Dead Men's s Boots

For Nicky, being dead is a lifestyle.

He’d been a hotshot data analyst when I first met him – selling the secret history of the future to greedy CEOs who were in awe of his ability to predict share prices based purely on the flow of information across digital exchanges. He was an arrogant son of a bitch, too: he pissed people off outrageously just for the hell of it, showing them up with pointless displays of expertise whenever he could. After a friend introduced us at a party I used him a couple of times to chase down information I had sormise no legal right to access: I couldn’t pay him a tenth of what he was worth, but he got me the stuff anyway because it made an interesting change from what he did the rest of the time.

He died young, of a heart attack, which didn’t surprise anybody.

Then he came back, which kind of did.

There were already a lot of zombies around by this time, so it wasn’t the plain fact that Nicky clawed his way out of the grave that was unusual: it was how skilfully he rolled with the situation afterwards.

The dead still don’t have any legal rights, despite endless parliamentary debates and a few orphaned white papers. In theory, Nicky’s living brother and sister could have waltzed off with all his worldly goods and left him cooling in the gutter. But they didn’t, because he hid his money so successfully that – apart from a couple of grand in a current account – no lawyer was ever able to find a penny that was his. And while they were hunting, he was setting up a maze of blind trusts and offshore shelf companies that would give him full control over how the money was used without it ever legally, incontestably, belonging to him.

Then he brought his data-rat brain to bear on the question of survival. Zombies enjoy a whole lot of advantages over ghosts: having bodies, they can interact with the world in most of the same ways that the living can – touch and taste and smell and all the rest of it. But the downside is that the body they’re anchored to is basically a slab of rotting meat. They’ve set sail in a sinking ship, and for most of them it’s a short voyage: even though it’s probably raw will rather than nerve impulses that makes their limbs move, decay and decomposition gradually reduce the body to a state where it can’t hold itself together any more. The inhabiting spirit may still carry on clinging to the increasingly rancid carcass, or it may give up the unequal struggle and strike off on its own, but either way, at that point the ship is aground: you can’t make disarticulated legs move, or see through eyes that have closed up like dead flowers.

Nicky was very keen not to reach that stage, and he realised that the key to long-term survival was to learn as much as he could about his own internal workings. He picked up a stack of biology textbooks and read through the parts on human anatomy, supplementing what he learned by posting queries on medical message boards and talking to real doctors – mostly dead ones – at remorseless length.

He became an expert on butyric decay, dry decay, and decomposition. And then he went to war against them, with a single-mindedness he’d never applied to anything when he was alive. He stopped eating and drinking, something a lot of zombies like to keep doing for reasons of nostalgia and emotional reassurance: when you’re dead, your alimentary system can’t process food, so it just rots in your stomach and creates another vector for infection. By contrast he began to take a whole pharmacopoeia of virulent poisons, mostly by injection. He pickled his flesh, not in formaldehyde but in embalming compounds that he brewed up for himself from recipes he found online, and steeped his body’s cells in a cocktail of inorganic compounds so potent that at one point he started to sweat contact poisons.

There was more to it than that, I knew. He hooked up with Imelda Probert, more generally known as the Ice-Maker – a faith healer who offered a bespoke deal to the living dead – and now visits her a couple of times a month for a mystical/religious tune-up. He learned meditation techniques, and claims to be able to visit different parts of his body on a cellu sody/relar level, repairing damage with the cement of self-belief. And, like I said earlier, he stays out of the sun in case he spoils.

But today he was sitting out in the open on a bench on the Pall Mall side of the park, his arms spread across the back of the bench and his crossed legs sticking out in front of him, looking relaxed and expansive. Okay, there was still a heavy overcast and a chill wind, but even so it was shocking to see Nicky out in full daylight.

I sat down next to him, on the edge of the bench because he didn’t bother to move up and make room for me. His gaze flicked sideways to acknowledge me, then he went back to staring up through the leafless branches at the grey, swag-bellied clouds.