Free The Ghosts of Altona by Craig Russell

The moment was right today.’
    ‘And?’
    ‘And I think I got through to her. She opened up to me too. About the shooting, I mean. She feels guilty about it, which I already knew.’
    ‘Do you know something?’ said Susanne. ‘I always thought you had a bit of a thing for her.’
    ‘Anna?’ Fabel said, clearly surprised.
    ‘And I’ve always said I know she has a thing for you.’
    Fabel laughed and shook his head dismissively. They fell silent for a while and ate, Susanne’s tiredness seeming to overwhelm her.
    ‘When do you have your next session?’ she asked.
    Fabel laughed. ‘You mean the “Club of the Living Dead”? Tuesday.’
    ‘I do wish you wouldn’t call it that, Jan. It’s not something to be flippant about. Is it helping?’
    ‘It’s not meant to help. Or not at least directly. We’re subjects, not patients. Lorentz’s guinea pigs. His zombie guinea pigs.’ Fabel held up his hands, clawlike, and made a twisted face. Susanne gave him a look and he dropped his hands and expression. ‘I do get something out of it, I suppose. And I guess it’s interesting to others who’ve not had the experience.’ He paused. ‘How come you’ve never asked me?’
    ‘Asked you what?’
    ‘What it was like.’
    ‘What what was like?’
    ‘Being dead.’
    Susanne looked at him for a moment, something glinting through her tiredness. ‘Because you can’t tell me. Because you weren’t dead. I work in neuroscience, Jan, and that means I know what you experienced wasn’t death. Being dead isn’t like anything. Being dead is nothing. Exactly that, nothing. You can’t experience being dead, because there is no experience to be had. What you experienced was dying, not death. The process, not the event.’
    ‘They said I did. That I was clinically dead.’ Fabel affected an expression of mock pride.
    ‘Your heart stopped. You stopped breathing. That isn’t death. Those were two physiological events and like I say, death isn’t a process, it’s a event. You’re only truly, completely dead with brain-stem death, when the last flicker of neural activity stops. They brought you back before you got to that stage. And if you’d got any closer to it I’d be spoon-feeding you your dinner – a couple more minutes of oxygen deprivation and they’d have brought you back brain-damaged. Any longer than that and you would have died. And once you’re dead, you’re dead, there’s no coming back.’
    ‘I’ll tell that to my fellow zombies.’ Fabel smiled. ‘I’m sure they’ll be pleased.’
    *
    Fabel was stacking the dishwasher when he heard the first sirens. Not too close, but not distant enough. He reckoned they were to the east, somewhere towards Altona Altstadt. Two at first, both coming from the same direction, then a wave of them from another. He switched on the radio and caught the news. The storm had broken, after all.

13
    The rage burned in him as he watched the news. Georg Schmidt sat in his room and watched Altona once again fall victim to hate. The Nazi marchers had followed almost exactly the same route they had in 1932. How could that have been allowed to happen? And just like in 1932, the people of Altona had made their opposition known. Why could no one learn from history? Why did we always repeat the same mistakes?
    The fury within him concentrated itself, clustering around a specific focus. Helmut Wohlmann. Wohlmann was as responsible for this current carnage as he had been for what happened in 1932. He had helped to create the history now doomed to repeat itself.
    Georg Schmidt remembered. It had become a memory stored not in his mind, but in his notebook. Whenever something else came to him, some image from that day, he would add it to his journal. His mind held the pieces, but the notebook held the completed jigsaw. Whenever he needed to remind himself of who he was, what had happened and who was responsible, he read through his notebook.
    And remembered.
    *
    It all happened that day.