12. Philosophical Zombies
“That’s the emergency robo-call done.” Harry sat back, feeling like something was finally working halfway right. Maybe it would be the start of a trend. “The meeting’s on. Now give me something to tell them, Stevie Ray.”
“I wish I could. I can’t raise the state police.” Stevie Ray leaned back from the desk full of radio equipment and shook his head. “Not the sheriff either, and I’m not getting an answer from the National Guard unit.”
“What, you didn’t call Homeland Security?” Harry’s tone was halfway between mocking and genuinely outraged. No reason to let the civilians, or Stevie Ray either, know how worried that news made him. If they were really cut off…
“No luck there either. I get busy signals, faults on the line, or just plain empty hissing.”
“What are we going to do?” Otto said, those big pop-eyes of his bulging, made him look like a walleye. Otto had no more spine than an earthworm, but he could do what he was told, and he wasn’t as dumb as some, but Harry would have still sent him home if he hadn’t been a witness to the unmasking of a mass murderer.
“We’ll keep trying, Otto. That’s what we’ll do.”
“You guys bothered to check the internet?” Rufus pulled out one of those fancy new phones, all shiny and round-edged like some kind of technological chiclet. “That’s where the real news is going to break first… Huh. No signal. That’s weird. My coverage is usually good in the middle of town.”
“Internet’s down in here too,” Stevie Ray said. “I called over to WoBoCo, but didn’t get an answer.” WoBoCo was the town’s local internet service provider, and pretty much the only game in town unless you wanted to sign up with AOL, which not many people did anymore. At least those initials “AOL” stood for something—“WoBoCo” sounded like an abbreviation, but it wasn’t, that was just what the kid who ran the place decided to name it, thought it sounded cool. Harry didn’t care what he called it, so long as he kept the service up and running. Harry wasn’t a young man, but he liked young men’s games, and though he had a big TV and some of the next-gen gaming consoles, he couldn’t play his Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games without the internet, and if the lag got too bad he’d been known to make stern phone calls to WoBoCo personally.
“Of course you didn’t get an answer, you idiots.” Mr. Levitt was leaning against the bars of the single jail cell with his arms sticking through, like he was hoping to snag a passerby. God, Harry could have done without the reminder of his existence. A serial killer right here under his nose. That was a black eye and no mistake. Never mind that Harry was stretched pretty thin, being 75% of the police department (Stevie Ray was solid but he was only a part-timer), barely able to keep up with making sure drunks stayed off the road, kids stayed out of the quarries, and nobody beat on their spouses too much. But a murderer, that sort of thing he should’ve noticed. At least Levitt seemed to prey on outsiders. That didn’t make Harry feel much better, but it made it a little bit less personal.
“What do you mean, sir?” Harry said, because the old man might have been stone-evil, but he was also self-evidently pretty smart.
Levitt grinned. “Can’t figure it out? Need me to lead you to water, you broken-down old horse? Okay. Where is WoBoCo located?”
Harry frowned. “Right here downtown, why?”
“But what building is it housed in? I swear, it’s no wonder I operated with impunity here for decades if this is the caliber of the local police force.”
Harry rose and walked over to the bars, and Stevie Ray said, warningly, “Harry, don’t let him get to you.” Stevie Ray should have known better than that. Though maybe he was playing along, trying to scare Levitt. He’d have better luck scaring the moon. It was just as far removed from humanity. But the man could be bargained with, maybe.
“If you hit Mr. Levitt, it’s going up on YouTube,” Rufus said, holding up his phone. “I’ll call it a police brutality/elder abuse mash-up.” He paused. “I mean, Mr. Levitt probably deserves to go to the gas chamber, but that doesn’t mean you have the right to beat him for talking shit about you.”
