Cal sighed and turned back to the wall. “OK, OK. We’re digging.”
He began hammering at the wall, driving the metal tip of the pickaxe into a crack in the rock. He found that if he imagined the rock was the Harvester’s head, and the solid pickaxe was… well, a solid pickaxe, the process was much more enjoyable.
He kept digging, glancing back every few seconds to see if the Harvester was still there. The ugly shizznod hung around for a few minutes, then glided off to bother some other poor bamston.
Cal immediately stopped digging. Silence fell in the side chamber. “Man, I hate these guys,” Cal muttered, watching out for the Harvester appearing around the corner again. “I mean, I don’t know about you, Red Hat, but I have zero job satisfaction.”
Cal had had some pretty shizzy jobs back on Earth. He’d worked part-time in a few bars, of course, but that was pretty much par for the course. He’d worked at a pretzel stand at a local mall for a few months, before ‘accidentally’ burning it to the ground on one particularly sunny afternoon when he’d been refused time off.
He’d worked in two call centers for a combined total of three hours and sixteen minutes, managed a branch of Blockbuster Video for half that time, and worked for a company that produced wedding videos until he’d mixed up the camera’s ‘record’ mode with its ‘do nothing whatsoever’ mode, and turned in a lot of footage of his own feet, the inside of a lens cap, and not a whole lot else.
Since coming to Space, he’d only really had one other job. It involved cleaning an endless amount of dirty dishes and being violently attacked by a psychotic old woman with impressive ninja skills and a frankly astonishing ability to take a beating and stay standing. That job had made him want to kill himself after the first forty-five minutes. And yet it was still, by quite some margin, better than this one.
“Don’t worry, buddy. I’ve got a plan,” Cal said, still scowling in the direction the Harvester had gone. “Well, I’m in the process of forming one,” he clarified. “And it’s technically more of a scheme, than…”
He realized his voice was the only sound in the side chamber. Red Hat had stopped digging.
Cal turned to find the little figure slumped on the ground, one arm folded awkwardly beneath him, his legs twisted into an uncomfortable-looking number four-shape.
“Red Hat?”
No reply.
Cal rushed to the Nogem’s side, hollering, “A little help down here!” back along the chamber.
Dropping to his knees, he felt Red Hat’s neck for a pulse. Nothing. But then, was that where these guys kept their pulse? They laid eggs through flaps in their stomachs, so there was no saying where the fonk their pulse was.
Cal randomly pressed his fingers against various parts of the Nogem, but felt no tell-tale beating in any of them.
“Shizz. Come on, buddy. Don’t do this,” Cal whispered. He spun around and began shouting for help again, only to find Loren just a few feet away, rushing toward him along the chamber. There were a couple of Nogems behind her and, further back, the Harvester who had cracked the whip at them earlier.
“What is it? What happened?” Loren asked.
“I don’t know, he just… He was working really hard, and then he just… I don’t know,” Cal said. He gestured helplessly to the motionless body. “Do something!”
Loren dropped to her knees beside Red Hat and prized open one of his eyelids. The eye behind it was glassy and blank. Cal had compared the Nogems to toys earlier, and that was exactly what Red Hat’s eye reminded him of now. It was a doll’s eye. It was the eye of something that was not alive.
With a sigh, Loren slowly closed Red Hat’s eyelid again, just as the two Nogems clattered up behind him, coughing and wheezing and swaying unsteadily on their feet.
“Aw, no. Not Red Hat,” said one. His hat was a checkerboard of green and blue, and Cal didn’t really feel confident enough to have a bash at his name.
The other—who sported a simple yellow hat that matched his bristly blond beard—leaned over and squeezed one of Red Hat’s ears. He stood there like that for several seconds, counting under his breath, then released his grip and gave a sad, solemn shake of his head.
“He’s gone,” Yellow Hat said. “It’s no use. He’s gone.”
The Harvester glided up behind them, appearing like a ghost. His whip hummed as he coiled it around and around in his hands. “What do you think you are doing?” he demanded. “Return to your stations. Get back to work.”
