“It didn’t make us happy, Peter,” Tokala went on. “None of it did. But having all that stuff did something very clever: it stopped us from ever noticing. It kept us busy and, in turn, compliant, as others busied to make more money out of us. We never questioned it. We were too busy. Busy behind our bright screens, busy behind our followers, our likes, our filters, our work, our chores, our box sets, our things. Even movie theatres and televisions, filling our head with other people’s dreams. Keeping us quiet. Keeping us in the dark. We just kept filling in the hole, filling in the empty space, filling in our empty lives with stuff so we never even noticed that something else, something better, should always have been there in its place. Life. Life and the natural world around us.”

Tokala stood, making his way over to the window. “The Dead were the brutal revolution to set us free. They freed us from a materialist world we had created but were utterly incapable of changing. The planet tried to save us many times. Fires ripped through whole continents. Floods. Plagues took over the whole world. But we never learned. We just went back to how things were before. Buying things. Owning things. Owing on what we owned and letting that system continue to stuff us. But the Dead finally managed it. Or should I say that the people finally managed it? Don’t be mistaken, Peter. We were the ones half asleep. We were the ones in a torpor. We were the zombies.”

The darkness of Tokala’s words danced across the surface of his eyes and Peter leaned closer.

“That boy you saw in the ticket booth wasn’t bitten, Peter. There was no virus. There was never any virus. And we were never driven from our lives by monsters, only ever by ourselves. The Dead are us, Peter. They were only ever us, or what was left of us, once humankind finally gave up. And they’ll give up again. That boy back there and the rest of this town already did. Despite the government’s best-laid plans for our return to the modern world, it’s doomed to fail and the people are doomed to fall, only to rise back up again just so that the rest of us are free to live. Yes, to live, Peter. To live. But not here. Never in here inside these glass coffins. But out there.”

Peter’s heart stirred as if the lake itself was calling and looked to the window. “Cooper’s trance and my daydreaming are one and the same thing.”