Working Stiff

by Kevin J. Anderson

  “Sebastian is the only witness left,” McGoo said. “And obviously our traditional police protection methods haven’t worked.”

  “Sounds like you need a zombie detective,” I said.

  “We need someone competent. Sebastian has to go into witness protection until the case comes up for trial.”

  Robin just nibbled on her pencil, deep in thought. “So you need our help to make sure he’s moved without being seen.”

  McGoo nodded. “We’ve already got an operation under contract. He’ll be taken cross-country in a coffin in the back of an eighteen-wheeler. We’ll disguise the truck, make it look like it’s hauling pre-packaged school lunches.”

  I cringed, and Robin shuddered, both of us remembering our own experiences with school lunches. “No one’s going to mess with that cargo.”

  So, McGoo already had the general plan and his connections to the police force. We just had to work out the details.

  Obviously, as the ominous voice always says in movie trailers, something went wrong. I wasn’t the one who was supposed to be riding in the coffin. Somebody had set me up.

  Once I pushed the loosened coffin lid to one side, I began to work on the silver chains and padlock. Fortunately, silver has no effect on me—that’s an advantage to being a zombie, and I try to look at the glass as half full.

  As a detective, I’m quite proficient, or at least marginally adequate, with lockpick tools that I keep in a handy travel pack in my pants pocket. My fingers were clumsy, but no more than usual. I worked with the tools until I sprung the padlock, removed the hasp, and shoved the chains to the floor.

  Just as I sat up, the semi truck hit a bump in the road, which made the coffin thump against the trailer bed. My teeth clacked together, and then the hum of the road became smooth again. I knocked the lid to the floor and lurched up out of the coffin.

  This was actually easier than when I had clawed my way up through the packed graveyard soil back when I first rose from the dead—not to mention a lot less dirty, too.

  The truck rumbled along, and I stepped out of the coffin, flexing my stiff knees, stretching, brushing the wrinkles in my sport jacket. I looked around the coffin, but saw no sign of my fedora. I hoped it wasn’t lost.

  Even though my leaky brain had recaptured the basic story of Sebastian Bund going into witness protection, there were still many gaps. Once again, I felt around my head, but discovered no lumps. It’s difficult to knock a zombie unconscious by bonking him on the head, anyway. There must have been something else, maybe a sleeping potion. I felt groggy, rubbed my eyes, still trying to get awake.

  “Coffin” and “coffee” both derive from the root word “caffeine,” I think—and I could have used a strong cup right now to help wake the dead. I needed to be alert, to judge whether I might be in danger.

  Inside the trailer, other crates were stacked high all around where the coffin had been stashed. The crates were all filled with prepackaged school lunches; from the “Use By” dates stamped on the sides, they would not expire for more than a century.

  I worked my way toward the front of the trailer, hoping I could find some way to signal the cab. The driver up there needed to know he had the wrong cargo. If someone had knocked me out and switched me with Sebastian Bund, then the star witness might be in danger.

  The engine noise was loud, but I leaned against the wall and started pounding as hard as I could. (For a trucker hauling coffins filled with the undead, that would probably be unnerving.) If he had the window open, maybe he’d be able to hear me back here. I pounded harder and then, to reassure him, hammered out “Shave and a Haircut.”

  Faintly, from the cab, I heard him pound back on the door, “Two Bits.”

  I pounded harder, more desperately. He pounded back, and I heard his muffled voice. “Quiet back there!”

  So much for raising the alarm. I guess I would have to wait until he stopped for a potty break—I hoped he had a small bladder.

  I sat back down on the edge of the coffin, slipped my hands into the jacket pockets—and felt immediately stupid when I found my phone. That would have been a good thing to remember from the start. I didn’t like all these lapses in my memory. Could a zombie get a concussion?

  Since I had no idea where the truck was, possibly out in the middle of nowhere, I hoped that I’d get a signal. I was pleased to see at least one-and-a-half bars; that should be good enough.

