I pass a homeless zombie on the street and he gutters out this howling moan, this really awful sound, so bad it makes me stop in my tracks and take another look. He’s well into his second death now, flesh all oozy and maggot-ridden, skin sagging to reveal white bone. We stare at each other. He sniffles at me. I’m almost tempted to give him a strand of hair or sliver of fingernail, just ‘cause I feel so bad for him, but I can’t. If zombies get a piece of you they’ll follow you home weeping for more. They’re starving for what they’ve lost. If you give a mouse a cookie and all that.
So when the zombie blinks up at me with weepy disjointed eyes, I just say, “Sorry, man, don’t have anything,” and turn and hurry back on my way. He groans as I go, low like a stomach rumbling. No one pays him any mind.
I’ll be just like him in a few months.
The thought still makes me shiver, even though I’ve had a year to come to terms with it. If I press down, I can feel the tumor just beneath my stomach like a meal not quite digested. It started in my ovaries, which is ironic, but makes a fucked-up kind of sense if you think about it: I spent so long hating the girl bits of my body that they started to hate me back. Now we’re in a civil war, and I already know which side will win.
I’m out of breath. I pause beneath a street lamp to light a cigarette. Let loose the buzz of nicotine to calm me down. I hope the tobacco finds my tumors and the two do a toxic mating dance in my stomach. I would end it now except I know what comes next and it’s scared me into staying alive so far. The decay is bad enough, but the loneliness is what kills you the second time. The absolute certainty of knowing that you are rotten to the core, because good people don’t die twice. Good people get Claimed.
A guy on the street pauses to tear off a fingernail (left pointer finger) and toss it to me. It takes me a second to realize he thinks I’m undead. Yikes. Didn’t realize I looked that bad already.
“Fuck off, dude,” I say around the edge of the cigarette. “I don’t want your nasty nails.”
He flushes, obviously startled. He’s freckly. Baby-faced in a way that tells me he’s never had to worry like I have. “Sorry,” he sputters. “I thought you were—”
“You ever seen a zombie smoke a cigarette?”
“Well, there’s a first time for everything. You never know. Um.” He fishes out a crumpled dollar bill and offers it to me apologetically. “Is this better?”
I roll my eyes. “Why do you assume I need your money?”
“Well—” He starts to say something, then seems to think better of it. “Is there anything I can do to help you, then? You seem— sad. I don’t know. Sorry.”
Is sad better than undead? I’m not sure. I offer him up an ugly smile, making sure to show my nicotine-stained teeth. “You can Claim me when I kick the bucket.”
He thinks about it for a moment, then says, “Sure.”
I say, “What?”
He juts out his chin, stubborn in his decision. “I’ll do it.”
“Yeah, but—” The cigarette has gone out. I spit it onto the sidewalk and crush it beneath my heel. Weird Guy winces. He probably leads anti-littering campaigns on the weekends. He seems the type. “You know what Claiming is, right?”
“Yes.”
“‘Kay. So you know it’s not something you can just do on a whim. You gotta actually know the person.” A while back, in the ‘70s, a bunch of Good Samaritans tried to start a movement to Claim the bodies languishing in morgues all across the country. It didn’t work— the dead still came back to life, and this time, they didn’t decay. They just lay there and screamed and screamed and screamed for days until the government sent in a SWAT team to shoot them all dead again. The world learned its lesson after that.
“I know,” Weird Guy says, “So let me get to know you. What’s your name?”
He’s so damn earnest about it, shivering in the snow beneath the streetlamp, that I slip up and say, “Nerve.”
He blinks. “Nerve?”
“Yeah. I picked it myself. You got a problem with that?”
“No,” he says, but I can tell he’s still kinda freaked. When I ran away from home, I needed a good name to keep me safe. I like the double meaning of Nerve: anxious and gutsy. I’m both. Plus, if people are distracted by my name, they won’t ask about a) my body, b) what I’m doing with my life, or c) where my parents are in all of this. (Answers, in order: a) trans and cancerous, b) waiting for it to end, and c) kicked me out when I was 16.)
“I’m Liam,” Weird Guy says, and I snort. It’s so normal. I don’t know what I expected. “I’m excited to get to know you, Nerve.”
“Oh, fuck off. It was funny at first, but this is dumb.” I shake my head and start walking away from him. He chases after me.
“But I was serious! I want to help!”
“You don’t even know me!” I call over my shoulder.
“Exactly!” he says. “I can’t Claim you if I don’t know you, so let’s find somewhere warm to sit and talk—”
I turn around to face him. His pity makes me sick. “I don’t want to be Claimed by you,” I snap, scowling with red-rimmed eyes. “You’re just gonna make the rest of my short life even more miserable. So fuck off and volunteer at a soup kitchen or something.”
