Archive of Our Own

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"Where were we?"
"He was deciding whether to cut your throat or love you forever."
"Ah, right. The usual choices."
- Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

 

**

You lose your father when you are young.

You lose him the way most boys your age do: you are not what he was expecting.

He tries, of course, and when you're older it's the kindest thing you can say about him. He was your dad, and he tries. He asks you about football; he even comes to your matches at first. You can hear him shouting, and sometimes it's in the right places. He'll come through the den when you've got a movie on, and you'll feel acutely aware of his presence, the shift of his weight behind you, and you'll never be as an analytical of any part of any film as you are when your dad's catching part of it with you. But explosions were never his thing, and he finds American accents crude.

You are not what he was expecting.

Later, when you've got all the time in the world to construct imaginary conversations with him, and he's not doing you the inconvenience of being there to shut you down, you'll tell him this:

The pressures on you growing up were different than the pressures on him. It's not that you didn't like books of classical sheet music -- you do, actually, because you have eyes in your head and classical composition looks to you an awful lot like poetry -- or dead Oxford academics or late-night NOVA on the telly, it's just … it wasn't anything you could talk about with your mates. They liked cars, and David Beckham, and girls in short skirts. And they probably liked other things, too, but you never talked about that.

There were scripts. Like American movies, there were strict scripts on what you could and could not like, could and could not build friendships on.

(If you're being perfectly honest, it was all very High School Musical. Nobody actually snapped their fingers and sang, "stick to the status quo", but it was implied.)

When you're an adult, you have the luxury of ignoring these, but as a teenager -- well, you didn't have room in you for anything else. Adults forget that, you think; just how much you have to perform. Your father certainly did.

After awhile, he stops trying.

**

When you're diagnosed at sixteen, your parents move around the house with an almost fleshy, palpable relief. They've got pamphlets now. They understand. They're not working against you anymore.

But it's your brain. It's you that sat outside the pediatric psychiatrist's office and listened to her say to your mum, "neuroatypical" and "does depression or disassociation run in your family, Marion?" until you didn't want to hear anymore. And you don't want to tell them that it's not that simple, and it's not going to be that easy.

"Are you deliberately trying to be difficult, son?" your father says to you.

You are frightened of disappointing them, frightened of losing them, frightened of them giving up on you, but you cannot, cannot, cannot spare the energy to stop it from happening. You barely have enough energy to get yourself through the day. You cannot pretend. You cannot smile and deny everything: no, you feel fine, yes, you've gotten out of bed today, Mum, look, you've even changed clothes, yes, school's great, yes, you're considering joining a club but maybe you're a little afraid of choosing the wrong one, sure, yeah, your mates are fine. Honest.

Honest.

Things happen. Sometimes they happen to you, and you go along with it. That's about all you can manage, and you're not sure how to explain that to them.

When it happens, it's when your dad comes out and asks whether you wanted baked chicken or a fry-up, and you meet him with a very honest "I don't care."

And he mutters, "Big fucking surprise. Big fucking surprise."

You look at him, faintly startled, and from the armchair your mother says sharply, "Iain!" but the venom's already there, a smear across the dining table where you eat your toast and watch your TV. Your father looks at your mother, says, "Marion," and your mother says, "Iain," and nobody says "Simon" because you are not there. You exist but you are not there. There is a cavern of space inside of you and that's where you live, and sometimes someone will stand at the mouth and call your name. You'll hear it echo but it comes from too many sides at once and you don't know how to get out, and eventually they go away.

**

You lose your mother five days before Christmas.

You lose her like this:

She waits for you by your grave.

You won't remember this immediately. At the time of your neurogenesis, your mind is a fallow field and this has been dug out of it, but it will come back, in time, in bits and pieces grown from the seeds of other things. Other memories planted in you -- the slick slide of your hand in the mud in the underpass where you sleep; the sudden klaxon cry of a siren and another Disciple shouting "raid!"; the touch of Zoe's hand to your face -- and suddenly you are back there in the graveyard, the night of the Rising.

Kieren's right: it does take ages to dig yourself out. The crush of the dark and the dirt is absolute, and when the loose earth pours in through the hole you punch in your coffin, some instinct has you pushing it down towards your feet, and in this way you ascend.

It's been raining. The storm came in around midnight, and in Roarton they mistook the sound of the Rising for thunder, but your grave's much farther south and it's been raining for hours before you wake.

You feel the change, the earth growing damp and malleable as you dig upward through it. Later, the academic papers will all agree on this, that the weather was one of the main contributing factors to how easily the dead Rose and caught everyone unawares.

Your fingers touch open air at the same time your mother grabs for you. She holds your hand in one and digs with the other, shoveling out great scoops of dirt, single-minded and intense. She births you for the second time in her life, and she is the first thing you see when blink the soil from your eyes. Her voice pours over you, pooling in eddies around your shoulders, "oh, thank god, oh my god, babe, my baby boy, it's okay, you're back, you're back, love, it's okay, they said -- I came as soon as I heard, look at you look at you."

She says "Simon," but that name stopped being yours long before they gave it to the headstone that rests above you.

It never occurs to her to fight you.

**

You'll hear stories at the commune later, about PDS who did amazing things in their rabid state: mothers who crossed countless hillsides and trenches to bring their kills to their living children, like birds bringing worms back to the nest; a man with a Y-shaped autopsy scar says he kept lifting the hunting dogs out of the ravine he was living in, convinced they'd gotten there by accident; Abigail the Fifth Disciple whose ears could not be reconstructed at the treatment centre uses sign to tell you she's sure she put herself between the army and a schoolbus full of children, she's sure, but the living tell her no, no, she was trying to eat them, except she knows she would have rather been shot than harm them.

The world won't hear these stories because they contradict the common narrative: the PDS in their untreated state are mindless, primitive, carnivorous monsters. That's why containment and medication are so important.

But you went home.

You Rose, you killed your mother, and you took her home with her blood on your chin.

This is what remains in you at your most primal, your subatomic level: the knowledge that your father loved your mother more than he was capable of loving you, and you love him anyway, so you brought her home to him.

**

You make it to 27. You aren't really sure how.

Apathy, you suppose.

Living's easier than most people think, after all, and you're 27 years old and dwelling in a dark shithole of a flat with the kind of friends you don't have to care about -- and, for one molding, dank day after another, the whole lot of you just keep surviving, by grind and work but mostly by accident.