“You’re absolutely right, Rufus.” Harry said. “Violence is an act of last resort. I’m just coming a little closer to remind Mr. Levitt here that, in the absence of a greater societal framework, I am the whole of the law here, and if this little… crisis… we’re in goes on too long, we’re going to have no choice but to come up with some sort of homegrown justice system. It’ll have a jury of your peers, don’t worry about that, but it won’t have a complex appeals system, and if a death sentence comes down one night, it’ll be carried out by morning. Understand?” Harry didn’t think it would come to that—there’d be loss of life, it would be a bad catastrophe, but the National Guard would step in, civilization would carry on, and here, in remote Lake Woebegotten, the impact of the disaster would be minimal. He’d get everyone up to speed at the meeting tonight, and they’d be prepared for a few wandering corpses. Nothing to worry about. Still, if he could worry Mr. Levitt into cooperation, so much the better. “I’ve never administered a hanging, but I know how to tie a noose.”
“So you’re saying you’d prefer me to be a cooperative monster, then,” Levitt said. “All right. I’ll tell you what should be obvious to you, in exchange for a promise.”
“What’s that?”
“I want to speak to a priest as soon as possible. I imagine Father Edsel is the only one available. He’ll do.”
Harry laughed. “What, are you ready to repent?”
“That’s between me and the intermediary between me and my god.”
“I don’t see why you can’t have spiritual counsel,” Harry said. What could it hurt?
“Very well. WoBoCo is—”
“Holy shit it’s in the funeral home!” Rufus sprang up from the bench where he’d been fiddling with his phone, startling all of them, and drawing a low hiss and a flat stare from Mr. Levitt. “WoBoCo! Remember, the guy running the place didn’t have enough money for decent office space, so he rented out one of the viewing rooms, the Mathison Brothers said they only really needed two!”
“That’s right, there was a stink about it,” Otto recalled. “People said it was disrespectful having a high-tech company next to the place where people were grieving, but Will Mathison said unless people in town were willing to start dying a whole lot faster and more regularly, he needed the extra money. It all blew over years ago though. Why—”
“The funeral home.” Harry’s heart sank. A serial killer, a wily and secretive monster with a rock-solid public persona and sterling reputation, okay, that you could miss. But for Harry to overlook the funeral home? Maybe he was getting too old for this job. He picked up his earflap hat and jammed it on his head.
Stevie Ray was on the phone again, and after a moment, shook his head. “No answer at the Mathison Brothers’. There are at least two dead people there now, I know for a fact.””
“At least two zombies, you mean,” Mr. Levitt said, and gave another dry hacking laugh. Harry was really starting to get sick of that sound. “And probably more than that by now. They’ve been in there all day. You’d better just hope they can’t figure out how to work doorknobs. You bunch of morons. I should be running this city, but I’d just end up hunting all of you for sport.”
“Stevie Ray, get a couple of the new shotguns, we’ve got to get over there.” Harry looked around as Stevie Ray hurried to the gun locker. He couldn’t leave the old man alone, so… “Otto, Rufus, you two are special deputies now. We’ll swear a nice oath later.”
“Do we get guns?” Rufus said, and Otto just gaped, probably wanting to object, to say he had to get home to Barbara, but now that Rufus was being so manly with the gun talk, Otto didn’t feel he could speak up. Good enough for now.
“For now, you just get keys.” Harry tossed a ring to Rufus. “Stay here, keep an eye on Levitt. Don’t let him out unless the building catches fire or something. If somebody from the state cops or county police or any damn body in authority calls, let them know our situation here.”
“What is our situation here?” Otto said.
“Dire,” Mr. Levitt said, and Harry grunted.
Stevie Ray came back holding a pair of guns, and Otto whistled. Harry knew why. He’d heard “shotguns” and expected a double-barrel, maybe a pump-action or even a sawed-off, but the things Stevie Ray carried looked more like exotic insects than shotguns.
“Hot damn,” Rufus said. “Is that an Auto Assault-12?”
“It is,” Stevie Ray said, giving him a narrow-eyed, thoughtful look. “I tried one out back when I was in the Marines, liked the feel a lot, so when we got some Homeland Security funding to beef up our armaments, I put in for a couple. You… you didn’t serve, did you?”
