A Boy and His Corpse (5 page)

              “Good. He should be here in about an hour.”

              The President sighed. “I’ll make myself available. Text me.”

              The President hung up and stared at his phone. He hoped desperately that he was making the right decision.

Alan

              Alan nudged the volume up on his iPod. His head bobbed and he mouthed the lyrics as he listened to the fast, pounding beat of his favorite group on his walk to school.

              His morning walk was his thinking time. He shoved his ear buds in the minute he stepped out of the house and often moved on auto-pilot, ending up at the school without any clear recollection of how he got there.

              His thought was almost always the same. He imagined Mort walking out from the aprons at Madison Square Garden. Lining the stands were thousands upon thousands of rabid fans chanting his name.

              “Mort-i-mer! Mort-i-mer!”

              Alan envisioned himself controlling all the action backstage, almost like a puppeteer hanging over the display case. The only difference was that the strings in this case were invisible. Along the way to the squared circle, Alan would make Mort slap the hands of all the ravenous UWF fans. Some of them would be holding signs over their heads with the names of famous wrestling moves he had created, like the “Up jump the boogie,” which was a move where Mort would do a kick right to the chin of another corpse and decapitate them completely.

              Or the “Bury you with Satan”, which was actually the name of song by Alan’s favorite rapper, Necro. This move consisted of Mort going to the top rope with another corpse and pile driving him right on his head so that it exploded and the guts and maggots would fly out everywhere.

              Sure, it was super violent, but that’s what Alan imagined the people wanted. Wrestling had grown boring as of late. Ever since the ICW bought out Ring of Glory (RoG) to form the one and only wrestling league in the business, the storylines had gotten stale and predictable. That’s why the idea of using corpses was the key. Their bodies could easily be destroyed, so the wrestling could be “real”. No staged chair shots, no stomping the mat before punching to make it sound like the hits were authentic, and no more fake blood. Just raw, unadulterated “wrastlin’” for the hardcore fans like him and James.

              Alan switched songs as he started walking up the long climb that led to his high school. He preferred old school tunes rather than modern music with its sirens and bass drops.

              He tapped the screen and scrolled down to Slayer.

              He headbanged along to the thunderous rhythm of the drums.

Alan was a strange bird and he knew it. As a black kid, he didn’t really associate with the other black kids in the school. For that matter, he didn’t really associate with anybody in the school, but that was to be understood, as he had spent almost the entirety of his life living underground with his parents.

Those weren’t the best years.

He shook his head to the heavy guitars and bit his lower lip. In the corner of his eye, he saw something strange, and took a quick look. Two girls were walking up the hill on the other side of the road. They pointed and laughed at him, mimicking the way he had shook his head. Alan sneered and lowered the hood over his face. He turned the music up and stared at his feet as he climbed. All thoughts of Mort wrestling faded away.
 

Herbert

Herbert walked down a secret corridor underneath Mandolin Arsenal. When he wasn’t on a mission overseas, he walked this hallway every Monday through Friday to report to work.

At the end of the metal hallway was a door with a small screen beside it. Herbert placed his hand on the screen and a green light scanned it. Cool air flowed from his fingers to his palm, then back to his fingers again. The sensor flashed blue twice and the door slid open. Herbert always wondered where the idea for biometric verification came from first—the U.S. military or the cinema.

He stepped into a dark room and headed downstairs until he reached a basement floor that stretched on for over a mile. He used to live down here with his ex-wife and Alan. Sometimes, he even grew nostalgic. Even though he could manipulate magic in a lot of ways, he mainly only worked with corpses because it was all that was asked of him.

The basement was home to rows upon rows of tables, each prepped and ready as the resting place of an undead Army. Years ago, there would have been a dead body on every table. Today, he counted seven. And it wasn’t lack of funds or demand that had left the room mostly empty but his own faltering inability to control his troops. Lifting even ten corpses at once without getting a debilitating migraine was almost impossible now.

He moved closer to the section of occupied tables. Unlike normal corpses, these seven had their brains exposed. A lemony mist sprayed down on them to mask their stink and halt their decay. It was a special concoction created specifically for preserving corpses without freezing them. Mr. Rovas, the genius behind the preservation technology, leaned against a table near the feet of one of the corpses.

              “Mr. Rovas,” Herbert said with a curt nod.

              “Herbert,” Mr. Rovas said, looking up. He wore a long white doctor’s coat and thick glasses. He had strong, firm cheekbones, and silver hair that went down to his shoulders.

              “What are we doing today?” Herbert asked.

“Just give me a second,” Mr. Rovas said, but a second turned into a full minute as he focused on his phone.

              Herbert’s hands burned green with magic. “What are we waiting for?” Herbert asked.

              “A call,” Mr. Rovas said. He peered up and then looked back down at his phone.

             
A call from whom?
Herbert wondered, his hands grew even hotter.

              “If we’re not going to do anything today, then I’m going back home,” Herbert finally said. “Call me when you actually want to get to work.”