You meant to ask your dad what happened to your stuff, after -- your clothes, the knickknacks you brought back from America, your photographs and bottles. You pocketed three of his Oxford books when you left home, including the one with the money tucked into a poem about death, and you never get the chance to check the shelves in your childhood home for them before he drives you out. "An Irishman Foresees his Death" becomes a kernel in your mouth, and you chew up each word with every step of your pilgrimage into the city, until it's the enamel on your teeth.

It's the only thing of your father's that you keep.

**

Something about the Collective of the Undead Prophet unsettles you. Maybe it's because you've been with the Disciples up until now, clearing out of abandoned estate after abandoned estate and moving fast to dodge the raids, churning out manifestos and drafting documents while outside on the street the living stomp their feet at Victus rallies, but everybody's so … passive here. Like you'd been in your first life. Drugged. Medicated, even.

(You hear they're working on an even stronger kind of neurotrypsaline, to make your kind "calmer". Any calmer, you think, watching people sway to some musician's guitar, and you'd be dead again.)

It's not really their fault, you know that. It's just you've forgotten how to live slowly.

You're used to the Disciples, but for the PDS who live in constant fear of a contact slipping, mousse wiping off, a touch to a hand that shouldn't be lukewarm -- the commune is a safe place to exist and you can't fault anyone who comes here looking for sanctuary.

You've been there, after all -- searching.

It's in Wales, low in the boggy hinterland beyond the perimeter fence that had protected the metropolitan areas during the Rising. They say there's still rabids in these hills, waiting to attack, but mostly all you've seen so far is birds and sheep. Thom, a spindly broomstick of a PDS sufferer who got bit by a snake while he was out hunting quail one day, does the ferrying between the main house and the train depot, and the whole drive up, he talks to you about the looms, the library, and the livestock that keep the farm running.

"It's a wonderful place, Your Discipleship, sir," his teasing white eyes flick to yours in the rearview, bushy mustache twitching with his grin, and you roll your eyes. "You'll never want to leave."

"That seems to be the consensus."

That's what makes me uneasy, you think. You make a perfect habitat for something when you want to keep it.

(Your faith to your Prophet isn't so blind that you don't wonder why you're collecting PDS.)

**

"I really do love it here," confesses Amy Dyer beside you, lifting her face up to the breeze with the hindbrain instinct of someone who still hopes she can feel it. "I'm going to miss it."

The wind kicks up in answer, and you lean away as it sends her hair whipping into your face. You pull strands of it from your mouth. The two of you sit perched on a tall boulder worn smooth from years of shepherds using it for this exact purpose; creekwater bubbles and babbles beneath you, snaking down into the ravine, and the sheep range all around the field in the other direction, chewing absently at the wet grass. An ewe pillows her head on Amy's thigh, flecking spittle across her dress while Amy strokes her muzzle.

"It's funny," she continues when you don't say anything. "It was horrible, being hunted, but there were parts of it I'm actually kind of nostalgic for. The outdoors, mostly," she lifts her hand from the ewe's head to gesture. It's green, everywhere. "Kieren and I -- we lived in the woods -- up by Bowland, I don't know if you -- anyway. Obviously, I was rabid, and you can't appreciate much when you're rabid, duh, but piecing the memories together afterwards … that was the bit I liked best. The woods. This reminds me of that."

Kieren's the fiancé, you remember. She mentioned him with the girls once or twice when talking about Roarton: they're getting married as soon as it becomes legal.

You don't have a high opinion of him, really, if she's here and he's not.

Who stays home while his wife-to-be flees to Wales to escape persecution?

(You'll mention this to Amy later, and her eyebrows will form a perfect, unimpressed arch. "Home, where we had two hate killings in two days? No, Simon, no, if you're going to call someone a coward, it's going to be me, I panicked and did a runner and couldn't go back, not even when --" and you move like she'd kicked you, because she is the last person you would call a coward. She holds you back, fists turned to rocks against your spine, and shudders.)

"Are you excited to be reunited with your fiancé?" you ask.

"Who?" she says blankly. Then, "Oh! Of course! I mean, we're not really …" flustered, she flicks a look at you, then away, and her fingers go to her hair, tucking it away only to have the wind pluck it loose again in a moment. "We're not getting married. We … I just say that to have a claim. Like? We Rose together, hunted together, were electrocuted and caged together. He's mine, you know? Like, cosmically, or whatever, but not romantically. When I came here, it was easier to … to put that in terms people understood? And the, um, the lie spiraled from there."

You fill in the blanks, It was also an easy excuse to leave, if the Collective wasn't what I expected.

"Anyway!" Her hands flutter. "Enough about me. What about you? What stories do you have about your Rising? Any adventures?"

She punches your shoulder with one balled-up fist, lit-up and grinning, but then her hand lingers, fingers uncurling to touch the fabric of your jumper, the patches at your elbow. Her eyes dart up to yours, and the clarity of the moment is as bright as the crystalline color in them.

You think, ah, and, oh, dear, and your chest burns with a bizarre kind of flattery, that someone you admire could look at you so shyly, like maybe she loves you.

"Not so much, I'm afraid," you manage, and if your buttoned-up spine tightens up at the question, you aren't noticing, still careening with the centrifugal force of this revelation. "I practically went straight from the grave to the treatment centre. Not a lot of time for camping."

She looks at you like she knows there's a story there, so you add, "If he's not your fiancé, you'll have to find something else to call him, you know."

She smiles. "I'll let you know when I figure it out. It'll be grandiose and very serious. Very fitting."

**

Three weeks after you make medical history by blinking your eyes open with your mother's blood dried to a black crust on your chin, across the country Dorothy Dyer calls up her solicitor and gets her will rewritten so that her dead granddaughter inherits all her property.

"She died in the Rising," Amy tells you, setting her luggage down so she can wrestle the door open, the wind at your backs. "Er, not in the Rising. I mean, she died during the Rising, but not due to any Rising-related … shenanigans. She was just old. She … she kept joking that we were in a race to see who the cancer would kill first. Guess I won."

She gives you the tour of the bungalow, which you would have pegged for a nan's even if she'd never told you a thing about it; nothing about the furniture, wallpaper, or kitchen appliances seems to have modernized much past the postwar. She throws open a door and says, cheerily, "This is you! I'm the door opposite, so -- Simon?"

