I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.
—Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
Later, when the risen dead were at high tide and the world as it used to be was scarcely even visible any more, Richard Cadbury came to see his wife Lorraine’s demise as the first domino, which in toppling had brought down everything else. Though that made no logical sense, on an emotional level it was compelling.
In her passing, Lorraine had tilted the world.
Cadbury rolled with it, to the furthermost edge of existence. In the months following his bereavement he seemed to retreat into a smaller and smaller space, excluding in succession all of the people he knew—friends, family, work colleagues, neighbors—from his interior life. It was not that he ceased to feel affection for them. It was rather the opposite, that he wished to spare them the utter anomie, the lack of meaning and sense and direction that now defined and delineated his life.
These changes in him were profound, but they were hard to see from the outside. Cadbury continued to drive to the lab every day and put in a full day’s work. He took a single day off for the funeral and then returned to his bench, politely declining the offer of compassionate leave and the equally well-intentioned, equally misguided offer of counseling. What he felt he could not utter. Even within his own mind it remained entirely unarticulated. There was, simply, a hole where his heart had been. The rest of him was falling into it in a slow-motion cascade that would probably last until his death.
In a sense, then, death became his vector. Perhaps that was why—despite his profound isolation—he became aware of the risen dead very quickly. He was unable to remember later on where and when he picked up the first hint. It was most probably through a radio item, but he turned on the TV shortly afterward and watched the longer and longer segments devoted to the crisis on the TV news.
He made the journey from skepticism to belief quickly and smoothly.
It was easy to be dismissive at first, when all anyone had to go on were the verbal accounts of inarticulate witnesses remastered into media-speak by bored TV anchors who didn’t believe or care what they were saying. Easier still with those preposterous fragments of found footage, so ineptly framed and focused they screamed amateurishness and implausibility. The men and women lurching around streets and parks looked as though the night before had instantaneously turned into the morning after. No worse than that. No hint of a new ontology, a turning point in the history of life on Earth.
But when Cadbury opened his door the next morning to go to work he saw the lurchers out in the street. Saw them seeing him, and switching their attention to him. Converging on him, even while he got into his car and drove away. Quite an extraordinary length to go to, for a hoax. Some of them had wounds on their bodies that looked very convincing.
He didn’t get into the lab. The receptionist, Sheila, was on the other side of the double doors, throwing herself repeatedly against their shatterproof glass. Her face was a pulped mess in which bloodied teeth worked constantly, as though she could gnaw her way through the glass to get to him.
In the ninety seconds or so that Cadbury stared at her, irresolute, almost a dozen lurchers appeared around the corner of the building or from the alley behind the storage sheds, all stumbling and staggering toward him. The smell of decay came with them on the light breeze, mild but unmistakable.
So then he knew. Knew what everybody else knew, anyway. Death had become a reversible condition, but something was lost in that brief crossing of the threshold. Something profound, evidently. The returned seemed to be neither blessed nor burdened with sentience. They enjoyed a more rudimentary existence, governed by a single impulse.
What that impulse was he saw for himself on his journey home. A number of lurchers had trapped a dog and were devouring it messily even as it struggled to get free of them. Cadbury was distressed by the creature’s suffering but could see no way of alleviating it. Within a few seconds it was borne down, the teeth of a middle-aged woman fastening in its throat. The woman’s handbag still hung from her left shoulder, vestigial and grotesque.
When Cadbury got back home he had to run the short distance from the curbside to the house, keys at the ready. Even so the lurchers scattered around his lawn and his driveway almost got to him before he was able to get the door open and get inside. He slammed it shut on clutching fingers, severing two that seemed from their appearance to come from different hands.
The phone was ringing. He hurried across the room and picked it up.
“Hello?” he said.
“Dr. Cadbury? Richard? Is that you?” It was the senior supervisor at the lab, Graham Theaker, but his voice was so high-pitched and his diction so broken that it took Cadbury a moment to identify who was speaking.
“Hello, Theaker,” he said. “The most astonishing thing is happening. I wonder if you’re aware of it?”
“Aware of it? Dear God, Richard, it’s—it’s the end of the world! It’s the apocalypse! The—the dead! The dead are coming back to life to devour the living!”
“I know that, Theaker. They’ve been talking about it on the news. And when I tried to get into the lab half an hour ago I saw what had happened to Sheila.”
