Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones

by Micah Dean Hicks

  Henry raised an eyebrow.

  “Talking to my ghost.”

  “At least you still have one.”

  Their mother pulled into the driveway. The trunk popped open, and Jane went to the window with Henry, watching their mom unload a wheelchair and take it inside.

  She got it for the robot. So he can get around better.

  “Glad to see she cares about someone in this house,” Jane said.

  Does she? If you only love things that love you back, do you really love anyone but yourself ?

  There was a twinkling melody, tiny chimes playing a sad tune. Henry opened his hands and revealed the music box, pink flowers garlanding the porcelain.

  “You fixed it. See, you didn’t even need a ghost.”

  “It was just dirty and old. I cleaned the case and tightened some screws. Not exactly a miracle.”

  “Still, that’s something. You don’t have to save the world.”

  “Bethany texted me this morning. Says she feels a little off. She’s coming over so we can do some tests.”

  He’s thinking about radiation, damaged DNA, exotic matter, cancer. He has no idea what’s coming, and he’s afraid.

  “This is Bethany we’re talking about,” Jane said. “Whatever it is, she’ll beat it.”

  * * *

  The laser array on top of the house had shut down after the alien light fell. It stuck out from the roof, lightless and dead, no doubt swimming with ghosts. Jane watched Bethany do sprints in their yard while Henry made notes.

  Bethany dug in to her run, shoulders forward and head down. She moved slowly, like she stood at the bottom of a lake. And she ran at a slant, as if the ground under her wasn’t level. She gritted her teeth and sweat, ripping up chunks of grass in a pair of running cleats, her ponderous steps throwing turf into the air.

  “Did something happen to her ghosts?” Jane asked.

  They’re the same as always. Just like her. Obsessed with reps and weights and protein powders. They haven’t gone anywhere. They are frustrated, though. They aren’t used to things being this hard.

  Henry had her run sprints, blow bubbles through a straw until she felt lightheaded, and throw darts at a target with one eye closed. He had her hold a compass, and complete a low voltage circuit with her fingertip, and he measured the strength of cell phone signals near her body. She did pushups and crunches, and though she could do just as many as always, she said that it felt harder now. Still, he couldn’t find anything wrong.

  Every time Bethany asked him a question, he looked at the ground and said, “I’m not sure” or “I don’t know yet” or “We’ll figure it out.”

  Jane’s phone buzzed, and she wondered if it would be Trigger. She still didn’t know what to say to him. She understood why he hadn’t listened to the CD. Her ghost made sure that she understood other people’s feelings. But knowing why he was afraid to lose his ghost didn’t make her any less angry with him.

  The buzzing was only her alarm, letting her know that it was time to leave for work.

  She asked her ghost what Bethany was thinking. Was she secretly excited, thrilled for some new obstacle to throw herself against, ready to prove that she could beat even an alien?

  No. She’s wondering if this is what losing feels like.

  “Henry, I’ll be back after work. Don’t do anything dumb.”

  His mind flickered with the pigs working in the factory, the alien light falling, Dennis and the dancing girl, the warehouse full of violent ghosts.

  He sighed and a wave of regret rippled through him. “Well. We both know I won’t be doing anything smart.”

  Jane had never seen so many cars at the grocery store. They filled all the available parking spaces and made new spots at the ends of rows. People parked off the street nearby and walked. The vehicles were rust-spotted, had different-colored fenders and hoods, sat unevenly on mismatched tires. Jane parked around by the dumpster and walked in through the back of the store.

  There were people in the storeroom, digging through the produce cooler for heads of cabbage or sacks of fruit. When Jane walked through the vinyl flaps and into the fluorescent glow of the store, the tile was covered with torn boxes and spilled breakfast cereal. People grabbed armloads of packages and dropped them into overflowing carts. Some shepherded two or three carts at a time.

  She could feel her ghost’s glee, how it knew something Jane didn’t and was holding back to savor the secret.

  “I give up,” Jane said. “What the hell is going on?”

