Noir (14 page)

“It didn’t happen to you,” lied McNihil. “You didn’t fade.” The impulse hit him, to sweep the rapidly dulling trash from the table with his forearm. “You’re still beautiful.”

She smiled indulgently. “In my way, I suppose.” She put the cigarette to her pale lips, though the smoke wasn’t drawn in, trickling slowly by her ashen cheek instead. “How does the old poem have it? The Coleridge—is it ‘Life-in-Death’ or ‘Death-in-Life?’”

“I don’t remember.” Though in fact, he could hear some of the lines being recited in his head.
Her lips were red, her looks were free, / Her locks were yellow as gold: / Her skin was white as leprosy, / The nightmare Life-in-Death was she, / Who thicks man’s blood with cold
…. If McNihil looked at her in a hard way, without the blurring overlay of memory, that was what she reminded him of. It wasn’t pleasant; he preferred to let his
mental vision go subtly out of focus, to turn his head and see, from the corner of his eye, something closer to the woman who was alive in the unforgotten past.

“You didn’t come down here to discuss poetry. At least, not this time.” McNihil’s dead wife leaned an elbow on the wobbling table. Gray ashes drifted across the stricken lovers on the romance novels. “You’re in trouble, aren’t you?”

That was how it was, dealing with the dead; they always knew stuff. The virtue, the advantage of death; their vision wasn’t occluded, betrayed by simple things like memory, dreams, hope. McNihil wasn’t the first to discover that the dead were wired into cold reality, in a way that the living could never be.

The entire economy of the dead—the indeadted—and of the dead territory in which they existed, depended on that relationship. Which varied: there were high-functioning corpses such as McNihil’s wife, and low-level scrabblers such as the ones he had seen from the window of the train coming down here. A lot resulted from whatever shape the particular deceased was in when the reanimating transition was made. If some poor bastard had scoured out his neural pathways with various pharmaceuticals, reduced the cortex in his skull to a red sponge squeezed down to its last endorphins and catecholamines, then all the batteries and add-on sensors and motivational prods that could be retrofitted onto his chill-cased spinal column weren’t going to make him into anything more than a shambling scrap-picker. The little scattered herd of unfortunates out along the tracks used their low-grade but effective skills to pluck out recyclable metals or anything else of possible value from the rubbish heaps that the garbage-laden trains dumped off twice a day. Cheaper to let the idiot dead scavenge and collect, in their slow, hunched way, than spend the money for automated scanning machinery to do the same thing.

Which proved that being in trouble was a relative thing. McNihil felt an old horror, familiar enough to be almost comfortable, deep at the floor of his gut, when he saw the pickers and scavengers going about their black-fingered rounds, like crows minus even a bird’s intelligence. But they didn’t seem to mind it. Rooting around for scraps of aluminum foil, the still-shiny tracings off busted circuit boards, probably didn’t even bring in enough to service the interest on whatever debt load they had died carrying. “Died” in that other world, the one the
officially living inhabited. So most of them—short of coming across some lucky find, maybe an ancient collectible Lone Ranger and Trigger lunch-box at the bottom of some unexplored slag-pile—were actually just scrabbling themselves deeper into debt, becoming more truly indeadted with every bent-spined raking of splintered fingernails across the mulching discards of the world they were no longer part of.

They could go like that for decades, McNihil knew. With no cellular regeneration, the scavengers would wear away their hands against the corrosive, sharp-edged trash, until they were poking through it with the stumps of their forearms, their backs permanently fused into perfect half-circles. And beyond: dismaying rumors circulated, of the torsos of unlucky deadtors scrubbed free of all limbs, chests dryly flayed to breastbones and spidery ribs, the exposed batteries draining down to the last feeble amperage fraction.

“You shouldn’t think about these things,” said McNihil’s dead wife. She smiled; even when alive, before acquiring the skills that came with death, she’d been in the habit of reading his mind. “You’re just spooking yourself.”

“Sorry. Can’t help it.” Being in the territory of corpses made it difficult to put away the grim images. Of worse things yet, of poor bastards worn down to ragged skulls, trailing an umbilicus of batteries after them as they inched their way across the bleak landscape with little motions of their dirty-white jawbones. Digging out glittery bits of old gum wrappers with their eroded incisors, nudging like dung beetles their little wads of recyclable detritus to the redemption center at the zone’s border, making another meaningless nick at the tab they’d accumulated in that other, pre-death life. Like Marley’s ghost, dragging around a chain whose links were instead forged out of the enticing perishables of the cheap-’n’-nastiverse, bright junk like the stuff that McNihil had laid out on the table between himself and his wife.

“It’s not so bad.” The cigarette in her hand was half gone. “Don’t blame yourself. It’s the thought that counts.”

She was correct about that as well. As with so many things. This was why they were still married. What death could not put asunder: he had never stopped thinking about her, in love and guilt, even long after it would’ve been better for him to have done so. Though there were advantages to the arrangement as well, to having her dead and communicating. Better than a Ouija board, for getting messages from the other
side, he received the word face-to-face, rather than having to wonder if it came from his own imaginings.

“You’re right,” said McNihil. He had pulled the other chair out and sat down at the table, across from her. “I’m in trouble. More than usual.”

“The usual … that’s just what you bring on yourself.” His dead wife nodded slowly, thoughtfully. “Just from your usual bad attitude. For more than that, other people are required.”

Nothing he didn’t already know. Even who the other people were: McNihil had gotten on the train and come down here to the territory of the dead, even though he had an existing job to take care of, a favor for an old friend. Because he needed to find out what the deal was with Harrisch and all the rest of that DynaZauber bunch. Plus the mystery of how Travelt the rising young corporate junior exec had become that empty-eyed clay gazing up at the ceiling. If all that hadn’t been the most interesting thing in the world to McNihil before, it stood a good chance of going that way.

