Well, at least it wasn’t an expensive car.
And it was her fault. She used to make calls while driving all the time, but now that she was decomposing, her reflexes had slipped.
She pulled her car to a gas station on the other side of the intersection.
“My baby! You hurt my baby!” The other driver had neglected her car in the intersection and walked towards Melanie, despite the fact that traffic whizzed by them.
Melanie didn’t see a car seat in the other vehicle, but a bat-eared Chihuahua’s head peered out of the woman’s arms, and she realized the woman was talking about her dog.
How ridiculous. The woman had been in a car accident, just survived it, and she was worried about her stupid pet?
“I’m going to sue! My baby has whiplash!” The woman shook the dog at Melanie’s side window to demonstrate. “Do you hear me? Whiplash!”
Melanie turned the engine off and fumbled on the floorboards for her cell phone. She’d hoped she’d be able to get out of this without calling the cops, but that didn’t look like it was going to happen. She put on her sunglasses, unbuckled her seat belt, and opened the door.
“Eww!” the woman said audibly, as if Melanie stunk like old garbage. She put her hands to her nose, except she was still holding the dog, so it went too.
Melanie decided she didn’t like the Chihuahua woman. True, she hadn’t had a shower in a few days, but the woman was rude. “Get your car out of the road, so you don’t block traffic.”
“Oh, my God,” the woman said, in a horrified gasp. “Your face!”
“What?” Melanie wrenched the rear view mirror to inspect herself. The steering wheel had torn flesh away from her forehead, exposing bone. She almost cried. Her beautiful face, gashed open. Make-up wouldn’t fix that.
Her lip started to quiver, and her throat closed up as if she were about to sob. She had known this would happen someday—she was finally losing her looks.
The Chihuahua wriggled out of its owner’s grasp and scampered forward, its bark like the bark of a real dog played at 78rpm. When it reached Melanie’s leg, it chomped into her lower calf, shaking its head back and forth until it tore off a chunk. The rat-dog sank its teeth in, gnawing as though it had found a delectable morsel.
“Bitsy! Bitsy, stop it!” The woman picked up her Chihuahua and pulled the piece of flesh out of its mouth. “That’s dirty, don’t eat that.”
“Dirty!” Melanie wailed. That was it. She wasn’t going to deal with this bitch’s problems. Rat-dog woman would have to deal with the mess herself. “Screw you!”
She stormed off, crossing the street without even bothering to look for traffic. Cars screeched and honked, one missing her by inches, but she didn’t care. Peace and quiet, though…
Oh, and to find whoever had raised her from the dead, but since there weren’t any warlocks in her social circle, there was the horrifying possibility that it was an old boyfriend from high school or someone she barely even knew, but whoever it was, he could find her on his own.
She was done with living people. The living were so rude, so… judgmental about the least bit of decay.
She looked around, getting her bearings. She’d started driving without any goal in mind, and realized she’d driven north of Van Nuys, not too far from where she’d lived as a child. Hills rose ahead of her. She and her sister used to climb to the top of those hills to see the sunset when they were younger.
She took the crow’s path, cutting across lawns and parking lots and once over a chain-link fence despite a “No Trespassing” sign. What was the point of following city ordinances when you weren’t even obeying the laws of nature?
Flesh was falling off faster now. She’d been buried more than a week earlier, after all, and the temperatures had to be in the nineties. Flies clustered around her wound, each carrying off a small mouthful. She thought of them as lightening her load.
The tendons in her legs weren’t working as well as they had, and her gait slowed to a weary shuffle, but since she didn’t have to sleep or rest or eat (though she wouldn’t have minded a glass of wine) she was able to travel all afternoon and through the night. She didn’t mind.
By dawn she’d reached far enough up the hill that she could see pinkish light creep over the town. She carefully sat down, her back against the concrete support of a power line, and watched the sun rise.
Time ceased to have meaning. The sun rose and set, animals carried on their daily business, and the trees got older. Her flesh rotted away, her skin and eyes dried and shrunk, and her lips pulled back. Her hair stayed blonde, her teeth were still white and straight, and her breasts still defied gravity (those silicone implants would last forever) but she didn’t care much about that any more.
She’d grown lazy and peaceful, now that she didn’t have anyone to impress. Whatever magic animated her left her able to think and see, even without eyes and a brain. On the day her sister hiked up the hill, she was still able to wave.
Jessica was boyishly thin and dirty, hair hanging around her face in walnut-colored dreadlocks. She had loose cargo pants, a tiny tank top, and a haversack made of Guatemalan fabric with Peace Corp written on it. Her neck was hung with bone and shell beads strung on thongs, and she had lines on her face even though she was only in her mid-thirties. She was more beautiful than anything.
Jessica sat down next to her gracefully, not winded from the climb up the hill.
“Oh, my God,” Jess whispered. “I am so, so sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“No, I mean it. When I came back for the funeral, I had no idea. I mean, it was such a shock for me that you died in the first place, what with you being so young, and I completely forgot about the shaman. I’m sorry.”
“Really, Jessica, it’s okay.”
“You can yell, it’s okay, I deserve it. You must be so mad at me.”
“No. I’m not mad. I’m happy.” Jess was the only one who had been nice to Melanie since she died. How could she yell at someone who apologized to a corpse? “What happened?”
“It was this shaman, see, at least, he said he was a shaman, and he asked me if I wanted to live forever.” Jess sat cross-legged with her elbows on her knees, as though she were used to sitting on the ground. “I said no, but my sister would, because you once said you were more afraid of getting old than anything else. It was kind of a joke.”
Melanie waited for the rest of the story, but Jess stopped and leaned back. Melanie belatedly realized she’d been too silent. “Go on.”
“I thought he was kidding. He was kind of drunk, you know? And then as soon as I got home from the funeral, I got an email from you, and then from Brandon, saying that you’d been wandering around scaring people, and I realized I’d really screwed things up. It took a month or so before I could get my visa sorted out and come back to the States again, or I would have been here earlier.” Jess sighed. “I’m so sorry. It must have been horrible for you.”
“No, not bad.” Melanie said. It was getting harder to talk now that she didn’t have lips. “Happens to everyone.”
Jess pulled one of the bead and bone necklaces off. She laid it on the ground beside Melanie’s bony hand. “I got him to give me this. This will let you die the second time, when you’re ready.” She kissed Melanie on the skull.
“Thanks,” Melanie said. She didn’t reach for the necklace yet, since she had all the time in the world. “But I’m going to enjoy the view for a while.”
DEAD LIKE ME
by Adam-Troy Castro
Adam-Troy Castro is the author of the novel Emissaries from the Dead—an interstellar murder mystery, not a zombie novel, despite the title. He’s also written three Spider-Man novels and a pop culture book called My Ox is Broken! about the television show The Amazing Race. His short fiction has appeared in such magazines as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Analog, Cemetery Dance, and in a number of anthologies. His work has been nominated for several awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Stoker.