Rufus shook his head. “Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, dude.”
Stevie Ray looked bewildered. “It’s a video game,” Rufus said, a little sheepishly.
Harry patted Stevie Ray’s shoulder. “Only the best damn military shooter ever made. I keep telling you, you need to get yourself a console, me and you could light things up.” He sighed. “Come on. Let’s get over to the funeral home and see what we’re dealing with.”
“Why do you want to see a priest?” Rufus asked, cocking his head at Mr. Levitt like the dog in those old stereo ads, with Rufus being the dog and Mr. Levitt being the phonograph horn.
“Don’t talk to him,” Otto said. “He’s a—he’s—they didn’t say we should talk to him.”
“People fight for the chance to interview people like me,” Mr. Levitt said, still leaning against the bars all casually, like he was chatting at a church supper. “Behavioral psychologists. Psychological profilers. Police detectives. They’d want to study me.”
“I think people like you are pretty simple,” Rufus said. “You don’t think anybody else is real, right? Other people are just playthings. All the other stuff, whether you take trophies or not or whether you were abused as children, all that’s just like ornamental details. Not thinking other people are real, thinking you’re the one real thing in the universe, that’s the main thing.”
“Ooh, someone’s been reading a lot of Criminal Minds fan fiction, hasn’t he?” Mr. Levitt said, and Otto didn’t know what he was talking about, but it made that smug look disappear from Rufus’s face, so Otto was willing to get behind it 100%. His nephew always thought he was smarter than anyone else, but Otto was pretty sure Mr. Levitt had the advantage in brainpower, whatever else was wrong with him.
“I think other people are real, young man,” old man Levitt went on. “Killing them would be a lot less fun if they weren’t. In fact, I have to tell you, while cutting down those zombies in my house had a certain visceral pleasure, it got the adrenaline flowing and the serotonin trickling and I don’t mind saying it gave me an erection, which is no trivial thing at my age, it didn’t satisfy in the same way killing a real person does. I wasn’t snuffing out a life tonight. I was just killing bugs. And while I do enjoy killing bugs, it’s like junk food, briefly enjoyable, but not really filling. Frankly, killing zombies is respectable, it’s helpful, it’s kind of boring and repetitive. I’d be disappointed if I believed everyone else around me was a p-zombie—”
Otto frowned. Pee zombie? A zombie made of pee? A peeing zombie?
“You know about philosophical zombies?” Rufus said, and Mr. Levitt snorted.
“I have a Ph.D. in pedagogy, young man. I took a philosophy course or two along the way.”
Rufus glanced at Otto, and must have read his stony face correctly, because he said, “I was learning about them in this class I took, p-zeds, or p-zombies, or philosophical zombies. They look and act just like ordinary people, but they don’t have any kind of real consciousness, they’re basically robots—if you poke one with a needle it acts like it experiences pain, but it doesn’t really, it has no sense of self, it’s just a set of behaviors disguised as a human.”
“There are people like that?” Otto said. It explained a lot. Plenty of people just acted and reacted and didn’t seem to really have a light going on upstairs.
“No, Mr. Salesman,” old man Levitt said. “P-zombies are a construct used in thought experiments to interrogate the philosophy of mind, and to explore issues of behaviorism, materialism, the nature of qualia, and, ah, I can tell from the expression on your face that I might as well be saying ‘ooga booga boo’ for all you’re comprehending. You’re no p-zed, at least—you don’t demonstrate even the imitation of conscious thought.”
“But here I am, the one on the outside of the cage,” Otto said, levelly, and was pleased—and surprised to find himself pleased—by the look of admiration Rufus gave him.
“You all really are idiots,” Mr. Levitt said. “Have you ever heard of a shark cage? They lower divers in a cage into shark-infested waters, and the sharks can’t get to the divers inside the bars. Do you know what this is?” He tapped the bars with the ring on his finger, making a metallic bing. “This is a zombie cage. And you poor fools are all out there in the water with the zombies.”