“Sheila.” Theaker sounded close to tears. “She has three children. Sweet Jesus, if she’s spread the infection to them…”
“Is it an infection?” Cadbury inquired. “I wasn’t aware that any explanation had been generally accepted yet.”
Theaker didn’t seem to have heard him. “But it’s not just Sheila, Richard, it’s everyone. Almost. Almost everyone. Dr. Herod. Lowther. Alan…”
“Alan?”
“The intern. He went into Dr. Herod’s office to deliver her mail. She bit him in the throat! He was able to get out of the room and lock her inside, but he died soon after from loss of blood. Or he … he seemed to die. We called for an ambulance, but nobody came. And then an hour or so later he stirred, and got back up again. Harrison had to strike his head off with a fire axe. It was horrible. Horrible!”
“Yes, no doubt, no doubt,” Cadbury agreed. The bulk of his attention was already elsewhere, parsing the meaning of this strange apocalypse. That is, its meaning for himself, and for his dead wife. He tried to offer Theaker some solace, but really he just wanted the call to be over so he could pursue his thoughts to where they seemed to be leading. “You should turn on the TV,” he suggested, “or the radio. The government is coordinating local task forces to deal with the situation. It might be a few days before they get a handle on it, but they’re coming. I would imagine that the best way to survive is to remain in complete isolation until they arrive.”
“Isolation?” Theaker repeated.
“Absolutely. Stay at the lab. It’s more easily defended than your house. Go out once to secure some food and water, if you must, but then barricade yourself in and wait for the all-clear. Use the security shutters, so long as you can fit them without exposing yourself to risk.”
“Of course!” Theaker sounded energized now, and even hopeful. “And you’ll join me, Richard? If you drive your car right up to the doors—”
“I will be working from home,” Cadbury said. “Goodbye, Theaker, and good luck.”
He hung up the phone. When it started to ring again he first ignored it and then unplugged it at the wall. He had work to do.
Obtaining a specimen was the first order of business, and it wasn’t hard. The lurchers converged on the living without hesitation, and every such encounter left casualties. There was a window of time, some few hours, before these casualties underwent the same metamorphosis as their killers. Cadbury cruised around the neighborhood until he found a dead man lying at the curbside. He quickly bound the man’s hands with kitchen twine and muzzled him—after a fashion—with wire mesh taken from a garden center, the loose ends twisted together with pliers.
He drove home with the dead man in the trunk of his car. He didn’t open the trunk until the car was in the garage with the roll-over door drawn down and locked. By that time the dead man was no longer dead. He was squirming and writhing in the trunk, trying to break free of his bonds. Cadbury considered trying to remove him and secure him to a workbench, but thought the risk too great. He got out his circular saw instead and removed the man’s head directly. There was less mess than he expected, possibly because of postmortem changes to the viscosity of the man’s blood. It had not coagulated completely but it had thickened to the consistency of molasses.
Cadbury took the head into his basement, which he had long ago converted into a laboratory both for his own pet projects and for unofficial overtime. He excised the brain and examined its structures on a microscopic level with growing fascination.
They were, for the most part, no longer viable. The brain had already begun to decay, but it seemed that with the quickening back to life that process had been arrested. Even within a head that had been severed from its body, the brain was inexplicably drawing—from the syrupy blood, or the ambient air, or some storehouse as yet unidentified—the nourishment it needed to keep itself alive.
But that word seemed tendentious, in Cadbury’s opinion. Like its opposite, dead, it assumed a binary system in which all things that were not in group (a) must be in group (b). But the risen dead were anomalous. They had a tithe, a fraction of what might be called life, rather than the whole complex extravaganza of thought and feeling, selfhood and sentience. The minds of these revenants should have shut down entirely: instead they were open just a crack, like the door of a child’s room at night before the child has accustomed himself to the dark.
For his second sample he did not remove the head. He searched for a small and manageable corpse, and found one at last after two hours of driving around. She was a woman of very slight build. She began to stir to life while Cadbury was binding her, which was alarming but fortunately not fatal. He was able to keep her pinioned with one knee on her chest while he tied her arms, and then to wrap the mesh around her mouth from behind. She bit him in the hand despite all his precautions, but he was wearing thick gardening gloves and the bite did not break the skin.