  The owner ran ads in the paper. He’s closing the store. Selling off everything at a huge discount. After today, there won’t be a grocery store in Swine Hill.

  “He didn’t tell me. What about my job?”

  Her ghost wasn’t paying attention. She fed Jane a stream of anxiety and panic. The closest grocery store was more than forty minutes east on the highway. Some people didn’t have cars. They’d be shopping at gas stations or the tiny drugstore from now on.

  Down one of the aisles, Hogboss pushed a train of five carts. Stray cans and boxes slipped from their mounded tops and left a trail behind him. People got out of his way, some because they were afraid of his size and some because they were repulsed by him.

  They blame him for the store closing.

  “That’s stupid.”

  Is it? The owner thinks the pigs came here for him. The ghosts of pork roast and tenderloin. He has nightmares about dead animals clawing up from the meat coolers to kill him. He thinks about it all the time. So now he’s leaving.

  “He’s afraid of everything. Even me.”

  At the front, lines backed up in every checking lane. There were no more bags, so the cashiers just put the groceries loosely in shopping carts. Thought after flashing thought cut through Jane’s mind. She’d never been around so many people at once before. She could track Hogboss through the store by how the thoughts shifted. An invisible thunderhead, a spot of pressure and violence, followed him.

  “Aren’t you going to help?” asked Kathryn, one of the day checkers. She was possessed by the ghost of her dead husband, Jerry, and talked to herself all the time. She wore his nametag instead of her own.

  “Why?” Jane asked. “Tomorrow, none of us will have a job. Maybe we should be stocking up on groceries too.”

  Kathryn and her husband started arguing about it, and Jane walked away, wanting the couple’s thoughts out of her head.

  When Hogboss came back to the front, Jane waved him over to the manager’s booth and checked him out there. He held up a package of sandwich cookies. “Dennis says that he’s a vegetarian now. He won’t eat anything I cook for him. Do you think he’ll eat this?”

  He’s talking about his son, a pig boy who goes to school with Henry. Hogboss actually thinks your brother will keep him safe. Isn’t that sad?

  Jane made a note to ask her brother about Dennis, then looked at the ingredients on the cookies. “I don’t think there are any animal by-products in this. Not a lot of plants in it either. Just trash.”

  Hogboss seemed relieved.

  After he paid with his Pig City charge account, Jane helped him push the overflowing carts outside. Customers watched her go. Special treatment for the pigs, they thought. What about us? What will we do without a grocery? Will that girl finally leave? Better take her broken little family with her when she goes.

  Jane and Hogboss dumped the groceries in the back of his truck bed, almost filling it.

  “Thank you for being so kind,” Hogboss said. “We don’t have many friends in town. People still haven’t gotten used to us.”

  People will never get used to them. He knows that, deep down.

  “I’m sorry to ask, but I need a favor. The store’s closing. Everywhere in town is cutting jobs.”

  Hogboss put his hands in his pockets, the denim stretching around his broad fingers. “Corporate doesn’t want us hiring. We have so many pigs working now and more starting every day.”

  “Maybe you have somet
hing temporary?”

  He shook his head, but he wasn’t thinking about her question. Something else was on his mind, a mosaic of smells and memories from the pig houses, his earliest memories before Henry had reshaped his mind.

  “I’ve been watching the pigpens,” he said. “How we manage the animals. You know, I might never have met my son. There’s no reason to introduce a boar to its offspring. I read that in the wild a boar might even kill his own piglets so the sow will go back into heat. Without Henry, I wouldn’t know Dennis. Isn’t that amazing?”

  Don’t turn around. Don’t meet his eyes.

  Jane could hear the police car slipping up behind them, could feel the fist-pounding anger of the officer watching her talk to the pig man. Of course, he recognized her. He would blame all of them, her whole family. The store closing was just further proof.

  Hogboss kept speaking, unaware of the danger they were in. “I suppose I owe your brother a lot,” he said. “Hop in the truck and ride with me up to the plant. Maybe I do have a job for you.”