  I kept McGoo’s number on speed-dial, and he picked up on the second ring. He must have seen the Caller ID. “Shamble! What are you doing awake already?”

  “Trying to figure out where the hell I am.” He didn’t sound surprised to hear from me. “You sound like you know more about this than I do.”

  McGoo snorted. “I know more about most things than you do.”

  “I’d argue with that, but today I’ll give you a free pass if you can tell me why I woke up in a nailed-shut coffin surrounded by silver chains in the back of a semi truck.”

  “Silver chains? There weren’t supposed to be any silver chains.”

  I stared at the phone, then put it back to my ear.

  “That’s the part you find unusual? Why am I here in the first place?”

  “It was your idea, Shamble, but if you don’t remember your own brilliant solution, I’ll take credit for it. The narcomancer said you might suffer some temporary memory loss as a side effect. It was a powerful spell.”

  “Narcomancer?” The word meant nothing to me, and I couldn’t call any image to mind. “Don’t you mean ‘necromancer’?”

  “Narco—narcomancer,” McGoo said. “I suppose you’ve forgotten you owe me a hundred bucks, too?”

  “I don’t owe you a hundred bucks. But narcomancer … like in narcotics?”

  “No, like narcolepsy. His name was Rufus. He’s a wizard who worked a spell to put you to sleep—and putting a zombie to sleep is no easy task.”

  “Rufus?” The name still didn’t ring a bell.

  And suddenly, it did.

  I recalled the man whose matted mouse-brown hair seemed to have a moral disagreement with combs. His wispy beard looked as if someone had been experimenting with spirit gum and theatrical makeup but had given up halfway through the job. His watery blue eyes were extremely bloodshot, and he seemed jittery. Although he specialized in putting people to sleep, he seemed to be an insomniac himself.

  I remember him rubbing his hands together, repeating his name and grinning. “Yes, Rufus … are you ready for my special roofie? You’ll snooze away the journey.”

  He began to speak an incantation—then everything went blank.

  “It’s all going down as planned,” McGoo said on the phone. “We made all the arrangements for Sebastian to be whisked away in the truck to his new home, but we put you in the coffin instead, under a sleep spell—it was supposed to last for the entire drive—while Sebastian went by a roundabout route. A brilliant idea, actually. I suggested it.”

  “No, you didn’t,” I said. “That was my idea.”

  “I thought you didn’t remember.”

  “But why would we do that?”

  McGoo said, “Just to be safe. You were triggered to wake up if anyone tampered with the coffin. You were worried something bad might go down.”

  At that moment, an explosion hit the truck, blowing out the side of the trailer, scattering packaged school lunches everywhere, and hurling me out into the pitch-black night.

  2

  The squeal of the truck’s air brakes would have made a banshee envious. The semi jack-knifed, its wheels smearing rubber along the highway like black fingerpaint. The truck groaned to a halt with a cough and gasp, and debris rained down everywhere.

  After being thrown from the truck, I landed in a ditch—a mud-filled ditch, of course. I got to my feet, dripping; stagnant slime oozed out of my hair. It seems the harder I work to keep myself well-preserved, the faster karma comes back and smacks me.

  The door to the truck cab popped open, and a stocky man with a
black jawline beard swung out. His eyes burned like coals, and even from a distance I could tell he was hopping mad. He wore a trucker’s cap, a red checked flannel shirt open to show his white undershirt, and jeans. He didn’t seem injured, just furious as he stepped away from the wheezing and gurgling diesel engine that fought to keep running.

  He stared at the ruined trailer, where a blackened crater and splintered wood surrounded the remnants of a slogan: “The Finest in Processed Lunches—Tolerated by Children for over Twenty Years!” On the image, a group of gaunt boys and girls looked dubiously toward the picture of their meal, which had been obliterated by the blast.

  “They blew up my rig!” The trucker stalked back and forth, twisted his cap around backward, then, dissatisfied, twisted it back around front. “Out here on an empty stretch of highway? They blew up my rig!” He kicked gravel with his steel-toed boots, then looked up and saw me shambling toward him. “Did you see that?” Then he glowered, giving me a second look. “Where did you come from?”