It takes you a moment to connect the name to yourself.

"I'm fine," you say. "Are you sure?" Your sleeping pack is on your back for a reason; you cannot actually remember the last time you had a room to yourself, and not a spot on the floor between the other Disciples. No, wait, yes you can: your father's storage room, done up in a pantomime of your childhood room the first and only night you stayed at home.

"Of course I am, silly." The next door opens with a swish of her skirts. "It's a good thing our sense of smell is so shot, I'm sure I'd be …"

She trails off, and your pack hits the floor, your heel in the carpet as you turn.

She's frozen in the doorway, poised with all the stillness of a stopped clock, and you've seen enough PDS in the grips of a flashback that you're moving before you're consciously aware of doing so, hooking an arm around her shoulders as she launches herself forward with a strangled, wordless cry, a fierce creature suddenly laid low and made helpless in a trap. You aren't sure what she was aiming for -- the vanity, maybe? -- but she struggles and kicks at you with her heavy boots for several long moments before she comes back to herself.

You keep murmuring even as she sags against you, hands burrowing underneath your parka.

When she speaks, her voice is barely big enough to make the climb up your collar. It says, "I was assaulted there," and your stomach makes a terrific two-storey fall as you make the connection: it wasn't the cold-blooded hate killing of Maggie Burton and Rick Macy that drove Amy out of town, it wasn't the hate killings that kept her away, it was this: this space made unsafe.

Her voice grows claws, digging into the knit of your scarf. "Can we kill him?"

You pretend to think about it. "Do you know where he might be?"

**

Gary Kendal's jaw in your hand feels shockingly fragile, his pulse a fleshy, bulbous thing beating against your wrist, and you want to squash it the way people do with spiders.

The woman at the bar pulls a gun on you, and you hear Amy keen "Simon!" with distress, but Simon isn't here right now. Gary wriggles, like something spineless on the end of a hook, a blood-sucking lamprey all covered in mud, and you want to bare your teeth at the barkeep, you want to laugh, because even if she can hit you in the right place (which she might, because at close quarters it's not like your forehead is a small target; your mum always did like to tease you about that,) you'll still snap Gary's neck. Or she could shoot him and save you the trouble.

You feel incandescent, lit up like you've got live blood rushing in you. It flushes you incarnadine, like you'd been with one hand under Sean's belt as he offered you a line, like you had when the Prophet said, I was waiting for the Twelfth and here you are.

You stare her down and her eyes grow rounder, rounder, and you are surrounded by the living but you are undead, you are Redeemed, pure and unholy, and what can they do, what can they possibly do.

And then Kieren fucking Walker puts himself between you.

**

Your faith comes, not all at once, but slowly; in stages, in clips, in moments of gratitude so uncorrupted and blinding you cannot imagine it being anything other than divine grace.

You do not deliver yourself to the Disciples with belief ready-made in your heart, because your father mocked religion with the quiet sense of superiority that intelligent people often do, and you wouldn't know how to believe in God even if you wanted to. You come because you are desperate, and lonely, and you are too skeptical to ask for faith but it comes to you anyway.

It is the pillars you build your new world on, the rock you use to build your church.

Each day with the Disciples -- each casual touch, which you hoard because you have not been touched with kindness since your mother … well, your mother, the "hello, Simon, how are you feeling?"s, the "overwhelmed? Me too!"s that push right into laughter, the understanding, the discussions that deliberately open themselves to include you ("they're medicating us by the hundreds, they're going to rehabilitate us, but so much is being decided for us -- did you know that there isn't a single PDS person sitting on the Department for Partially Diseased Affairs? How can the living understand what we need? How can they be deciding for us?"), the rage and frustration, the joy, the hope, the freedom, all of it communal, all of it shared, all of it given to you -- you need, more than anything, to thank somebody for this chance.

Julian suggests you thank God, and why not, you think. It makes as much sense as anything else.

Abigail the Fifth Disciple comes for you while you're at the paper shredder, and she says "Simon" in her thick voice, and you've never heard your name so much before you came here. It still doesn't feel like it belongs to you, like it was something you slapped on in order to pretend, like cover-up mousse or your contacts. Halperin and Weston could make you their Frankenstein, but you're not sure they could fix this part of your brain.

You glance behind you, then point at yourself -- me?

She nods, then signs in the abbreviated BSL the undead use, "wants to see you," before she fists her hand and pounds it over her heart, the other miming pulling a mask down over her face -- the sign for the Undead Prophet.

"The Prophet?"

"Yes," says Abigail, expression warm, and she takes you to a room with a camcorder and a computer. You sit down on the cement, numb and holding the documents you'd been shredding, not sure if you're ready for this, and as she pushes buttons, a red light comes on the camcorder and an image of the Prophet fills the screen, a bland smiling skull. It tilts its head, and your breath catches.

Behind the computer, Abigail nods: it's live.

"Simon," says the robotic voice, as unisex as the Prophet themself. Seriously, everyone keeps saying "him," but you're looking at those shoulders, the turn of the mask as the Prophet speaks, and you realize that you can't tell, not really. Your throat works. The significance of the moment staggers you; the Prophet acknowledging you in person. "The last and most prodigal of my sons. Welcome home. Are you ready to serve?"

Your nihilism died the instant Halperin and Weston pretended they couldn't hear you begging them to stop, and you want to never feel that helpless again.

"I am."

**

You lose your Prophet in the twelfth hour of the twelfth day of the twelfth month.

You lose them like this:

Before the bells of Roarton have finished tolling in the graveyard, you have denied them three times.

**

The doorbell goes as you're getting ready to leave, and Amy darts past you to answer it, the tiny mirrors sewn into the hem of her skirt flashing and winking like minnows, kicked around her ankles.

She squeals in delight, and you know immediately who it has to be.

"Just the handsome man I was hoping to see! Simon, come take a look, did you know that they delivered gorgeous door-to-door these days? Oh, you have to come with us!"

"Come with you where?" Kieren Walker's voice floats back, and the dryness in it makes you smile.

You finish lacing your boots and stand just as Amy pulls Kieren around the corner, gesturing around the room and saying, "We need new blackout curtains, we decided, because Nan's are getting pretty threadbare. So we're going to make a walkabout out of it, poke our noses in all the shops along High Street, give Mrs Lamb and all them old bats a right scare. What do you think?"

