Dead Rite’s headquarters was a small rented warehouse located in an industrial part of the city. In a curious twist of fate, the building was previously used by a coffin manufacturer. In a post-zombie world, the coffin business had gone much the same way as Kodak and Encyclopedia Britannica had in a post-digital world. That is, it was now largely redundant. After the events of the past three years, few people wanted to risk having their loved ones making an unexpected reappearance during their own funeral, and so ninety-five percent of people now opted for cremation over a traditional burial.
Steve was still kicking himself that he didn’t see that one coming. Crematoriums were the growth industry they should have expanded into rather than undead management and control.
Miles, Elliott and Felix had returned from the processing centre and were now filling in time before their next call-out. Felix always made productive use of this downtime, tinkering away in the small workshop out back on whatever his next big invention was. Elliott was on the phone with his girlfriend Amy, while Miles ate his dinner in the break room. On the way back from the processing centre, he had stopped by an Aqua Bar outlet to pick up a chicken caesar wrap and organic orange juice.
He was midway through his dinner when he heard a familiar voice on the TV.
He spun his chair around and saw his housemate being interviewed by a reporter from the front lines of the rally. She was leading the protest against the court decision handed down to the four men convicted of killing a zombie.
“We’re here to make a stand!” Clea declared, exercising her right to be righteous. “We’re here to send a message to politicians, to the media, and to those who still think it’s okay to use former humans as punching bags and target practice. We want to stop the violence. Stop the hatred. It’s time we all moved forward as one to create a better society!”
Clea’s idealistic words and calls for peace were juxtaposed with vision from the rally. Viewers were treated to scenes of protesters decapitating an effigy of Bernard Marlowe, the outspoken anti-zombie crusader and aspiring Prime Minister. Another protester squirted lighter fluid over the effigy as if he was urinating on it, then set it alight in front of a cheering crowd.
As far as Clea’s rallies went, this was par for the course. They would usually start out with the best of intentions, but it wasn’t long until the situation descended into shambles and mob rule took over. Different protest groups that had little or nothing to do with undead issues (and often had opposing agendas) would begin shouting over one another, and the whole thing quickly became farcical. The Anti-GM Foods group struggled to be heard over the Legalise Drugs group, while the Save the Oceans group jostled for airtime with the Cancel the Debt group.
Meanwhile, a feminist collective paraded topless to highlight the issue of gender inequality and sexual harassment in society. They certainly received plenty of attention from the media, but it was debatable as to whether their intended message got through or not.
Clea’s protests often ended this way, having the opposite effect of what she had intended. A previous rally targeting large corporations and the undemocratic influence they exerted over government policy quickly became a riot, resulting in dozens of small independent businesses being trashed.
Before that, at a protest meant to highlight the alarming levels of environmental degradation in the modern world, a large bonfire was started which the protestors continued to fuel by tossing on garbage, old shoes, clothes, street signs, wooden benches and whatever else they could find. It was estimated that the carbon emissions created by the fire was the equivalent of what ten thousand cars produced in one year.
Worst of all were the peace marches. These almost always ended in violence.
It was all too easy for the mainstream media to mock and belittle these people, and for viewers to dismiss them as a bunch of loony activists with too much spare time on their hands. This particular news report showed only a short three-second sound bite from a human rights lawyer, but it did allow a man in a bear costume riding a unicycle a full thirty seconds to air his somewhat unique view of the world.
Meanwhile, in another part of the country, Bernard Marlowe appeared at his carefully stage-managed press conference to denounce the appalling behaviour of the protesters. He maintained that while the undead needed to be protected, people came first and the laws shouldn’t be used to turn honest, hardworking, upstanding citizens into criminals. He reiterated that the current legislation had gone too far in favour of the undead, and promised to repeal the laws should he win office at the forthcoming election.
He added that his thoughts and prayers were with the families of the four men sentenced to prison for the unprovoked killing of a zombie. He made no mention of the still-living family of that zombie, who witnessed their son getting torn to shreds by a pack of bored, bloodthirsty thugs.
