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It’s been a month since Kieren went crazy in a graveyard and nearly killed everyone.
The strange part is how little has changed. He still spends most of his time either in his parent’s house or in the PDS Give Back scheme, wearing his violently ugly vest and methodically working through the endless business of cleaning up the zombie apocalypse. Sometimes Simon works with him, sometimes he doesn’t. Simon’s been quiet ever since the whole Undead Prophet disaster, which actually makes a lot of sense. Kieren knows what it’s like to have everything you built your life around suddenly disappear. He hadn’t dealt with it very well either.
Life at home has been quieter too. Now that Jem is no longer convinced that he’s some kind of mythical hell-demon, it’s been a lot easier to deal with his parent’s well-meaning attempts at normality.
“Would you like some more potatoes, dear?” Mum asks. She offers him the dish from across the dinner table, conveniently missing the fact that his plate of dinner is as entirely untouched as it has been every night for the past few months. Since he rose from the dead.
“No he wouldn't, Mum,” Jem says, patronisingly. “He’s too dead to eat.” She catches Kieren’s eye and grins at him. “If he’s not even keen on brains anymore, potatoes aren’t going to do it for him.”
Kieren smothers a laugh.
“Jem!” Mum says, scandalised.
Jem shrugs. She chews her own potatoes a little louder than absolutely necessary, triumphant. Kieren really loves having her back on his side.
“It is kind of true, dear,” Dad says. “Bit of a waste of leftovers at this point, isn’t it?”
Mum wavers a little before giving up and replacing the potatoes back on their placemat. She fusses with the serving spoon until it sits perfectly in the centre of the dish.
“Thanks anyway, Mum,” Kieren says brightly. “I always loved potatoes.”
His Dad shakes his head at him warningly, but Mum only gives him a tremulous smile. “I know, I know, I’m being a bit silly,” she says. “I just want everything to be like it used to be.”
Kieren feels a funny thump in his chest, and he rubs at it absentmindedly. Phantom pains. “Don’t we all,” he says. He'd heard on the news the other day about a crackpot over in London - a living person - insisting that he’d been a PDS sufferer but he’d managed to recover somehow. Somehow. Kieren can’t let himself think about it. Getting his hopes up too high would be too much to bear.
He hasn’t really been pretending to be normal as much any more, whatever normal even was - not since that train wreck of a dinner with Simon and Gary. Mostly he just sits at the table with a full plate until everyone else finishes, which is when he covers his food with tin foil and leaves it in the fridge for Dad to eat for lunch the next day. It’s a good system, mostly.
The dinner conversation has trailed off, so he gets to his feet and takes his plate into the kitchen. “Think I’ll have an early one tonight,” he calls back through the doorway to the dining room. “See you all in the morning.”
“Night, son,” Kieren hears his dad call in reply as he trudges his way up the stairs.
The night goes by as slowly as it always does. He lies on his bed and stares at the ceiling until the rising sun gradually begins to lighten his room.
He doesn’t sleep.
*****
That Tuesday, Simon shows up to the Give Back Scheme for the first time in the past sixteen days, not that Kieren’s been counting.
It’s only the two of them - since that day in the graveyard, with the Blue Oblivion and the Second-Rising-That-Almost-Was, the council had decided it would be a better idea to spread all the PDS sufferers out into smaller groups. Though the official word was that this was to give them the opportunity to cover more tasks in a shorter time frame, it was very clear that people were worried about the possibility of another extremist group forming in Roarton.
Kieren privately was of the opinion that all this was slightly ridiculous. After everything, most of the PDS sufferers in Roarton had quietly left to stay with relatives or friends elsewhere, leaving only about six or so behind, one of whom was missing an arm from the elbow down due to being caught in an explosion while untreated. Six and three quarters zombies, Kieren thought, did not a fighting force make.
The job they had to finish that day wasn’t particularly difficult, just tedious. They had been set to paint over some of the ever-present anti-PDS graffiti that had been been popping up all over town ever the since the reintegration had started. This particular slogan defaced the back wall of the local supermarket, heavy black letters at about head height.
