The Living Dead 2 (The Living Dead, #2)(152)

He checked in on Nathan as he passed the living room door. The boy looked bad. His legs and feet were swollen and bruised. His skin had an unnatural blue-green hue and one corner of his mouth hung open. A dribble of stringy, yellow-brown saliva trickled steadily down his chin, staining his favorite football shirt.

“Okay son?” Simon asked, having to remind himself how to talk again. Nathan slowly lifted his head and looked over in the general direction of his father.

“Bored.”

“Just sit there for a bit,” he said between breaths as he carried on down the hall. “Mum and I will work out what we’re going to do.”

Janice’s appearance caught him by surprise. She’d changed her clothes and was wearing a dress she’d bought yesterday.

“Might as well get some wear out of it,” she said.

“You look nice,” he said automatically, even though she didn’t. Always compliment your wife, he thought, even in death. Truth was, the way she looked made him feel uneasy. By squeezing herself into such a tight, once-flattering dress, she’d highlighted the extent to which her body had already changed. Her ankles were bruised and bloated like Nathan’s (because the blood which was no longer being pumped around her body was pooling there—he’d learnt that online) and her belly was swollen (most probably with gas from countless chemical reactions—he’d learnt that online too). Her once-pert breasts hung heavy and unsupported like two small, sagging sacks of grain. She lurched into the light and, just for a second, Simon was thankful for the frozen, expressionless mask that death had given him and which hid his true reaction.

Janice looked grotesque. She’d covered her face in a thick layer of concealer which appeared even more unnatural than the jaundiced tinge of decay her skin had shown previously. She’d applied mascara (managing to coat her eyeballs more than her eyelashes), eyeshadow and lipstick with clumsy hands, leaving her looking more like a drunken clown than anything else. He didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing.

“Just want to feel normal again,” she said. “Just because I’m dead, doesn’t mean I have to forget who I am.”

For a moment the two of them stared at each other in silence, standing and swaying at opposite ends of the room.

“Been trying to find out what’s going to happen,” Simon told her.

“What do you mean?”

“What’s going to happen to us. How bad things will get before…”

Janice moved unexpectedly. She didn’t want to hear this. She headed for the dishwasher which she hadn’t emptied since they’d died.

“Don’t want to know…”

“Need to think about it. Got to be ready for it.”

“I know,” she wheezed. She squinted in frustration at the white china plate she held in her hand. It was dirty again now that she’d picked it up but she put it away in the cupboard anyway. “How long will we have before…?”

“Depends,” he said, anticipating the end of her question. “Could be six months. Need to keep the house cool, stay dry…”

She nodded (although her head didn’t move enough to notice), stopped unloading, and leant heavily against the nearest cupboard.

“We’re lucky really,” Simon said, pausing to take another deep breath of air. “Six months is a long time to have to say goodbye.”





By mid-afternoon the street outside the house was an unexpected mass of clumsy, chaotic movement. More and more dead people had dragged themselves out into the open as the day had progressed. Simon thought he recognized some of them, although they were pale shadows of who they used to be.

What were they hoping to achieve out there? Surely they must have realized by now that the situation was beyond hope? No one’s going to help you, he thought. You can’t cure death or make it any easier—these people needed to get a grip and get back indoors. Some of them began to squabble and fight, unable to react to their impossible situation in any other way. Most, though, simply staggered around aimlessly.

Simon watched them all walking in the same clichéd, slothful way—shuffling and stumbling, legs inflexible, arms stiff and straight. That was one thing those horror film people got right, he decided. They were out by a mile with just about every other aspect of how they’d imagined the dead would reanimate, but they’d got the painfully slow and clumsy zombie walk spot-on.

Zombies, he thought to himself, smiling inwardly. What am I thinking? He cursed himself for using such a stupid word. He wasn’t a zombie, and neither were Janice or Nathan.

Where was Nathan?

Janice was in the kitchen, still cleaning and fussing pointlessly, but he hadn’t seen Nathan for a while. He tried shouting for him but he couldn’t make his voice loud enough to be heard. The boy wasn’t anywhere downstairs and Simon couldn’t face the long climb up to check his room. He lurched into the kitchen.

“Where Nathan?”

Janice stopped brushing her lank, greasy hair and looked up.

“Thought you with him?”

Simon walked past his dead wife and headed for the utility room at the far end of the kitchen. Using the walls and washing machines for support, he hauled himself along the narrow passageway and looked up. The back door was wide open. The whole house would no doubt be freezing cold but, as they were no longer able to feel the temperature, humidity, air pressure, or anything else, neither of them had noticed. He squinted into the distance and thought he could see Nathan near the bottom of their long garden. There was definitely something moving around down there….