I could tell from the first ring that I had a bad connection. The phone line rattled and clicked like a drunk unlocking a door. Decay. I was just glad the lights were on. Blackouts would soon become a daily occurrence, like the rain. This was another fringe benefit of the Change. Just after the rains started but before the dead rose up, telecommunications the world over went on the fritz. Some of it made sense, too. Cell phones and other satellite dependent technologies like the Internet and television were immediately impaired. The continuous ceiling of cloud could be blamed at least in part for interference. But the Change went beyond that. It was as if the complex system of communications satellites had simply ceased to exist. Signals could not reach them and no explanation was forthcoming. Scientists wanted to blame the residual effects of the Millennium bug, but that concept was too laughable to bear. Instead, the shuttlecraft Declaration was prepared for launch to investigate the anomaly. It blew up on the ground killing everyone aboard.
Computer scientists had warned NASA about that, since it was no secret that computers and networked systems had also begun to behave erratically if they worked at all. But NASA went ahead, boasting a breakthrough in computer system shielding technology-one of the theories at the time was that electrical systems were being compromised by enormous bursts of electromagnetic radiation from increased sunspot activity. NASA ignored reports that information stored digitally was growing more difficult to retrieve and a program stored might not open completely, if it opened at all. The crash investigators later blamed the computer responsible for firing the solid rocket boosters. Its program designed to control this process fired only one of them, which ripped open and ignited the main fuel tank. Similar computer-related accidents the world over soon gave credence to the theory. Information saved on computers was being garbled and made irretrievable by causes unknown.
And there followed an all-encompassing devolution of sorts. Computers were too undependable so they were yanked out of everything: planes, boats, clocks and cars. Everything. Just about any device using post-1970 designs was scrapped and the world entered a retro phase. Simple old-fashioned internal combustion engines were embraced-wind-up clocks reappeared. Companies dug through their archives for designs and started working on the old reliable. You could get a `57 style Chevy that would look like an original if it did happen to have heavier, rain-resistant-perhaps bulletproof-options available. One company offered the Millennium-T with crank motor. I'd actually seen one on the highway-smoother lines but just as ugly. The new rule seemed to be simple works. So progress took a couple of steps backward.
Since microwave relay towers were useable but flawed, communications companies were forced to revert to more dependable landlines. Computers and the Internet were unstable, and so the public went back to typewriters and telegraphs. For some reason, electricity itself had begun to behave in an erratic and unpredictable fashion that scientists were still at a loss to understand.
Military leaders were made increasingly paranoid by the revelation that all electrical systems were behaving as if they had been subjected to the magnetic pulse released by a high altitude nuclear detonation. But since the whole world was affected, it was unlikely that any independent country could be considered that hostile. With every surprise the Change brought came a matching conspiracy theory. It soon degenerated to a whole lot of ignorance shooting in the dark as a crowd of walking dead formed around the experts. Pakistan and India nuked each other outright, the Middle East wiped itself off the map and a small but dirty atomic device lifted the Vatican to heaven. Luckily the mass destruction stopped there. Genocide raged through its familiar haunts in the Old World, and in southern parts of the new, but the nukes fell silent.
I had left Douglas Willieboy's room an hour before and was back at the office trying to look busy. A chirrupy woman's voice finally answered. "You have reached the office of Richard Adrian, President of Simpson's Skin Tanning and Preservation for the Deceased." A recording. "The offices are closed." She spoke quickly, as though she had consumed all the coffee in Colombia. "Our business hours are…" She rattled out the regular Monday to Friday, nine to five routine. "If you are calling from a touch tone phone." I hung up. I had no interest in leaving a message. The receiver shrieked as I set it in its cradle.
It was Sunday. Of course their office was closed. Some still held with the old observances-this company could afford to. Economic powerhouses like Simpson's owned enough of the market to be nostalgic. Most everyone else had to work whenever and wherever they could, continuing the spirit numbing grind set out at the end of the Millennium with the Merging Monopolies, the World Economy and New World Order.
Out of one of my plentiful utility pockets, I pulled the business card from Van Reydner's room. The logo was on front, under that the business office number for appointments. I flipped it. The five numbers on the back were different, but matched the phone number Willieboy had given me.