“ROTTERS GO HOME, PLEASE,” Simon reads aloud in a deadpan tone. “That’s a pointless tag if I ever saw one.”
Kieren swipes his brush half-heartedly against the wall, letting the runny white paint splatter against the ground beneath. “What do you mean?” he asks. As far as he can tell, this is actually one of the more politely phrased pieces he’s seen in a while. All anti-PDS messages tended to have the same general gist, but this one had measurably less swear words which was always a bonus. All the words were spelled correctly too, which was another rare find.
“This is your home,” says Simon, gesturing aimlessly with his paint brush at their general surroundings. “Where exactly are they expecting you to go?”
Kieren thinks that this is probably one of Simon’s rhetorical questions. “Maybe the hospitals,” he answers anyway, ignoring Simon’s involuntary shudder. “Maybe our graves, even.” He shrugs. “Anywhere that isn’t around them, I suppose.”
Simon slaps a bit more paint onto the wall in lieu of a proper reply. “You’re a wee bit maudlin today, aren’t you?” he says finally.
“I am actually dead,” Kieren reminds him, matter-of-fact. “If anyone deserves to get maudlin, I think it’s probably us.”
Simon barks out a startled laugh, and Kieren hides a grin. He re-applies paint to the part of the wall where he’d started, hiding the faint outlines of the letters that are still showing underneath the first coat of paint. They’d both been working for nearly half an hour and had made very little progress.
OTTERS GO, the sign now reads.
Kieren smiles. “I like otters,” he says, out of the blue.
Simon looks at him fondly. He smiles back. “Do you now,” he says.
They finish repainting the wall in companionable silence. By the time they leave, Kieren has left a little black doodle of an otter on the footpath, underneath the pristine, newly painted wall.
It’s kind of wobbly. He’s really out of practise.
*****
Since Kieren has had enough flashbacks to almost fully regain the (awful, unwanted) memories of what had happened during his untreated state, his nights are no longer full of terror but are instead slow and empty. It’s almost worse. Most nights he goes walking through the familiar streets of Roarton, now that the last of the HVF patrols have finally stopped and there’s roughly 600% less chance of him getting himself beheaded.
Working with Simon that afternoon had set him to thinking. Painting something, creating something - as small as it had been - had felt familiar in a way that not much else did anymore. He’d decided to carry his old paints and a small sketchbook with him tonight, just in case inspiration struck. He doesn’t know what he wants to draw yet, only that he wants it to mean something.
At about half past two in the morning, he finds himself outside Janet Macy’s garage door. His paintbrush is already in his hand. She still hasn’t covered up the harsh green of the PDS suffering resident notification, even if it isn’t true anymore.
At first, Kieren only intends to paint it over like he had the supermarket wall, but before he knows it he’s brought out the rest of his paints and a picture has started to form under his hand. Not Rick’s face or anything. The inside of that house is still too much of a shrine to him (and god, his mum still has to live there), but instead a lively collie. Black and white with a lolling pink tongue, tail upraised as if caught mid-wave.
Rick always wanted a dog, but his dad was allergic.
*****
Mrs Macy smiles at him when she sees him in the street the next day, her eyes full of tears. He’s not quite sure how he should feel about it. It’s good though, that the thought of Rick has started to ache a little less. Like a healing wound, even if he can’t really remember the last time he had one of those.
He gets another of those phantom pains in his chest and has to rub at it until it goes away.
*****
One night when Simon is out, possibly doing something mysterious and clever but probably just walking alongside the quiet train tracks because it helps him think, Kieren repaints Amy’s cottage. Simon still hadn’t done anything about the angry slogans and messages the Undead Prophet’s disciples had written on the walls, and the idea of him looking at the damage every day makes Kieren feel a little sick. He thinks about using that offensive shade of PDS vest orange as a joke, but in the end he decides to use a can of lovely eggshell blue he finds in the garage. It takes him hours, but he doesn’t bother with drop cloths or anything, as the carpets are already marked up from the parades of PDS sufferers traipsing back and forth through the house for Simon’s… sermons, for want of a better word. He finishes at about quarter to five the next morning and sits himself down on Amy’s favourite couch. He wants to remember her quietly for just a second, but by the time Simon comes home, Kieren’s still sitting inside, staring at one of the newly pristine walls. He doesn’t have to breathe, so the paint fumes don’t bother him.
