He Died as he Lived
Sally remembered the day her daddy died as if it were yesterday. He’d been sat in front of the TV with a half-finished can of lager for at least three hours before Mummy had finished the housework and found his body.
Sally’s Mummy was very annoyed about this. She said that they couldn’t afford for him to just up and die like that! Sally’s Mummy was a care worker! Care workers don’t make enough to live on! Most of what she brought home each week went on babysitting, with a little bit left over for the grocery shopping. It just wasn’t right for Daddy to just die right now! And it was probably because of his chain-smoking too! It was just plain rude!
Sally’s Mummy called in the Death Directors so they could have a chat about their options, because dead and gone forever was off the table. Unfortunately for Sally and Mummy: resurrection and immortality were off the table too.
Immortality was far too expensive. Some countries had nationalised it, but in this country, it was a subscription-only package, and it was only really taken up by people on five or six figure incomes.
Full on resurrection was even more expensive. The biggest companies that offered resurrection services usually had branches in most airports, railway stations and ski resorts; wherever people were most likely to die from accidents, which was something that immortality had never been able to prevent. Resurrection shops were usually sat between branches of Starbucks or Burger King just in case anybody needed to pop in with a fresh corpse that had just had an accident.
The Death Directors who came round that day were very nice. One of them gave Sally a lollipop. He carried a pocket full of them in his trench coat for whenever he had a call out to visit a family with small children to discuss their post-life options. Even though the entire process of death had changed beyond all recognition since resurrection and immortality had been put on the market, children still tended to react really badly to it. The reason for this was that so many people chose to opt out of having a life extension. Immortality and resurrection companies had never understood why some people were happier to just end their lives at around 70 or 80 like people used to do back in the bad old days. Who doesn’t want to live forever? Life’s fantastic, isn’t it?
The market research teams found that some people were just fine with death. They didn’t bother becoming immortal and just went whenever they went. It was a pretty popular option, so regardless of whether they understood the appeal or not; all Death Directors would keep traditional death, funeral and cremation or burial on the books for the customers who could afford to lose a loved one.
So Sally sat with her Mummy in the living room next to her father’s dead body as they talked over the packages that were available.
The cheapest on offer was pretty useless; it just involved stuffing her father’s corpse with the type material that was typically used in cushions and soft toys and fitting him with a voice box so that when you squeezed it; it would utter a selection of up to eight phrases. It was there to just make you feel as though your deceased loved one were still with you. People only utter around seven or eight phrases on a daily basis anyway; “Yes dear,” “No dear,” “How was your day, dear?” “What’s for dinner?” etc, so the cheap taxidermy package was available if you couldn’t afford anything a bit more realistic.
Sally’s Mummy wanted the limbs package so that Daddy would still be able to work for a living.
“Excellent choice Madam,” said the Death Director. “If you’d just like to enter your bank details here…”
The men from the Death Directors left that day with the body. They told Sally and Mummy that he should be ready in about a week or two. She could apply for a bereavement allowance until they’d finished.
Mummy signed up for the work-revival scheme. She’d pay off the cost of her husband’s post-mortal operations in instalments over a twenty-year period. It was all fairly simple. It was almost as if low-income families had been factored into the equation when immortality had initially been put on the market, which naturally they had been.
Families like Sally’s would need immortality just as much as everyone else, and the technology was a lot cheaper than the companies that provided the service let on. If there were customers who required their services, then why not market a cheaper option? It just made sense.
So a few weeks later, Sally’s Mummy got home to find Sally and the babysitter in the living room where a man-sized package that had been delivered by the pallbearers earlier on was sat waiting to be opened. Sally’s Mummy cut the tape that bound the cardboard coffin together and found her husband neatly wrapped in bubble wrap and lying in a bed of polystyrene. His eyes were closed. He looked almost peaceful.
“Sally, could you go to your room, please?” Mummy had asked.
“But why?”
“Now!”
Sally didn’t know why her Mummy had wanted her out of the room. Her Mummy’s face had fallen when she’d seen her husband lying there in that box and she didn’t know why.
Her Mummy hadn’t let her spend much time with her Daddy after that. Sally had only seen him in the hallway a few times.
The hallway was where he slept now. He had metallic braces holding his body up. The braces were woven through the skin on his arms, legs and torso; acting as a robotic exoskeleton. He had a strange piece of machinery fixed to the side of his head with an outlet for a charger cable that Mummy would plug into the hall socket every night.
He slept bolt upright, which confused Sally. Wasn’t he uncomfortable? Why didn’t he sleep in the big bed with Mummy anymore? Sally had thought the entire reason they had resurrected him in the first place was so that nothing would change, but everything had changed. Everything was different now. Different and wrong.
*
Sally would always remember that first night that she followed her dead father when he went out to work.
She’d been very careful not to let Mummy see that she was spying on Daddy. It had been very early in the morning; the sun was only just coming up and the sky outside was a deep blue. Her father’s mechanical body reacted to the faint glimmers of sunlight slowly creeping through the window at the end of the hallway. The machine on his head activated and held his eyes wide open, making it almost look as if he were still alive, but he wasn’t blinking. His face was pale and expressionless.
Peering out from her room, Sally’s heart began to beat faster and faster as her father’s body sprang to life. It made slow whirring noises as his motorised feet took him over to the stairs.
Sally slowly and silently padded along the hallway and watched her father as he headed downstairs where he put on his jacket and shoes and closed the door behind him.
Sally decided to follow him. She went to put her own coat on over her fluffy pink dressing gown. She was sure she’d be back before Mummy woke up; she just wanted to watch him.
