Zombies: The Recent Dead (42 page)

Doug would never forget Rochelle’s face, either. He had gotten to play the role of father to her for about a week and change, and it had scarred him indelibly. Given time, her loss, too, was a strangely welcome kind of pain.

Legally, disinterment was a touchy process, since the casket containing the remains was supposed to be technically “undamaged” when removed from the earth. This meant Jacky and the other backhoe operators could only skim to a certain depth—the big scoops—before Doug or one of his co-workers had to jump in with a shovel. Some of the big concrete grave liners were stacked three deep to a plot; at least, Craignotti had said something about three being the limit. They looked like big, featureless refrigerators laid on end, and tended to crumble like plaster. Inside were the burial caskets. Funeral publicists had stopped calling them coffins about forty years ago. “Coffins” were boxes shaped to the human form, wide at the top, slim at the bottom, with the crown shaped like the top half of a hexagon. ”Coffins” evoked morbid assumptions, and so were replaced in the vernacular with ”caskets”—nice, straight angles, with no Dracula or Boot Hill associations. In much the same fashion, “cemeteries” had become “memorial parks.” People did everything they could, it seemed, to deny the reality of death.

Which explained the grave liners. Interment in coffins, caskets, or anything else from a wax-coated cardboard box to a shroud generally left a concavity in the lawn, once the body began to decompose, and its container, to collapse. In the manner of a big, mass-produced, cheap sarcophagus, the concrete grave liners prevented the depressing sight of . . . er, depressions. Doug imagined them to be manufactured by the same place that turned out highway divider berms; the damned things weighed about the same.

Manning his shovel, Doug learned a few more firsthand things about graves. Like how it could take eight hours for a single digger, working alone, to excavate a plot to the proper dimensions. Which was why Craignotti had been forced to locate operators for no fewer than three backhoes on this job. Plus seven “scoopers” in Doug’s range of ability. The first shift, they only cleared fifty final resting-places. From then on, they would aim for a hundred stiffs per working day.

Working. Stiffs.
Rampant, were the opportunities for gallows humor.

Headstones were stacked as names were checked off the master list. BEECHER, LEE, 1974-2002—HE PROTECTED AND SERVED. GUDGELL, CONROY, 1938-2003—DO NOT GO GENTLY. These were newer plots, more recent deaths. These were people who cared about things like national holidays or presidential elections, archetypal Americans from fly-over country. But in their midst, Doug was also a cliché—the drifter, the stranger. If the good folk of Triple Pines (the living ones, that is) sensed discord in their numbers, they would actively seek out mutants to scotch. Not One of Us.

He had to get out. Just this job, just a few days, and he could escape. It was better than being a mutant, and perhaps getting lynched. He moved on to STOWE, DORMAND R., 1940-1998—LOVING HUSBAND, CARING FATHER. Not so recent. Doug felt a little bit better.

They broke after sunset. That was when Doug back-checked the dig list and found a large, red X next to Michelle Farrier’s name.

“This job ain’t so damned secret,” said Joe Hopkins, later, at Callahan’s. Their after-work table was five: Joe, Jacky, Doug, and two more guys from the shift, Miguel Ayala and Boyd Cooper. Craignotti sat away from them, at his accustomed roost near the end of the bar. The men were working on their third pitcher. Doug found that no amount of beer could get the taste of grave dirt out of the back of his throat. Tomorrow, he’d wear a bandana.
Maybe
.

“You working tomorrow, or not, or what?” said Craignotti. Doug gave him an if-come answer, and mentioned the bandana. Craignotti had shrugged. In that moment, it all seemed pretty optional, so Doug concentrated on becoming mildly drunk with a few of the crew working the—heh—graveyard shift.

Joe was a musciebound ex-biker type who always wore a leather vest and was rarely seen without a toothpick jutting from one corner of his mouth. He had cultivated elaborate moustaches which he waxed. He was going gray at the temples. His eyes were dark, putting Doug in mind of a gypsy. He continued: “What I mean is, nobody’s supposed to know about this little relocation. But they guys in here know, even if they don’t talk about it. The guys who run the Triple Pines bank sure as shit know. It’s a public secret. Nobody talks about it, is all.”

“I bet the mayor’s in on it, too,” said Miguel. “All in, who cares? I mean, I had to pick mushrooms once for a buck a day. This sure beats the shit out of that.”