Simon puts a careful hand on his shoulder and Kieren immediately covers it with one of his own. “I thought you might want…” Kieren trails off as Simon tightens his hand on his shoulder. He tries again. “I just didn’t want you to have to see this all the time,” he says, quietly. “You must have hated it. I hated it.”
Simon pulls him up from the couch and into a fierce hug. He doesn’t say anything, but Kieren doesn’t mind.
He also doesn’t let go for a while, but Kieren doesn’t mind that either. It’s not like either of them have anywhere to be.
*****
The next time Kieren gets his paints out is more outright illegal. He’s been working up to this though, visiting the cemetery every night for a week to plan out exactly what he wants to do. He starts by carefully picking out a tiny white lily on the back of Amy’s gravestone with a thin horse hair brush. Kneeling in the cold dirt brings back uncomfortably vivid memories of a month ago, lying in that same dirt in Simon’s arms and trying to fight back the blue bleeding from his own eyes.
Well, he assumes the dirt is cold. He can’t really tell.
When Kieren’s finished with his lily, perfect and delicate, he looks at it and immediately reconsiders. It’s wrong, he decides. It doesn’t fit. He pulls the rest of his paints out and starts to cover it up with as many brightly coloured peonies as he can fit. Pinks and blues and yellows and even that ghastly orange he’s getting to be secretly fond of all fight for space on the stone until not a single spot of plain grey remains. The flowers are loud and garish and tacky. Amy would have loved them to death.
(Loved them to death. Ha ha. Graveyard humour.)
By the time he’s finished with his little memorial, the night has lifted into a grey and overcast morning. He gathers his gear together and leaves the cemetery, weaving his way between gravestones and patches of newly planted soil. Getting the PDS sufferers to repair their own burial sites had seemed like a strange decision for the council to make at first, but as the work had progressed it had made much more sense. It was incredibly disconcerting to visit the resting place of a loved one only to find it surrounded by churned earth and the debris of smashed coffins. The smooth earth and newly replaced grass was much more relaxing.
Kieren feels a strange sensation against his mouth, strange in that he’d even been able to feel it at all. He brings his hand up to his lip and it comes away black and oozing. Wiping his nose on his sleeve, he looks down at it in confusion. A little black ichor is smeared against the fabric, fresh and wet.
“Hey! Who’s there?”
A loud voice coming from the direction of the road snaps Kieren out of his reverie. He moves cautiously into the shadow of a large stone angel, trying not to make a sound, but -
“Kieren?”
He doesn’t move.
He hears footsteps moving closer, muffled by the soft grass. The voice sighs. “Kieren, I can see you.”
Kieren looks up warily from between the stone angel’s spread wings. He blinks. “ Gary?” he says.
Gary nods. He looks awful, his face washed out and pale with darker circles under his eyes. He looks like he hasn’t slept in a week. Kieren would have more sympathy, but he hasn’t slept in years. Also he’s dead, which kind of gets him off the hook as far as compassion goes.
“What are you up to?” Kieren asks, fishing about for something better to say and entirely failing.
“I could ask you the same thing,” Gary retorts automatically, but his heart’s clearly not in it.
Kieren shrugs, straightening up from behind his statue. “I’m heading home,” he says shortly. “Maybe you should too.” He walks past Gary without even looking at him, and he knows something is seriously wrong when Gary doesn’t even try to take the opportunity to knock into his shoulder as he passes. He starts to walk a little faster.
“Hey!” Gary calls again.
Kieren stops, but he doesn’t look back.
“I’m not going to say sorry,” Gary says forlornly.
That makes Kieren turn around, an incredulous look on his face. “What?” he asks.
“I’m not,” Gary repeats.