  “I was inside your truck,” I said. “I’m Dan Chambeaux, private investigator.”

  The trucker blinked, still suspicious. “And I’m Earl—Earl Joe Bob, owner and operator of Earl Joe Bob Trucking.” He scratched his beard. “Say, what were you doing in that coffin? You weren’t supposed to be in there.”

  “Ever hear those stories about babies being switched in the nursery?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “I guess it happens with coffins, too.”

  Earl Joe Bob put his hands on his hips and swung his head from side to side, looking in dismay at his mortally wounded rig. Under the bright running lights, which could have given a Christmas tree on the Las Vegas Strip a run for its money, I saw “Earl Joe Bob Trucking” and a phone number, as well as government license number on the driver’s door. He sighed. “At least the cab and engine are still intact. But damn—I’m liable for all this! And, hey, you weren’t supposed to be in that coffin!” He shook his head again, stuck his thumbs into the waistband of his jeans. “What a mess.”

  At least the trailer hadn’t caught fire, though some of the shards of wood still smoldered. “I think we were hit with a rocket launcher.”

  “It happens,” said Earl Joe Bob. He went back to the cab, got some flares and reflective hazard triangles.

  I realized that out here on this open and silent stretch of highway, under the stars and with no city lights in sight, we were much too vulnerable. This truck hadn’t run into a random migratory rocket. I patted my pockets, looked around—I had lost my phone during the explosion.

  “We have to call for help. Can we use your CB? Or a cell phone?”

  Earl Joe Bob shook his head. “No, wouldn’t be wise to use it.”

  I was exasperated. “Why not?”

  The trucker narrowed his eyes at me. “Just can’t.”

  I couldn’t argue with that logic. I walked around the other side of the truck again, working my way back to the ditch, where I hunted around for my phone. The weeds were tall, and I splashed through the standing water. Mosquitoes fled from me—another advantage of being a zombie. I would have to write all the advantages down one day, just as a reminder.

  Fortunately, the phone’s screen light was still on, though my call with McGoo had been disconnected in the explosion. I smeared it against my muddy shirt, making a marginally clean patch, and was dismayed to see that my Angry Vultures scores had been wiped out. That was a problem I would have to deal with later.

  I phoned McGoo, who answered right away. “Where are you, Shamble? What happened?”

  “I’m on a road somewhere,” I said, glancing around. “And I don’t see one of those You Are Here X’s.” I told McGoo about the explosion, and that we were stranded. He promised to call in reinforcements right away.

  “I’ll see if we can track your signal through the cell towers,” he said. “Maybe the truck has a GPS in the cab.”

  I ended the call and began making my way along the back of the rig, when I froze, hearing voices. I saw two figures approach the wounded truck. It was a starlit night, clear skies, a quarter moon. Zombie night vision is generally good, but I didn’t need any supernatural powers to pick out the two young men. They wore camouflage jumpsuits—but light-colored desert camo, so they stood out plainly. They carried long rifles.

  Since the side of the truck had been blasted open with a rocket launcher, and since these two men were approaching heavily armed, I decided it wouldn’t be a good idea to wave my arms and hail them for help.

  Earl Joe Bob spotted them as well, and bunched his meaty arms as he stalked toward them. “This wasn’t the deal I had with Ma Hemoglobin! Which two of her boys are you—Moron and Imbecile?”

  “No,” said one of the young men. “I’m Huey, and that’s Louis.”

  “Well, you’re still Moron and Imbecile to me. You wrecked my rig! We were supposed to meet up at the Rest In Peace area down the road and make the transfer!” He spluttered, waving his hand at the crater in the side of his truck. “What kind of stupid—”

  The two boys raised their rifles. Huey said, “Ma thought you might double-cross us, so we took matters into our own hands.”

  “You must be two of her human boys,” Earl Joe Bob said. “A vampire wouldn’t be that stupid.”