He pulls up short. His face is flushed pink and white and red, like a candy cane. He looks hurt, and I feel bad for a moment, until he says, “You’re part of my life now. You don’t get to leave it just like that.”
“Fucking watch me.” I storm away.
“Wait!” He grabs my arm, presses a business card into my palm. “Call me. If you change your mind.”
Who carries around business cards anymore? Pretentious assholes, that’s who. I want to tear it to shreds right in front of him, but it looks like he’s on the verge of finally leaving me alone, so I just nod like I’m seriously considering any of this and tuck it into my pocket. Then I turn and nearly sprint away before he can stop me.
I don’t throw away the card, though, and I’m surprised to find that I don’t regret it, because I need to call the number on it sooner than I thought.
See, I’ve been crashing on the couches of not-quite-friends for the past few months, but then last night one of them brought her girlfriend’s sister home, and apparently the girlfriend’s sister had a dog, and the dog got priority over me, an actual living person. I would’ve been fine to sleep on the couch with the dog, but the girlfriend’s sister made a big fuss, and honestly, I think it was just an excuse to kick the weird transvestite out, but whatever. I had nowhere to go, and it was fucking December.
“…and that’s the only reason I called you,” I finish, taking a swig of my apple cider. Liam and I are sitting in the sticky corner booth of an all-night diner. The lights keep flickering on and off. It’s really annoying.
“You want to crash on my couch?” Liam says.
“Well, I was hoping you could just lend me cash for a hotel room, but sure, whatever.” I try not to get my hopes up. I couldn’t believe he answered when I called. The business card was for an attorney’s office, but he’s too young to be an attorney. Maybe he’s an intern. I almost ask, but then I remember I don’t care.
“No, couch is better,” Liam says. “Stay as long as you need.”
“Your girlfriend would be okay with it?”
“Boyfriend,” he corrects. “And I’m single at the moment. So it’s fine.”
“Cool. Sorry for assuming.” I finish my drink. It leaves a wet ring on the table. “Listen, man, I appreciate the favors you’re doing me, but don’t think of this as me agreeing to be Claimed by you. I don’t wanna be owned by anyone.”
“So you’d rather rot,” he says. “You’d rather give yourself an awful second death than a peaceful first one. Just because you hate the idea of being vulnerable with someone.”
“Yes.” I grit my teeth and spit out the word. Nerves nerves nerves nerves nerves.
“Okay. Your choice, I guess,” Liam says, shakes his head, and pays the tab.
We go back to his place. It’s nice, not as fancy as I expected. Standard twenty-something’s first apartment. He sets up the futon for me, asks me how many pillows I prefer (how the fuck am I supposed to answer that?) and tucks in the corners of the blanket. It’s that stupid little kindness— those tucked-in corners— that makes me break and finally say, “Why?”
He looks up at me. He’s got big brown eyes, deer eyes. “Why what?”
“Why are you being so nice to me? I mean, at first I thought it was pity, that’s pretty standard, but this goes past pity and into angel-in-disguise territory, so there must be an ulterior motive. My best guess is either religion or serial killer, but you don’t seem like the cultish type, so—” I’m rambling. Liam cuts me off.
“You want to know the truth?” he asks.
“Lie to me if it’s nicer.”
He laughs softly, shakes his head. On the coffee table there’s a stack of business cards, the same one he gave to me yesterday. He picks them up and thumbs through them. “My father,” Liam says. The corners of the cards crumple in his hands. “He was abroad when it happened. Heart attack in Europe. I couldn’t get to him in time. So he went Unclaimed, and he came back, and— you know how it goes.”
I do. Because the thing is, no matter how good or bad you are, you still die. There’s no secret to immortality hiding in sin or sainthood. Everyone dies. And if you have one person who knows and cares about you enough— just one— then they find your body at the morgue, Claim it, and your life ends there. If you’re so universally loathed that no one can be assed to come get you, then you become a zombie, and moan and weep until your body decays and you die again. Second time hurts more, or so I’m told, but it’s also the last time. Thank fuck for small mercies.
“So anyway,” Liam says, blinking hard, “I realized that I don’t want anyone to go Unclaimed after that. Not if I can help it. And then I met you, and I guess I saw my chance.”
“So it’s not pity,” I say, lighting up a satisfied cigarette, “Just trauma. Good to know.”
“Don’t smoke indoors, please,” is his halfhearted response. I make sure to tap ash on the coffee table before I snuff out the cigarette.
“Your turn,” Liam says, looking at me.
“Uh, my turn to what?”
“Well, I told you my deepest trauma. It’s only fair that you do the same.”
“Nice fucking try. Knowing things about people is how you get to Claim them.”