He looks like he's going to regret asking. "Why do you need new blackout curtains?"

"For the ritual sacrifices, duh."

Kieren darts his eyes at you, a quick flick of an expression that says he wouldn't actually put it past you, and you lift your eyebrows back like you're hurt he would even consider it. This earns you an eyeroll; Amy's former fiancé is about as impressed with you as he would be a slug.

"Right." Any dryer, and you could use his voice as sandpaper. "Duh. Do you want my advice on what matches your furniture?"

She makes a mock-indignant face. "Uh, of course. Wouldn't make any decisions without you, handsome."

With a pull of his mouth, he tells her, "That is a horrible idea. Just for that, I'm recommending nothing but black or white," and she clutches her heart and leans on him as if fatally struck. You're looking for it, so you see the fondness that softens the reluctance in him, the way it melts and turns runny. He puts his arm around her, playing along with her theatrics. They are, for a moment, entirely outside of you.

For a man who wears cover-up and routinely shows his belly to a town that hates him, Kieren Walker charms you in spite of yourself.

(These, of course, will be your famous last words.)

**

It's Amy who gives you the idea, in the end.

You've got guests: Idris and Ian, the only two ULA representatives living in Roarton before you and Amy turned up to double that number. Ian did stenciling in his first life and still manages to be steady with it even in his new body, so they're the ones that bring you the ULA insignia that now hangs on the wall in the bungalow's main room. They treat you with something approaching wonder, and it makes you shy and pleased to be around them.

After all, you're only a disciple, but them? They rose in Roarton. They have no idea how special they are.

You think perhaps this had been the point of sending you to the commune first -- to accustom you to the idea of people looking up to you. It made you careful.

You watch the back of Ian's bald head as Amy preps the skin under his nose for a septum piercing ("why do I need the disinfectant? We can't get infections." "It sets the mood, silly!") You remember Midori from the commune, who'd taken her sudden lack of nerve endings to pierce every single part of her anatomy she could fit a barbell through, and a few places she probably shouldn't. Amy'd become very steady with a piercing gun.

She'd hesitated for only a moment after Ian asked. She said, "… but your religion … ?" and Ian smiled the polite smile he got whenever Scripture entered your discussion of PDS politics, saying, "Applies to living bodies, I should think."

"You were never a good Muslim anyway!" called Idris from the next room. "You shaved your beard in your first life, don't try to deny it."

Ian's look of wryness deepened, and he adjusted the kuffiyeh over his shoulders. "Don't tell my mum, or the next thing you know, she'll do something and the imam from Liverpool will be over for dinner. If there's anything worse than having all of your mum's friends over, it's when those friends are religious leaders."

"Hey now," you said mildly, flipping the page of your report to the sound of their laughter.

Amy sifts through her jewelry, looking for a good stud and asking Ian if he was thinking about a barbell or a horseshoe-shaped bull ring later, which leads the conversation towards all the things they want to do with their afterlife.

"I want to do everything," she tells them, enthusiasm humming in her voice like it's got wingbeats. "I've got all this time, now. I want to campaign. I want to travel, I want to fall in love, I want to do everything the living aren't brave enough to do," and it's the burn in her words that makes you, suddenly, want to try.

So when Kieren singles you out by the bonfire, you are happy, you are alight, you are doing your Prophet's work and it's helping these people come together, you can see that, and you're not thinking about any of that when you reach for his hand.

You lose control of the situation rapidly after that.

**

"So what's the deal with the Second Rising, anyway?"

You lift your head from your contemplation of discount shelf of scented candles: artificial "sugar cookies" is about the closest your kind will ever come to eating them ever again. Kieren dances his fingers over the claw-foot end of a curtain rod, and steals a look back at you.

"Do you really want to know, or are you just asking?" you reply, and he huffs.

"Zoe only mentioned it in passing a dozen and a half times today."

"Did she?"

The Second Disciple who only goes by X because, she says, her first name belonged to her first life and thus died with it -- she calls people like Zoe Kelly matchstick people. Their insides are coated in phosphorus, and when the right belief comes along and strikes them, they go aflame. It's beautiful and enchanting to see.

"It's a verbal play on the Second Coming of Christ, I got that, yeah, and the point of a Second Rising is to resurrect more people back from the dead. Why not, right? It's the one thing the living fear above all else. Does your Prophet guy really think our numbers took such a hit in the first Rising that we need to engineer more bodies for his -- for your creepy undead army?"

You shoulder his scorn on one side and shrug it off the other.

For a long moment, you watch Amy, who's chatting with the nonplussed saleswoman -- judging by the energetic pinwheeling of her hands, the conversation's veered away from curtain fabrics, and this girl's going to go home tonight wondering why on earth everyone hates the PDS so much, when some of them are like Amy.

People call you the preacher, but Amy does her fair share of it, too.

Then you speak. Quietly, and assuredly. "The Second Resurrection will rise from their graves the righteous, the good, the tolerant, the princes of peace and conductors of compassion." You're expecting a spare me from Kieren's direction, and are surprised when it doesn't come. He is not, after all, your father. "The First Rising was merely to announce the coming. We are the heralds, sent to make way for those that come next. 'For those that believe in him shall not perish, but shall have eternal life.'"

"John 3:16, yes, I know my Gospels, thanks," he says in the tone people use when complaining about how they know every word to that awful pop song du jour. "So basically what you're saying is that you can't effect any kind of revolution on your own, so you're going to hand it off to the next bunch of suckers?"

You don't answer that, but simply look at him until his bristles go down.

After another long pause (in the background, Amy gushes, cutest possible faces, oh my gosh, you have to see it -- make a day trip out of it!) he ventures, calmer, "The Second Rising isn't going to bring back anybody like me, is it?" and the grave sitting unspoken between you has Rick Macy's name on it.

"Or me," you remind him. "Kieren, the Second Rising will fill the world with people like Amy," and in tandem, the both of you look at the woman in question. "How could humanity possibly suffer from that?"

Amy has two swatches of cloth in her hands -- one loudly colored, the other loudly patterned -- and in the silence you hear her demure, "Let me ask my fiancé -- his approval matters too, I guess," and she glances over her shoulder, expression deliberate.

