by Mike Driver
“What you got for me?” croaked The Armadillo. He had the voice of an old man, croaky and cracking, but that could have been the smoke. Ray couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live here, constantly under the clouds and dust. Reflexively, he pulled a fresh face mask from the glove box and pulled it over his nose and mouth.
“Some sort of zombie,” replied Ray. He tossed a clipboard of paperwork out to The Armadillo. “I think they called it a Class Four? Heals fast, I’ll tell you that much. I had to go ’round back and break its legs three times on the way here.”
The Armadillo raised a dust encrusted eyebrow. “What’d you use?”
“Sledgehammer,” replied Ray, his voice muffled by the mask.
“Huh,” grunted The Armadillo. “I’m an axe man myself. Sever a few tendons, that’s the trick. They always seem to have trouble growing those back properly. They’re never quite the same. That’s why so many of them limp.”
“I’ll give it some thought,” said Ray, with the unmistakable tone of a man who will do no such thing. He’d been a hammer man for ten years, and he wasn’t going to change now.
The Armadillo pulled a thick tipped marker out of the pocket of his dirty overalls and ticked off a few pages in the paperwork before tossing it back to Ray through the open window.
“Looks in order,” he grunted. “Let’s get him out. I’ve got my cart ’round back.”
Ray hopped out of the cab, dragging his sledgehammer off the passenger seat, and followed The Armadillo around to the back of the truck. The thing inside threw itself up against the wall as Ray passed, rocking the truck from side to side. Ray’s grip on his hammer tightened.
Ten years down, another three to go, and then his contract was up. That was nine, maybe ten runs at most. Ten more runs and he was out. No more zombies, no more monsters, no more things that didn’t even have a name. No more truck, no more Centralia, and no more Armadillo.
“You … busy?” Ray asked idly, as he fished the keys for the three padlocks that secured the back doors of the truck out of his jeans. Small talk was all part of the process, Ray’s subconsciousness needing to humanize this most inhuman of processes, his sanity boarding up the doors and windows of his brain.
“Too busy,” replied The Armadillo, “Time was, I saw one truck every couple of months. Now, I’m seeing two or three a week.”
“That many?” asked Ray. He had assumed there were others, that he couldn’t be the only person in his … line of work. But two or three trucks a week, coming from all over the country?
“New recruits a lot of them,” The Armadillo replied. “Full of questions. Pain in my ass, frankly. And not one visit from anyone who can tell me what to do once the mine gets full.”
“It’s getting full?” Ray asked, snapping open the first two padlocks. “I thought that thing went on forever.”
The Armadillo pulled a rusty old axe from underneath his heavy metal wheelbarrow. “It’ll probably burn forever,” he replied. “Anthracite vein’s been burning since ’63, but the mine is only so big. We pack ’em in too tight, they’re not gonna burn right, and then all hell breaks loose.”
Ray slipped the third key into the third and final padlock. Inside the truck the thing had started to pound on the doors. Ray wondered if it knew what was waiting for it. As far as he had been told, the undead didn’t feel pain, not in the way that humans did, but the thought of being trapped in a perpetually burning mine, your flesh constantly being burnt away only to regrow again? Living forever, burning to death every day? It was close enough to the description of hell that Ray had grown up with that he could even feel sympathy for the snarling, biting, hate filled thing that was trapped in the back of his truck. If he were a religious man, he would wonder if Centralia was really Hell on Earth, clambered up from beneath the soil to claim the dead that thought they had escaped the clutches of the afterlife and its judgments.
Whatever, the things sure could scream when they wanted to. Ray didn’t like to think about what it must sound like, when the Armadillo shoved a fresh one down there.
“What you gonna do when it’s full then?” Ray asked.
“Don’t know,” replied The Armadillo. “If no one comes up with a better way of keeping these things down? I guess I start digging again, build a new shaft.”
“Guess so,” said Ray.
He snapped the padlock open. The thing in the truck fell silent.