“Lie, then. If it’s nicer.” There’s a challenge in his voice. Fine.
Deadpan, I say, “My deepest trauma is being kicked out because my roommates liked a corgi better than me.”
Liam doesn’t laugh like I want him to. He just says, so gently it makes me want to puke, “How many times have you been kicked out?”
“Sixty-nine million, four hundred and twenty-thousand.” A beat. Whatever. It can’t hurt to give him this. “Twelve. First time was the worst.”
“It always is,” Liam says. I turn to him, surprised, and he clarifies: “We moved around a lot when I was little. I was an army brat.”
Huh. “Me, too.”
“Look,” he smiles encouragingly, “We do have something in common. And you told the truth. That wasn’t so bad, right?”
I can practically feel my face close off and go expressionless. “I need to take a piss. You got a bathroom?”
He sighs like he knows he fucked up. “Second door on the left.”
“Thanks.” I flick my cigarette stub at him as I stand up.
His bathroom is nice, too. All of him is nice. I want to break the mirror over the sink and shove my fists full of broken glass. I don’t, though. Instead, I just turn on the tap and wash my hands. Once, twice. It’s not enough to get the nicotine stain off my nails, but it feels good. Haven’t had hot water to myself in a while.
The face in the mirror really does look dead. It’s easy to see how Liam made that mistake. It’s not quite the complexion— though I’m pallid and grim as any corpse— but something in my eyes. Some big bad grief threatening to overflow. Ugh.
I run my hands through my too-long hair, and I’m almost ready to step back out and face Liam again when a sharp throbbing pain stabs into my gut. I know this feeling, so I manage to make it to the toilet just as I start retching. The motion makes my whole body shake. I clutch the edge of the toilet for support.
Liam raps on the door. “Are you okay in there?”
I’m too busy puking my guts out to answer, so he adds, “I’m going to open the door! Say stop right now if you don’t want me to come in!”
I gag in response. The smell of toxic bile fills the bathroom, and I quickly flush the toilet as Liam hesitantly steps inside.
“What— oh,” he says, and softens as he sees me quivering like a kicked dog, still white-knuckled against the toilet seat.
“Cancer,” I say, by way of explanation, “terminal. So I guess you better Claim me soon, huh?” And I try to laugh, but of course my stupid fucking body betrays me again and it comes out as a sob.
Liam rushes to comfort me, but I push him away. “I don’t— I can’t talk about it,” I say through tears, “so just talk about anything else. Anything you want. Even if it’s a lie.”
Liam pauses, chews over his words for a moment, then says, “I’m writing a thesis paper about Claiming.”
“Really?” I look up.
“It began after World War Two, all those Unclaimed dead returning home to haunt their families. Yet even before the zombies came, there was the practice of going down to the morgue to identify a body. To say yes, I knew them. I loved them. But it’s possessive, too, and maybe a little bit wrong, because the corpse can’t contradict you. What right do we have to someone else’s legacy? What does it mean to belong to one another? To say that this person is mine?”
I’m quiet. The bathroom tile is cold beneath my feet. My stomach hurts. “I’m not yours.” My voice is hoarse.
“No. You’re not. And I won’t ask you to be.”
“What are you asking for, then?” I wipe my stupid weepy eyes and remember the wet tears of the homeless zombie. “Absolvement for your father’s death? A way to get into Heaven? I can’t give you that.”
“I ask for what you can give,” he says simply. “If you want to offer me enough of you to save yourself, then do so. And if you want to die alone, both times, then it’s your choice.”
“I don’t want to die at all.” I’m shaking. He sits down and wraps his arms around me. I don’t protest, just shiver into his embrace.
“I know,” he says. “I know, and I’m sorry.”
“It’s not fair.” The weeping is back. Big ugly tears and snot, too.
“It’s not fucking fair,” he echoes. He’s angry on my behalf. He doesn’t even know me, and he’s angry.
“I just want it to stop hurting. That’s all. It’s hurt so bad for so long.” My throat swells up and swallows most of the words, but he seems to understand me. “I’m scared.”
“I know. I know.”
“Does Claiming hurt, too?”
“Can’t say for certain. I imagine it’s less painful than decay.”
“Do it, then.” I blurt it out before I can change my mind. “Claim me when I die.”
“Nerve,” Liam promises, solemn as a church oath, “I’ll do everything in my power to make the rest of your life a good one. Then, when you die, I’ll Claim you. But you have to tell me what happened. Tell me who you are.”
And I do.
| Avi Burton (he/they) currently moonlights as a writer and daylights as a university student. His work has appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Escape Pod, and other literary magazines. His stories often feature mythology, revenants, and—on occasion—laser swords. You can find more of their stories on their website, www.aviburton.com. |  |