Dead Men's s Boots

And while they were hunting, he was setting up a maze of blind trusts and offshore shelf companies that would give him full control over how the money was used without it ever legally, incontestably, belonging to him.

Then he brought his data-rat brain to bear on the question of survival. Zombies enjoy a whole lot of advantages over ghosts: having bodies, they can interact with the world in most of the same ways that the living can – touch and taste and smell and all the rest of it. But the downside is that the body they’re anchored to is basically a slab of rotting meat.

They’ve set sail in a sinking ship, and for most of them it’s a short voyage: even though it’s probably raw will rather than nerve impulses that makes their limbs move, decay and decomposition gradually reduce the body to a state where it can’t hold itself together any more. The inhabiting spirit may still carry on clinging to the increasingly rancid carcass, or it may give up the unequal struggle and strike off on its own, but either way, at that point the ship is aground: you can’t make disarticulated legs move, or see through eyes that have closed up like dead flowers.

Nicky was very keen not to reach that stage, and he realised that the key to long-term survival was to learn as much as he could about his own internal workings. He picked up a stack of biology textbooks and read through the parts on human anatomy, supplementing what he learned by posting queries on medical message boards and talking to real doctors – mostly dead ones – at remorseless length.

He became an expert on butyric decay, dry decay, and decomposition. And then he went to war against them, with a single-mindedness he’d never applied to anything when he was alive. He stopped eating and drinking, something a lot of zombies like to keep doing for reasons of nostalgia and emotional reassurance: when you’re dead, your alimentary system can’t process food, so it just rots in your stomach and creates another vector for infection.

By contrast he began to take a whole pharmacopoeia of virulent poisons, mostly by injection. He pickled his flesh, not in formaldehyde but in embalming compounds that he brewed up for himself from recipes he found online, and steeped his body’s cells in a cocktail of inorganic compounds so potent that at one point he started to sweat contact poisons.

There was more to it than that, I knew.