Jake's Wake (10 page)

Smiling down at his friend, his red-rimmed eyes and mouth weeping amber fluid, Jake spat out a wad of cotton and croaked, “Bring him here, would’ja? Alive, if possible.”

Gray took a step back as, once more, reality cock-punched him and stood back to watch the fun. This body, this thing he’d wished to see walk more than anything…it walked, it talked, but was it really…

“Jake…?”

Jake’s huge, slightly greenish hand slapped Gray on the back and gave his arm a playful squeeze that would leave a bruise on the bone. “Good to see you, too, man. Now get that prick for me.”

Grinning, Gray caught the bawling minister by his sweaty collar and dragged him back to curl up on the toes of Jake’s size-thirteen patent-leather wingtips.

Jake hung his head and let the spirit come into him, as he did whenever he was about to launch into a sermon.

“You really did spout off an awful lot about heaven and hell, back there,” Jake husked. Short of breath, as if he’d lost the trick of breathing, and had to remember to draw in air to speak.

Working out a post–rigor mortis kink in his neck, Jake bowed down over the quivering minister. Smiling.

“I forgive you for that, but I’m here to school you. I could tell you what I saw on the other side, but you don’t have to take it on faith anymore.”

Jake lifted the minister up by his lapels until his toes barely scraped the floor.

“I came back to
show
you.”

He set the minister on his feet and placed both hands on top of his bald head, as if to confer a blessing. The minister seemed to hang from Jake’s hands, animated by them alone as they stroked the slack contours of his face and came to rest at the corners of his half-open mouth.

The minister gave no resistance as Jake slid his thumbs into it, but he tried to pray. “J-J-J-Jesus…”

“No. It’s Jake.”

His thumbs slid up to the webbing of his palms in the minister’s cheeks. Whispering,
“Shhhhh,”
he took hold of those chubby cheeks and, as easily as you’d take the wrapping off a birthday present, ripped his face off in two runny handfuls.

“Hallelujah!”
Jake cackled, flinging the scraps of face at the cross behind his coffin. “Let us pray.”

And they did.

Admiring himself in the full-length mirror in the workroom of the funeral home, Jake tried to keep his runaway emotions in check. His unbridled joy at the sight of his body was tainted; but all things considered, it was not so bad.

He tore off the suit, slitted up the back like a doll’s clothes, and ripped away the heavy plastic body-condom wrapped around him to keep drainage from staining the fancy display coffin. But his laughter died in his throat when the harsh embalming-room light revealed his naked body.

His skin was a mottled yellow-gray where it stretched taut over muscle and bone, but sagged alarmingly at his abdomen, where the puckered lips of the autopsy incision terminated at his groin.

His spine felt cramped. The stab wounds in his back and belly were not healed, but sealed with superglue.

Probing his head under the stiff, sticky mass of his hair, he found sutures in his scalp, a semicircle over deep grooves in his skull, where they cut his skull open with a circular saw and took out his brain. Maybe they dumped it back in, or sent it to a university for med students to
jab with scalpels, but his thoughts of outrage and revenge had to be coming from somewhere…

His heart was not beating. His belly was emptied of organs, and filled with packing material, scarecrow stuff. Whatever was in his veins, it wasn’t blood. He felt a mild burning sensation, inside and out. Formaldehyde.

Rude holes had been bored into the base of his neck, upper arms and thighs, and a sliced and dilated segment of artery or vein peeked out of each, like the puckered neck of a deflated balloon, stretched out and bloated from where they pumped the shit into him.

To his delight, some things worked as good as ever. The shriveled club of his cock responded eagerly to his chafing hand, swelling to jut out like a riot baton, though the fumes from the amber droplets that oozed from his urethra made his eyes sting.

No, this wasn’t so bad. He’d never eat again, but he’d never need to shit or piss, or get sick or hungry or tired. He was remade better than before, reborn to spread the word and sow his seed, and woe to the sinners who defiled him as he slept.

He was not alive, but so far from dead. He felt the formaldehyde in his veins like pure grain alcohol, bathing him in that golden glow of invincibility that only a good, stiff drink can provide.