“I don’t need analysis of my personal shortcomings right now.” McNihil laid his forearms across the tabletop, leaning toward her, close enough to see into the little black
’s of her eyes, but not close enough for a kiss. “Tell me something else.”

“If you want to know about the trouble you’re in …” His dead wife gave a shrug. “It’d be simpler to just wait. You’ll find out soon enough.”

“Probably so. But I’d rather know right now.”

“Why?” The same question she always asked, whenever her still-living husband came here, wanting to find out things. “Now … or then … what difference does it make?”

“You’re forgetting.” It was McNihil’s turn to give a little indulgent smile. “Where I just came from, time still matters. One way or another. That’s why they call it
timing
. These people I’m dealing with … I just don’t want to be caught surprised by them.”

She shook her head. “You poor thing. Someday … you’ll be over all that.”

The way she said it, gently, with pity and no malice, chilled the sweat on his skin. “Maybe so,” said McNihil, after a moment. “But in the meantime … it’s like I said. I’ve still got to take care of business.”

“And like I said. You poor thing.”

No reply from him; all McNihil had to do at this moment was wait. In a small dark room, in a house in dead territory, a declining construct
that had been abandoned by the living a long time ago. Abandoned, then reinhabited, taken over by the dead.
Who take over everything
, thought McNihil,
eventually
. The prefab walls leaked formaldehyde, appropriately enough; the windows cracked beneath layers of dust; some archaic god of burials alone knew what was in the closets of the bedrooms down the hall. McNihil had been here before, sitting at this table in a kerosene lantern’s pool of light; he had waited then as he waited now. What was the point in trying to hurry the dead?

His dead wife closed her eyes. The cigarette had burned down close to the backs of her fingers; McNihil leaned forward and plucked it away, then ground the stub out against the table leg beside him. She didn’t appear to notice what he’d done, just as she wouldn’t have noticed her dead flesh being singed by the small fire. There were already a couple of careless burn marks between her knuckles. As with the others inhabiting this territory, her sense of pain, the boundary between herself and the dead world around her, had dwindled almost to the point of nonexistence.

That was McNihil’s own personal theory of how dead knowledge, the knowingness of the dead, worked: they had given up the useless distinctions between themselves and any other thing, so they were open to all the information, raw and unfiltered, in the dead world and the living. A salvageable gum wrapper buried in street muck was as evident to their percept systems as the prick of a knifepoint against their cold skin. It was a characteristic of the dead, to be so well connected, to be wired into everything. Only the living maintained defenses and filters and immune systems, tried to unhook and disconnect themselves from the world; an attempt that was doomed to failure, inasmuch as they would all wind up as ashes or worm food eventually, or at least if they were lucky. But a brave and necessary attempt, regardless.

“They’ve been leaning on you,” said McNihil’s dead wife, “for a long time now.” She spoke without opening her eyes, the cold, battery-juiced brain behind the bruised eye sockets tuned into frequencies faint and invisible as radio waves. “Putting the pressure on. For you to do something for them.”

McNihil knew where she was getting that much from.
Right out of my head
, he thought. She’d been wired into there even before she’d died. Perhaps a little more tightly now; “leaning on you” was his language,
not hers. That mirror-gazing effect was something to be expected when hanging out with the deceased.

“I know that.” McNihil regarded the stubbed-out cigarette butt at his fingertips. “Just about everyone in the world seems to.”

A scowl creased his dead wife’s brow. “Something about a corpse?” She tilted her head, as though listening to a ghost’s whisper. “A real one, I mean. Really dead.”

“Yeah, and not going to move around anymore, either.” McNihil tossed the cigarette butt onto the floor, with all the others scattered there. His wife’s housekeeping, as he’d noticed before, had gone all to hell since her death. “Even if this Travelt guy—that’s the corpse’s name, by the way—even if he’d been in debt when he was croaked, they wouldn’t have been able to power him up, get him walking and talking again.” The finance companies and loan sharks monitored their debtors’ health, even to the point of radio-tagging their vital signs with detector implants; that way, their postmortem surgical teams could swoop in on someone who’d died with an account in arrears and splice in the thermal packs and batteries before the cortex decayed into unrecoverable mush.
Really and truly dead
, mused McNihil. Lucky bastard Travelt had died with money in the bank; lucky for him, too bad for Harrisch and the rest of his executive-suite cronies, who could’ve otherwise pumped Travelt’s animated corpse for the answers as to how he’d died.

“Hard luck for you as well,” said McNihil’s dead wife.

“Yeah …” He nodded. “If they’d been able to get the info straight from the corpse’s mouth, they wouldn’t have had to come around and bother me. It’s not as if I wanted to get dragged into this sorry-ass loop.”

“Oh, no—” She opened her dark-filled eyes, gazing straight at him. “It’s not because of the corpse. That wasn’t the start of it all. They wanted you even
before
he died.”

McNihil said nothing. He leaned back in the chair, letting his own brain silently pick away at what he’d just been told. This was something new, something he hadn’t known or even suspected before.

“Why should you have known about it?” The dead woman continued her calm regard. “They wanted you, but they hadn’t come round for you yet. But as soon as they had a reason to …”

“Not a reason.” McNihil gave another slow nod. “You mean, an excuse.”

His dead wife shrugged, bones visibly articulating beneath the surface of her skin. “Whatever.”

It put a different light on things, he had to admit. If his wife was right—and McNihil had no call to doubt her, and plenty for belief—then the implications were even deeper and spookier than before. If Harrisch and the rest of DynaZauber had been scheming on him, trying to find a way to drag him into its net, then Travelt’s death was suspiciously convenient.
And not just the poor sonuvabitch’s death
, thought McNihil.
Everything leading up to it
.