“You sure you don’t want an axe?” The Armadillo asked.
Ray swung the doors opened, and gasped through his mask at what was inside.
There wasn’t one zombie. There were ten. And they were waiting.
“Shut the doors!” shouted the Armadillo, throwing his small frame up against the metal door frame as Ray stood dumbfounded.
“There was only one… I swear…”
The Armadillo reached past Ray for the other door, but he was too late. The things inside were moving, and they were moving fast. With a thud, the nearest zombie collided with the door from the inside. It swung open, knocking the Armadillo onto his back. He fumbled with his axe as he struggled to his feet in the dust.
“Move!” he shouted, grabbing Ray by the shirt and yanking him away from the truck.
Ray moved slowly after the Armadillo, shambling like one of his Class Fours, as the rumpled little man ran down the main street of Centralia. Something sour in Ray’s stomach was telling him that something was very wrong, not just with his truck full of zombies, but with him too. Ray’s head was starting to itch, and he didn’t like the way it felt.
The Armadillo turned left off the main street, glancing over his shoulder to check that Ray was still there. Ray glanced over his shoulder too, but the zombies weren’t chasing them. Whatever they were after, they were staying close to the truck. Their heads were cocked towards each other, and Ray was sure he could hear things that sounded like words. He didn’t think zombies had words.
Ray rounded the corner to find the Armadillo taking the padlock off the side door to a small house. Of all the buildings in Centralia, this one seemed to be the furthest from ruin. The Armadillo vanished inside and Ray followed, letting the small man push back past him to close the door before slamming a metal cage door inside shut and slide bolts home.
Ray blinked in the semi-darkness. He was in a hallway, of sorts, with doors to the left and right. The walls were covered with pictures, each one with a small black ribbon across the top right corner and a small brass plaque underneath. Names and dates, more than Ray could count, but with plenty of space left on the walls for more.
The Armadillo reappeared, having exchanged his axe for a shotgun.
“Drivers who didn’t make their term,” he said grimly, nodded at the photos. “Someone has to remember them, right?”
The sour thing in Ray’s stomach lurched upward. “Yeah,” he said, swallowing some bile. “Someone.”
“Take your mask off, son, the smoke doesn’t get in here that much.”
Ray took off his mask, his eyes never leaving the barrel of the shotgun that was aimed squarely at his chest.
“Look, I don’t know what happened back there. I had one, that’s all. You saw the paperwork…”
Ray’s voice trailed off. Trapped in a town that had been burning for decades, with a shotgun pointed at his chest and a truck load of zombies on the loose, paperwork probably wasn’t the best thing to rely on. Right now, the Armadillo scared him more than the fire and the zombies combined.
“Take off your hat and turn around,” said the Armadillo.
“Hang on a minute, look…”
“I’m not going to shoot you in the back,” grumbled the Armadillo. “If I wanted you dead I’d have left your slow ass outside. Just do what I’m asking, and maybe we’ll find a way out of this.”
Ray turned around reluctantly, fishing his trucker’s cap off his head. It felt damp for some reason.
“Ah, shit,” muttered the Armadillo.
“What is…”
The
Armadillo slammed the butt of his shotgun into the back of Ray’s skull, and the trucker fell the floor unconscious.
Ray woke up with a sore head, naked except for his boxer shorts and tied to a bed. The Armadillo was waiting.
“Now, before you say anything,” the grouchy little man said, “Let me explain.”
Ray looked around the room, waiting for his brain to catch up with the situation. He was in a bedroom, although he was pretty sure he was still on the ground floor. The bed was brass, old fashioned and with a mattress that was like sleeping in a heap of marshmallow. Ray spent most nights in the cab of his truck; he wasn’t used to sleeping lying down, let alone comfortably. The walls had more photos, more black bands, more name plates. Ray wondered how many rooms this place had, and how many photos. How long had it all been going on?
Ray blinked as the Armadillo snapped a photo of him unexpectedly using a Polaroid camera.
