and forth, a thoughtless rhythm while she stays engrossed with her screen.
“Stop that,” I say, reflexively. “You’ll break the chair.”
She doesn’t look up, but after a moment she does ease it down to all four legs. She slouches forward instead, sprawling out and keeping her eyes locked on the screen.
Most teenagers, you have to worry about them texting boys and arranging illicit hookups or sending nudes. With Zoe, I’m more afraid that she’s plotting a political revolution from her iPhone.
“Randy left,” she says, and her tone is accusatory.
I try for a joke. “I hope he put clothes on first.”
She ignores me. Instead, she types something out with her thumbs, then sets the phone down and looks at the eggs with a vaguely surprised expression, as if she’s not quite sure how they got there. They’re burnt, a caramel-brown skin clinging to their rubbery sides.
“The party is the 28th at 8,” she says.
“What party?”
“My birthday?” She lets out an exaggerated noise. If an eye-roll made a sound, that was it. “Unless you forgot.”
“I was there when you were born, maggot,” I say mildly. “I just didn’t know we were doing a party.”
Her nose wrinkles. “Well, whatever. CJ’s at 8. Don’t forget.”
“CJ’s?” I can’t hide the surprise in my voice. CJ’s is a local coffee shop, known in Los Ojos for its ethically sourced dark roast and fresh-baked danishes. It also happens to be the meeting place of the local Undead and headquarters of The Underground. When Randy and I were running Lazarus all over town, CJ’s was the front we laundered all the money through. It’s a weird choice of meetup destination for a birthday party. But then, Zoe’s got some unusual friends. “Is that a good idea?”
“It’ll be fine,” she says, and sounds annoyed that I’m questioning her about it. “We’re just hanging out.”
“Who’s coming?”
“The regular crowd. You know. Jo and Andrea and Ash and Lilith and everybody.”
So, The Underground. Does Zoe have any regular friends? I try to think of one, a name I can suggest, but my memory’s drawing a blank.
“Well, if that’s what you want.”
“I figure I can get some really good footage, too. For the documentary.”
“Zoe —”
“I know, I know. I’m not releasing anything yet, I’m not an idiot. But, you know. One of these days, the time will be right, and it’ll be safe to go public. And when that happens, we’ll all want to remember where we’ve been. Where we came from. We’ll want to remember…everything.” She gestures vaguely around our kitchen.
Zoe’s been obsessed with this idea of making a documentary for weeks now. It started the night Randy and I locked ourselves up, waiting for withdrawals. At the time, neither of us knew for sure what might happen. We knew that The Undead who go off Lazarus are supposed to lose their minds and become mindless, vicious zombies.
So we locked ourselves away, just in case. Zoe had set up a webcam, snaking its cord through the door, pointing it at the room so she would have some warning if things went wrong.
Unfortunately, Zoe’s footage turned out too dark and grainy to be of much use, and she was devastated about it. Here she was, sitting on definitive evidence that The Undead were not the monsters the media made us out to be — that we didn’t need their drugs or their treatment centers — and she couldn’t use it.
So she’s taken to recording everything else that she can, all the brief moments of humanity and existence, just in case. Building up a case for Undead rights.
There’s just one small flaw to her plan, something I haven’t told her about yet because I’m still trying to wrap my head around it myself: I’ve seen an Undead turn inhuman. I watched it with my own eyes.
“Davin?”
“Huh?”
“You okay? You kind of…zoned out there for a second.”
“Oh. yeah. Sorry.” I don’t know why I haven’t told her everything about what happened the night Randy and I first went off Lazarus. At the time, there had just been so much going on — Randy and I barely making it home, feverish and sweating blood and hitting that crisis stage of withdrawal, and the emergency of our uncertain futures was more important than what had happened to bring us to that point. And after, for the first couple of weeks, I hadn’t brought it up because the trauma was too fresh, the memories too upsetting. It was hard to dredge it back up.
But how long could that excuse hold?
Shielding Zoe from the truth is a laughable concept. Zoe lives and breathes the truth. She knows more about what’s going on in the world than probably anyone. ...
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