With the woman bound in a chair in his basement he measured the electrical flow through her brain using a device of his own manufacture—an encephalometer. He found that most aspects of brain function were no longer present. Instead of the rich three-dimensional ebb and flow of charge, the endlessly rewoven tapestry of neural connectivity, there was a single cyclical pulse. A powerful stimulus endlessly repeated, like the radio signals sent out by pulsars.
Cadbury remembered the old saw: the fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing. The risen dead were not cunning. They were not versatile. The panoply of human response had been pared down in them to one impulse, one behavior. It was a minimal, utilitarian sort of resurrection.
Was it, though, in any sense, elective? Could a man enter that state of his own volition, and control his immersion into it?
He thought of Lorraine, awake in the earth, alone. Of his own life, in the free air but still no less entombed. This situation, he felt, was not supportable. He had to go to her. But there was no point in embracing her if she saw no more in him than a warm meal.
Five cadavers later, Cadbury took his research from the universal to the personal. He constructed a machine whose business end was a plastic bucket with layers of padded latex covering most of its open end. He could thrust his head into the bucket and then seal it by means of an adjustable metal collar into which the overlapping pleats of latex were gathered. Oxygen could then be extracted from the air within the bucket by means of a Jessom-Simmonds filter and an electrically operated pump.
The hardest part was the timer. Cadbury needed to be able to calibrate it very finely, but also to adjust it in use without being able to see the numbers on the dial (because his head would be inside the bucket). He taught himself the rudiments of braille and labeled the dial with carefully placed dots of hardened resin.
Over the next two days he subjected himself to 182 near-death experiences. Each was unique, minutely different from the others either in the percentage of oxygen depleted from the air or in the duration of the ensuing suffocation.
His head began to throb after only a dozen of these self-inflicted ordeals, but he did not falter. He made notes, at first in his usual meticulous hand but then in an increasingly messy and uncoordinated scrawl. Orthography was the least of his worries. After the blood vessels in his eyes began to burst it became harder and harder to see what he was writing.
You can’t make an omelette, he reminded himself stoically, without breaking a few eggs. He was the egg, in this scenario. He broke himself time after time, and charted the damage with precision. The encephalometer became his map, and his holy writ. He squinted at its endless printouts with his head tilted back almost to the horizontal, the angle that seemed optimal for what was left of his erratic vision.
The dividing line, he finally decided, was three minutes and fifteen seconds at an eight percent oxygen saturation. The encephalometer’s readout showed a progressive simplification of neuronal activity from two minutes and forty seconds onward. He had ventured as far as three minutes and five seconds and come back—but only just.
He had actually felt the change. The replacement of his brain’s complex staging of past, present, and future, real and counterfactual, felt and believed, with a single bellowing hunger. But he had still been himself. The bellowing was a din through which he could still hear, a splash of hypersaturated red through which he could see. And think. And be.
Ten more seconds, then, to take him up onto that knife-edge, but not over it.
The lab had a van with a portable generator. Cadbury ventured out and requisitioned it. He saw Theaker watching from one of the upstairs windows. The man did not look well. He waved frantically at Cadbury and tried to get the window open to shout down to him, but by the time he had done so Cadbury was inside the van and driving away. He had nothing to say to Theaker, and no interest in hearing what Theaker had to say to him.
The generator was not at maximum charge, but it would be more than adequate for his purposes. Cadbury loaded the van with his suffocation device, as well as a shovel, a screwdriver, a crowbar, and a double-barreled shotgun. He hoped he would not have to use either of these last two, but it was as well to be prepared.
He drove to the cemetery. There was a parking area just inside the open gates but he ignored it, taking the van up over the cement shoulder and in among the graves. It was difficult to navigate here, the way very narrow, but he needed to have the generator close at hand for what came next.
The lurchers were an additional hazard. They were very numerous here, for whatever reason, and they did not move as the van bore down on them. He felt their bodies crunching under the wheels, the van rising and falling as it rode on over them.
He pulled in at last, right beside the familiar headstone. LORRAINE MARGARET CADBURY, it read, followed by two dates and a platitude. SHE IS BUT SLEEPING. He hoped with all his heart that was a lie. That Lorraine was wide awake, and waiting for him.
He opened the door and stepped out. All the lurchers in the vicinity immediately swiveled and headed in his direction. He took out as many as he could. A head shot was required to dispatch them, and a head shot could not always be managed. Before the vanguard got close enough to be a threat he got back into the van and decamped to another spot, a hundred yards away.