“We, uh, we should take him to the morgue,” said Yellow Hat, lowering his eyes to avoid the Harvester’s gaze. “Please. It’s not right just leaving him.”
The Harvester’s teeth rippled. The whip uncoiled to its full length, the orange glow flickering all the way to its tip. “Return to your station,” he ordered. “Do not make me tell you again.”
The Nogems both stood and shuffled away from the body, keeping their gazes on the floor.
Cal scooped Red Hat up and cradled him in his arms. He felt small and frail, and Cal flashed-back to a time when he had held another body, not much bigger, a whole lot of years ago.
“I’ll take him,” Cal said. “Where’s the morgue?”
“You will put that thing down, and you will get back to work,” the Harvester growled.
Cal stepped closer to the monster. “Tell me where the morgue is, or you’ll be the next person who gets sent there.”
The Harvester poked Cal in the throat with a finger. With his arms full, Cal was unable to defend himself, and could only grit his teeth against the pain as it tore through him. He held the Harvester’s gaze, refusing to look away. Refusing to give him the fonking satisfaction.
When the finger was eventually withdrawn, Cal took a few seconds to compose himself and enjoy the lack of agony, then spoke in a voice he hadn’t even been aware he possessed. It was a cocktail of Clint Eastwood and thunder. A subtle blend of Sly Stallone and an earth tremor, with just a hint of space bear around the edges. It was a voice that said as much, if not more, than the words themselves.
“Get the fonk out of my way, and tell me where the morgue is. Now.”
Loren appeared at Cal’s side. “Just let him take him,” she said. “Then we can all get back to work before Manacle arrives.”
“The great Manacle,” the Harvester parroted. His eyes had crept to the edge of his nostrils as he attempted to force Cal to step down.
Cal was having none of it. He couldn’t do the pop-out eye trick, but he could glare with the best of them. He’d once gone a full day without blinking. Admittedly, the subsequent eye infection had seen him bed-ridden for over a week, but that wasn’t the point. If this fonk wanted a staring contest, he’d give him one.
Or, failing that, he’d kick him in the testicles and dodge past him while he was throwing up. Either one worked, and he was actually leaning slightly in favor of that second option.
Fortunately—or perhaps, unfortunately—it didn’t come to that.
“Take it and dispose of it,” the Harvester said, stepping aside. He pointed an elongated finger at Yellow Hat. The Nogem instinctively cowered back, bracing himself. “You. Show him the morgue.”
“Yes. Yes, thank you,” said Yellow Hat, practically curtsying with gratitude. “We’ll work even harder to make up for this.”
The Harvester’s teeth rippled. His eyes bulged all the way out of its nostrils before retreating into the dark caverns. “Yes. You shall,” he seethed. “I shall make sure of it.”
Seventeen
Cal had seen the inside of a couple of morgues in his time. Both had, pretty much by their very definition, been horrible places. Clean and tidy, yes, and professionally run, but not somewhere you’d want to take a picnic.
The one he was standing in now was several magnitudes worse. He wasn’t really sure it technically qualified as a ‘morgue’ in fact, being nothing more than a long rectangular cave with no obvious medical or cadaver storage facilities anywhere to be seen.
What
it did have—and what was most likely the very definition of what made a room a morgue—was bodies. Hundreds of them lay around the place, mostly Nogem-sized, although three or four were bigger. The majority of the corpses had been covered in sheets, although a few had been denied that dignity and left to decompose al fresco.
The smell in the place was so strong Cal was convinced he could see it hanging like a green mist in the air. It was the smell of rot and decay and of things long dead. This probably shouldn’t have come as any great surprise, given the room’s contents, but the sheer potency of it was enough to make Cal reconsider his stance on noses. He’d previously been firmly in the pro-nose camp, but having been subjected to the stench of the morgue, he could feel his allegiance swinging in the opposite direction.
“Jesus, there are so many of them,” Cal remarked.
Yellow Hat nodded solemnly. “Too many.”
“Doesn’t this make you angry?” asked Cal, struggling to contain his own rage at the horrible injustice of it all.
