Alice used to be my best friend. We were in the same class at school. We used to do each other’s hair and borrow each other’s clothes until one night when we were both sixteen, and everything changed.
The details don’t matter now. All you need to know is we were at a party in a basement, and we both snorted something that we thought was cocaine, but it wasn’t.
The next thing I remember is waking up in the hospital with everyone telling me it was a miracle I was alive because the other girl was dead.
There’d been a story in the local paper a couple of months earlier about a guy who’d collapsed in the park. He was declared dead on arrival at the hospital and was taken to the hospital mortuary. A few hours later, he woke up.
No one thought much about it at the time, everyone just assumed he’d been mistakenly declared dead when he was actually in a coma. These things happen. Not often-and never before in the kind of place where nobody dies without the whole town knowing about it-but they happen.
The man hadn’t spoken once since waking; they said he just stared into space.
I remember they interviewed some expert on the news who used a lot of big words just to say sometimes it’s like that when you wake up from a coma.
Alice had been dead a little over twenty-four hours when she opened her eyes. Like the guy before her, she never spoke or reacted to anyone or anything; she just seemed to stare into the distance as if she was looking at something no one else could see.
A few weeks later they sent her home, saying there was nothing they could do.
I wasn’t that well myself-as everyone kept reminding me, I was lucky to be alive-but I went to visit Alice every day. We would sit in her room with me talking and her staring straight ahead as if I wasn’t there. And every day as I left, her mother would beg me to come back again tomorrow: “You’re her best friend. Keep talking to her; maybe you can bring her back.”
When a forty-nine-year-old man named Sam Jenkins woke up the morning after he’d died of a heart attack, people finally began to suspect that something strange was going on. This man was definitely dead, the doctors insisted. They were being especially careful about who they declared dead these days; Sam Jenkins had been repeatedly checked-and double-checked-for any signs of life, and his body had been cold when they finally allowed it to be taken to the mortuary.
Like the previous two people to wake in the hospital mortuary, Sam Jenkins never spoke. Unlike the other two, Sam Jenkins had risen naked from his mortuary slab, walked home without being noticed (it was four a.m. and the streets were empty), and got into bed beside his wife.
By the time Rosemary Harold died of cancer, they’d decided the problem must be something to do with the mortuary, so they kept her body upstairs. This didn’t make any difference; Rosemary was awake the next day.
Then everyone thought maybe it was something to do with dying in the hospital, so-as much as possible-people started dying at home. Once again, no difference. They all opened their eyes within twenty-four hours.
People eventually came to the conclusion that the problem was the town-as far as anyone knew, this wasn’t happening anywhere else-so the next time someone died, the body was immediately shipped to another state. But the guy still woke up. The other state wouldn’t allow him to stay-they said it was not their taxpayers’ responsibility to support another state’s walking dead-so he was brought back here.
Soon the dead fell into a routine of spending their afternoons in the park. You’d see them there from one o’clock every day, sometimes sitting on benches with their faces tilted up to the sun, other times just standing in a kind of loose formation. And every day at dusk they would go their separate ways, returning to the homes they’d known in life.
Some, like Alice, were obviously cared for by the living. Alice’s mother always made sure that her clothes were clean and her hair was combed.
But others were not so comfortable with their dead. On finding her husband in bed with her, Sam Jenkins’ widow had at first moved into the spare room, but having a dead man in the house soon became too much for her and she changed the locks, with the result that her dead husband spent his nights standing on the front lawn. It was around this time that I first heard the word “zombie” being used.
The first thing that happens when the dead start waking is not that they go on a rampage like you see in the movies, it’s that you find out all your insurance policies are worthless. Sam Jenkins had a life insurance policy with his wife as the beneficiary, but the insurance company refused to pay out because they said Sam didn’t meet their definition of dead.
Then Alice’s mother got a huge bill from the hospital because her daughter-being officially deceased-was no longer covered by her health insurance.
The second thing that happens is property values plummet. Sam Jenkins’ widow, unable to pay the mortgage, tried putting the house up for sale. But nobody wants to buy a house with a dead man standing on the lawn. Even if-like Sam’s widow-you try to make the dead man a selling point by explaining he deters burglars.
The third thing that happens is church attendances rise. The fourth thing is they fall again as everyone comes to the conclusion there’s no point in worrying about the afterlife if you’re only going to spend it hanging around the park.
The fifth thing is all the jobs go, as businesses tend to prefer locations where the dead stay dead.
The next thing that happens is the town itself begins to die as everyone who can get away gets as far away as possible, until the only people left are the dead and those few who refuse to abandon them.
Sometimes I go to the park and watch the dead together. Despite being all different ages and backgrounds, they seem at ease in each other’s company.
The silence of the dead when faced with the living can seem awkward, but when the dead are together, their silence is a comfortable one, their blank faces not so much vacant as serene.
And though their faces are far from expressive, I was there one day as a newly deceased came to join them for the first time, and I am sure I saw recognition in their eyes.
Five years ago, there were more than three thousand people in this town. Now there are less than three hundred. As the town’s living population continues to move away, more of the dead are being left to fend for themselves.
With no one to dress them or comb their hair, some of them were getting into quite a state until a woman named Hilary Frentzen stepped in. The first thing Hilary did was to get a shelter built so the dead would have somewhere to get out of the rain. Then she set up a charitable foundation to collect donations of food and clothing, which she distributes in the park.
The dead do eat, just not a lot. Every day Hilary hands out slices of day-old bread donated by supermarkets, and watches as the dead take one or two bites and then scatter the rest on the ground for the pigeons. Of course the pigeons-being dead themselves since the town council poisoned them all a couple of years ago-are no more interested in the bread than they are. Not even the insects are that interested since the park was sprayed, so every day before she leaves, Hilary picks up the leftovers.
She’s tried giving them vegetables, but the dead won’t touch them. If you ask her, she’ll tell you that no matter how hard she tries, she cannot get the dead to eat broccoli.
Once, as an experiment, Hilary bought a dozen chocolate cakes and took them to the park. The dead didn’t leave a single crumb behind. She told me she can’t afford to do that every day, but now once every month or so, she’ll buy them some chocolate cakes as a special treat. (Even dead wasps perk up at the smell of chocolate, which is another reason she doesn’t bring it too often.)