He felt good, but he could not forget, let alone forgive, what they had done to him.

They cut him up and filled him with weed killer to cover the stink, and they would have burned him if he hadn’t put his foot down. Dumped his ashes and gotten on with their lives, as if he had never been.

“Over my dead body,” he croaked, and made himself laugh again.

He noticed Gray in the mirror, hanging in the doorway with his eyes riveted to Jake. He held out another of
Jake’s suits on a hanger. “She dumped a bunch of them here.”

Jake turned and strode across the tiled floor to take the suit.

“Where you want to go now?” Gray asked.

Jake caught him watching as he stepped into his slacks. Bitch couldn’t be bothered to send him into the fire with a decent pair of boxers.

But that could be easily remedied.

“Take me home,” he said.

The way they dragged their feet as their sorry procession came down the hall, you’d think the party was over. But even if everything Esther thought she knew about her husband was turned on its ear to night, she was no idiot.

What she feared about him had been proven, and she knew that what ever force had raised him up, it was not concerned with any justice but Jake’s.

And nobody knew how to punish like Jake Connaway.

Jake led them at a lanky, halting pace, keys jingling in his hand like they would open a honeymoon suite. Esther and Evangeline came close behind him, in shell-shocked lockstep, like the brides at a polygamist wedding. Emmy and Mathias followed closely, clinging to each other like Hansel and Gretel, lost in the Black Forest.

“My wife’s the kind of person that likes to keep up appearances.” Jake chuckled, percolating phlegm deep in his chest. “Doesn’t do such a great job of it, these days. But it’s what she likes to do…”

Eddie and Christian dragged Jasper’s dead body behind them, which left a wide trail of blood, like a carpet of crushed roses, in its wake.

Gray came last, kicking at Jasper’s heels and wistfully twitching his trigger finger.

It was a slow death march down the corridor, but Jake the jocular host had forgiven them for leaving him behind, and didn’t rush the tour. Nobody else dared to speak.

Jake paused before a door at the end of the hall. Making a little show of finding the right key, he unlocked it, turned and favored them with a sly grin. Hard to tell if he was breathing, but the formaldehyde fumes were a miasma around his head.

“So that was her nice little side of the house.” He tipped them a wink. “But this is mine.”

Jake threw open the door, or maybe the cold wind sucked it out of his hand, pulling the heat and light of the house into the empty darkness. Silly, but that was what it felt like: not just cold, but a perfect vacuum.

The knob hit the wall hard enough to punch a hole in the Sheetrock.

Once, this half of the rambling ranch house had been the free school. The hall opened into a communal classroom space, with satellite rooms and another hall branching off it. Once, the walls had been plastered with hippie artworks like God’s eyes and macramé tapestries, and children’s finger paintings of Jerry Garcia and the Dalai Lama.

All of it so long gone, now, it was retroactively undone. This place could never have heard children laughing.

Darker and bleaker in here, even when Jake pawed the light switch, but the room almost glowed with the reflection of his savage intensity. The décor was stark and modern, smoked glass and chrome, and a convincing cast of office furniture, like a diorama of the habitat of the Successful American White Male. Esther hadn’t found any genuine records of her husband’s “business” here.

The art was apocalyptic with a dusting of religious imagery to sweeten the raw carnality, and set the right context for Jake’s favorite artwork: the many, many mirrors.

Jake prowled the room, taking in the hidden details in sweeping, jerky arcs like a falcon, and finally nodded, smirking at Esther as if to say,
Nice try, bitch.

The computer was on and running a screensaver, and the file cabinets were rifled. A few of the open ones were filled with sealed reams of blank Hammermill typing paper, for heft.

Esther flicked her tired eyes at the faces of the other women whenever she could avoid locking eyes with Jake, looking for traces of things better left unsaid. She’d barely ever gone into this room once Jake settled in and laid down the law, and never any farther into his domain, unless he carried her—practically hooded like a kidnap victim—to his bed.

Emmy looked more lost than ever, and seemed to want to wilt into Mathias’s arms, if only he could hold her up.

Evangeline was cagey, looking from the empty cradle of the cordless phone to the chairs and tables, all the while seeming to chew her lip and try not to swoon.