  * * *

  “I had wanted Henry to help me with this,” Hogboss said. “But he said that he doesn’t know how to speak to machines anymore.”

  He showed Jane into a dusty and claustrophobic room with a bank of security monitors. The screens had error messages. Some trembled with static. Jane could feel the ghosts of old plant workers caught in the equipment. A tired spirit, wandering back and forth across one of the monitors as a flicker of light, wanted desperately to go home.

  He’s been in there for years.

  “I’m too clumsy for this sort of work,” Hogboss said. He held up one of his dinner-plate hands, blunt fingers splayed apart.

  Jane crawled under the desk and unhooked some of the ghost-fouled cables. “Do you have more of these somewhere? Or could you get more?”

  Hogboss took them away.

  She cobbled together enough working parts to get one of the video feeds working again. It showed a corner of one of the pig houses. People came to give the pigs shots, to open sacks of feed, and to hose out the stalls. They took the biggest ones away for slaughter.

  Jane connected the same feed to all of the monitors so she could pick out which screens were still working. Pigpens covered the wall in front of her. She rewound the tape, watching a day’s worth of work speed by. A woman sat on the floor by one of the pens and stayed too long. It was Jane’s mother. She fed the pigs from her hands, like they were pets.

  She misses being able to touch someone without hurting them. At least the pigs don’t flinch from her.

  Jane felt ashamed and angry, wishing she could hide the feeling from her ghost, but she had no privacy from it.

  Hogboss came back into the room carrying a bundle of new cables.

  “I’m pretty much done,” Jane said. “Too bad it only took me an afternoon. Did you have anything else you needed me to do?”

  “I talked to HR,” Hogboss said. “We can keep you on for a few months at least. You’ll monitor plant operations from here and let me know if you see anything strange.”

  Before Jane could thank him, Hogboss pointed at the video feeds, the image of the kneeling woman repeated ten times.

  “I remember her,” he said. “From before Henry worked on me.” He touched one of the screens, and the image shattered into static until he took his hand away.

  “That’s my mom,” Jane said. “She isn’t always this nice. Honestly, she’s a bit hard to live with.”

  “Your mother? Wait here.” Hogboss left the office again.

  “What was that about?” Jane asked.

  He was thinking about a field behind the factory. There are wildflowers growing in the waste runoff there.

  “Flowers? Why?” Jane turned back to the video, trying to understand. The picture was grainy, but it looked like her mother was talking to the pigs. She let her arm hang in the pen, scratching their heads. They pressed their soft snouts into her palm.

  Hogboss came back holding a bouquet of flowers he’d just picked. They had a faint chemical smell from the ditch behind the factory, and gray dirt still clung to their roots. “Please,” Hogboss said, “give these to your mother. Tell her that I— Tell her that we all appreciate her very much.”

  He left wiping his eyes and leaving Jane holding the flowers.

  Oh, the big dumb pig, her ghost said. I think he’s in love with her.

  * * *

  Back home, Jane put the flowers in a vase and left them on the kitchen table. The robot sat tall in the secondhand wheelchair, narrowing its glowing eyes at her. She could feel her mother lying in bed and watching TV and Bethany holding in her anger while Henry tried to help her.

  When Jane went upstairs, she heard Bethany say, “You’re looking at the Wikipedia page for acute radiation syndrome. Even without a ghost, you can do better than this.”

  Jane found the music box on her dresser. She wound the key and let it play, making sure that it worked before she put it in her pocket.

  He might hate you. This could be how you lose him.

  She ignored her ghost and went back outside to where Trigger waited in his work truck. He’d given her a ride back from the plant after Hogboss stranded her without her car. It was growing dark out, but Trigger had the night off. Like most other people, his hours were being cut.

  He drove her back toward the store to pick up her car, not saying much. More people than usual sat on their porches or drove aimlessly, full of nervous energy, nothing to do and nowhere to go. Swine Hill was trembling, on the verge of something violent.

