Tim Waggoner: Nekropolis

“Keep it, Matt.” He smiled sadly. “This one’s on the house, okay?”

I didn’t know what I’d do with Honani’s soul, but Papa refused to take it, so in the end I walked out with the jar still in my pocket. I had two souls now, when what I needed was another body. Life-and death-is full of little ironies, isn’t it?

Devona was waiting for me outside, leaning up against the wooden wall of Papa’s shack, arms crossed, surveying the Descension Day celebrants in the street with a wary, nervous gaze. The crowd was thinner this far from the center of the Sprawl, but there were still a lot of loud, drunken monsters about, and they bore watching.

Devona’s leather outfit clung to her like a second skin, and even though I no longer had any libido to speak of, I couldn’t help appreciating how good she looked in it.

I had my own problem now, and no time for hers. But I thought I could at least hear her out. Maybe her problem would turn out to be something simple. And I could use the darkgems; I would need them if I was going to find someone else-someone more powerful than Papa-to extend my unlife.

“All done. I’m ready to talk.” I didn’t feel a need to mention the bad news I’d received. After all, Devona and I had just met.

“Not here. We need someplace private.”

Like I’d told her, I wasn’t a detective, no matter what she’d heard from them, whoever the hell they were, and I didn’t have an office. But my apartment wasn’t far from Papa Chatha’s.

“How about my place?”

She nodded.

A few more blocks of negotiating our way through the chaotic riot of partiers-which for Devona meant slapping more than a few males of various species and states of life and death who decided to grab her shapely leather-clad posterior-and we were there.

My neighborhood is actually one of the more mundane sections of the Sprawl, a street of urban townhouses, which, except for the fact that the bricks appear to be made of gristle, looks perfectly ordinary.

We went up the front steps, inside, and up more steps to my apartment. I had unlocked the door and was just about to grip the knob when a voice behind us said, “Hey, Matt!”

“Hell,” I muttered, and turned around to greet my neighbor. “Hi, Carl,” I said without enthusiasm. “What’s up?”

Carl was a grizzled old fart in a rumpled seersucker suit which had probably once been white but was now mostly yellow.

He grabbed a sheet of paper from the stack under his arm and thrust it into my hand.

“Just finished printing out the latest edition of the Night Stalker News. I’m breaking a major story this week.”

I glanced at the headline: WATCHERS FROM OUTSIDE PLOT CITY’S DESTRUCTION.

“Sounds ominous, Carl. I’ll be sure to read it.”

I quickly opened the door and gestured for Devona to go in; she did and I hurried after her.

Carl scowled. “Don’t you humor me now, Matt. It’s true! None of the other media will have anything to do with the story. It’s too hot for the Tome, and even that rag the Daily Atrocity won’t touch it. If we don’t do something about it soon, we’ll all be-”

I closed the door in Carl’s rapidly reddening face, cutting him off.

“Just you wait!” came his muffled voice from the other side of the door. “You’ll be singing a different tune when the Watchers come!”

He shouted a bit more before finally moving off, grumbling to himself about idiot zombie cops.

“Who was that?” Devona asked.

“Just some nut who lives upstairs. Used to be some sort of tabloid reporter back on Earth, but he can’t find work on any of the papers in the city. The stories he comes up with are too crazy even for Nekropolis. Don’t worry; he won’t bother us anymore. He’ll no doubt head out into the street to harangue the festival-goers with his latest paranoid expose.” I crumpled Carl’s socalled “paper” into a wad and tossed it into an empty corner while Devona surveyed the room.

“It’s better than a tomb, even if it does have about as much personality,” I said, feeling only a little self-conscious. A threadbare couch, a single wooden chair-with one leg shorter than the others-and a Mind’s Eye set sitting atop a wooden stand comprised the sole contents of the living room. No pictures, no rugs, not even curtains. No toilet facilities, either, but then I don’t need them. One of the perks of being dead.

Nekropolis doesn’t have television. Instead we have Mind’s Eye Theatre. Mind’s Eye is exactly what it sounds like: psychic transmissions are received by your set and then relayed straight into your brain. The process is kind of hit and miss for me, probably because my zombie brain doesn’t get good reception, so I tend not to watch too often. I read instead, hence the reason for the piles of books stacked in the corners of the room. Right now the set was off, the large eye closed, its lashes crusted with yellowish crud, probably because it had been so long since I’d turned it on. I wondered if the set had some kind of infection, and I told myself to remember to call a repairman.

“Do you have a bed?” Devona asked.

“I told you: I don’t do those kinds of favors.”

She gave me a look which said I was being less than amusing. “I’m just curious. Do zombies sleep? I’ve never thought about it before. But then, I’ve never been to a zombie’s apartment, either.”

“I have a bed.” Though it was just a lumpy mattress sitting on the floor, no sheets, no covers. “I don’t sleep, exactly, but sometimes I feel a need to…rest. To relax.”

“And so you just lie there and stare at the ceiling?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes I close my eyes. So tell me, what’s it like to sleep in a coffin? Ever feel like a sardine?”

“Bloodborn don’t sleep in coffins,” she said disdainfully.

“Even when they’re half human?”

Her eyes widened in surprise. “How did you know?”

I shrugged, the gesture a bit lopsided thanks to the bite Honani had taken out of my shoulder, which Papa hadn’t been able to repair completely. “Little things. You don’t move as gracefully as other vampires. Your pallor isn’t as white. And whatever your problem is, it’s got you tied up in knots inside. I’ve never seen a fullblooded vampire afraid. It doesn’t seem to be an emotion they’re capable of.”

I went into the bedroom, and she followed. Aside from my mattress, the only other items in the room were my laptop computer, the desk it sat on, and the chair I sat on when I used it. In Nekropolis, the computers are organic, fashioned from bone, cartilage, muscle, sinew, and specialized organs. The machines breathe, gurgle, and moan-especially when doing difficult tasks-and have even been known to burst blood vessels if asked to perform too many functions at the same time. The damned things literally get sick when they catch a virus and become all mopey and lazy, refusing to do any work until they get better. The spoiled things are worse than pampered cats.

My computer made a soft humming sound to catch my attention, and I grudgingly went over and scratched the top of its casing. In response, it let out a moist, phlegmy purr.

“You use your bedroom as your office too?” Devona asked.

“I don’t have an office because I don’t have a business,” I said. “I mostly use the computer to play DVDs-it works better for me than the Mind’s Eye-and to hop on the Aethernet from time to time.” The Aethernet is Nekropolis’s answer to the Internet back on Earth. Information is swiftly transported through the system by data-ghosts: the spirits of executed criminals sentenced to spend their afterlives ferrying bytes back and forth for the rest of us.

“So you can check out zombie porn?” Devona asked with a wry grin.