“I didn’t think they made those any more,” said Ray.
“No one told me,” replied the Armadillo.
Ray noticed the hostess trolley at the end of the bed. There was a metal surgical tray on it, blood splattered around the rim. There was a photo frame as well, face down but with its black band showing.
“You said you’d explain,” said Ray, feeling his temper rising. Ten years, ten years since he’d last lost his temper. Ten years since he’d put his hands around her neck and… Ray shook his head. He didn’t have time for a trip down memory lane.
The Armadillo pulled a wooden chair across from the wall and sat down. Muttering to himself, he pulled a battered metal tin from the breast pocket of his overalls and opened it. Inside were cigarette papers and dark brown tobacco.
“You smoke?” asked Ray. “You live here and you smoke?”
“Didn’t used to,” replied the Armadillo, licking the edge of a paper. “Just this last year or so.”
Ray didn’t ask any more questions, just watched as the strange little man finished the ritual of rolling his cigarette and lighting it. He took a wheezing drag on it, then blew out a jet of pungent smoke.
“Have you ever heard of a Class Nine?” he asked, his voice croaky.
“No,” said Ray. “I thought the scale stopped at seven.”
“Well, it doesn’t,” replied the Armadillo. “They only bother to put up to a Class Seven in the field manual because anything else is so rare. Or at least it was.”
“You’re telling me that I drove in here with a bunch of Class Nines in the back of my truck?”
The Armadillo looked at Ray for a moment, taking another ragged another drag.
“No, Son. What I’m telling you is that you’re a Class Nine.”
Ray felt the sour something rise up in his gut again.
The Armadillo got up and shuffled back down the end of the bed. Reaching into the metal surgical tray, he lifted up a small glass container. A gray, leprous worm writhed inside, its mouth full of suckers and barbs pressed up against the container’s wall.
“What the hell is that?” asked Ray.
“I’m not sure it’s got a name, not one in English anyway, other than Class Nine” said the Armadillo, shaking the container. “I cut it out of your head while you were… sleeping.”
“That thing… was in my head?” said Ray. Instinctively he tried to reach for his head, forgetting for a moment that his wrists and ankles were tied to the bed posts. His mouth had turned from sour to bone dry.
“Some of it still is.”
Ray strained against the ropes.
“Let me out of here,” he barked, “Right now!”
“Whoah now, hold your horses,” said the Armadillo, his tone as emollient as it could be between his wheezing and spluttering. “You need to let me explain.”
“I’ve been letting you explain,” growled Ray. “And you haven’t told me a god-damned thing! Now let me off this bed, so I can take my hammer and deal with those sons of bitches who put a freaking slug in… my… head!”
The Armadillo smiled. “That’s the spirit,” he said.
“What?”
The Armadillo took a small, sharp knife from inside the medical tray and began to cut through the rope around Ray’s nearest ankle.
“A Class Nine is a parasite,” he explained, cutting through the rope braid by braid. “It gets in your head, takes over your visual and auditory centers, and from there on in you’re only seeing and hearing what it wants you to. You think you’re in control, but you’re not. After a while, the dreams are all your brain wants. You leave the worm inside too long and you end up an addict, as well as…”
“I want the rest out,” interrupted Ray.
The Armadillo winced. “No can do, I’m afraid.”
“Why?”
“Because the other thing that a Class Nine does is poison the host,” said the Armadillo, cutting through the rope around Ray’s second ankle. “Once the poison takes effect, its only the secretions from the parasite that keep the host body mobile. Bottom line? As best I can tell, you’ve been dead for about three weeks.”
Ray sat in the Armadillo’s kitchen, staring at the cup of coffee that had been going cold for the last half an hour. The mug had had a slogan on it once, but innumerable washings had faded it away to nothing. Ray wondered what kind of person had bought the Armadillo a novelty mug, and why. It was a stupid question, but asking stupid questions seemed better than dealing with the really big questions right now. Maybe it was a little bit of the Class Nine’s poison, still pumping around Ray’s system somewhere, but all he could feel was cold and calm. It was better than the alternative, of course. For ten years Ray had ferried the undead to Centralia to burn. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do now that he was dead himself, but he was pretty sure it would involve fire.
