When the dead came back, they turned out to be assholes.
“Wake up, dude.”
I cracked an eye open, groaning, hoping it wasn’t cops. Roscoe, the mutt who stays with me for some stupid dog reason, was sitting up beside the shopping cart. The cart was jammed out of sight between two bushes growing by the funeral home. I’d worked my way behind the bushes a few hours earlier and gotten as comfortable as you can, sleeping on cold ground.
“Hoo’zat?” I muttered. My mouth tasted foul. Goddamn that cheap wine.
Roscoe turned towards me. “Stay quiet,” he said. “Things are happening.”
My dog was talking. “Things are happening” seemed like an understatement. A dream, I figured, or maybe DTs, so my dog speaking to me didn’t alarm me that much.
But Roscoe waking me made me one of the first people to see the dead come back. The side door to the funeral home squeaked open, and two dead people walked out. One wore a suit and tie, the other in just a hospital gown. They smelled, of blood and rot and embalming fluid. The smell would lessen over time, but I didn’t know that then. They didn’t lurch or moan. They didn’t mutter “Brains-s-s-s” like they were in some stupid zombie movie. The dead sauntered out that door. Like they owned the world. Like they knew secrets the living didn’t. Like they were better than us.
And they were smirking. Yeah, smirking. I got to hate that smarmy know-it-all expression on their faces. Everyone got to hate it.
One of them, the good-suit one, saw me lying behind the bushes. He spat cotton gauze out of his mouth and spoke.
“Bum,” he said, and laughed.
“Worthless bum,” the woman in the hospital gown added. They both laughed. They started to walk away, but then the guy turned back and spoke again.
“Your dog is ugly too.”
Roscoe growled. “Assholes,” he muttered. I petted him and told him to calm down. Maybe because I thought I was dreaming or the booze was finally melting my brain, or maybe because I was used to that sort of treatment, but both of us got back to sleep pretty quickly after the dead people walked away.
It wasn’t a dream. By the next afternoon, more than just recently-dead began coming back. Graves were clawed open from the inside. Cremation urns shattered, the ashes whirling around like a desert dust devil until they found a source of water; the slurry and mud formed into misshapen doll-like things that changed into meat and bone, and grew, and became full-sized and whole again.
A lot of the dead were in rough shape, but they…
I don’t know if “healed” is the right word. Besides the creepy reformations of the cremated, the dead sweated out embalming fluid, missing limbs regrew, and they looked more and more normal over time.
But they didn’t act normal. They walked around, looking at the world through eyes filled with contempt. When they didn’t ignore us, they derided us.
I saw a wide-eyed woman run up to a dead man on the street. “Daddy?” she cried. “Daddy, is that you? Daddy, come home.”
He looked at her with a withering look. “Do I know you?” he said. “Do I want to know you?” Glee lay under the contempt in his voice. He was enjoying his cruelty. And then he said, “Are you worth knowing… Mary?” and turned and walked away from the woman. Her face crumpled, and she fell to her knees on the sidewalk, weeping.
Roscoe and I went to her. Roscoe pushed his head into her lap and did the Sad Doggy Eyes thing. I patted her shoulder and offered her my cleanest handkerchief. She hugged Roscoe for a while, then stood and walked away silently, head down.
I thought becoming able to talk might mean Roscoe would have some answers about the returning dead. He didn’t have that much to say though.
“Jeez, dude, you’re asking a dog for advice.”
“Is God doing this? Is there a God?”
“No fucking idea. I can lick my own balls. That seems like a good argument for Intelligent Design. Not sure what it says about you.”
“So why are you able to talk now?”
“I’ve always talked. Maybe you never listened before. Let’s find something to eat.”
Then the dead began to grow wings, and we finally got some half-assed answers out of them. “So we can fly to Heaven. ‘Cause we’re going to Heaven and you’re not, losers.”
That was just too damn much for a lot of people. There were just too many assholes in the world now. They started hunting the dead. They shot the dead. They cut them down with swords and axes and chainsaws. They hung them from lampposts, doused them with gasoline, and set them ablaze.
