Thicker Than Water

’

‘Yeah, well, Rutger Hauer says you’re full of shit,’ Nicky pointed out, fitting the lid onto the can and carefully detaching it from the projector’s housing.

‘Fine actor - not the sharpest tool in the box,’ I summarised.

‘It’s left ambiguous.’

‘In this version it’s left ambiguous. In the director’s cut, the sequence where Deckard dreams about the unicorn nails it down tight.’

Nicky put the film canister into the steel cabinet at one end of the projection booth, closed the doors and double-locked them with painstaking care.

‘I prefer Deckard to be human,’ he said, tugging on the handles to make sure the doors were secure. There was a slight tension, both in his voice and in the set of his shoulders.

I let it go at that point. Maybe it’s a nostalgia thing, because Nicky used to be human once too. That was before he had a heart attack in his late thirties and joined the ranks of the existentially challenged. Some people come back in the spirit - as ghosts - and have an uneventful afterlife hanging around the places they remember from back when they had a pulse.

Others take the low road, invading and possessing and reshaping animal flesh (the default option, if only because animal spirits are weak enough not to make a fight of it most of the time) into something broadly resembling the body they used to have. That’s how werewolves are made, although the term most often used these days is the polite, non-judgemental loup-garou.

Nicky is a stubborn bastard, in death as he was in life. He took the third option, generally considered to combine the drawbacks of the other two - the isolation of the ghost and the flesh-management problems of the werewolf. He came back in the body, as a zombie.

For most people it’s a short-term option: bodies rot, and once they pass a certain point all the will-power in the world won’t make them move any more.

Nicky was holding that crisis at bay with an idiosyncratic mixture of home embalming, faith healing and careful refrigeration. And to be honest he looks pretty good for a dead guy: the artificial tan he buys in by the bucketload disguises the waxy sheen of his pickled flesh, and his Mediterranean good looks still make women take a second look unless they’re close enough to catch that subtle whiff of formaldehyde.