The lurchers followed, and Cadbury saw off another half dozen as they lumbered toward him. Again he got back into the van before any of them were close enough to be a danger, and again he relocated. He repeated the maneuver seven more times before he had finally cleared the area.
He returned to Lorraine’s grave and set himself to dig.
This physical labor was the hardest part of the whole procedure. He was unused to using his hands to manipulate anything heavier than a pipette, and the effort told on him. Before long he was panting and sweating, his hands trembling and his shoulders aching from the unaccustomed effort.
Did the lurchers hunt by scent? He did not believe so, but it was an unnerving thought. He might be taken as he toiled in the deepening hole, unable to escape to the van before he was overrun.
But his luck held. By five in the afternoon or so he had completely uncovered the coffin. Moreover, he discovered to his intense relief that the screws were largely pristine. If they had rusted he would have been forced to resort to the crowbar, prizing the casket open by main strength and damaging it in the process.
As it was, a few minutes sufficed to remove all six screws. Long before he had finished he could hear the faint scrabbling from inside the coffin. He threw open the lid and beheld her, his lost love.
Cadbury was a realist when it came to physical processes, and he was not squeamish. He had prepared himself mentally for what he was about to see. There was therefore no moment of shock or resistance. If anything he was amazed at how recognizable Lorraine still was. Wasted, of course, and decayed, with her face sunken in and more of her hair lying on the white silk behind her head than on her scalp. A gray fungal growth on the left side of her chin made her look, strangely, as though she had decided in death to sport a beard but had trimmed it too recklessly.
Her upper body squirmed as she tried unsuccessfully to raise herself. Nine months dead, her muscles were too atrophied and eaten away to support and animate her frame, meager and hollowed out though it was. Her eyelids fluttered but could not close over the dry, sunken pits of her eyes.
“Lorraine,” he said. “It’s me, Richard.” He did not know if she could understand him. He presumed not. But he did not wish to intrude on her privacy without announcing himself.
He set the dials. Eight percent. Three minutes and fifteen seconds. He slid the bucket over his head and pressed the switch. The van’s generator chugged and the pump hummed, industriously extracting oxygen from the air circulating around his mouth.
The descent seemed to take much longer than it had the other times. Perhaps, though, that was merely because this time he had an actual destination. His head began to pound around the end of the second minute. His lungs sucked helplessly for sustenance that would not come. A wave of dizziness compelled him to sit down, and then to lie full length on the ground.
The third minute was an eternity; the final fifteen seconds longer still. His last, failed breath was drawn out unfeasibly, his chest taut and quivering, until the muffled ding of the bell announced that his time was up.
He struggled out of the helmet. It took a long time: he could barely remember where the fastenings were, or how they worked. His thoughts passed through his brain like flotsam bobbing on a sluggish tide.
But Cadbury had measured the time and the saturation to a nicety. He had dosed himself with death, as a man might dose himself with penicillin. He was one of the reanimated now, yes, but he was still himself. His descent into death had been a series of progressively longer immersions, all of them under his own control. His resurrection was the same.
Piecemeal.
Fragmented.
Mediated.
He felt the stirrings of the all-consuming hunger that defined the rest of the risen, but it did not overwhelm him. He could think through it, though it took a vast effort and a vast time. He remembered himself, and his purpose.
Slowly he stood. He advanced to the lip of the grave and lowered himself into it, taking care not to step on Lorraine in the narrow, confined space.
He squeezed in beside her, gradually and gently.
As he had hoped, she did not respond to him as food now. He was of the dead, as she was—at least to the point where his proximity did not stir her appetites.
He tried to speak to her, to tell her not to be afraid, but speech was no longer available to him. Though he could form the words, he had no breath to push them out into the world. They lay on his tongue, which vibrated with stillborn syllables.
He lowered the lid of the casket.
He settled himself into as commodious a position as he could find, on his side so that he took up less space and did not press against Lorraine in a way that might be constraining. Her body stirred softly against his. Perhaps she was still trying to raise herself up, but he thought not. The movement had nothing of urgency about it. Rather it seemed that, like him, she was making herself comfortable.
Goodnight, my love, he said. There was no sound, only the flexing of his throat and the rise and fall of his tongue against his palate.
He found her hand, and held it. He closed his eyes.
Eternity passed, on the whole, very pleasantly.