“No, I got that bit thanks,” says Kieren. “What made you think I expected you to in the first place?” He’s finding this whole encounter deeply confusing. Gary hasn’t been this civil to him since they were children. No, actually, not even then.
Gary looks at him directly for the first time. Come to think of it, Kieren hasn’t actually seen him since that day in the graveyard - not in town, not at the Give Back Scheme. Nowhere.
“You fought it,” Gary finally says, dully. “You were meant to be a monster but you fought it and you didn’t try and kill any of us and now I don’t know what to do about anything.” His voice is rising steadily, and he looks a little wild around the eyes.
Kieren feels slightly alarmed. “You need to go home and sleep, Gary,” he says. “Of course I’m not a monster. None of us are.” He turns around and keeps walking, eager to escape the weirdness of this conversation.
“But I killed so many rotters,” he hears Gary say to himself, in almost a bewildered tone of voice. “So many. I’m a hero.”
Kieren doesn’t stop walking. He almost feels bad for Gary. Almost.
*****
By the time he’s walked home, quick and steady since he doesn’t have to breathe and he doesn’t get tired, Jem is up and having her breakfast before she has to leave for school. There’s an extra piece of toast in the sink that he thinks she probably made for him before remembering he wasn’t going to eat it. Habits of a lifetime are hard to break, and he deliberately doesn’t think about all the mornings when he was dead - really dead - and she’d been confronted with his loss all over again. His ribs ache at the thought and he doesn’t know why, so he ignores them until the feeling goes away.
He does want to feel alive again, he really does, but he can’t quite figure out how.
Pulling up a chair at the table, he sits down next to Jem. He fiddles with the marker in his pocket so that his hands have something to do. “Jem,” he says, “How do I know if I’m doing this right?”
“Doing what right?” she replies through a wet mouthful of toast and butter. It’s disgusting and he loves her so much it almost hurts.
“Life, Jem,” he says.
She swallows her toast thoughtfully. “Well,” she says, “How do any of us know if we’re doing it right? I mean, really.” Jem looks over at him and smiles. “Your hands are disgusting, Kier,” she says. “Just because you’re dead doesn’t mean you don’t have to wash, oh my god.”
Kieren makes a show of rolling his eyes, but he pushes back his chair and goes to run the tap in the sink. To be fair, he has got paint all over his hands now, under his nails. It is pretty gross and unhygienic, but he can’t get sick anymore so he doesn’t think it really matters. He lathers up the soap anyway, trying to guess if the tap is running hot or cold. He thinks it might be warm, but that could just be wishful thinking.
“I ran into Gary just before,” he says as he’s rinsing the soap off his hands. “He’s been quieter since he broke up with you, you know.”
“Since I broke up with him,” Jem clarifies in a lofty tone. “Very important distinction there.”
Kieren smiles. “It’s weird,” he says. “I’m the dead one, but it’s everyone else who are acting like they’re zombies.”
Jem nods slowly. “ I guess they’re not sure if they’re living right either,” she says. It’s a surprisingly good point. Kieren’s kind of impressed, but Jem ruins it by poking him in the knee as he walks past her to dry his hands.
“Ow!” he says, affronted even though it hadn’t hurt.
“You’ve been drawing on your jeans again,” she says quietly. “You haven’t done that since high school, Kier.”
He hadn’t actually noticed, but sure enough, small black doodles are dotted over his trousers from his thighs to his knees. The small octopus he’s drawn curling over his left pocket is his favourite. He looks up from the drawings to gauge Jem’s reaction.
She’s smiling into her toast.
*****
A couple of days later, Kieren carefully applies his cover-up mousse and puts in his blue contacts for a trip to the hardware store two towns over. After going so long without bothering to cover his skin at all, his face feels stiff and wrong. He thinks he understands what Simon meant about hiding himself now, about how it would never feel quite right no matter how many layers he was wearing over his grey skin. The trip itself goes off without a hitch - he uses some of the money he’d saved for France to buy himself some spray paint in a range of colours and the tallest ladder he can find.