I looked at the photo of Van Reydner. It was old, but a good color image. Her hair was red, shoulder-length, and shimmered like blood in the sun. Willieboy had not exaggerated about her chest by much. It was out to 'here' forming a porch you could hold the company picnic on. Her pose had a Mae West kind of bend to it, all breasts and hips. Her liquid blue eyes trickled right out of the picture and dribbled into my lap. She wore an evening dress, and the lighting was perfect. The photo had a professional, staged look to it, like something you might find in a model's portfolio. Beneath my consciousness Tommy's psyche began to grow, as did his erection. I had to fend off the sick images that leaked across the barrier between our minds. I'm not a prude, few of the thoughts were alien to me, but having Tommy's presence leak through was like finding out your boarder has been filming kiddy porn in his bedroom. Van Reydner's face was pale, as redheads' usually are, but there was something dark in her gaze.
I kicked my boots onto the desk and leaned back in the chair. It was about three o'clock. I could hear the occasional scream echo up from the streets below. More zealots lamenting their fate. I still remembered the twitching dead thing I had found crucified on the telephone pole behind my building one afternoon-it might have been a Sunday too. The poor bastard had been nailed up during the night. Worse part was when I tried to help him down he nearly chewed my hand off. He started screaming proverbs at me. He told me he was doing this for me. I could remember the insanity in his eyes. The flesh around them was creased and stretched from inhuman devotion. I told him I would look out for my own sins, went into the office, and phoned Authority to come scrape him off. They managed to do so with the minimum of frenzied screaming. I kind of hardened after that.
Whatever had happened fifty years ago had knocked the holy wind out of quite a few religious sails. The true believers were caught napping-the ones who believed and loved the idea of believing. After it, strange sects had sprung up all over. Fanatics stepped out of the woodwork spouting new dogma for a new age. It turned out that just about every religion had an Apocalypse mythology written into it. So waking up one day to find dead people wandering away from mortuary tables was too much for many. The idea of Apocalypse and Revelations came to the minds of most-even the unbelievers. Hell it had been drilled into every waking moment by the media at the end of the Millennium-a phenomenon that had escalated from chasing fire trucks to setting the blazes. The Internet hummed with stories about government cover-ups and notions about the U.S. Army bioengineering a flesh-eating form of influenza. Stories circulated about lights from the heavens, holy men disappearing, Elvis was playing Vegas, but none of the tales were ever verified because people had grown used to gathering information without requiring proof. The Hype Age was mystified by the Change because the first rule of Hype was that none of the dire predictions ever came true. But what happened was worse than they had ever imagined. People had been primed for trouble whether something happened at the end of the Millennium or not. When something as strange as the Change did happen, the world just lost its mind. The jury was still out on whether it was going to be temporary insanity or not. I really couldn't tell much of a difference. Except for the obvious strangeness, it felt like the same world to me.
I lit a cigarette and rocked gently in my chair. So, we have a dead lawyer killed in the apartment of a woman who is missing. I had looked for her phone number already, and found nothing. So maybe she never existed before, or she lived at the Morocco and that was that. Still, from the picture, she didn't seem like the type of woman who would make her home there. She had the look of someone who was used to being treated well. Regardless, in the weeks before she disappeared and my client got whacked, she happened to have a strange set of conversations with a man named Simon who is somehow involved with a skin tanning salon for the deceased-and uses the company president's phone. Billings dies, and she disappears. Now the hotel burns down. I could already smell the incense burning.
Since the Change there had been intense competition among establishments for preserving dead flesh. Funeral parlors were the first into the competition. They easily adapted their embalming equipment to offer formaldehyde baths, skin tanning, leather preservation treatments, plastic wraps-there were lotions and creams-all of it. Death was a growth industry. Since you suddenly 'could' take it with you, the world found itself with a lot of extremely rich dead men who wanted to keep their earthly remains intact. Time was of the essence. The hearse had taken on a new role as a kind of high-speed ambulance for the dead.
And the dead were organizing. There was a rich dead industrialist and former senator William King who had dumped tons of his money into preservation techniques. Dubbed the King of the Dead by the media, he did what he had to in the name of research, and was so wealthy that he was allowed to hold his court in a neighborhood set aside for the living. It was rumored that he would stop at nothing to fulfill his quest for immortality. Certain individuals I knew had made veiled half-frightened observations about the King's underworld connections.