  The truck was cold. Trigger concentrated on the road so that she couldn’t read his thoughts, but her ghost caught fragments. Guilt, anger, and desire. He wanted her, kept thinking about the afternoon spent in his bed, but he was afraid he’d already ruined things. His self-loathing was the skeleton the rest of him hung on.

  The grocery store was dark. Jane’s car was the only one in the lot. Inky shapes stepped through the locked doors and windows, ghosts flooding the empty store, full of anger that another piece of the town had crumbled. By the front door, the murky figure of the ghost who had been shot lay in front of the doors, still crying out for help. At the corner of the building, Jane thought she saw her father for a moment, just a glimmer of motion and then gone. Trigger pulled up beside her car and waited, unsure what would happen next.

  He’ll take you there, her ghost said. If you ask him. He’d do anything for you right now.

  “Where did it happen?” Jane asked. “The place where your brother died?”

  The inside of the cab sparkled with frost under the console’s glow. He ran the heat to keep the windshield clear, but every time he exhaled, it was like winter itself came pouring out of his mouth. Jane clenched her teeth and held herself for warmth.

  “Oh.” He gestured south of the town, toward the freeway that carried Pig City meats into the world. “Less than an hour away. Not far.”

  “Do you ever go back there?”

  “I used to. I’m not sure why. That place is always near.” He picked up a star of leaves stuck together with ice that had grown in the space between them.

  “I’d like to see it. Maybe it would help me understand.”

  Her ghost expanded in her, wide and smiling like the moon. It loved when Jane told a lie.

  “Okay.” Trigger put the truck in drive and pulled out of the lot. “If you think it would help.”

  The sun went down, and ghosts rose hissing and thick out of the wreckage of the city. Trigger drove away from town. Spirits on their way to work at the pork-processing plant bloomed in the headlights like fog. As soon as they joined the highway, the cloud of ghosts vanished.

  They passed through a small town where billboards had faded to white. The old brick buildings had been gutted and stripped down to their foundation. They passed through the whole thing—a scattering of houses, some churches, a school—in less than a minute. A green sign, choked with ivy, read, WELCOME TO DALEVILLE: CITY OF PROGRESS.
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br />   “Are there any ghosts here?” Jane asked. She pulled her legs against her chest, rubbing them with her hands.

  “Just the ones we bring with us,” Trigger said.

  There are a few. Deep in the oldest buildings. In houses sunken into the woods. Every place has its hauntings.

  Soon they were out in the country, following asphalt that slowly disintegrated into gravel. Trees closed in tall and dark on both sides. The road plunged down into a wooded valley, and the stars were swept away by the long-fingered hands of trees.

  They turned down an old logging track, the truck rocking back and forth over the uneven dirt. Tall weeds battered the front of the truck, tinkling like rain against the bumper. Inside the cab, the windows grew milky with ice, narrowing what they could see.

  His ghost knows where we are. This is exactly what it wants, for Trigger to remember what he did.

  Trigger took a flashlight out of the back of the truck and led Jane through the woods. The leaves died and whitened as they passed, and the air cut her skin. All around them, his ghost bent late spring back to winter.

  There was no danger of them getting lost. Droplets of blood guided them between the trees. There were echoes of distant gunfire, a teasing at her ears like voices shouting far away. Animals crashed through the leaves nearby, fleeing the icy breath that blew into their dens. After being inside his house, Jane found this place familiar.

  Trigger stopped in a clearing between the trees and gestured with his flashlight. The beam passed over weeds shrinking in the cold. There was a bloody patch of ground here. He tried to speak, but his voice broke. Taking a deep breath, he said, “Well. This is where I killed him.”

  His ghost is lonely. It wants to be held.

  Jane nodded. She didn’t think his ghost would be that complicated. Most spirits weren’t.

  There was a flare of outrage and disgust from Jane’s ghost. Just do what you’re going to do.

  She pulled the music box out of her pocket. When Trigger’s flashlight beam found its shape, the porcelain box looked like a ball of snow.