Jake looked around at each of his mourners, as well, seeming to swell up with the old time evangelical spirit, his eyes to gleam brighter, as if he sucked something vital out of each of them.

“You wanted to know, so now you will. And then everybody will. Now get your asses in here.”

They didn’t hesitate, but every step Esther and Evangeline took was half the length of the one before, like that silly old paradox, so they might never make it at all.

Both kept their eyes on the floor and their hands crushing each other at their waists. The sight of it made what ever Jake was using for blood these days flush his
pale face. If only he could have had them both…but to night, he could have much more. All of it.

Gray herded them in with judicious pokes at Eddie and Christian and kicks at Jasper’s corpse. The picture window in the dead man’s back slurped and dropped a flapping lobe of lung, shredded by shattered ribs, dragging behind Jasper like a loose shirttail.

Christian, towing his best friend by one hand and trying to see only the floor in front of him, bit back a searing heave of undiluted alcohol puke. If he so much as dripped on the rug, he sensed that Jake would put his fist through his face, never mind what the wreck of Jasper’s torso was doing to the ghastly deep-pile shag.

He wiped his mouth with the velvet sleeve of his wounded arm, and kept his mouth shut.

They followed Jake through the office down the far corridor. They could see a picture of Jake on the wall at the end, but it seemed impossibly far away. The light sconces flickered and cast long shadows, added years to sunken faces. But it all seemed horribly by design—as if the place sucked the life out of everyone it touched, just like its master.

Jake led them, shivering, to another odd dead end. Straight ahead stood a pair of doors, both padlocked, flanked by another pair, both standing open. To the right was his bedroom. The bathroom was to the left.

Jake’s expansive gestures seemed like an attempt to hold up his surging ego, or just to contain it. Jerky with rogue impulses chasing across his face and down his massive limbs, he had some trouble snapping the key into the lock of the closed left-hand door.
Honeymoon jitters, heh heh…

Gray pressed closer, crowding them into a tangle of limbs so they’d trip each other up if anyone tried to bolt.

“This,” Jake said, “is where the magic happens. This
is the Church Of Eternal Life. And don’t you fucking forget it.”

The door squealed when Jake threw it open.

The whole back end of the house was Jake’s studio: a DIY video production facility, with computers, monitors, lights, mics, cameras, a green screen that covered one whole wall, shelves containing hundreds of archived VHS tapes and DVDs, a rollaway pulpit with a sampling keyboard hidden behind it, and a rough-hewn wooden cross on wheels, big enough to crucify Hulk Hogan.

To the untrained eye, the setup would look pathetic: the lowest rung of religious entertainment, ground out by a solitary crank too unstable to face—or too cheap to pay—a studio crew, let alone a live audience.

But as they entered the room, wary of traps, the selfish ingenuity of it soaked in. Jake would sometimes use burnouts from his church to come and do the grunt work, but the beauty of the setup was that he didn’t need anyone to tape his show.

The cameras were trained on the green screen in an adoring semicircle, and a live editor control board had been set up on the floor beside Jake’s duct-taped mark on the floor (a cross, naturally). It looked like a guitarist’s effects pedal rig, but with it, Jake could direct the show as he performed, cutting it live with his toes.

Clearly, all those years of playing in crappy, overblown rock bands had finally paid off.

Jake did not enter, but ushered Mathias and the women inside. They took it all in, becoming more frightened than ever, pressed in a row against the heavy, movie palace drapes that covered the wall nearest the door.

They could feel this was the worst room in the house.

In the hallway, Jake watched the men drag Jasper’s body toward him. Gray cocked his head like a dog hearing a whistle. Jake tossed him the key ring and waved at the bathroom.

“Okay, you,” he sneered. “Tinkerbell.” Pointing at Christian. “Drag the body in there. Pool boy, you back off.”

Christian and Eddie looked at each other. If anything passed between them, an invitation to do something stupid, it didn’t get far.

Gray raised the gun and looked like
he
was the one holding
it
back, when it couldn’t wait to introduce their faces to the wondrous innovation of lead-projectile dentistry.