Nobody moves except for the saleswoman, who looks from you to Kieren and back again and raises her eyebrows, dubious.

You're just starting to wonder who missed their cue when Kieren digs at you with his elbow, whispering, "I think she means you. She called off the wedding with me, didn't you hear?" and you jolt, "oh, right!", and you pull him forward with you anyway, because you're a traitor.

Amy holds out the samples to him, but he rebuffs her with his hands up, "Nope. Nope, I told you, if it's not black or white, I won't consider it."

"Kieren Walker, you swing for both teams, don't even lie to me," and your eyebrows fly for your hairline. Kieren laughs while you think, that was an innuendo! and Amy rounds on you next, grinning and extending the fabrics, one of which will be the new curtains that the both of you draw shut with kindness, so as not to hurt those with the eyes that don't adjust as easily as they once did.

**

When you were twenty-one -- and this is back when you were still mostly on speaking terms with your parents, took coming home for the holidays to be fed and sheltered as your due -- you pour every single drop of effort you have left into saving up the money to move to America. Your mum helps where she can, because she's never seen you focused like this.

You suppose, somewhere deep down, you'd been hoping it would be like the movies.

You don't lie to Kieren about this: as an escape, it's absolutely brilliant. You tell a dozen lies about where you come from and who you are, you eat a disgusting amount of food, your accent makes everybody younger than you (and a few people older, too,) come closer like they've never heard it before, like Google doesn't exist or something. You insist on calling soccer "football" just because it's funny, and when a couple girls invite you to come with them on their spring break trip, full of nervous bravado, you do that, too, because you hear America's a lot bigger than you can wrap your head around.

But with time, you learn.

No matter where you go, you're still Simon Monroe with the malfunctions in his brain.

Kieren Walker is still Kieren Walker with the bruised nails and black mouth, even if he wears his cover-up and goes to paint for tourists in Paris.

You'd almost been glad to come home, where things were miserable and meaningless, sure, but at least they were a familiar meaningless: a place where you couldn't bring yourself to care about the leaky flatshare, or Sean who'd pulled some jailbait from private school and had him in the bed of what had been your room.

"Perhaps the bit I liked the best," you tell those who come to the bungalow to feel safe behind your new blackout curtains. "For awhile, I had these mates who invited me to play football with them. The American kind, mind. Said I had the shoulders for it."

You flex to demonstrate. "Oh, please," comments Amy from the back, which makes everybody laugh. This, here, this is your inner circle: Zoe the zealot, Ian with his new bullring piercing and Idris Mugawbi perched on the sofa arm next to him. Brian sits on the rug by Frankie's knee; Frankie who died at fifteen with no idea what killed her and a family that won't talk about it, who ducks her head when you try to make eye contact and is scared for her friend Henry, who's gone missing. Cherie sits beside you, wearing flawless make-up and those uncanny violet contacts she must have gotten off the Internet -- she'd declined to remove them, saying that her "natural" state is what the blokes at the brothel paid for, and it was only covered up that she got to pretend to be herself, ta very much.

"The point of American football," you say, "is to flatten as many people smaller and weaker than you as you can so that one fellow can grab the ball and run without hindrance."

They are Roarton-risen. If you are the heralds of those yet to come, then they were the first to be redeemed. How holy they must be, that God should choose them first.

How grateful you are to know them.

"Being a … well, being a zombie in a world that glorified the killing of zombies until a cure was found … it felt an awful lot like that. Aggression as sport. They view us, not as one of them, but members of another team -- smaller, weaker, diseased. They see the disease we carry first. We are not their neighbor, their friend, their family member. We are PDS, first and last. They flatten us and imagine a crowd cheering."

Your Prophet has ordained you to find the holiest of them, the harbinger of you all. You are to find the Adam or the Eve of Roarton, the one who will be the Shepherd to you and all that come after you --

They who were the First Risen.

**

Maxine Martin summons you to her office as you're leaving, bib already half-way over your head.

Amy stops and casts you a worried look, Zoe and Kieren hovering just beyond her. You nod them on, and take your time sauntering back across the hall.

You've met your match when it comes to a stare-off, you think, and a whole minute ticks by before the hall is completely clear spare for the sounds of Philip Wilson and Dean Halton muttering at each other over the stamp cards. The local MP for Roarton Valley leans back in her chair, reaching behind her to pull a familiar small blue bottle from her bag.

"I hear you're something of a celebrity among extremists, Mr Monroe," she says, clicking her pointer finger against the side of the bottle. "Do you mind telling me how a boy like Rob Carnforth could get his hands on this?"

She does not break eye contact.

You want to say to her, do you know how I died, Ms Martin? Do you want to know what makes me the last person on earth likely to give drugs to the underage?

You say nothing.

"I don't imagine you'll like the punishment for cooking Blue Oblivion, but," she shrugs and turns back to her folders, a casual dismissal. "I can't help you."

The absence of her stare is nearly physical. You're wrong-footed. You have never cooked Blue Oblivion in your life -- that was always a job for the Sixth and Seventh Disciples, along with the martyrs they train, and they excuse it by saying that the government was going to find a way to militarize the PDS as biological weapons sooner or later and they might as well claim their rabidity for themselves, first. If either of them were here, they wouldn't hesitate.

If you're arrested now, though, they'll find your bottle like a cyanide capsule in your bureau, and your church will crumble behind you as if built on sand. You will not see them again.

"Out of curiosity," Ms Martin waits until you've turned your back on her to speak, the silver sting of a knife in your open spine. "Why are you here? You weren't buried here, Mr Monroe. What brings you to Roarton?"

"The fresh air," you tell her, and leave.

**

They keep a pair of rabids in a cage in the lobby of the GP -- even your muted olfactory sense can pick them up, which means the smell must be atrocious.

You touch your fingers to theirs between the mesh, and you remember, suddenly, in a way you hadn't until this very moment, how keen your sense of smell had been in your rabid state: the dirt, the rain, your mother's perfume, your mother's blood. You have no trouble imagining how it would have killed you, to be like that and be forced to live with your own stench.

You know what your Prophet would have you do.

You are the ULA. You are the "liberation" in the liberation army.

You imagine that phone call. You imagine the soft noise of approval your Prophet will make when you tell them what you've done. In your mind's eye, the future of these two plays out the same way Amy's story had: we lived in the woods. I miss that part the most.

