The Loitering Dead

There was fear when the dead first rose. Many dead were attacked on sight, for who could calmly encounter a corpse suddenly reanimate?

But the panic gave way to confusion. These dead did not chase the living, they did not bite or bludgeon or grasp. In fact they did next to nothing. At first it was just the newly dead, climbing laboriously up through loosely packed soil of fresh graves, their wounds healed, the first smears of rot wiped away. They did not decompose, they did not stink. If anything they smelled of wax, new candles with no scent, an odor of no odor.

They looked much as they had alive, but they had nothing of their previous minds. Their burial clothes remained on their bodies, tattered and gradually falling away to reveal skin with hair or no hair the same as when they died, but the hair did not grow or become greasy or matted. Their bodies remained unchanged in extremes of heat or cold. They did not sweat. They didn’t seem to care if they were clothed or in rags or naked. They did not become aroused and were insensate to arousal in others.

If unmolested, they would stand where they were, motionless or swaying slightly. Perhaps they would shuffle a step, in something that might look like a small circle if you watched for a great while. Every few hours they might exhale, like a small gasp or sigh.

But they did not otherwise breathe, or eat, or produce waste. They gave way easily to prodding, could be pushed around or knocked down, they did not resist and were weak as infants. Once prone they might take hours to roll over, or days to listlessly sit up, perhaps rise to their feet again with an elderly tremble. Though their flesh could be broken easily they did not react to injury or damage and did not seem to feel pain. Animals ignored them.

These dead might glance at bright lights or incline their heads to loud noise, but such things didn’t interest them more than a moment. They didn’t know people, places, or things from their living days, in fact they could not be engaged with any objects or actions or speech. The nostalgic and sentimental kept their returned relatives around their homes, usually in a basement or shed. Some would take them to church or the park or the mall, for while they went nowhere by their own inclination they could be easily led by the hand. Startups formed to sell a range of products to maintain the dead, from harnesses and leashes to simple generic clothing to indulge the modesty of the living, even cleaning products to spray away grime from smog or dust. Most people who kept their dead just hosed them off periodically.

Soon the less recently and even old dead were also coming back. It seemed that if a skeleton had any scrap of flesh or marrow remaining, new tissue would spread and recover the frame and bring back the person in question to whatever this was, this new state of being or unbeing, sooner or later.

But those who had been dead a long time, or been badly disfigured, they didn’t look much like themselves. The new bone and new muscle were round and childlike, pliable, gestural, like the rough draft of a body. New skin had no lines or creases, no hair at all. The more new flesh regrew, the more those old dead looked alike, smooth and hairless dolls, quiet unfinished mannequins with eyes deep and dulled. It seemed the reanimation process gave up and phoned it in after a certain point, bringing the person back but not bothering with the details.

Cemeteries became prisons, since most graves were presumably occupied by technically animate unpeople who just didn’t care to claw their way to the surface. Knowing this, it was hard for the living to enjoy quiet contemplation in such places anymore. Public opinion wobbled as the undead became more numerous, less relatable. They were a nuisance, appearing in their thousands and eventually millions and, one assumes, billions worldwide. They consumed no resources other than space and attention, but those resources turned out to be more dear to the living than anyone before suspected.

Sometimes there would be outbreaks of violence, with citizens smashing the undead with clubs and bats, then axes and knives, then shooting them with guns or running them down with cars. They were easy to harm, but you had to really dismember and chop them up finely to prevent the dead from eventually restitching themselves and clambering back to their feet.

They were studied, the ample supply and nebulous legalities meaning both the government and private sector ran every kind of process on uncountable dead, trying to figure out what this meant or how it was happening. Many people allowed themselves to die under clinical observation so the conversion could be studied. It was hoped that cracking the secret could lead to functional immortality for the living, but whatever made the dead so hard to destroy did not respect the higher functions of thought, and no dead ever seemed to know themself.

And now they were everywhere, just a fact of the landscape you edited out of your everyday perception like clouds or trashcans or trees or the poor. In large cities the dead followed the living by drift, borne along by rush hour crowds on sidewalks and into subways and buses and onto elevators and into offices. They were used as furniture, become workplace mascots and earned nicknames, ruefully tolerated as an adorable nuisance or cleared daily by custodial staff from boardrooms and broomclosets alike.

But eventually the living’s collective patience ran thin, and new policies were enacted. Cremation for the newly dead became the norm. The returned dead were herded onto reservations in deserts and badlands and brownfields and disused parking structures, where they occupied little space and no attention other than those who came to gawk at their assembled indolence. Some nations disposed of them through mass incineration or similar drastic means, which while messy and nominally horrific seemed to work out for the living’s sensibilities. In the end, little was learned, nothing explained. On the plus side, everyone now knew exactly what happened after you die, which is, nothing.