“We tried anger,” Yellow Hat said. His voice was hollow. His expression, even more so. He gestured around the room at the mostly covered corpses. “This was the outcome. Now, we work. We must always work. That is the way of it.”
He gestured to an empty spot along one of the rows of sheets. There was a theatrical sort of reverence to the Nogem’s movements, and Cal approached the spot with what he hoped was a suitably respectful silence.
Then he tripped over one of the bodies, shouted a panicky, “Fonk!” and fired the lifeless Red Hat several feet through the air.
“Shizz, shizz, sorry!” Cal said. He scrambled over to the twisted wreckage of Red Hat and cradled him aloft again.
To his surprise, when he turned, he found Yellow Hat clutching his sides, with tears of laughter welling up in his eyes.
“Well, that feels inappropriate,” Cal chastised.
“Sorry. Sorry!” Yellow Hat giggled. “But Red Hat would’ve loved that!”
Cal looked down at the body in his arms. One of its legs was facing the wrong way, and its head hung at an angle that suggested the various parts of his neck were no longer connected. He didn’t look like he’d have loved it. Quite the opposite.
“He would?” Cal asked.
“Ha! Yes. Red Hat had a wicked sense of humor. Very dark. He’d have adored seeing you dropping him!”
“Really?” said Cal, feeling a little better about launching the poor bamston through the air like a cannonball. “Ha! Maybe we should try tossing him into the spot from here,” he laughed. “Or, no! We should prop him up so he looks like he’s alive, then watch the next person who comes in shizz their pants!”
Yellow Hat’s laughter died away. His expression went from being one of amusement to one that could best be described as ‘mystified horror.’
Cal cleared his throat. “No. No, that would be too far,” he said. “I’ll just set him down gently here…”
He set Red Hat down in the spot Yellow Hat had identified for him.
“Straighten his legs and point his head the right way, like this…”
There was a cracking of bone that made Yellow Hat wince.
“And… voila,” said Cal, stepping back to admire his handiwork. Red Hat looked a little better than he had a few moments ago, but he wasn’t exactly a pleasing sight to behold. “We should get a sheet,” Cal said.
“There are none left,” said Yellow Hat. “They ran out.”
“I’m sure this guy won’t miss his,” Cal said, catching the edge of a sheet that was being used to cover another body, and pulling it off.
As the sheet was removed, it peeled away strips of rotting flesh from the face of the body below it, revealing the little figure’s grimacing skull.
“Oh God. Well, that was horrible,” said Cal. He dropped the sheet, shuddered involuntarily, then carefully plucked another covering from a corpse that, to his relief, turned out to be more recent and far less decomposed.
“We’re just going to borrow this for a while,” he told the body. “Share and share alike.”
Cal lowered the covering over Red Hat with what he hoped was a suitable level of solemnity. “There,” said Cal. He waited for a suitably respectful amount of time, then jabbed a thumb in the direction of the door. “Well, I guess we ought to be getting back.”
“We should say a few words,” said Yellow Hat.
Cal sighed, almost imperceptibly. The stench of the place was doing his gag-reflex no favors. He’d stopped breathing through his nose, but the smell was still finding a way into his respiratory system and making itself at home.
“Right. Yeah,” said Cal.
Yellow Hat watched him expectantly.
“What, me? You want me to say something?”
“I am not good with words,” Yellow Hat said.
Cal glanced down at the sheet-covered mound between them. “I don’t think he’s going to be quick to judge.”
“Please,” the Nogem encouraged. “Say something fitting. I do not have the words to be First Mourner. That responsibility must be yours.”
Cal muttered a quiet, “Aw, Jesus,” under his breath, exhaled forcibly through his nose to try to evict the stench of decay, then launched into an impromptu eulogy for someone he barely knew. “Red Hat was… a guy. A little guy. A little guy with a big heart. But not, like, abnormally big. Physically, I mean. Physically, it was probably in proportion to the rest of him. I mean, I assume. I’m not an expert on…”
He caught Yellow Hat’s quizzical look, cleared his throat, then continued.