Anything, anything, anything would be better than here, waiting on Halperin & Weston's leisure.

"Don't," hisses Kieren, startling you. "Don't do anything stupid."

When you leave, they're still there, groaning out of their sunken-in faces, and you have no idea who you're angrier with: Kieren for manipulating you, or yourself for being manipulated.

You will deny the Prophet three times. This is your first infraction.

**

You die the way your mates always fancied themselves dying -- fucked out of your mind with a girl in your lap.

You feel pretty bad about that, actually.

Her name is Kenzie and she's new to the lifestyle, armored in punk rock clothes and standing a half-step behind Devon who says, "Yo, yo, mate, this is Kenzie, she's a doll, so relax her up a bit, you know, and keep an eye out on her, you know? You know? Don't let Mickey get skinny on her, you know what he's like around ladies of a certain persuasion," and he makes a gesture that's crude and you can't see how it correlates to Kenzie at all. She throws a loathsome look at the back of Devon's head for, you imagine, insulting her, belittling her, and objectifying her in the span of a single introduction. That's Devon, really.

You smile at her reassuringly and you say, "If Mickey tries anything, it's not her I'd be worried about."

At least, you think that's what you say. You're high as fuck. Whatever it is your mouth does, she smirks back, and that's how you wind up with a fledgling under your arm for the night.

She's eighteen, and drops a reference to her mock exams in conversation just the once before she adjusts for the crowd, and she wants love but is willing to substitute it for attention and claim it's the same thing -- you've gotten very good at recognizing that in other people, you think.

You keep an eye on what she takes, when she takes it, and what she mixes it with. You call over people you trust -- which does not, Devon accurately predicted, include Mickey in any way -- to share with her, because by this point you're bored with everything available to you.

She doesn't completely relax around you until Sean tumbles into the room, spots you and howls "Simon!" and accidentally gets your dick with his knee in his uncoordinated attempt to crawl into your lap and get half-way down your throat. You kiss him back because it's making shades of blue bubble like wax behind your eyelids, until he remembers what he came into the room for, and as he leaves he points at you and hollers to Kenzie, "I'm going to marry that cocksucker, paddy bastard or not!" and you watch her realize that you're not a threat, that your kindness doesn't have a price tag.

She sticks close all night, and when your heart stops, she's mostly asleep with her head pillowed on your jumper.

Her name was Kenzie and she never did anything to deserve waking up on top of your corpse.

**

Because his last relationship killed him, it doesn't take you long to realize that Kieren is not going to risk you.

Rick Macy refused to compromise his beliefs -- you never met the man, but the ghost of him isn't hard to feel out, with his ingrained hyper-violence, his narrow definition of masculinity -- and why would Kieren come near you if you are just going to be a variation of the theme?

"BDFF," trills Amy, lifting herself up on tiptoes before giving you a dazzling smile.

"Is that what you've decided he is, now that he's not your fiancé?" you say, amused. "I thought it was going to very grandiose. Very serious."

She throws her head back and laughs, and you want, suddenly, a dozen things all at once. You want to keep Kieren for Amy. You want to keep him for yourself. Oh, you want to touch him in the kitchen of the bungalow none of you ever use for its intended purpose, want him flattened back against the doorframe with nowhere to go but to you. You want to wander the woods with him like rabids. You want to belong to him so much that he is what you return to, in your primal and unmedicated state.

But he won't risk you because you are the Twelfth Disciple, and he thinks you will never prioritize him over that.

He comes to your door at half-ten at night, one-eyed and roughed-up and breathing hard, and when all of it adds up, you hear Amy's voice: I was assaulted here. Murder happens in your heart, as cleanly as if striking a match.

"What happened?" you ask him, and he moves.

**

Here is where you completely fuck it up:

All those weeks you spent here, putting on the orange bib in the morning and raising the perimeter fence for the people who oppress you, weeks of collecting stories of the Rising in exchange for affirmation and self-worth, and you never once think to turn to Amy Dyer who has shared her house with you and ask her, "At the time you Rose, was there anyone else around?"

**

You have Kieren Walker on your bed.

You aren't sure how. Your mind is on a Richter scale, jumping and scratching and catching on only the important details, like how they'd been at his house and now are at yours, and there's rain on your shoulders. He keeps his head low, like they tell you to do when you're nauseous, and he shakes it, muttering, editing and reediting his argument even though the confrontation is over and there's no one to hear it but you.

You don't think he's aware of you, but when you step back he jolts and looks at you -- no, he searches you, and it doesn't once occur to you to hide anything.

You couldn't pretend not to care if your life depended on it.

You have planned for this, of course, in a hundred different ways. You have fantasized about how this will go like a child daydreaming. Approval. Oh, you are such a sucker for approval. You'd wanted Kieren to see the true, fist-shaped, beating heart of the ULA. You'd wanted him to come with you freely, smiling, white-eyed and on your left, Amy on your right. You, the three of you, you were going to bring the First Risen to the Prophet together. You imagined it so many times you've worn a groove in it.

But to bring Kieren to the Prophet, for the Prophet to bless him, to give Kieren's name as much meaning as you already have …

You will never be able to feign nonchalance again, probably.

Kieren Walker is the First Risen. He is the holiest of you, your harbinger, your shepherd, and earlier this day he bared his teeth at Gary Kendal like if you smashed that man's head open for him he wouldn't even hesitate.

He is the First Risen and he is on your bed.

He straightens up. He puts his shoulders back, and his gaze shifts from you to himself in the mirror. You stand as witness as he lifts his thumbs to his eyes, digs at them, smears the brown color out of them. He flicks his contacts to the floor. You are here, you are wide-eyed, as he removes a cloth from his pocket and starts to wipe the cover-up from his face. It has not occurred to you to imagine what he looks like without it.

Next you know, his body stands with yours in the doorway. You are aware of it on a seismological scale.

The cover-up you took such care in putting on for him comes away effortlessly.

His hands are on you, steadying you with a grip on your shoulder and holding you still so he can work, and the cloth finds places you are almost never touched -- the grooves by your nostrils, the corners of your eyes. He leaves no trace of mousse on your skin.

You break the silence first, pebbles thrown into a still pond.

"You chose me."