Footsteps on the stairs outside the kitchen heralded the Armadillo’s return. Ray drank the coffee quickly, and realized that he couldn’t tell if it was hot or cold. Or if it was coffee.
“Can’t taste anything?” asked the Armadillo as he entered.
“Nope,” said Ray. “That’s part of it, huh?”
“It will come in handy,” said the Armadillo. “The smoke tastes like shit, gets on your chest like you wouldn’t believe.”
He dumped a pair of old fashioned hand mirrors onto the table in front of Ray. Ray picked them up and started to stare at the reflection of the back of his head.
“Jesus…” he muttered. On the crown of his head, a puffy mound of black necrotic issue pulsed in time with his heartbeat. He still had a heartbeat, he’d checked, although he hasn’t sure how long it might last. “It looks like some kind of nest.”
“Won’t help to stare at it too long,” said the Armadillo. “Just thought you should see it, you know? To put things in perspective.”
The Armadillo tossed Ray’s trucking cap onto the table in front of him.
“So what’s going on outside?” asked Ray.
“They’re Class Sixes,” said the Armadillo, pulling out a chair opposite Ray. “They’ve been raiding the mine workings, getting digging equipment.”
“Can they do that?”
“Sixes can. They’re some of the cleverer ones.”
Ray shrugged. Whatever was happening out there, he couldn’t shake the weight of it. He had no idea when it had happened, or how, but he’d been the one to drive into Centralia with a truck load of the undead because he had a maggot in his brain.
“You got any idea why they’re doing it?”
Armadillo poured himself a mug of coffee.
“We had a Class Eight, came in a few weeks ago. One of the new kids. All pleased with himself he was. Anyway, she was real nasty, the Class Eight. I dragged her down the vein myself, kicking and screaming all the way. I reckon they’ve come for her.”
“Can’t be,” said Ray. “They’re not organised like that, they don’t communicate with each other.”
“I looked at your file,” said Armadillo. “Biggest you ever brought in was a Class Four. Trust me,
you get past the Fives and its a whole different world. And it’s changing. Why do you think we’ve had so many new recruits?”
“I guess I wasn’t paying much attention,” said Ray. “I just wanted to serve my term and get out.”
Thinking about his term took Ray back to that night again. Ten years ago. His hands around her neck. Blood, cops, blue lights, sirens. A man in a suit with a briefcase and a piece of paper. Sign here. Thirteen years back behind the wheel of your beloved truck, or we let them take you away and take our chances. Ray had been so close to closing out his god-damned term.
The Armadillo sipped his coffee. There was steam coming off it, so Ray guessed it must be hot after all.
“Yeah, about that,” said the Armadillo, “I can’t let you leave Centralia.”
“I guessed as much,” said Ray. “Don’t worry, I’ll go quietly when you’re ready to burn me.”
The Armadillo chuckled. “Yeah, about that too. I’m afraid you won’t be burning for a long while yet.”
Ray watched as the strange, rumpled little man got up from the table and shuffled out of the room. Ray heard him creak along the floorboards of the hallway, listened to a door open and close, then listened to his footsteps coming back. The Armadillo came back in, holding a fat manila folder and another picture frame. Ray had seen it before, sitting at the foot of his bed. When the Armadillo put it down though, it wasn’t Ray’s picture behind the glass.
It was the Armadillo.
“I thought that was for me,” said Ray. “You took my photo.”
“For your new ID,” said the Armadillo, dropping the manila folder in front of Ray.
Ray opened it. There were loose sheets of paper inside, bad photocopies of old typewritten pages, topped with a freshly laminated ID. The Polaroid of Ray had been crudely cut down and stuck inside. The job title on the ID said “CARETAKER”.