*
Sally had never been allowed out in the village at this time before, and she’d certainly never been allowed out on her own. She wasn’t really on her own though, was she? Her Daddy was lumbering to work just a few hundred yards ahead. She’d been allowed to be outside with Daddy when he was alive, so she wasn’t breaking the rules just because he was dead; not really.
She was quick and sneaky at first, hiding behind bins and street corners whenever she found somewhere just out of sight in case her Daddy looked back, but he never did, and she realised that she could probably just walk a few hundred yards behind him and be almost certain that he wouldn’t notice. It turned out that the small box on his head hadn’t reanimated his ears. Hearing wasn’t necessary for Daddy’s job, so why bother giving him it?
She followed her Daddy to the cemetery on the edge of town. She’d passed the cemetery a few times before when she’d been out with Mummy and Daddy on the weekends, but she’d never been allowed in. Her Daddy hadn’t liked his job there, so he’d never asked Sally come along with him; not even on bring your daughter to work day.
He took a set of keys from his coat pocket and unlocked the padlock binding the rusty chain around the cemetery gates. Her Father’s corpse then stopped by the tool shed next to the crematorium. She waited behind a bush as she peered through the branches at the grotty little hut where he came out again about ten minutes later. His robotic body had taken off his jacket and had wrestled his corpse into some overalls and picked up a shovel for him. He looked a right a mess; his pale grey skin that had been artificially preserved by the Death Directors almost matched the colour of his dusty work clothes, and the exoskeleton was poking out of the material at all sorts of odd angles.
He then trudged off to start the morning’s work.
Sally followed him past the rows and rows of graves. There were a lot more of them than she had expected. Maybe it was because her Daddy hadn’t been allowed to die that she’d assumed that most people’s Daddies would’ve had to keep on working after death just like him, but no, she was very wrong; the graveyard was full of headstones.
Her father reached the end of a row where the next traditional death customer would be buried, presumably later that day. He marked out a patch of grass with a can of spray paint and began to dig. Sally watched him from behind a nearby grave as he piled the dirt up beside the pit. His arms repeated the same shovel action over and over again; there was no pause, no hesitation, always same intensity that the motorized corpse struck the ground with, and he brought out almost the exact same amount of dirt every time. His arms kept repeating that industrial whirr of the mechanisms at the joints. Ruthlessly efficient and precise; it took him about an hour.
Once he’d finished, Daddy marched back towards the crematorium with the shovel over his shoulder with it clattering against his exoskeleton as he went. Sally followed close behind and watched him go inside.
She crept up to the door and peered through a crack. Inside, she saw Daddy tending to a large human sized black bag on a plinth in the centre of the room. He unzipped the bag and revealed another dead body. The body was naked, and pale and a bit older than Daddy was.
She stood and watched for a while as her father dressed the corpse in a nice suit that would never be seen again. He then wheeled over a brand-new coffin on a trolley and parked it next to the plinth and locked its wheels into place. His strong robotic body lifted the dead man over the wall of the shiny new coffin and manoeuvred it into a peaceful-looking position.
It was then that Sally accidentally knocked against the door. Her dead father suddenly looked up at that moment. She gasped and froze. Her Daddy slowly raised his head towards that flicker of movement that she’d caused just in the corner of one of his reanimated eyes.
She could feel her heart pounding furiously through her entire body as the walking corpse fixed its glare upon her. It held that horrifying and unblinking expression for a while. The intensity of that gaze was magnified now that she was seeing him this close.
He almost looked as though he recognised her. He continued to stare at her, transfixed; the box on his head now shining with the reflection of amber rays of the rising sun flickering through the windows of the crematorium. Her father’s jaw lowered ever so slowly, and with his rotting throat, he uttered a terrible hoarse wail.
The motorized corpse started shuffling towards her as it shrieked. Sally staggered back as the writhing mass of preserved pale flesh and juddering mechanical arms got closer and closer. She fell over and onto the gravel outside. Holding up her arms, she closed her eyes and cried out as the corpse towered over her.
But then: there was nothing.
The body slammed the door behind it and lurched straight past her and headed towards the cemetery gates where an ambulance was arriving from the local hospital.
She sheepishly left the graveyard as the living man delivered a fresh corpse to the dead one. She slowed up and watched for a moment as the mechanical arm that was attached to the preserved flesh of her father held his hand over the delivery man’s little proof-of-delivery machine and signed his name.
She couldn’t stop thinking about it as she headed home and crept back in, careful not to wake up her mother.
*
In the years that followed, as Sally grew up, she often snuck out early in the morning to watch her father go about the graves; see to any vandalism, tend to the flowerbeds, unlock the gates and take deliveries of newly-dead customers.
She’d always watch from a distance as she couldn’t stomach being too close to him. His body would start to smell of decay towards the end of a shift, and she and her mother would have to recoat him in preservative fluid so he didn’t stink up the house if they had guests coming over.
Maybe one day they’d be able to afford to let him die. Sally wasn’t old enough to get a part-time job yet, but she would be next year. Until then, her dead father continued to work and pay for Sally and her mother to continue living their…well, not a good life as such, but it was stable.
They weren’t that deep in debt, and they were both sure that they’d finish paying off the Death Directors someday. The interest rates had been climbing pretty steeply in recent years, so it would probably take a bit longer than the first estimate they’d been given, but they’d get there eventually.
As she sat and watched her father dig those graves, she’d think about the day that he’d finally be allowed to be still.
Listen to the dramatized version on my podcast Abnormal Stories
https://play.acast.com/s/625864f58ef2de0015f5bf87/625c505e189bf100139bc401