And it's this, the wonder and truth and the weight of it, that amazes you. You can barely get the words out, because this is what will entomb you: Kieren Walker, removing his contacts for you; Kieren Walker, for whom you wore cover-up and who takes it off of you now. He chose you over them. He chose you.

And you -- you've never seen his eyes before, both of them, as white and moon-colored as your own. He'd never pass for one of them now.

You never, ever want him to.

He folds the cloth once, then twice, so none of the mousse is facing out before sliding it back into his pocket.

"Simon," he says throatily. Is that your name? Oh, god, that's you. "You have to choose me too. Okay? If I decide on you, you have to -- to decide on me too, Simon, yeah?"

You have no idea what your reaction to that is, but you must do something -- drop your eyes for just a fraction of a second, just to watch the shape of your name in his mouth -- because his breath hitches like it'd been caught in a trap, suspended up in barbed wire and afraid of a fall. You ache for him, feeling wrung out with sympathy, because you have been flattened and breathless from the moment he said, no, the other graves were fine, and the significance of who was seated at your left-hand side crashed into you in a stunning tackle. Some part of you is still frozen in that moment.

You move.

You move because you cannot actually do anything else. Your heart is fist-shaped and grey, a deadweight in your chest, but you don't think you've ever felt it this much, like it's swollen and suspended between your ribs. Vertigo swims your head, and you move to stop yourself from falling.

Your hands come up, and you catch him and you catch yourself with his jaw between your palms, and you carry him one step, then two.

You kiss him and he surges into you.

Your name is Simon Monroe, and you are here, in your body, and the First Risen of the Undead kisses you with tongue.

His arms go around your neck, mouth spreading under yours. This is Kieren, sucking down the last of the cover-up from your mouth, and if he wants you to choose him, you have no idea if you can ever do anything else. He saved your life in the pub when you were about to break Gary's neck, and he didn't even know you then. He said, "Simon, come on," in his parents' house, and you got up and you followed him and you're not sure you'll ever stop.

He pulls his mouth from yours, disentangles, but doesn't go far -- to the edge of the bed, where he sits.

He looks at you and he looks at your hands, still suspended midair in the shape of him, and his throat works.

He says "come here," and you do, instantly, you go to your knees on the carpet in front of him, and you haven't even touched him but his whole body jerks. He swears at you, "Jesus Christ," and you want this, too, so you stretch up to him with your mouth on offer and he takes it: fingers on the back of your neck, teeth scraping your lips.

(You haven't yet, in this new body, but Amy says you can. "Just takes awhile," and she grins. "But that's the fun part, isn't it?")

You stay like that, one hand on his knee, until you feel his lashes touch against your cheek as his eyes come open and he says, "no," and "Simon, stop."

You stop instantly, trying to pull away, except his hands catch your face, tips of his fingers against the corners of your eyes.

He murmurs, "Take these off."

Dumbfounded, you can only stare back at him before his finger moves and you remember: right, your contacts. You forgot you were wearing them, and so you rise and go to the bureau where you keep your mousse, your contact solution, your boxes of spares away from those that might call you out for it. For you, for any of the Twelve Disciples of the Undead Prophet, to cover yourself up is on par with defacing the image of God -- a kind of corporate graffiti, illegal and crude, and today it wasn't a matter of survival. You painted your face because Kieren Walker asked you to.

You have denied your Prophet for the second time.

It takes you some fumbling, because it's been months since you wore them last, but you put your contacts away and behind you, he says nothing.

He says nothing until you turn around, and then he says, "there you are," with a relief in his voice that buries you, absolutely fucking buries you, and you cannot be held responsible for how you go to him then.

**

You have the First Risen flat on his back in your bed, and you kiss him like you can devour him.

You are, the both of you, still in your shoes. Your shoulders are damp, but the rain has passed -- just in time, you hear, for the protest. The wallpaper is pomegranate-colored and the door to your room hangs wide open, and the fixture in the hall throws light in the shapes of shards on the carpet. His hand with the bruised nails is in your hair, shifting you as he likes, and the dead Oxford academics in all their poetry never warned you it was like this.

You did not think he would risk you. You did not think he would compromise his beliefs for you.

And the Blessed Mother Mary watches from her portrait on your wall, Jesus Christ and his Sacred Heart watch from beside her as you look at each other, bare-eyed. They stand and bear witness as you lay Kieren flat on his back in your bed and kiss him in the shadow of the cross.

**

The bonecutter's knife isn't in your hand anymore.

Kieren lies beneath you, and you might as well be back in your bedroom, Simon, because you cannot hide yourself from the Kingdom of Heaven. All its eyes are on you for this; this moment of judgment, this last toll of the church bells.

You will never be unseen.

You look for Amy, but she isn't there. You look for the barkeep and see the stricken expression on her face behind her smoking gun, and your forehead might be a large target, but your shoulders are wider and you have an awareness -- if not pain -- of a bullet in your back. You are grateful she can at least hit that. You are grateful she didn't miss you, because her other options were Kieren or his father.

Kieren coughs black bile down his chin, and blinks himself awake, and you have no room in your chest for fear, only a stunning, breathless relief, a divine grace.

He is here and you will keep him, and the Second Rising will not happen.

You forsake your Prophet for the third time.

**

You never met the man, but you imagine that Rick Macy's greatest sin is that he wanted to be safe.

You can't blame him for that.

At the end of a meeting, when you and Zoe are standing out on the front step, the both of you with your backs to the graffiti that reads "SEND THEM BACK" while, inside, Amy and Cherie exchange books and squeal enthusiastically about the developments in one series (a conversation that could definitely last another half-hour) -- you tilt your head and you ask her about him, because in their first lives, Zoe'd been Rick Macy's martial arts instructor. Not a detail you'd expect to know, but it'd come up while you were discussing Roarton's hate killings with the group.

By this point, you just assume that Henry Lonsdale has been murdered, and not a single soul will be held accountable for that child's life. This is what PDS are worth.

She considers the question.

"He was … he was like me. He was like you and me," and she looks at you until you catch her meaning. Your eyebrows flinch up in surprise. "But we never mentioned it. Our environments wouldn't let us. Protecting ourselves became involuntary, a habit. If we just … kept pretending, made sure we had everyone's approval, then nobody would look too closely and we could … be who we wanted to be, with who we wanted to be with. Quietly."