As he hands his money to the woman at the till, he begins to feel slightly uncomfortable. Is he pretending to breathe too much or not enough? Is he blinking the right number of times per minute? He resolves to watch her and just blink every time she does in case there’s a problem, but she just smiles at him and calls him dear as she bags the paint. She’s either ignoring the unnatural tone of his face and hands or not even noticing.
It’s so ordinary, such an everyday, human encounter. Bewildered, Kieren drops all his change into the small tin on the counter advertising for a fundraiser to get a small girl a seeing-eye dog. He hasn’t been outside of Roarton in so long, he’d kind of forgotten that the outside world had just... continued on.
He waits for the last bus into London so that it will be as empty as possible. A teenager with a backpack alone on a bus doesn’t look very suspicious. Everyone looks washed out and dead when they’re stuck on public transport in the middle of the night. The ladder was a bigger gamble, but he manages to slide it under the rows of seats against the left side of the bus while the driver is off having a smoke, so he’s pretty sure he got away with it.
The driver does raise his eyebrows when Kieren pulls it back out again at the end of the trip, but the street is empty enough that he can just hurry off out of sight and into the night.
At first he just wanders aimlessly up and down empty side streets. City centres had been among the first places to be abandoned during the Rising, and while people were slowly starting to trickle back in, the edges of the sprawling city were nowhere near as full as they once were. More windows are boarded up than not, doors barred shut to keep out squatters both alive and dead.
He comes to a stop outside an abandoned stone building. Its walls are high, empty grey stone stretching outwards and upwards. Kieren ratchets up the ladder as high as it can go, props it up against the wall and begins to climb. When he reaches the top, far too many feet from the ground, he pauses to consider the stone in front of him. The first paint can he pulls out of his backpack is the white one. He’s used spray paint before, but never on this kind of canvas, so at first it’s slow going. Very slow. The ladder is unstable and he doesn’t have any kind of a spotter, so he falls off a couple of times before he gets the hang of balancing. He doesn’t feel anything, though, so it’s okay.
He doesn’t know how much time has passed by the time he finishes. His clothes are torn from repeatedly falling to the ground, his sleeves covered in paint. Half of his spray paint cans have already run dry.
Kieren looks up at the wall and the enormous figure of a dark haired girl looks back at him, her dead white eyes wide and sad. The moonlight reflects off the wet paint and he fights down a shiver.
He thinks to himself, “I did that.”
His arms aren’t tired, but he feels like his hands are tingling. He thinks this must have been what adrenaline used to feel like.
*****
That’s the first one.
*****
After that, it’s like the floodgates have been opened. Every night he’s either out painting or he’s thinking about it, an apartment block here, a boarded up storefront there. Flowers, trees, people. People who are alive and breathing, people with PDS who are no less alive because of it. He’s better than a lot of the living artists because he doesn’t have to be as careful - once he falls three stories from where he’s balanced on the outer railing of a car parking building and he’s fine. Well, mostly fine. His foot twists round to face the wrong way and it makes a really unpleasant cracking noise, but it’s pretty easy for him to twist it back. He thinks he imagines it aching for a while, though.
Sometimes his wrists ache too, and his ribs from where he fell on them the first few nights. He doesn’t know why, nor does he particularly want to think about it.
He does know that what he’s doing isn’t entirely legal, but it isn’t entirely against the law either. All over the world, from England to America to New Zealand, cities have unspoken agreements with street artists - not taggers, artists - who leave their work on abandoned buildings and in empty spaces to brighten up the world around them. He likes that idea. After all, they’re coming out the other side of the zombie apocalypse, and people probably need some cheering up. A little colour is always nice.
*****
One day he falls from his ladder and it hurts.
It’s only from a short height, but he’s been getting careless, feeling invulnerable since the worst had already happened. He didn’t think he could die twice, after all.
But he’s been hearing of murmurings in the PDS community of sufferers who had started bleeding blackly from the nose, who’d begun eating again, sleeping again. That crazy guy in London who's quietly disappeared from the news reports. No one dares to speculate on what it might mean, but Kieren thinks he knows what it feels like. Kieren had thought that he might be one of them. Watching blood - not weird black sludge, blood - pooling in a small scrape on the heel of his hand, he knows it for sure.
