Born _again_...?
What year? He glared at the sky and the midnight autumnal stars moving
in slow illuminations across the windy black. He read the tiltings of
centuries in those stars. Orion thus and so, Aurega here! and where
Taurus? _There!_
His eyes narrowed. His lips spelled out the year:
"2349."
An odd number. Like a school sum. They used to say a man couldn't
encompass any number over a hundred. After that it was all so damned
abstract there was no use counting. This was the year 2349! A numeral,
a sum. And here he was, a man who had lain in his hateful dark coffin,
hating to be buried, hating the living people above who lived and lived
and lived, hating them for all the centuries, until today, now, born
out of hatred, he stood by his own freshly excavated grave, the smell
of raw earth in the air, perhaps, but he could not smell it!
"I," he said, addressing a poplar tree that was shaken by the wind, "am
an anachronism." He smiled faintly.
* * * * *
He looked at the graveyard. It was cold and empty. All of the stones
had been ripped up and piled like so many flat bricks, one atop
another, in the far corner by the wrought iron fence. This had been
going on for two endless weeks. In his deep secret coffin he had heard
the heartless, wild stirring as the men jabbed the earth with cold
spades and tore out the coffins and carried away the withered ancient
bodies to be burned. Twisting with fear in his coffin, he had waited
for them to come to him.
Today they had arrived at his coffin. But--late. They had dug down to
within an inch of the lid. Five o'clock bell, time for quitting. Home
to supper. The workers had gone off. Tomorrow they would finish the
job, they said, shrugging into their coats.
Silence had come to the emptied tombyard.
Carefully, quietly, with a soft rattling of sod, the coffin lid had
lifted.
William Lantry stood trembling now, in the last cemetery on Earth.
"Remember?" he asked himself, looking at the raw earth. "Remember those
stories of the last man on earth? Those stories of men wandering in
ruins, alone? Well, you, William Lantry, are a switch on the old story.
Do you _know_ that? You are the last _dead_ man in the whole damned
world!"
There were no more dead people. Nowhere in any land was there a dead
person. Impossible? Lantry did not smile at this. No, not impossible
at all in this foolish sterile, unimaginative, antiseptic age of
cleansings and scientific methods! People died, oh my god, yes.
But--_dead_ people? Corpses? They didn't exist!
What _happened_ to dead people?
The graveyard was on a hill. William Lantry walked through the dark
burning night until he reached the edge of the graveyard and looked
down upon the new town of Salem. It was all illumination, all color.
Rocket ships cut fire above it, crossing the sky to all the far ports
of earth.
In his grave the new violence of this future world had driven down and
seeped into William Lantry. He had been bathed in it for years. He knew
all about it, with a hating dead man's knowledge of such things.
Most important of all, he knew what these fools did with dead men.
He lifted his eyes. In the center of the town a massive stone finger
pointed at the stars. It was three hundred feet high and fifty feet
across. There was a wide entrance and a drive in front of it.
In the town, theoretically, thought William Lantry, say you have a
dying man. In a moment he will be dead. What happens? No sooner is his
pulse cold when a certificate is flourished, made out, his relatives
pack him into a car-beetle and drive him swiftly to--
The Incinerator!
That functional finger, that Pillar of Fire pointing at the stars.
Incinerator. A functional, terrible name. But truth is truth in this
future world.
Like a stick of kindling your Mr. Dead Man is shot into the furnace.
_Flume!_
William Lantry looked at the top of the gigantic pistol shoving at the
stars. A small pennant of smoke issued from the top.
There's where your dead people go.
"Take care of yourself, William Lantry," he murmured. "You're the last
one, the rare item, the last dead man. All the other graveyards of
earth have been blasted up. This is the last graveyard and you're the
last dead man from the centuries. These people don't believe in having
dead people about, much less walking dead people. Everything that can't
be used goes up like a matchstick. Superstitions right along with it!"
He looked at the town. All right, he thought, quietly. I hate you. You
hate me, or you _would_ if you knew I existed. You don't believe in
such things as vampires or ghosts. Labels without referents, you cry!
You snort. All right, snort! Frankly, I don't believe in _you_, either!
I don't _like_ you! You and your Incinerators.
He trembled. How very close it had been. Day after day they had hauled
out the other dead ones, burned them like so much kindling. An edict
had been broadcast around the world. He had heard the digging men talk
as they worked!
"I guess it's a good idea, this cleaning up the graveyards," said one
of the men.
"Guess so," said another. "Grisly custom. Can you imagine? Being
buried, I mean! Unhealthy! All them germs!"
"Sort of a shame. Romantic, kind of. I mean, leaving just this one
graveyard untouched all these centuries. The other graveyards were
cleaned out, what year was it, Jim?"
"About 2260, I think. Yeah, that was it, 2260, almost a hundred years
ago. But some Salem Committee they got on their high horse and they
said, 'Look here, let's have just ONE graveyard left, to remind us of
the customs of the barbarians.' And the gover'ment scratched its head,
thunk it over, and said, 'Okay. Salem it is. But all other graveyards
go, you understand, all!'"
"And away they went," said Jim.
"Sure, they sucked out 'em with fire and steam shovels and
rocket-cleaners. If they knew a man was buried in a cow-pasture, they
fixed him! Evacuated them, they did. Sort of cruel, I say."
"I hate to sound old-fashioned, but still there were a lot of tourists
came here every year, just to see what a real graveyard was like."
"Right. We had nearly a million people in the last three years
visiting. A good revenue. But--a government order is an order. The
government says no more morbidity, so flush her out we do! Here we go.
Hand me that spade, Bill."
* * * * *
William Lantry stood in the autumn wind, on the hill. It was good to
walk again, to feel the wind and to hear the leaves scuttling like mice
on the road ahead of him. It was good to see the bitter cold stars
almost blown away by the wind.
It was even good to know fear again.
For fear rose in him now, and he could not put it away. The very fact
that he was walking made him an enemy. And there was not another
friend, another dead man, in all of the world, to whom one could turn
for help or consolation. It was the whole melodramatic living world
against one William Lantry. It was the whole vampire-disbelieving,
body-burning, graveyard-annihilating world against a man in a dark
suit on a dark autumn hill. He put out his pale cold hands into the
city illumination. You have pulled the tombstones, like teeth, from
the yard, he thought. Now I will find some way to push your damnable
Incinerators down into rubble. I will make dead people again, and I
will make friends in so doing. I cannot be alone and lonely. I must
start manufacturing friends very soon. Tonight.
"War is declared," he said, and laughed. It was pretty silly, one man
declaring war on an entire world.
The world did not answer back. A rocket crossed the sky on a rush of
flame, like an Incinerator taking wing.
Footsteps. Lantry hastened to the edge of the cemetery. The diggers,
coming back to finish up their work? No. Just someone, a man, walking
by.
As the man came abreast the cemetery gate, Lantry stepped swiftly out.
"Good evening," said the man, smiling.
Lantry struck the man in the face. The man fell. Lantry bent quietly
down and hit the man a killing blow across the neck with the side of
his hand.
Dragging the body back into shadow, he stripped it, changed clothes
with it. It wouldn't do for a fellow to go wandering about this future
world with ancient clothing on. He found a small pocket knife in the
man's coat; not much of a knife, but enough if you knew how to handle
it properly. He knew how.
He rolled the body down into one of the already opened and exhumed
graves. In a minute he had shoveled dirt down upon it, just enough to
hide it. There was little chance of it being found. They wouldn't dig
the same grave twice.
He adjusted himself in his new loose-fitting metallic suit. Fine, fine.
Hating, William Lantry walked down into town, to do battle with the
Earth.