Simon barely even looked at him. Instead, he watched Kathleen—one of Janice’s circle of friends—as she tried to get back home. She was crawling along the road, badly broken legs dragging uselessly behind.
Safely back inside his house, Simon leant against the door and tried to make sense of everything he’d just seen. He caught sight of his face in the long mirror on the wall and squinted hard to try and force his eyes to focus. He looked bad. His flesh was lifeless and pallid, his expression vacant and dull. His skin, he thought, looked tightly stretched over his bones like it belonged to someone else, as if he’d borrowed it from someone a size smaller.
Nathan sat in front of the TV while his parents had a long, difficult and surreal conversation in the kitchen about their sudden, unexpected deaths and their equally sudden and unexpected reanimation.
They had all stopped breathing but quickly discovered that by swallowing a lungful of air and forcing it back out again, they could just about speak. The Internet was still working—thank god—and they stood together over Simon’s laptop, prodding the keyboard with cold, clumsy fingers. While most major news portals and corporate sites remained frozen and had not been updated, they were able to access enough personal blogs, micro-blogs and social networks to answer their most pressing questions: Yes, they were dead. Yes, it had happened to everyone, everywhere. No, there was nothing they could do about it.
The film that Nathan had been watching on TV ended and was replaced with nothing. Simon returned to the living room, his legs stiffening, to see why the sound had stopped. He picked up the remote and began flicking through the channels. Some continued with their automated, pre-programmed broadcasts as if nothing had happened. Other stations remained ominously blank. Some showed a screen of unchanging, unhelpful emergency information and one—a twenty-four-hour news channel—just showed an empty desk, the tousled hair of a collapsed news anchor visible in the foreground of the shot.
“Getting stiff,” Janice said as she lurched into the room and fell down onto the sofa next to Nathan.
“Rigor mortis,” Simon wheezed as he sat down heavily opposite them, barely able to believe what he was saying. “Won’t last long. Read it online.”
“Scared,” Nathan said quietly, the first word he’d managed to say since he’d died.
“I know,” Simon replied, trying to focus on his son’s face.
“We’ll all just sit here,” Janice said, pausing mid-sentence to swallow more air, “and rest. I’ll get us some dinner later.”
Rigor mortis kept the family frozen in position for almost a whole day. For a time, they were barely able to speak, let alone move. In the all-consuming darkness of the long winter night, Simon stared into space, unblinking, and tried unsuccessfully to come to terms with what had happened.
His family was dead, and yet he felt surprisingly calm—perhaps because they were still together and they could still communicate. Maybe the loss would hit him later. He tried to imagine how any of this could be possible—how their brains could even continue to function. He wondered: Is this strange state of post-death consciousness just temporary? Would it last as long as their physical bodies held together? Or might it end at any moment?
He tried to distract himself with other thoughts but it was impossible. Everything had changed now that they were dead. Janice’s earlier words rattled around his head: her instinctive offer of a dinner he knew she’d never cook. He realized they’d never eat or drink again. He’d never again get drunk. He’d never smell anything again, never sleep or dream, never make love…. For a while that really bothered him. It wasn’t that he wanted sex—and even if he did, his sudden lack of circulation meant that the act was a physical impossibility now—what hurt was the fact that that aspect of his life had been abruptly ended with such dispassionate brutality.
Silent, unanswered questions about trivial practicalities and inconveniences soon gave way to other more important but equally unanswerable questions about what would happen next. What will happen to our bodies? How long will we last? For how long will we be able to move and talk, and see and hear each other?
As the long, indeterminable hours passed, still more questions plagued him. He thought about Janice’s faith. (Although he believed her regular trips to church each Sunday were more about seeing people and being seen than anything else.) Was there a god? Or had the events of the last day been proof positive that all religions were based on superstition and bullshit? Was this heaven—if there was such a place—or its unthinkable opposite?
He suddenly remembered a line from a horror film he’d seen once and adapted it to fit his own bizarre circumstance. When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk their living rooms, hallways and kitchens.