And there was Captain Updike, a messianic figure who appeared with the first of the dead and who orchestrated the first Great Revival. This living former military chaplain took it upon himself to resurrect the dead. His group financed and orchestrated a reclamation program that saw the exhumation and rehabilitation of the buried dead. Updike's organization was fast becoming enormous, though its objectives remained patently nonpolitical. His followers simply wanted to release their brothers and sisters from the prisons their graves had become. I had read that there were chapters in South America and overseas.
Live like Life was one of the skin shops' slogans. The rules of this New Age were simple, if you could stay in one piece it seemed you could have immortality. A couple of Egyptian kings were still around involved in precedent setting property battles. Supposedly they had wandered away from museums. Walt Disney's inheritors were exhausting the appeals process to keep old Walt on ice citing 'living death is not a cure for what killed him.' And word circulated that the elder Disney had only had the foresight to freeze his head anyway.
Come stay at the coast, where the salt sea air will give you years of afterlife.
My phone rang. It always does when I'm thinking.
"Hello," I followed this with a yawn. I had been pushing Tommy's body too hard. Soon, soon.
"Hello," came a clipped reply. I recognized it as the lawyer, Billings', voice from the snooty edge to it. "How are you today, Mr. Wildclown?"
"Fine," I said. "I don't have a wooden leg."
There followed a grating, bubbling sound that was either laughter, or a hamster drowning in oil. I laughed along too. There was no point in crying.
"Oh yes," I added. "I burned down that building-the Morocco-yes, the one you were murdered in."
He stopped laughing.
"I didn't actually do it by myself, but I was there when it happened."
"Then all the evidence…"
"Is gone." He was silent. I let him hang a second. "But, I think Van Reydner knows enough to find your killer. I'm about two phone calls away from finding her." I lied. He wasn't paying me enough for truth.
"You think she knows who did it?"
"I think she had a hand in the 'didding' of it."
"Never." His voice nearly broke. "She and I were…"
"Not an item you can't buy for a dime a dozen." I decided to push him. "Listen, you walked out that night looking for someone in the living room. She could have left the door open for a friend. Also-" I could hear his stuttering indignation. "She has contacts with the only people who could profit from your death in this day and age."
"But who?" he blurted.
"Since people don't stay lying down dead, killing isn't the best way to keep their mouths shut. So I doubt you could have known something that someone wanted to keep quiet. If you did, you'd have been put in a blender; your head would have been missing, or something. There was another motive, I'm almost sure." I hesitated. "Where are you going for your preservation treatments?"
"Simpson's Skin Tanning and Preservation for the Deceased. They come highly recommended and timing is crucial to the process. I purchased one of their policies before I died. But I don't…"
"I'll know soon," I cut in. "Of course, I'm still going to have to look for something concrete. That's why I need Van Reydner. Did she to tell you about the Simpson's Afterlife Policy?"
"Come to think of it. But she just mentioned it in passing…" His voice held the first hard notes of realization.
"Don't worry about that right now, all I've told you is a couple of pieces of a theory. I need evidence. Did you have any contact with Van Reydner outside of your therapies?"
"No," the lawyer said, voice lowering. "She and I had an arrangement. Since I was married…well you understand." He fell silent. I did understand. I didn't like it, but I understood. "We agreed never to talk about our personal lives."
"Okay," I said. "Are you familiar with the term 'conjecture?'"
"Of course."
"Well, that's all I'm talking about. Believe me, I'd like to tell you something really romantic like; she died protecting your fallen body. You never know, I might still find something like that."
"When will you know?" His voice quavered.
"Tomorrow, maybe the next day, but not today, I've already done too much work today. It's Sunday for Christ's sake!" I was standing up now and beginning to pace. The phone's short cord had it sliding around on the desk after me.
"Of course," the lawyer added hastily, "you'll call as soon as you know?"
"Yes." I hung up, grunted, and slipped my gun into the desk. I leered at the photo of Van Reydner once more before I put it in the filing cabinet, then walked out past Elmo to the couch in the waiting room. I lay down. My head felt heavy against the greasy black leather. Tommy's mind was nearly asleep. I could feel the pleasant REM state so close to me. The soothing nervous energy surged like spring water. I released my hold on him, floated toward the ceiling and began hallucinating immediately.