“What was it really called?”
“Necrotic hysteria.”
“Wow. That’s quite something…”
“Or death-shock, if you read the newspapers.”
“So they associated it with the outbreak?”
“That’s right. Somehow they decided the dead coming back to life made people go round the bend. Wonder where they got that idea from.”
“Was it widespread?”
“Lot of people came down with it during the first outbreak. You could tell. They stopped fighting, just stared all the time. Lot of them got mistaken for revenants.”
“That sounds more like ordinary shock…”
“Well, probably was. But it kept happening after the outbreak. People who got through without a scratch did the same thing.”
“Yes. Sometimes the extreme cases are like that. In some species, anyway.”
“Well, I didn’t get it.”
“The extreme cases are just the tip of the iceberg. Did you have any particularly harrowing experiences during the first outbreak?”
“The dead got up and ate the living, what did you think I was having, happy little daydreams?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know what you did. I don’t know what a normal day would have been like.”
“I was in the Coroner Corps. We went house to house. If someone answered, we searched it for revenants. If no one was there, we broke down the door and searched for revenants. Either way we found ’em.”
“How old were you?”
“Twenty. Twenty year old girl with a revolver and a couple of marines behind me and they were the ones shitting themselves. The marines were supposed to protect me from the living. I was supposed to figure out who was dead and put down the ones that were. Never worked out like that.”
“So you had to kill. And not just revenants?”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
“And there was nothing… nothing especially bad?”
She sat there for a while. “You don’t want to know.”
“Is it difficult to talk about?”
“Of course it’s bloody difficult.”
“I’d understand if you couldn’t. It’s a common symptom.”
“I don’t have any bloody symptoms. It’s—” She pursed her lips. “Have you ever killed anyone?”
“No.”
“Then you don’t know. What’s the point of telling you?”
“I’d like to know.”
“Yeh? You sure about that?”
“Yes.”
“Balls.”
“If you don’t have any symptoms, then what’s the harm?”
She narrowed her eyes. “I was at Tanymouth. You’ve never even heard of it…”
“No. I’m afraid not.”
“Well it didn’t give me any damned death-shock!”
“What happened at Tanymouth? Is that where you got your reflexes?”
“I already had reflexes,” she said, glancing down at my bruised arm.
“So what happened?”
She pursed her lips again. She didn’t want to say. But she couldn’t help looking down at my arm once more as I looked back with utter sympathy. Perhaps it was a feeling of obligation that motivated her, or just the sense she was backed into a corner. After a moment, she began.
“We were going up the coast, the Kernow coast, right? Village after village, little ports all the way along, places they’d been smuggling for centuries so they didn’t like the look of us, didn’t like anyone in a uniform. The navy put us and the marines ashore and they were all the same: no cholera here, ma’am, we closed the gates and didn’t let it in. Balls. They let it in all right — let it in from the sea. Them and their mates in Gaul were back and forth across the Channel the whole time. They were spreading the damn cholera, not hiding from it. So we weren’t any too gentle when we found what they were hiding in the cellar. Cholera killed ’em, and then the revenation bug brought them back, and their families thought they could hide the stink with rosewater and garlic.
“So that was it, one after the other for weeks. I put down hundreds of the bastards before we even got to Tanymouth, and I didn’t get any death-shock from that.”
“But then there was Tanymouth.”
“Yeh. The big town, the real port. Proper customs house and navy cutters in and out all the time. It was supposed to be safe, do you understand? Revenants were still crawling across the moors but Tanymouth was supposed to be keeping them out and staying clean.
“It wasn’t clean. Not one bit. They’d had the cholera, same as everyone else, probably the navy bringing it in. They’d kept it quiet and hidden all the sick ones far as they could from the harbour. Any sailors that revenned on shore got put down properly, but they weren’t letting it happen to their own. They thought we had a cure, only we were keeping it for the rich folks in the capital — typical Kernish.
“We went ashore on leave, until we saw all the things we’d seen coming down the coast. People not looking us in the eye. The odd one running off all of a sudden to warn someone. And that smell in the air, you don’t know that smell — not the revenants but the cholera. Do you know what cholera does? It makes you shit yourself trying to get rid of it, only you shit water and you end up dying of dehydration. The stink was everywhere.
“And then a couple of marines heard the moans. It’s never screaming with the revenants, they bloody moan. Like damned children can’t get what they want, only what they wanted was human flesh.
“We pulled all the marines out of the taverns and whorehouses and had the townsfolk off the streets in an hour. Men posted at every crossroads to make sure of it so we could start on the house to house. But we thought we’d give ’em a chance, so we went down to the town hall to see the mayor and corporation and ask them what was what and give ’em a chance to come clean.
“The mayor and the councillors came out into the courtyard and gave us all the nonsense: no, no cholera in the town ma’am, no revenants neither, we kept it all in the hospital. We listened to all of that and told ’em how it was going to be: we were searching every house and there was curfew until it was done. We told them to get inside and we’d search them last.
“They went in like good little mice and locked the gates behind them. And that was when it began. Just moans at first, and you couldn’t hear where they came from because they were coming from all round. It was a trap. They knew we’d find them out eventually. They weren’t giving up a single one of their dead, not while they thought we had a secret cure we weren’t giving them because they were Kernish. They used them instead. They had them in sanatoriums all round the town, just warehouses and the like, and they opened them up all at once. There were four hundred of us, Coroner Corps and marines on the streets, and two thousand revenants coming down every road from every direction — they must have been taking them in from the villages nearby as well, like as not they all had relatives in town and that’s where they ran when it started. And we had our men stationed on every street corner so they got surrounded by the bastards, and the townsfolk came out as well with whatever weapons they’d had hidden away. We must have lost a hundred men before we realised what was happening. We tried running for the harbour, but the revenants were swarming there because they’d seen all the marines and sailors on the docks. The dreadnought, Indefatigable it was called — hah! — they’d cast off and were halfway out the harbour by then. Revenants were falling off the docks trying to get to the ship, sailors on board were shooting them as they went, probably the only decent thing the navy did that day.
“So we ran for the main square. Taney Square. Anywhere we could get the space for a decent firing line and form a schiltron, not that we had the ammunition for that but what else were we going to do? The marines were splendid — straight there and forming up, getting the bastards as they trickled in but it was never going to be a trickle for long. There were only a dozen of us from the Coroner Corps in the square, all we had was pistols and not many rounds for those. We saved it for when they got close — keep the revenants off the boys with the rifles, that was the word.