Commutes of the Living Dead

"Why do I take the Aurora Crescent to Bellwich line to work rather than Brood End even though it adds forty minutes to my commute?

Because of the smell. In the end I couldn't stand the smell.

Look, it's not their fault. They're ghouls. They smell like dead things. They know it. But they try to fit in. Overdose on deodorant and perfume. Bottom shelf brands that blare like nasal trashpop vids. Sickly sweet vanillin and musk top notes. Greasy middle notes. Benzene bottom notes. In a closed crowded tube carriage on a Tuesday morning, you can cut the moist fug with a butter knife. A blunt one.

They all work at the Cerise Terminus plant. You heard of them? They're in maintenance and waste logistics. It's all right, no one has heard of them. Thing is, no: two things. First, they have the contract with City Central for hazardous waste disposal. Second, do you have any idea how many people die in the Greater Met on an average day? How many of them have families rich enough to afford funeral services like you see on Downton Abbey? Yep: the point one perfuckingpercent. All those other bodies: not cremated, no. Greenhouses. Particulates. Not buried, no. No land left not given over to hab or ag. Seriously. Bodies are a significant waste issue in our Modern Society.

So. Ghouls. They eat the dead. Always have. There used to be a terrible fear of them, something something resurrection and the life. Recycling dear old granny's empty meatsack was a terrible wossname, desecration.

Cerise Terminus employs them as abattoir workers, with a well stocked on-plant canteen, and doesn't even mind if they take their work home with them. They do: newspaper parcels with greasy wet patches that leave stains on the seats in the tube. They're sorry about that and wet wipe them up.

Don't ask me what eats wet wipes. Nothing, I think.

But the tragedy is, the ghouls are dying off. Modern corpses aren't what they used to be. Heavy metals, radioisotopes from Russ, PCBXYZ chem fragments, nanokibble, more ronas than you can name. The poor old things can't cope, any more than we could. The sin of the apex consumer: shit accumulates uphill. A generation and they're all dead: poisoned.

Then we will be all buried in our own dead. And we'll stink."

The doom that came to Tunwich

It was three weeks before those outside Tunwich realised what that last bout of roadworks had wrought. It took them another three weeks to work through the accumulated go-slow zones, diversions, reversions, revisions, turnbacks, turnarounds, roundabouts and traffic police. And when they did, they discovered that Tunwich had been cut free, excised from the city, and was sunk without trace. There was a lake there now. At least there were ducks.

The things inside the end of the world

We're all of us mere surfaces over structures. Our bodies as well as our personas. Skin, politeness, the reflection of incident light. We mistake these superficialities for realities. No wonder the things inside became jealous, wanted to share the limelight.

From where I sit the bone-tide is only a few hundred metres away. The sky over it is also bone-coloured, darker, like old ivory. It hungrily sucks the air to it.

Might air have bones too?

Splinters of bone jut from every surface that the bone-tide has touched: rigid explosions of jagged material, fractally sharp, as painful to touch as it is even to look at, or think about.

There are people there amid the spears and pickets of bone. They remind me of cordyceps caterpillars, far gone in parasitic submission to the fungus that has turned their bodies into fruits. Bones erupt from their skins, eyes, fingernails. It looks painful. But they are as immovable as everything else over there. Their skins are bone. So is their hair, and clothes, and mobile phones. Their suffering, if they are still capable of anything at all, is as passive as it is eternal.

The tide is moving. The keys under my fingers are becoming prickly. Sharp. I can feel my bones ache, desperate to be free.

It won't be long now.