He has to stop and breathe. He’d forgotten about that. All the messy little parts of being human, all the automatic tics and natural behaviours. His nose starts to itch, he can feel pins and needles in his arm where it’s bracing him against the concrete. His feet hurt and his eyes water. He’s been standing up for far too long, and he probably needs more than a little sleep. A yawn surprises a scratchy laugh out of him.
He experimentally rotates the ankle he probably broke falling off the car parking building and notes with relief that it just feels a little stiff. Shutting his eyes, he runs a thumb down the inside of his wrist, just in case. When all he feels is smooth scar tissue instead of gaping flesh, the relief makes him feel a bit light-headed.
That could also be the breathing, though, he keeps forgetting. He takes another few deep lungfuls of air to be sure. They definitely help.
Thinking back, this had probably started weeks ago, if not months. He rubs at the renewed ache in his chest, which probably hadn’t been a phantom pain at all.
He lies down on the cold concrete. It’s damp and incredibly uncomfortable and the best thing he can remember feeling in years.
His heart beats.
*****
He tries to run the whole way back to Roarton, but it’s not long before he’s out of breath, gasping like his lungs have forgotten how to extract the oxygen from the air. They haven’t, but he has. He begins to notice the holes in his boots from endless walking that he hadn’t paid attention to when his feet were nothing more than so much dead flesh.
By the time he gets home he’s exhausted and his feet have blistered to the point of bleeding. It’s amazing.
“Mum!” he yells, as he shoulders open the front door, “Dad! Jem!”
His mum doesn’t look up from where she’s drying the lunch dishes over the sink. “It’s two in the afternoon,” she says reprimandingly, “Jem’s at school and your father's gone for groceries. I know you’ve been out at all odd hours recently, but how did you lose track of the time so that…” She looks up at Kieren and trails off, her face as bone white as Kieren’s used to be.
Kieren grins at her wildly, his face flushed and perspiring.
“This is a dream,” his mum says slowly. She picks up another dish and starts to dry it mechanically. “How…”
Kieren limps over to her and takes the dish from her hands, setting it down gently on the bench top. He wraps her in a tight hug, feeling her quick heartbeat against his own. His feet are really starting to hurt now.
“It’s true, Mum,” he says hoarsely, “What they’ve been saying in the cities, the crazy people who swear we’ve been coming back to life, properly this time. I think it's all true.”
She sobs into his chest, clutching him tighter, her arms like steel bands around his waist. He hugs her back just as tight for a long moment, before letting go in order to prop himself up against the bench.
“Don’t suppose we have any potatoes in the fridge, do we?” he asks with a smile.
His mum sobs again, once, and throws her tea towel at him. He’s too tired to dodge and it drapes limply across his shoulder, where he can feel the end she was using to dry the dishes tickling wetly against the side of his throat.
“Of course we do, darling,” she says, clearing her throat and wiping perfunctorily at her eyes. “but first you’d better go wash up.”
Kieren smiles helplessly. “Thanks, Mum,”
“Of course, darling,” she says again, “of course.”
*****
He takes Simon to see his favourite one, later. They take the bus down in the day time, Kieren wearing sunglasses because he keeps forgetting that looking too closely at the sun will hurt his eyes, Simon with a handkerchief up his sleeve that’s spotted with black. In the space of a blank billboard on an empty motorway is the outline of a stained glass window, the Virgin Mary wearing Amy’s pale face, flowers in her hair. He thinks she’d find it funny. Moregeous.
Bordering it is Simon’s poem, his epitaph in flowing, golden letters. Kieren had found it in a little book of poetry from his mum’s school days - Yeats. An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.
“ I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere among the clouds above ,” Kieren murmurs.
“ Those that I fight I do not hate,” says Simon quietly, “ Those that I guard I do not love .”
There’s a silence.
Kieren breathes out. He watches his breath mist against the early morning sky. “Don’t you?” he asks.
Simon smiles and takes his hand.
Together they watch the sun rise.