The re-deadified just came back again. Limbs rejoined, wounds and bullet holes closed. Ashes drifted into clumps and piles again and sucked moisture from the ground again and turned back into meat and bone again. The dead gave us the finger and laughed.
Lots of people killed themselves after that, thinking they could come back, grow wings, and go up to Heaven too. But they didn’t come back. They only rotted and stank. The dead laughed about it. “Too late! Sucks to be you!”
Roscoe and I moved into a house left empty after the owners’ suicides. People had stopped caring much about paperwork and titles and that kind of shit by then. There were blood spatters on the bedroom walls, so I slept on the living room couch instead.
I woke to Roscoe’s growls one morning to find a dead woman sitting in the chair across from the couch. Her half-grown wings bunched up behind her. It looked uncomfortable. Good.
She said the dead needed to be left alone; we living people had to stop killing them over and over. When all the dead’s wings were fully grown, they’d fly up to Heaven together and never come back again. But they all had to go at the same time.
“Sure, maybe,” I replied. “Maybe you could shut the fuck up and not be such assholes until then?”
She laughed. She laughed hard, and ugly, and mean. “What do you think Heaven is?”
Lots of people received that message. The deadhunters put their guns and chainsaws away. It took several weeks, but all the dead had their full wings, finally. Some wings were pure white, but most were shades of gray and brown, like big fucking pigeons.
When they rose into the air, wings spread broad and beating fast, they dimmed the sun with their numbers. Then turds and piss rained down from the sky, and everyone watching ducked for cover. Just like damned pigeons after all. They rose higher and higher, getting smaller and smaller, until they couldn’t be seen anymore. No one saw the skies part, or visions of pearly gates, or a big suburb of mansions in the sky. The dead just went away, and have never come back.
If what the dead said was true, that Heaven is a place where you’re free to be an asshole, where it’s okay to be your worst self, to be mean and cruel and selfish, maybe it’s a good thing that the living left behind are cut off from any chance at going there after we die.
_____
Roscoe and I sit out on the front porch in the evenings; we’ve made friends with some neighbors. I got by for a while doing odd jobs, then got work stocking shelves at a grocery store. I don’t spend my paychecks on booze. Well, some. But I drink less than I used to, and bathe more often.
In a world without hope of Heaven, it turns out we try to be a little kinder to each other. That’s the favor the dead did for us. I don’t know if that’s the lesson we were supposed to learn, or if there was ever supposed to be a lesson at all, but we learned it anyway.
The neighborhood got together one weekend, with ladders and brushes and rollers and a whole big-ass load of paint. We spent the day on the big flat roof of the local mega-mart. People brought fried chicken and potato salad and home-made ice cream, soda for the kids and beer for the grownups. Some guys even brought up guitars and drums and an amp and we had music and dancing going on, being careful where the paint hadn’t dried yet.
Dogs don’t climb ladders very well, so I slung Roscoe across my shoulders and carried him up the ladder that way. “You’re pushing that unconditional love for an owner thing a little hard, dude,” he said. But he was a hit with the kids, and kept them away from the wet paint.
“What do you think, Roscoe?” I asked at day’s end. The sun was setting, but there was enough light left to make out the humongous lettering written across the wide roof.
He looked at me with disdain. “Dude, I’m a talking dog. A talking dog. What makes you think dogs know how to read?”
So I read the words out to him:
HAVING A GREAT TIME. GLAD YOU’RE NOT HERE.
“I think it’s time to go home, dude.”
I took a last swig of beer and thought about how maybe dogs had good advice for us after all.
“Yeah, let’s go home.”
_________________________
Bruce Arthurs has been writing occasional fiction since 1975, with scattered stories appearing in scattered venues over scattered years. He also edited two anthologies and wrote an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation ("Clues", 4th Season, 1991). In 2012, after a long hiatus, he began writing fiction again while recovering from a badly broken arm. (He does not necessarily recommend this as a cure for writer's block.) Half a dozen new stories have been published since, with more awaiting publication. He lives in Arizona with his wife Hilde, several housemates, a small mob of cats, and can most easily be found online as @BruceArthursAZ on Twitter.
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