February

Within three months, most of the continental US was covered by the returner phenomenon. The cause was still unknown, and in many places “new” returners kept rising, though technically they were the old, as those that had been buried longer, generally took longer to rise, presumably due to more advanced decomposition. Except for a few outliers, the oldest recorded returners were those that had been dead for around fifty years. So, it seemed there was some kind of limit to who could come back, though its mechanics were still unclear.

Some of the most gruesome cases were around the great necropolises in California, like in Colma, where the dead outnumber the living a thousand to one. By this time it was widely understood that people had more to fear from other people than from the returners themselves, and as such, most places adopted a new kind of lockdown, a quarantine from living, a social distancing from the social. As most necropolises are built at a distance from the cities that supply them, they became a depressing sight as hundreds of ragged, blind returners wandered around, only reacting to each others presence, moaning or groaning quietly.

After all the violence sparked by the attempts to combat the returners when they first appeared, the states to the west adopted a non-interventionist approach, letting the returners stagger around until someone came up with a better solution to the problem. By this time a number of businesses popped up offering returner-proofing services that harkened back to medieval precautions against vampires. Some offered reinforced steel coffins and caskets. Others simply paved over cemeteries, making it impossible for the returners to rise up through the soil. Most opted for the cheapest option of installing cameras and motion sensors to be notified of new returners, so as to adjust the reaction accordingly on a case by case basis.

Many now considered it taboo to (re)kill the returners. The premature, knee-jerk reaction in the Northeast had robbed researchers of their chance to gather valuable data at the most critical time. Now, the rest of the country was taking an extreme distance from the returners, the pendulum swinging to the opposite extreme. Some researchers began tagging the returners, as they would migratory animals, to track their movements. At first, they hoped to figure out some kind of group pattern, some herd mentality, but the data didn’t support such a hypothesis. Most of the time, a returner would react to another returner, like an animal hearing a sound in the dark, though upon getting close to the other, it would move away again, as if uninterested, or disappointed.

In another set of experiments, returners were bugged with audio-transmitters to record and analyze the sounds they produced, to see if they retained some sort of language and were communicating with each other. Mostly, these experiments proved inconclusive. If they were in fact trying to vocalize, the decomposition of the lungs, throat, and vocal chords made it nigh indecipherable. However, in some cases there definitely appeared a certain tendency towards repetition, as if the returner could hear that the words they are trying to utter aren’t coming out right, and are choosing the simplest, shortest units of communication in the hope of eventually enunciating it right. Still, none of the data suggested that the returners were communicating with each other, and in the rare cases when they would interact with the living, who generally tried to avoid them, the returners seemed far more vocal and physically active, as if whatever they were trying to express was meant for the living.

A breakthrough in this area was made by the parapsychologists who were still working near ground zero. What some call selection bias, others call quality over quantity. Instead of trying to crudely listen in on hundreds of returners, the parapsychologists with their extra sensitive equipment opted instead for listening closely to a few. In trying to get a kind of baseline frequency for background noise cancellation, they noticed that the returners seemed to emit a certain kind of repeating pattern, almost like a melody, but with a shifting rhythm. It was hard to tell if they were doing it intentionally or unconsciously, or if even they were producing it with their lungs, throats, what have you, or if it was a kind of resonance that reverberated in their bones for some unexplained reason. The only thing that was clear was that the same pattern popped up on all the subsonic recordings they had collected.

Unfortunately, due to the small number of samples and the long history of hoaxes in their profession, most had yet to take the discovery seriously. Fortunately, however, the ragtag researchers around ground zero were not interested in the opinion of “most” people. So, it came about that certain sympathetic philosopher-musician among them, specializing in the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Baroque music, termed the pattern the “ritornello,” Italian for “little return,” a word used for recurring passages in Renaissance music, and also adopted in a more philosophical sense by Deleuze, for a kind of refrain one hums to maintain courage and keep the monsters at bay. A supernatural selection bias.

The other thing the parapsychologists picked up, were the first recognizable words uttered by the returners. By attaching highly sensitive microphones to the necks of the returners they were able to pick up subvocal frequencies. Many people, when reading silently or going over a speech in their minds, tend to pronounce the words inaudibly with their throats. This happens unintentionally, due to the deep connections between the neural nets associated with language and the vocal apparatus. For a brief period, subvocal speech recognition was viewed by some as the next frontier in mobile communication, a kind of telephony without sound. But for all its promise, texting ended up dominating modern communication. The future is always a disappointment.

The words differed depending on the returner. Sometimes a person’s name, other times a town’s or landmark’s. Still, it was evident that the returners were all looking for something or someone, there just wasn’t yet enough data to figure out where.

Given the state of the world, there were many ways in which that February’s Valentine’s Day was different from the others, but one which stood out was the replacement of Cupid as the holiday’s mascot, with images of the headless St. Valentine, the third century saint who was sentenced to beating, stoning, and decapitation for his support of Christian marriage. The last thing he wrote before his execution was a note to the daughter of Judge Asterius, a girl whose sight he had miraculously restored earlier. The note was signed “from your Valentine.”