Dead Mann Running (9781101596494)

More Praise for

Dead Mann Walking

“
Dead Mann Walking
is an example of what good things can happen when you don’t play by the ‘rules’—these are not Romero-style zombies, and that makes them all the more interesting.”

—David Wellington, author of
Monster Island:
A Zombie Novel

“My old writing partner has brought the same magic to
Dead Mann Walking
that he injected into his run on the
X-Files
comics. A smashing good read.”

—Charlie Adlard, artist
The Walking Dead

“Petrucha successfully portrays the walking dead as more than mindless, flesh-eating killing machines, thanks to careful details of zombie life, culture, and slang.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“To get right to the point, I dug it. Hard-core.”

—Zombie Zone News

“With a zombie noir feel to the tale, readers will enjoy the escapades of Hess, private investigator.”

—Alternative Worlds

Also by Stefan Petrucha

Dead Mann Walking

A ROC BOOK

For my dear pal Steve Holtz. He knows why.

I have seen with my own eyes the Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when the boys asked her
“What do you want?”
she answered,
“I want to die.”
¹

¹
The Cumaean Sibyl referenced here was granted immortality by Apollo, but forgot to ask for perpetual youth and shrank into withered old age. Translated from the Latin/Greek epigraph to
The Waste Land
by T. S. Eliot.

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About the Author

R
ebirth sounds great, doesn’t it? Sounds like hope, possibility, spring. Nope. It’s more like that poet T. S. Eliot said,
April is the cruellest month.

Not that the rest of the year’s much better. Take November for instance. Take it on a boring night as a fat rain fell, the drops thick and icy cold, but too lazy to turn to snow. I was slumped in my ratty recliner, getting ready to watch Nell Parker, a dead stripper I’d had an unusual relationship with, on the tube. Sure, I could’ve shut it off, but there’s nothing like seeing the face of someone you want to forget every day on TV.

She’d gotten the gig partly as blowback for the Chak Registration Act; chakz, short for charqui, or dried meat, being the preferred term for us zombie-types. Thanks to an undead-riot caused by a pal of mine, an awful lot of livebloods died. Jane and Joe average didn’t like that much, so some pretty Draconian laws were passed. As a
nod to the bleeding hearts worried about chak rights, a “good” dead person was given a talk show.

Nell was better than good, she was perfect—smart, pampered, and nothing missing. Her skin was white and silky smooth, not the usual rough gray, her black hair straight and shiny. Oh, they had to work at it. I read the studio was kept below sixty to ensure rot didn’t set in. But best of all, Nell was also the only chak with eye color, green, no doubt to match her benefactor’s last name, he being billionaire pervert Colby Green. He and his powerful buddies loved chakz any way they could.

Despite the fact that TV was a definite step-up from pole dancing at Green’s private orgies, Nell never seemed to appreciate it. She tried to look harmless, knowing that the whole point was to show that all chakz weren’t a threat, but there was always a hint of disdain in those emerald eyes. It made me feel like she was looking at me.

The show itself was bullshit, fluff designed to make LBs feel better about imprisoning us. Not that I blame them for that. If a chak gets too depressed, they go feral. That’s kind of like going postal, but only if George Romero directed it. Thanks to the new laws, any chak who could speak or write had to take a monthly emotional stability test. Pass, and you’re free to enjoy your second-class citizenship for another month. Fail, and they put you in a concentration camp until you do go feral. Then they safely destroy you. They’re not clear on how they do the destroying. No one likes watching sausages getting made, or burned.

On the plus side, we all get free cell phones. Not that many of us know how to use them. In theory, they can be
used to track us if we go AWOL. In reality, the guard, a volunteer group composed mostly of testosterone types who used to spend their weekends chopping us up with machetes, is charged with chak control, and they don’t like sharing with local law enforcement. It’s moot in my neck of the woods. Fort Hammer doesn’t have the equipment to track anything. All in all, not so much Big Brother as his big, dumb, inbred cousin.

To be fair to Nell, she tried to branch out. She’d done a series of interviews with no less than ChemBet’s head of R & D, Travis Maruta, the man who made zombies real. A mousy guy you wouldn’t think had it in him to swat a bug, let alone change the world, he went on about how hard he and his wife Rebecca were working to improve the human race even more.

The way I heard it, Rebecca was a second-rate chemist, but a first-rate dominatrix. She’d gotten Travis into some kinky shit that made Colby Green look like a virgin. I doubted either of them gave a damn about anything except getting each other off.

But there are lies, and then there are damned lies. The former would be something no one believes, like if I were to say Nell Parker meant nothing to me. The latter would be a whopper, like my execution. When that needle pierced my soft pink skin, I thought at least nothing worse could happen. It wasn’t the first time I was wrong, but it was the last time my skin was soft or pink.

When DNA evidence threw out my conviction, I was subjected to ChemBet’s patented, self-perpetuating, neo-magical, electrostatic Radical Invigoration Procedure,
RIP
, for short. I came back with dry skin, brittle bones, sixty percent of my IQ, and none of my photographic
memory. And they said I was one of the lucky ones.

Now my memory’s like an old dog without a leash. It either lies around doing nothing, or winds up eating things it shouldn’t. When I thought Nell betrayed me by going back to Green, it reminded me of what an angry guy I’d been when I was alive. After that, I started thinking she was better off without me. I contented myself with stalking her on TV, but that night, she came on without the fake smile and barely able to speak.

“Dr. Travis Maruta,” she finally managed, “was found dead yesterday in his ChemBet laboratory, apparently from a self-administered overdose of an unknown substance. It was November twelfth, the eighth anniversary of his invention of the RIP…”

Some chakz would find the news satisfying; others say that real death was too good for him. Some would be too decayed to have an opinion. Me, I was thinking,
Suicide? Maybe the whiny son of a bitch finally realized what he did.

Big picture, I couldn’t care less. Sure, I wished he’d killed himself
before
he came up with the RIP, but blaming Maruta for my problems was like blaming Henry Ford for car accidents. When they switched from Nell to a “real” newscaster, I got bored, turned the set off, and took to watching the shadows on the floor.

I was doing a pretty good job thinking nothing, when a knock came at the door. Answering was Misty’s job, my assistant, but she was out with Officer Chester O’Donnell, a boy toy she’d met while I was in jail. When the knock came again, I remembered it might mean money, and that was in short supply. Business, never
booming, had gone downhill since the camps opened. Mostly, I’d get some chak hoping I could help him or her cheat on their next test, which I couldn’t. Misty ran a little memory class that made more than I did, and she hated charging.

But, seeing as how you never know, I shambled into our so-called reception area. The bottom half of the door wobbled from a third rap.