  “We’ll show you stupid!” said Louis. He opened fire with his high-powered rifle. Not to be left behind, Huey shot Earl Joe Bob as well. The bullets slammed into the trucker’s red flannel shirt, and he dropped to the ground.

  I silently reaffirmed my wisdom in not waving my arms and calling attention to myself.

  Now, as a detective, I solve cases, and I’m the hero in my own story. But sometimes heroes stick around longer if they aren’t always … heroic.

  I didn’t know how I was going to get out of here, or how long it would take McGoo to bring in reinforcements. If this truck was on a cross-country trip to deliver a decoy into witness protection, McGoo could be miles away, even if he had been shadowing me.

  With a jolt, I got a few more of my memories back: I did remember the idea of taking Sebastian’s place in the coffin aboard the truck. Meanwhile, Robin would take our nondescript and rusty old Ford Maverick, lovingly named the Pro Bono Mobile, with the scrawny blond vampire dressed in my fedora and a similar sport jacket, sunshades down, traveling across the state line to where he would be hidden in his new life. My ghost girlfriend Sheyenne was going to ride shotgun. Nobody would be looking for them. They would be safe. It would be a lark. I was the one under a narcolepsy spell in the back of a semi truck, a decoy. It should have been a long sleep for me.

  Now, Ma Hemoglobin’s two boys climbed through the blasted crater in the side of the trailer. My best bet was probably to climb back into the ditch and hide in the mud, but McGoo would never let me forget it.

  Instead, I crept along the opposite side of the trailer. If I could make it to the cab, open the passenger side door, and climb into the cab, I was sure to find some kind of firearm, baseball bat, or tire iron that Earl Joe Bob kept there.

  I heard Huey and Louis rummaging around inside the trailer, shining flashlights; I saw the gleam through splintered cracks in the opposite wall. They tossed aside a clutter of prepackaged school lunches. “The coffin’s empty! He’s not here!”

  The other voice said, “I hate it when coffins turn up empty! But was it empty in the first place, or were we tricked?”

  I made it to the front of the rig, yanked open the cab door—and of course the hinges screeched and groaned loudly enough to make any haunted house proud. The two Hemoglobin boys clambered out of the blasted trailer, brandishing their rifles, looking around.

  “There he is!” yelled Louis.

  “I see him,” said Huey. They began sprinting toward me, running past the body of Earl Joe Bob, who lay sprawled at the side of the truck.

  Earl groaned and sat up, shaking his head. “Dammit! You wrecked my rig and you shot me?” He sprang to his feet and flashed a set of ivory fangs.
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  I should have recognized earlier that he was a vampire. Many truckers who specialize in all-night hauls are vampires; they have no trouble staying awake, though they had to park in Rest In Peace areas and pull down the shades by dawn.

  The two Hemoglobin boys turned white and spun around, raising their rifles again. Each managed to fire one more shot. This time, Earl Joe Bob merely flinched before lunging forward again.

  “I thought you loaded the rifles with silver bullets!” Huey shouted.

  “I thought you loaded the rifles with silver bullets!”

  Earl Joe Bob was pissed.

  Moving with vampire speed (earlier, I did mention that vamps can be quite swift and agile), he lunged forward and grabbed the young men by their necks, one in each hand. His grip was powerful, and he squeezed hard. I heard the loud double-crack as their necks snapped; it sounded like popcorn in a microwave bag. He tossed the two dead bodies on the ground—truly dead, because Huey and Louis had been two of Ma Hemoglobin’s four human sons. (These days one or the other could still come back as an unnatural, but it wouldn’t be anytime soon.)

  Earl Joe Bob made a disgusted sound, brushed at his flannel shirt, looked down at the bullet holes healing in his chest. “I’m as much a mess as my rig is.” He saw me hanging onto the door and flashed his fangs. “And where do you think you’re going?”

  The vampire trucker moved toward me. I held up my cell phone as if inviting him to play a game of Curses With Friends. “I already called in for help. The police are coming.”