              Mr. Rovas put up a finger, and Herbert resisted the urge to snap it right in half. After another whole minute of just standing around, he had had enough.

              “Okay, that’s it. I’m out of here.” As Herbert turned around, he heard a giant, rasping sigh from Mr. Rovas.

              “Alright, alright,” Mr. Rovas grumbled. He dropped the phone in his pocket. “I might as well just show you since you’re here.”

              He dug his hand into his other pocket and pulled out a number of tiny, iridescent microchips.

              “What are those for?” Herbert asked.

              “You’ll see,” Mr. Rovas said, and he mumbled something Herbert couldn’t quite hear.

              “What do you mean, I’ll see?”

              “I mean, you’ll see,” Mr. Rovas repeated.

              The corpse they stood before had pale, milky eyes. His mouth hung open and his skin looked newly rotted, maybe only a few weeks dead. Mr. Rovas took out his phone and began to text again.

              “Why do you keep looking at your phone?” Herbert asked, flexing his fingers.

             
Mr. Rovas’ phone buzzed, and when he looked at it, his already thin lips became a line.

              “Son of a bitch,” he said.

              “Who? Me?” Herbert asked.

              “No,” Mr. Rovas said. “Somebody else. A liar. I should have known not to trust him. Well, I might as well just show you then. You’re here, after all, and the world
does
need our help.”

              Mr. Rovas put the green, rectangular chips on the table beside the corpse’s elbow. He rolled up his sleeves and extracted clear gloves from his pocket. He put them on, stretching out the fingers with his teeth. He picked up the chips and moved to the heads of the corpses. With clinical detachment, he slipped the chips into their open brains, sticking in two at a time between the two hemispheres.

              “What’s that for?” Herbert asked.

              Mr. Rovas reached under a table and pulled out a hand-held device with a single joystick and a red button.

“What are you going to do with that?” Herbert asked.

              “Just watch,” Mr. Rovas said. He pressed the red button three times and pulled back on the joystick.

              “Okay, they’re ready,” he said, staring intently at the corpses. “I want you to get one of them up now. How about this one?”

              He pointed with his chin to the one right in front of them.

              “Why? What for?” Herbert asked.

              “Because I want to try something,” Mr. Rovas said.

              “Try what?”

              “Look, we don’t pay and house you to ask questions, Herbert. You’re down here to work, and I said I wanted to try something out. So are you going to get this corpse up or what?”

              Herbert stared intently into Mr. Rovas’ eyes, and Mr. Rovas stared back at him, unflinching.

              “Well?” Mr. Rovas asked.

              “I don’t like your attitude right now,” Herbert said through gritted teeth. “Just tell me what this is all about and then I’ll raise him.”

              “No.”

              “What do you mean, ‘no’?”

              “I mean no. Some things aren’t meant to be disclosed to you. You know that. In fact, the call I was waiting for was from the President.”

              “Why? What does he want?”

              “Well, it doesn’t matter
now
. He was supposed to come through and he didn’t. That’s why I didn’t vote for him. He never did look like the trustworthy type. All good looks and nothing between the ears. But I digress. What matters now is that I need to see if these chips work or not.”

              “What are the chips for? To control them?”

              Mr. Rovas’ expression didn’t change as he continued to stare at Herbert.

              “Wait, you can’t be serious,” Herbert said.

              Mr. Rovas expression still didn’t change.

              “How is that even possible? You don’t know anything about controlling corpses. Nothing at all.”

              “Well, we’ll just have see about that once you get this one up.”

              “And what if I decide not to?”

              “Then you’re turning your back on your country.”

              “Oh, please. What do you have to tell me about
my
country? You’re not even from here.”

              Mr. Rovas narrowed his eyes. “Look, Herbert, you want the truth? You’ve grown sloppy. You don’t want to admit it to yourself, but you have. Every time we go on that battlefield these days, you’re a liability.”

“A liability how?”

“What? Are you living in a different universe or something? A universe where Valazquez isn’t dead?”

              “Don’t you
dare
pin that on me, Rovas. He never should have gone back into a burning building. Who does that? That was his mistake. Not mine.”

              Mr. Rovas shook his head and clicked his tongue. “The old Herbert never would have said that. You’ve grown callous in your old age, Herbert, but that doesn’t concern me. What bothers me is that you’ve grown
careless
. Now are you going to lift this corpse or what?”

              Herbert stared at Mr. Rovas through scrunched up eyes. He had hundreds of choice words on the tip of his tongue, but he swallowed them all when he thought about Sgt. Valazquez.

              “Whatever, let’s just get this over with,” Herbert said. “But I’m telling you, it won’t work. Corpses aren’t robots.”

              “Well, let’s just see what happens.”

Herbert lifted his flaming green hand and all seven corpses sat upright.

              “Do what you have to do,” Herbert said without even looking at them.

              Mr. Rovas pressed the red button seven times, and to Herbert’s surprise, all seven corpses turned their heads in his direction.