Even though it was now illegal to commit an act of violence against an undead being, there were still those in society who refused to abide by the law and insisted on taking matters into their own hands. They viewed these creatures as a threat, and many still harboured a great deal of resentment towards zombies after what they had previously witnessed during the initial outbreak. They believed that “the only good zombie was a dead zombie”, a slogan they proudly proclaimed on their bumper stickers (apparently unaware that zombies were already dead). Others simply wanted to try out the high-powered weaponry they had purchased during the outbreak but never got the chance to use.
At the other end of the spectrum, there was a small but vocal group of people who objected to this sort of mistreatment. The Former Human Defence League was established (“Former human” was the politically correct term for an undead being, since “zombie” was considered to be outdated and offensive), made up mostly of traumatised friends and relatives who had witnessed loved ones hacked to death by gangs of barbaric rednecks. Their aim was to stop the slaughter of what they considered to be a living creature.
After numerous legal challenges and appeals it was ruled that former humans, while not technically living creatures, were still regarded as sentient beings and therefore deserving of protection. The National Law to End Violence Against the Dead Act (NEVADA) was brought into effect, stating that an undead being could not be harmed or interfered with in any way except in instances of self-defence. Killing for sport or recreation was strictly prohibited.
This ruling proved to be highly contentious. Many considered it a violation of their rights, and felt they should be able to take preemptive action when protecting their family and property. Despite the laws being in place for over two years now, zombies were still being attacked and killed on a regular basis by a minority of people who refused to accept the ruling. The most extreme example of this was the vigilante gangs that were said to traverse the countryside, wiping out zombies before the UMC workers could get to them
Clea became involved in various forms of activism in her teens, and continued to support her many causes as she entered college. But by the seventh year of her studies, a nagging feeling of disenchantment was beginning to creep up on her. She was starting to feel that, despite the numerous causes she’d put her name to, there was nothing she could do that others hadn’t already done before her. Women’s rights, anti-war, save the rainforests – those battles had been fought by her parents’ generation. There was little she could do to make a name for herself.
So when the zombie outbreak happened, Clea discovered her new calling. This was her chance to make a difference and blaze her own trail. The fact that zombies were so unpopular among the general population made it all the more alluring. This was a cause worth fighting for. She would truly be raging against the machine, while her contemporaries wasted time worrying about polar ice caps or endangered parrots.
Along with other like-minded revolutionaries such as Fabian and Amoeba, she founded the Zombie Equality Resistance Organization (ZERO), although they later abandoned that name once it was established that “zombie” was a derogatory term. They now referr
ed to themselves as Zeroes individually, or the Tribe of Zeroes as a collective. Their logo, which they graffitied on walls and billboards and scratched into the paintwork of any cars they found displaying anti-zombie bumper stickers, was a circle with a “Z” in the middle, like a sideways anarchy symbol.
The Tribe of Zeroes became a vocal and visible presence, holding regular protest rallies and racking up numerous media impressions. These trust fund anarchists may have ditched their material comforts, but their sense of entitlement and born-to-rule mentality was still going strong. They were more than happy to lecture the public on what was best for them and how the world should be run.
It was just a shame that their efforts never really amounted to much. If anything, they ended up turning the public against their cause rather than gathering support. People who saw them on TV or read about their antics in the newspaper would take one look at this bunch of work-shy layabouts and instantly take the opposing side to whatever it was they were supporting.
Clea refused to see it this way, of course, and deluded herself into believing that they were making a real difference. She claimed that the group had been so effective at changing public opinion that they were now under surveillance by the authorities, who were regularly sending undercover agents to try to infiltrate the group. She had warned the others that they needed to be extra vigilant now after reading about what happened to the ZLF, a militant French pro-zombie organisation. The ZLF were recently busted for running zombie safe houses; shelters designed to keep the undead out of the state-run processing centres. It was later revealed that various members of the group were in fact government informants, and the members were now facing ten-year prison sentences for harbouring undead beings.
Chapter 7