We follow her deeper into her workplace: a huge open warehouse converted into something resembling a hospital. The walls are corrugated sheet metal painted clean white, cords snaking around support beams to power EKGs, X-ray machines, artificial lungs, and small electric chainsaws. The place has been substantially reconfigured since I saw it last, organised and sterilised, but I know where I am.
“This place,” I say, and then run out of words. “You used to …”
“Yeah,” Nora says as she walks. “We used to dissect zombies here. Mostly we were trying to figure out new ways to kill you, but we also did a lot of our medical training here. You guys make excellent cadavers.”
Julie frowns but doesn’t say anything.
“We had to clean it up a bit, but all the equipment is basically the same, so it made sense to make this the zombie hospital. Before things changed we called it the Morgue, but now … well, we still call it the Morgue, but now it’s ironic.”
She leads us toward the far end of the building where most of the action seems to be. Men and women and children lie on operating tables in varying states of decay. The scene is nearly identical to the one I saw before, but with a crucial difference: the young physicians here are not cutting corpses apart. They’re putting people back together.
A young girl who is grey but otherwise whole requires little attention; one of the nurses stops by to check her pulse and other vitals but mostly leaves her to lie there, gazing around the room with an expression of confused wonder.
“How’re you doing, Amber?” Nora asks her.
The girl slowly stretches her lips into a smile. “Better,” she whispers.
“Glad to hear it.”
Next to Amber is a man whose flesh is only slightly rotted, but he has suffered multiple gunshot wounds and they’re beginning to bleed. His face is a mixture of excitement and fear as two nurses hover over him, working to remove bullets from long-congealed wounds. I give him a look of commiseration.
“Mr. T here’s in about the same shape you were,” Nora says to me. “So you probably know what he’s going through.”
I do. I remember the slow creep of awareness as I woke up like a drunk from a blackout, wondering what the hell happened last night. When did I get stabbed in the shoulder? When did I get shot four times? When did I fall off a roof and fracture most of my bones? I remember being grateful for my numbness then, the unexpected gift of natural anaesthesia. But I somehow assumed it would end when my wounds healed.
“How do you heal the rotten parts?” Julie asks. “Skin grafts?”
“Well, that’s where it gets weird. Let me introduce you to Mrs. A.”
Nora moves to a bed in the corner, set apart from the other patients. A woman lies naked on a plastic tarp, and another tarp on the floor catches the various fluids oozing from her ruined body. This woman has been Dead a long time. Her flesh is dark grey and withered into grandmotherly wattles. It has dried up and sloughed away completely in a dozen places, revealing the bones underneath. If I ran into this woman in my days of wandering the airport, I would have kept my distance, waiting for her to start grunting and hissing and clawing at her eyes. For that sour hum to rise from her bones.
“It’s rare that they come to us when they’re this far gone,” Nora says. “I can’t imagine what it took to break this lady loose, but look at her. Look how hard she’s fighting.”
The strangest thing about her is her eyes. Though the rest of her body is putrid, her eyes are incongruously whole. They stare at the ceiling with a fierce intensity, as if somewhere inside her she is lifting impossible weights. People and places and a lifetime of memories. A thousand tons of raw human soul hauled up from the depths.
Her irises are the usual metallic grey, but as I stare into them, they flicker. A brief glint, like a flake of gold in the sand of a deep river.
“What was that?” Julie says, but she’s not looking at Mrs. A’s eyes. She’s leaning in toward her chest, pointing to a gaping hole that has rotted out of her rib cage. “Did you see that?”
“A flash?” Nora says. “Like there’s a little mirror in there catching the sun?”
“Yeah … for like half a second. I thought I imagined it.”
Nora nods. “That’s the ‘weird’ I was talking about. And to answer your question about healing the rot … look closer.”
Julie and I both lean in. The hole in the woman’s side is … smaller. The edges are a little lighter. There are patches of pink in the tissues around it.
“What is it?” Julie asks in an awed whisper.
“I have no idea. I’ve never had less idea about anything. We’ve been calling it ‘the Gleam.’ Every once in a while it just … happens, and the Dead get a little less dead.”
A strange sensation trickles through my core. A chill of uncanny familiarity, like recognising an ancestor in a crowd on the street. I have felt this Gleam. In my eyes, in my brain, in my brittle, broken bones. I have felt it surround me and lift me to my feet, urging me onward. I catch the woman’s eyes, wide and feverish with strain. “You’re not dead,” I murmur to her.
“So it’s healing them?” Julie asks Nora.
“I guess you could say that.”
“Then why do they need medical attention? Why don’t you just wait for ‘the Gleam’ to fix them?”
“Well, that’s where it gets weirder. It doesn’t heal the wounds. Only the rot.”