Reset

People just keep dying. And dying. And dying again.

This is not the zombie apocalypse, but you can see it from here.

No, I don’t know how it’ll end.

#

We all remember how it began. Ordinary days. Ordinary lives. And then the dying started, out of nowhere, and for no reason anyone could see. People, young and old, sick, healthy, good and bad – they’d be fine one minute and then the person next to them would turn around and find them not breathing; their partner might walk back in from the kitchen to find a dead body sitting in the chair where the one they loved had been – chatting - just minutes ago.

And how? Why?

Tests showed nothing. And people panicked.

People had every reason to panic.

That wasn’t the worst of it though, the dying. It was the coming back that really fucked us over.

#

So, I remember this from my own life. My brother was one of the Unexplained Dead – we had to call them something, didn’t we?  He died while out drinking with some of his friends, happily laughing, reaching for one of the chips, and then suddenly just stretched out on the beer-sticky floor with his heart not beating anymore. Autopsy found nothing. Same as they never do.

“I’m sorry,” the doctor told me and Mum and Dad, “this is what’s happening now. It doesn’t seem as if the victims suffer.”

What it seemed, was that the world was going to end. Sooner or later, as the dying came to outpace the birthing. There were people already doing calculations: if we don’t find a cure for what’s happening here, the world’s population might have about fifty years, maybe sixty. There were other calculations that varied wildly either side of that.

But I digress.

Justin was gone. We’d all loved him. We held a funeral for him, we dressed in black, laid roses on a black-draped coffin, and stood in a snivelly huddle as they lowered that coffin into Justin’s final bed.

I put my arm around my mother, “We’ll get through. Honest, we will. We’ll come out the other side.”

And she just nodded, auto-bobbed her head, as if it was nice of me to say so, but what did it matter, really, now?

#

Then, three weeks later, he just came walking in.

Now, me and Justin, we’d been sharing the rent on an apartment. Nice enough place, small but tidy, decent-ish view, and the neighbours weren’t awful. So, it was me he ran into when he first came home. Me who looked up from the couch and could hardly believe what I was seeing.

“Justin, but-”

“What’s up sis?”

“You are.”

“It’s only eight.”

“No, I mean… I mean, out of your grave.”

“Huh?”

“Out of your grave. Out of the freakin’ coffin.”

“Have you been drinking?”

“Justin!” I buried my anger and terror and confusion in just hugging the crap out of him. I threw myself on top of him, bawling my eyes out promising that I loved him and he must never, never leave me like that again.

And Justin, entirely confused. He’d just come back from the pub…

“What’s the date today, Justin?”

“May 21^st.”

“The fuck it is.  June 17^th, you asshole.”

“What?”

“And in the meantime, you died and we buried you.”

“What?”

“I think there’s been some kind of dreadful misunderstanding, but I’ve no idea how it happened or what happened. It doesn’t make any sense. You’re not an asshole. Sorry. I’m just really freaking out.”

And it turned out a lot of people were doing that, because Justin wasn’t the only one to be reappearing, all resurrected and clueless, it was beginning to happen all over the world. The Unexplained Dead had become the Unexplained Reborn. They were returned from death as if nothing had happened, with no memories of how it had come about. Their bodies should have been in graves, but exhumations found coffins empty; the Reborn had no memories of what had happened to them, where they’d been – if been is even the right word – of being dead.

Nothing to remember?

Terrified speculation ran rife.

The likes of Justin became celebrities and pariahs, loved and hated and feared and studied.

“I feel normal,” Justin insisted.

“Well, you ain’t,” I said, and said often, until it started to be that he was normal. The death toll continued to mount, and the rebirth toll mounted with it. Too many to keep being celebrities, happening too often, too randomly, to more and more people. Justin and his kind stopped being shiny and new.

“For the best,” Justin said, always the one to take things in his stride, “I reckon I can safely mosey off down to the chip shop now.”

#

We were all kidding ourselves if we thought it was over.

Because the Unexplained Reborn became the Unexplained Redeceased. They died in droves. This all happening over several years now. It turned out that Unexplained Rebirth was temporary, and that the Unexplained Re-death was too.

A revolving door.

Justin died again six months after first coming back.

Five days later he was back on the doorstep.

And there were people who’d died four or five times.

I think the world record is currently sixteen; but that’s an outlier, the next closest is about ten.

What the fuck? That really is all I can think of to say to this.

#

It doesn’t stop.

And they study the crap out of it. Cut these bodies up, examine every inch. Leaving them lying under cameras, with witnesses next to them. They revive, they disappear, they reappear, and despite intense scrutiny we still don’t see it – our brains, or tech, it can’t wrap itself around what happens in that moment. Burn a body, cut it up, doesn’t matter. Your uncle Alfred is still going to come strolling back in the door as if nothing has happened.

And we don’t know why some and not others.

We don’t know if sooner or later it’ll be all of us.

“It’s great for my sex life,” Justin said.

“Ewww.”

“Well it is, it seems girls dig the resurrected.”

“It’s like doing it with a corpse.”

“Not really. Touch my hand; warm flesh. A pulse. Look, I’m as alive as you are. But some girls still think it’s sexy that I’ve been to the other side. Some of them even want to have my baby, just to see what it turns out like.”

They turn out like regular kids. There’s nothing different.

I said crossly, “Well, I find it scary. It creeps me out. I don’t mean that you do, but… it all feels wrong. I’m tense all the time just waiting for the moment when it’s me.”

“Don’t be,” he said, “it’s okay, really, I don’t remember anything, no pain, no flames, no angels, no nothing. I don’t know it’s even happened until somebody tells me it did.”

#

The dead don’t even have that any more.

The dying gets faster. And so does the rebirthing. It’s happening more and more now. People re-living for shorter and shorter. Popping up again like weeds.

And some… sometimes… subtle difference. Something in the eyes, or a kind of numbness in the skin. Some seem less than whole.

And the first few are starting to have memories. Just flashes, just glimpses. Things that are too small and confusing to put into words. Weird things. They don’t know where to start; and they don’t want to start. Just leave me alone for a while please, pass me that bottle if you don’t mind.

#

I woke up last night to that screaming sound. I ran into Justin’s bedroom. He was tearing at his cheeks with his fingernails. When I sat down on the bed beside him, he grabbed me and clung to me. “Don’t let them take me again, Oh God, don’t. Oh God, help me!”

When we spoke about it later, he didn’t remember what he’d dreamed, or what he’d said.

 

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work