“Metaphorically, he had a big heart, was my point. Although we’d only just met, and I probably annoyed him to the point of wishing me harm, he stepped in to help me when things were rough. He saved my life. Twice. In our short time together, he taught me about friendship. About love. The love between a human and Nogem.”
He held up a hand for clarity.
“But not, like, in a dirty way. There was nothing, you know, sexual. It was purely platonic. I feel like he’d want me to make that clear.”
Cal clicked his tongue against the roof his mouth.
“What else? He didn’t really have any hobbies, as far as I’m aware, unless you count hitting a wall with a pickaxe, which he was awesome at. He might have had a family, I suppose, but then he might not. Who knows? In many ways, he was a man of mystery. A short, bearded puzzle. An enigma in a red hat. And I, for one, am going to miss him.”
He lowered his head. “Amen,” he whispered. “Wait, no, you don’t say ‘Amen’ there. Forget that part.”
Yellow Hat nodded encouragingly up at Cal and raised his bushy eyebrows.
“What now?” Cal asked. “Should I do more?”
“The Death Song,” Yellow Hat said.
Cal frowned. “The say-what-now?”
“The Death Song. As conductor of the funeral service, it is your duty to compose and perform the Death Song. Your words alone can carry Red Hat to the next life.”
“Yeah, I’m not sure I’m really the best person to—”
“It must be you,” Yellow Hat pleaded. “It must! Only you can ensure safe passage for Red Hat to the life beyond life. His eternal soul is in your mouth.”
“In my mouth?” Cal spluttered. “Oh! You mean because I have to sing the song. Gotcha.”
He rocked on his heels. “Can it be, like, any song?”
Yellow Hat’s bell jingled as he shook his head. “No. It must tell the deceased how you felt about them, and what they meant to you. Your words will give Red Hat the strength to continue onward after life.”
Cal spent a few seconds trying to compose something suitable in his head, before realizing that he didn’t have to. The perfect song had already been written for just this occasion. It was a timeless ballad that weaved a tale of friendship, love, and mutual respect. It wasn’t just a song—it was much more than that. It was an anthem. An anthem that could’ve been written specifically for Cal and this one fleeting moment in time.
It was the theme to The Golden Girls.
Eighty-four seconds later, when Cal had finished, he placed a hand on Yellow Hat’s shoulder and squeezed. The Nogem’s face was buried in his hands, his tiny body heaving with sobs.
“Hey, it’s OK. It’s OK,” said Cal, wiping a tear on his sleeve. Fonk, those Miami ladies got him every time.
“It was beautiful,” Yellow Hat wept. “So beautiful. The bit with inviting everyone to a party… Beautiful.”
He looked up at Cal and managed a small, shaky smile. “You have honored Red Hat. You have honored all of us. From this day forth, you shall be an honorary Nogem.”
Yellow Hat made a series of complicated gestures with his hands. “I dub thee, No Hat.”
“Great! That’s great,” said Cal. “Now, we really should be getting back before anyone comes to kill us. Those Harvester guys are pretty tetchy.”
“Wise words, No Hat,” said Yellow Hat. “But, before we go…”
Bending, the Nogem pulled down Red Hat’s sheet to reveal his face, then planted a long, lingering kiss on the dead man’s lips. Cal watched for a moment, growing increasingly uncomfortable, then made a point of becoming intently focused on a spot on one of the walls.
The smacking of lips and the brushing together of beards continued for several seconds.
Cal began to whistle quietly. Then he began to whistle more loudly.
Eventually, the sound of kissing stopped. The sheet rustled as it was drawn back into place.
“You, uh… You done?” Cal asked.
“Indeed, No Hat,” said the Nogem. “The Smooch of Departing is the honor of Second Mourner.”
“Damn. And to think, I only got to sing the song,” said Cal, picking his way through the scattered rows of covered corpses. It was a slow, laborious process. Occasionally, Cal would pick a path that would lead to a sort of dead end of dead bodies, where the path was completely blocked by several densely packed rows of cadavers and would have no choice but to turn back.
Eventually, after several wrong-turns, he made it to the door, then turned to check on Yellow Hat’s progress.
Space Team- The Collected Adventures 4 Page 18