Screaming, Johnny found his feet, scrambling madly not towards the office, but to the garage and the outside door. His fingers had gone stupid and numb and rubbery and he could barely work the lock, barely throw himself into the black wet night before they were on him. Shouting and hollering, he fell out into the rain, coming to rest in a muddy pool. Thunder rumbled in the sky and lightening flashed, painting the landscape in lunar brilliance.
They had not followed him.
Johnny sat there in the muck, rain pounding down on him. The air was cold, but the mud around him was warm and sluicing like blood. He looked frantically off towards the prison itself, could see the high towers, the buildings, the wall… but not much else.
The whispering throng was coming out now.
They paid no attention to Johnny.
Balanced atop their shoulders, they carried caskets. Single file, they pushed through the muck and rain with their coffins, a funereal parade of contusions and slit throats, stab wounds and shattered skulls. A collection of stiffly animate rag dolls trailing stuffing from snipped stitches, bearing torn limbs and dangling shoebutton eyes. And making, yes, making for potter’s field. At least thirty of them, keeping an almost military cadence.
Johnny sat there for awhile, drenched and dirty and shaking.
The rain fell and the susurration of the ghouls faded into the distance and although Johnny wanted to run and run, he could not. He got to his feet, brushing mud from his arms. Then he followed them, knowing deep down he had to see this.
Through the swampy, sunken landscape he went until he caught sight of them gathered at the far side of the cemetery. In the flashing lightening, he could see they were working. Yes, they had shovels now. Dead men digging their own graves and not slowly, mindlessly, but with great effort and concentration.
Johnny could see there was someone with them.
Someone with a flashlight barking out orders.
Johnny came forward and soon enough saw Riker there, yelling at the dead men, kicking dirt at them, drumming them on the heads with the barrel of his flashlight. “Dig, you bastards!” he was screaming at them. “Dig, dig, dig! Dig ’em down deep, you know what you have to do! You know the way!”
Johnny, wordlessly, stood by the mortuary boss for some time, watching the gray rain-swept figures digging and widening and squaring off their holes. When they were done, they lowered their caskets down… and climbed into them. Within a half-hour, all the graves were dug and the last of the lids slammed shut with a brutal finality.
Then there was only silence. The sound of rain, distant thunder.
Riker, his face wet with rain, said, “See, boy, how it works is, the guards, oh they love me, on account I handle the mortuary so they don’t have to. I see that the dead are registered, the graves dug and filled and I do it all by myself. I do it with them.”
“Dead men,” Johnny managed, his mind drawn into a soundless vacuum now. “Living dead men.”
Riker clapped him on the shoulder. “That’s it, boy! That’s it exactly! See, years ago, when I started at the mortuary they was this Haitian fellow ran it, a drug dealer. He taught me about the walking dead. Corps Cadavre, he called ’em. He showed me how it was done. How to make the powder, the dolls, to make with the mumbo-jumbo ju ju talk—”
“Zombies,” Johnny found himself saying incredulously. Because that’s what they were. Dead men summoned up to dig their own graves. Just like the dead men you heard about, worked those cane fields in Haiti and Guadeloupe and those places.
Riker gave him a shovel and for the next hour or so, they filled in the graves, marking them with simple wooden crosses. Then it was done and they both stood there in that dank cold, in that brown sloppy soup of mud.
“Boy, you’d drank that whiskey like I told you,” Riker said, “you’d have slept right through all this, see? I put enough seconal in there to put you into dreamland for six, eight hours.”
Sure. That’s why he didn’t want anyone in the mortuary that night, things had been all set. The cadavers that hadn’t been claimed were given that powder and the little dolls, told when they were to open their eyes and get to work. It was almost funny… if it hadn’t been so damn depraved, so horrible and, yes, disgusting.
Zombies, Johnny’s brain thought, zombies.
Empty as a tin can, he turned away from Riker and that was a mistake.
Riker hit him with a shovel, opening his head. Johnny sank into the mud like a drowning man. Fingers of gray slop ran from the open crown of his head.
“Sorry, boy,” Riker said, “but I can’t have you telling what you saw.”
Taking Johnny by the feet, he dragged him back towards the mortuary, wondering what sort of story he might concoct. Figured it would be a good one.
Two nights later.
The prison mortuary.
A morgue drawer.
Tagged and bagged, Johnny Walsh lay in his berth in that cool, easy darkness. His hands were folded over his chest, the fingers carefully interlocked. He had no family, no one to claim him. Just more refuse of the state that the taxpayers would no longer be burdened with.
There was a little mud and stick doll stuck between his knees.
Johnny’s eyes snapped open.
He began to speak about zombies in a dead voice, spinning out the last things his brain remembered. He clawed at his sheet, kicked his feet at the door. The drawer slid open then, Riker standing there.
“C’mon, boy,” he said somberly. “Nobody’s claimed you. Time to prepare your place…”
EMILY
When Emily came out of the grave, Mother was waiting there for her. She saw little Emily and began to immediately shake and sob. A broken cry came from her throat as the immensity of her daughter’s resurrection hit her. She went down to her knees in the sluicing muck, gasping and staring, her mouth unable to form words.
Emily just stood there, her white burial dress dripping wet and dark with graveyard soil that fell in clots. Even in the wan moonlight, her face was pale as tombstone marble, her eyes huge and black and empty.
“Emily?” Mother said, caught in some sucking, manic whirlpool of utter joy and utter horror. “Emily?”
Emily just watched her, completely indifferent to the scene. Raindrops rolled down her pallid face like tears. Finally, she grinned because it was what Mother wanted. She grinned and Mother recoiled like she had been slapped. Emily had not grinned in awhile and it came out a bit too crooked, a bit too toothy. “Mother,” she said, her voice dry and scraping like a shovel dragged over a concrete tomb lid.
Mother came forward, uncertain at first, but that endless week of mourning had drained everything from her and she could no longer see how this was wrong, how this was unnatural and insane. So she stumbled forward and collected Emily in her arms, squeezing her in the rain, paying no mind to the fetid stench that came off her daughter.
“I prayed for this, baby! I prayed and I wished and I hoped and I never, ever, ever lost my faith!” Mother said. “I knew you would come back! I knew you would come back to me! I knew you weren’t really dead!”
Emily did not hug her back.
In fact, the warmth of Mother’s flesh slightly repelled her… even though the smell of it was appetizing. She felt Mother’s arms around her, but it did not move her. Emily came out of the grave with certain things, certain needs and desires, but love and affection were not among them.