“Doesn’t bother you?” said Boyd Cooper, another of the backhoe jockeys. Older, pattern baldness, big but not heavy. Bull neck and cleft chin. His hands had seen a lifetime of manual labor. It had been Boyd who showed them how to cable the lids off the heavy stone grave liners, instead of bringing in the crane rig used to emplace them originally. This group’s unity as mutual outcasts gave them a basic common language, and Boyd always cut to the gristle. “Digging up dead people?”

“Nahh,” said Jacky, tipping his beer. “We’re doing them a favor. Just a kind of courtesy thing. Moving ’em so they won’t be forgotten.”

“I guess,” said Joe, working his toothpick. He burnished his teeth a lot with it. Doug noticed one end was stained with a speck of blood, from his gums.

“You’re the teacher,” Boyd said to Doug. “You tell us. Good thing or bad thing?”

Doug did not want to play arbiter. “Just a job of work. Like re-sorting old files. You notice how virtually no one in Triple Pines got cremated? They were all buried. That’s old-fashioned, but you have to respect the dead. Laws and traditions.”

“And the point is . . . ?” Boyd was looking for validation.

“Well, not everybody is entitled to a piece of property when they die, six by three by seven. That’s too much space. Eventually we’re going to run out of room for all our dead people. Most plots in most cemeteries are rented, and there’s a cap on the time limit, and if somebody doesn’t pay up, they get mulched. End of story.”

“Wow, is that true?” said Jacky. “I thought you got buried, it was like, forever.”

“Stopped being that way about a hundred years ago,” said Doug. “Land is worth too much. You don’t process the dead and let them use up your real estate without turning a profit.”

Miguel said, “That would be un-American.” He tried for a chuckle but it died.

“Check it out if you don’t believe me,” said Doug. “Look it up. Behind all that patriotic rah-rah-rah about community brotherhood and peaceful gardens, it’s all about capital gains. Most people don’t like to think about funerals or cemeteries because, to them, it’s morbid. That leaves funeral directors free to profiteer.”

“You mean Coggins?” said Joe, giving himself a refill.

“Look, Coggins is a great example,” said Doug. “In the outside world, big companies have incorporated most aspects of the funeral. Here, Coggins runs the mortuary, the cemetery, everything. He can charge whatever he wants, and people will pay for the privilege of shunting their grief and confusion onto him. You wouldn’t believe the mark-up on some of this stuff. Caskets are three times wholesale. Even if they put you in a cardboard box—which is called an ‘alternative container,’ by the way—the charge is a couple of hundred bucks.”

“Okay, that settles it,” said Miguel. When he smiled big, you could see his gold tooth. “We all get to live forever, because we can’t afford to die.”

“There used to be a riddle,” said Doug. “What is it: the man who made it didn’t want it, the man who bought it had no use for it, and the man who used it didn’t know it. What is it?”

Jacky just looked confused.

His head honeycombed with domestic beer, Doug tried not to lurch or slosh as he navigated his way out of Callahan’s. The voice coming at him out of the fogbound darkness might well have been an aural hallucination. Or a wish fulfillment.

“Hey stranger,” it said. “Walk a lady home?”

The night yielded her to him. She came not as he had fantasized, nor as he had seen her in dreams. She wore a long-sleeved, black, lacy thing with a neck-wrap collar, and her hair was up. She looked different but her definitive jawline and frank, gray gaze were unmistakable.

“That’s not you,” he said. “I’m a tiny bit intoxicated, but not enough to believe it’s you.” Yet. There was no one else on the street to confirm or deny; no validation from fellow inebriates or corroboration from independent bystanders. Just Doug, the swirling night, and a woman who could not be the late Michelle Farrier, whom he had loved. He had only accepted that he loved her after she died. It was more tragic that way, more delusionally romanticist. Potent enough to wallow in. A weeper, produced by his brain while it was buzzing with hops and alcohol.

She bore down on him, moving into focus, and that made his grief worse. “Sure it’s me,” she said. “Look at me. Take a little bit of time to get used to the idea.”

He drank her in as though craving a narcotic. Her hair had always been long, burnished sienna, deftly razor-thinned to layers that framed her face. Now it was pinned back to exhibit her gracile neck and bold features. He remembered the contour of her ears. She smiled, and he remembered exactly how her teeth set. She brought with her the scent of night-blooming jasmine. If she was a revenant, she had come freighted with none of the corruption of the tomb. If she was a mirage, the light touch of her hand on his wrist should not have felt so corporeal.