A car goes by on the road, and Zoe lifts her chin so that her white eyes become visible, her smile rueful. "Guess we just traded one kind of pretending for another."

You put a hand on the shoulder of her tracksuit, and after a moment, she speaks again.

"Simon, the Second Rising … after the righteous have Risen, we'll outnumber them, won't we? The dead will outnumber the living? We'll be safe. No more compromising. Right?"

"We'll outnumber them," you promise.

You can't help but notice, later, that she chooses the Macy's cemetery as the site for her little demonstration, instead of going to the big graveyard on the hill. Her voice lashes at your back, "the Second Rising has to happen, Simon! It has to!" and she sounds terrified.

**

Up until the moment the first shovelful of dirt goes into the grave with a sound like rain on rooftops, some part of you expects Amy to sit up in her coffin and give Kieren shite about his mourning clothes.

You paint me these flowers, you imagine her saying with a toss of her head. You carve me the epitaph I want, you host my wake in your home, and then you wear paisley under black to my funeral. Back the fuck up, Kieren Walker, let's try this again. Honestly, what part of 'moregous' do you not understand?

But she doesn't.

Maxine Martin, local MP for Roarton Valley, did what you could not, and made Amy her sacrifice so that she may go and fetch the righteous, to show them the way from heaven to earth. Standing on this side of it, it sounds like complete bollocks, but you turn it over in your head anyway: Amy, sitting beside you in a field in Wales, smiling.

Amy, your shepherd.

If they are the first of your species, your Adam and your Eve, then what, you think, does that make you?

**

It rings once, then twice.

A click.

You are expecting the First or Second Disciples, Julian or X, your friends, but the voice that answers is robotic. It is masked. It is covered up and mechanical.

It asks you, "Well now. Is this my Judas?"

And you're lucky you had the foresight to put your back up against the glass, because it helps you control your slide on the rest of the way down. You hit the ground. You draw your knees to your chest in the corner of the phonebooth with the dried grey nubs of chewing gum, the cord drawn taut.

You can't say anything. Your throat works uselessly. There's a woman in Roarton whose husband slit her throat four days before their anniversary; she wears turtlenecks all the time, now, and types into a program on her tablet when she needs to speak. She forgets sometimes at Give-Back, jumping in with a guttural noise where she'd meant to speak. The sound you make now is like that.

Your Prophet chuckles. "My son. My most prodigal son. I'm sorry, did I frighten you?"

It's said so casually, like that hadn't been the intention at all.

"You are no Judas, my son. I promise. You have not betrayed me. That is not your role."

A pause.

The line isn't quiet. The distance between you hums, and the sharp buzz of static precedes your Prophet's voice, "Be not afraid, Simon-Peter. The Second Rising will occur even with this setback. You are still my servant."

A peculiar thing happens to you then, here in the moment of your naming: a voice speaks.

It's not the one in your ear. It's inside of you. It comes from that place you created when you were a boy, the place you buried yourself, deep in a cavern of your own making that even you could not navigate. People stood at the mouth of it and called for you, kept calling until they gave up and went away because you couldn't find your way out.

But this voice comes from beside you, like it's been there all along, all the years you thought you were alone.

Who's this manipulative bastard, then? it asks. And what do they think they're doing, acting in my Name?

The voice of God, you find, sounds peculiarly like Kieren.

Well, I'm not up for it. Simon, what makes you think you're precious to this person? Think about it -- have you ever heard them call you 'my most prodigal son' where any of the others could hear you? Right, yeah, Abigail was in the room. She's also deaf and couldn't hear a word the Prophet said. For all you know, they've called everybody 'most prodigal.'

"I --" you start.

Think about it. Where they'd get their money? Where they'd get their stash of neurotrypsaline? How did they get the land for the Collective? You do realize it's unlikely your Undead Prophet is actually undead, right?

Above your head, the clouds shift in the sky and sunlight hits the glass, catching on years of smudged fingerprints and keyed-on graffiti.

You did not ask for your belief in God. Like everything else that's ever mattered, it happened to you while your attention was elsewhere. If there's anything about your faith that's flawed, you realize, it's that you were told it was contingent on what the Undead Prophet allowed you to have.

Now, you think. Now you just have to be brave.

You were brave enough to fall in love. You're brave enough for this.

With a feeling in you like you're sitting across from your father in Norfolk all over again, you speak.

"I don't want to serve anymore."

The line buzzes.

"No disciple has ever left my service," says the Prophet.

"Then I will be your first."

The angle is more awkward than you'd like since you're on the ground, but it's still satisfying and absolutely terrifying, all at once, the act of hanging up on the Undead Prophet. You hug your knees and focus on breathing -- you don't need to, but you rely on the sense memory of it to calm you. Above you, the angle of the sunlight jumps, and jumps again. You stay still. Time cannot move if you do not, you figure.

Finally, the door to the phonebooth pops open, and the first thing you see is those black boots with their funny quilted tongues, and then you lift your head and meet Kieren Walker's eyes.

"… you all right?" he ventures, because you are a grown man huddled in the corner of a public pay phone.

"I think God just spoke to me," you say in amazement.

His eyebrows tilt, and the sunlight is doing dazzling things to the crystalline color of his eyes, and he steps into the booth with you. "Ah, look at that," he says politely. "God left you some change. How nice of Him," and he digs two coins out of the return slot, dropping them into your palm.

"Kieren," you say, and ah, that sounds more like you.

"Simon," he returns, and it's strange, how you've heard your name said a hundred ways by a hundred different people, but it's never once sounded like yours until you heard it in Kieren's mouth.

That's you, you know. You are not Simon-Peter the Apostle. You are Simon Monroe.

You are here and this is you, and you try it, carefully, inside your head: I am Simon.

With a rustle, Kieren slides down to the ground with you, jostling your legs for space. Whatever's written all over your face, it makes the dryness slip from his expression, his mouth smoothing out. He reaches for the hand that doesn't have the money in it, and if it's covered in grime then he doesn't say anything about it, and how can it hurt you anyway? What could possibly hurt you? You're undead, and this will not kill you, not this and not the ache you get sometimes in your shoulder, how sometimes you think if you touched your bullet wound your fingers would come away red.

My name is Simon.

"There you are," says Kieren with relief, and yes, here you are.

 

 

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fin