Her touch was not cold.

“No,” said Doug. “You died. You’re gone.”

“Sure, darling—I don’t deny that. But now I’m back, and you should be glad.”

He was still shaking his head. “I
saw
you die. I helped
bury
you.”

“And today, you helped un-bury me. Well, your buddies did.”

She had both hands on him, now. This was the monster movie moment when her human visage melted away to reveal the slavering ghoul who wanted to eat his brain and wash it down with a glass of his blood. Her sheer
presence
almost buckled his knees.

“How?”

“Beats me,” she said. “We’re coming back all over town. I don’t know exactly how it all works, yet. But that stuff I was buried in—those
cerements
—were sort of depressing. I checked myself out while I was cleaning up. Everything seems to be n place. Everything works. Except for the tumor; that kind of withered away to an inert little knot, in the grave. I know this is tough for you to swallow, but I’m here, and goddammit, I missed you, and I thought you’d want to see me.”

“I think about you every day,” he said. It was still difficult to meet her gaze, or to speed-shift from using the accustomed past tense.

“Come on,” she said, linking arms with him.

“Where?” Without delay his guts leaped at the thought that she wanted to take him back to the cemetery.

“Wherever. Listen, do you recall kissing me? See if you can remember how we did that.”

She kissed him with all the passion of the long-lost, regained unexpectedly. It was Michelle, all right-alive, breathing, returned to him whole.

No one had seen them. No one had come out of the bar. No pedestrians. Triple Pines tended to roll up the sidewalks at 7:00
pm
.

“This is . . . nuts,” he said.

She chuckled. “As long as you don’t say it’s distasteful.” She kissed him again. ”And of course you remember that other thing we never got around to doing?”

“Antiquing that roll-top desk you liked, at the garage sale?” His humor was helping him balance. His mind still wanted to swoon, or explode.

“Ho, ho, very funny. I am so glad to see you right now that I’ll spell it out for you, Doug.” She drew a tiny breath of consideration, working up nerve, then puffed it out. ”Okay: I want to hold your cock in my hand and feel you get hard,
for me
. That was the dream, right? That first attraction, where you always visualize the other person naked, fucking you, while your outer self pretends like none of that matters?”

“I didn’t think that,” Doug fibbed. Suddenly his breath would not draw.

“Yes you did,” Michelle said. “I did, too. But I was too chicken to act. That’s all in the past.” She stopped and smacked him lightly on the arm. “Don’t give me that lopsided look, like
I’m
the one that’s crazy. Not now. Not after I died, thinking you were the best damned thing I’d found in a long time.”

“Well, there was Rochelle,” said Doug, remembering how cautiously they had behaved around her six-year-old daughter.

“My little darling is not here right now,” she said. “I’d say it’s time to fulfill the fantasy, Doug. Mine, if not yours. We’ve wasted enough life, and not everybody gets a bonus round.”

“But—” Doug’s words, his protests had bottlenecked between his lungs. (And for-crap-sake
why
did he feel the urge to
protest
this?)

“I know what you’re trying to say. I died.” Another impatient huff of breath—living breath. “I can’t explain it. I don’t know if it’s temporary. But I’ll tell you one thing I do know: All that shit about the ‘peace’ of the grave? It doesn’t exist. It’s not a release, and it’s not oblivion. It’s like a nightmare that doesn’t conveniently end when you wake up, because you’re not
supposed
to wake up, ever! And you know what else? When you’re in the grave, you can hear every goddamned footfall of the living, above you. Trust me on that one.”

“Jesus . . . ” he said.

“Not Jesus. Neither Heaven nor Hell. Not God. Not Buddha, not Allah, not Yahweh. Nothing. That’s what waits on the other side of that headstone. No pie in the sky by and by when you die. No Nirvana. No Valhalla. No Tetragrammaton. No Zeus or Jove or any of their buddies. Nothing. Maybe that’s why we’re coming back-there’s nothing out there, beyond. Zero. Not even an echo. So kiss me again. I’ve been cold and I’ve been still, and I need to make love to you. Making love; that sounds like we’re manufacturing something, doesn’t it? Feel my hand. There’s living blood in there. Feel my heart; it’s pumping again. I’ve felt bad things moving around inside of me. That happens when you’re well and truly dead. Now I’m back. And I want to feel other things moving around inside of me. You.”