Dead Meat

by Joseph M. Monks

  Ben read over the police report on his way down to the hospital’s small morgue. According to the preliminary report, Cooper Riley’s car, a Pontiac GTO, had been in the process of crossing the tracks at the junction of RTE. 19 and FM 191 when it was struck by the westbound train. Ben knew the spot, even though it was outside of town and didn’t see much everyday traffic. 191 was a farm-to-market road, used primarily by commercial growers.

  And kids who took it as a shortcut to parties out at the quarry, Ben thought grimly. The report stated that the crossing signals had been working properly, the gates in the down position. But the GTO was a souped-up big-block thoroughbred, and whoever was driving—Cooper Riley, most likely—had bet that the one-ton muscle car had what it took to outclass the hundred ton freight train. There had been no contest.

  Sheet metal had torn like paper. Strips of the hood and fenders had been found hundreds of yards away. The GTO’s steel-belted radials had melted beneath the locomotive’s wheels as the train shoved the car along the tracks, the conductor desperately trying to slow the juggernaut. The GTO’s jack had been twisted into a corkscrew, the car’s rear axle protruding like an arrow from an old cottonwood. It reminded Ben of a fence picket, embedded in a tree in the wake of a tornado. One bucket seat remained intact. It sat there, facing the tracks, as if somebody might come along and sit down to wait for the next train.

  The bodies were...well, what Ben had expected. One girl—Ben guessed she’d been in the passenger seat—had been cut nearly in half. Investigators would try to reconstruct the series of events, but Ben thought it likely this one had gone through the windshield, and the damage he was seeing had been done by the GTO’s hood, which had been torn off its hinges. Another teen had been crushed with such force that his internal organs had been turned to pulp, erupting through machete-like gashes caused by the razor-sharp window glass. Classic era glass, not safety glass. Either the Pontiac had its original windshield, or somebody had spent a pretty penny replacing it to factory specifications. Not that safety glass would’ve made a difference, thought Ben, riffling through a sleeve of photos taken immediately after the accident. Nobody who’d been in the GTO had had a snowball’s chance in hell.

  Though Prescott was a small town, Ben didn’t know everyone, certainly not on sight. In this case, it probably wouldn’t have helped him if he did. There had been an extraordinary amount of trauma. In the condition the bodies were in now, he doubted their mothers could recognize them.

  The curious thing about the scene was that there were only three bodies, not four. The girl who’d been cut in half and the boy from the rear seat had been found close to one another, while the third victim was located more than a hundred feet from his friends, on the opposite side of the tracks. He’d come to rest at the base of a gnarled black poplar—a textbook example of what happens when a very movable force comes into contact with a far less moveable object. His lower extremities were folded backward at a near-ninety degree angle. The kid’s spine had been snapped like an old pencil, just below the ribcage. When he’d directed two attendants to place the corpse into a body bag, only half of the boy’s face complied. The rest remained attached to the tree. Human jelly smeared in the bark’s deep grooves. So far, these were the only three bodies which had been recovered. The train’s undercarriage was a likely spot for the fourth, but engineers from Carville had already poked around under it, and hadn’t found another corpse. Ben had informed the sheriff that it was possible there was a body hanging high up in a tree somewhere nearby, and boy had that given the cops the creeps. Flashlights pointing skyward, fearful of having bits and pieces come crashing down on them. There was another body out there somewhere, Ben was sure of that. The cops had questioned some of the kids gathered at the party, and had come back with consistent accounts of four people in the car. The clerk over at the Four Corners gas station and mini-mart remembered four kids getting out of the easy-to-recognize vehicle, and that was just about the last place you could stop before heading out of town toward 191. Plus, the car itself had been enough to convince Ben that there had been four passengers inside, even before cops started checking back in. Though the Pontiac’s roof had been peeled away like the top of a sardine can, meaning it was possible a passenger had been ejected from the car, there was plenty of evidence to suggest four people had been seriously injured when the train hit. Ben wasn’t exactly going out on a limb when he’d told the Sheriff to start looking in the trees for the last body, which he suspected belonged to the driver.

  Still, until the corpse turned up, there were going to be questions.

  Had somebody made it out alive? Ben didn’t think so, not from the amount of blood and tissue he’d seen on the steering column and dashboard. Had Cooper lent the car to his friends? None of the bodies matched the description of Cooper Riley, those present were all in agreement on that. The girl certainly wasn’t Cooper, and the two boys who’d been found had been eliminated on the basis of build and hair color, respectively.

  So, where was he? While Ben had officially pronounced the three victims dead and supervised the recovery of remains, officers continued to scour the area, both for the missing body and additional pieces of the GTO. Plenty of car parts…but no Cooper Riley.

  Whatever. It wasn’t Ben’s problem. He tossed the clipboard with the deputy’s preliminary report and crime scene photos onto a stainless steel counter and gloved up. The sheriff and Earl and the dozen or so other cops at the scene had their jobs, Ben had his. Match the remains to their Christian names, and determine cause of death. All of which should be relatively straightforward, given the circumstances. Blunt force. Massive head trauma. A good case for catastrophic internal injuries resulting in heart failure. He’d get it all sorted out. There weren’t many surprises to be found in a case like this. Perhaps liquor had been involved, or drugs. It wouldn’t change much, though. The toxicology results were merely a formality. Ben wasn’t going to find bullets in the driver which had led to the car being on the tracks at the precise moment the eight-oh-five was hurtling through the crossing at Rte. 19 and FM 191. There was nothing suspicious about what had happened tonight. Senseless maybe, but not suspicious.

  Aside from Cooper Riley, that was. The GTO had laid rubber as it geared up, speeding toward its rendezvous with the eight-oh-five. It had been heading toward the quarry, not away from it. It left little doubt—Cooper Riley would have been behind the wheel. And though Ben had seen some strange things in his career, even he couldn’t imagine a scenario where Cooper’s body could have been flung that far from the point of impact. The woods were thick on both sides of the tracks. Unless his body had literally been thrown over the trees, well, there would have been plenty of small parts close by. Ben had once attended a small plane crash in the woods north of Sabine. He’d seen a torso get through dense woods relatively intact, first-hand. But that had only been a torso, not a whole body. Strange…

  He went about finishing his preparations for the first autopsy, his stomach grumbling. The stale danish he’d gotten from the hospital’s cafeteria was no substitute for an Adam’s Diner cheeseburger and a double-order of seasoned steak fries.

  Another noisy gastric protest. Ben paused, a packet of disposable scalpel blades in his hand.

  It hadn’t been his stomach growling.

  Ben Purdue had been the county’s medical examiner for nine years. For seven prior to the promotion, he’d been the assistant medical examiner. He’d heard every possible sound a dead body could make. Seen how one could change over time. What the effects of livor mortis and rigor mortis could do. But as he glanced over his shoulder at the corpse he’d just transferred onto the autopsy table, the temperature in the already chilled suite seemed to plummet. He half expected to see his breath cloud when he exhaled.

  The girl on the table, Libby Dwyer: Unconfirmed, was moving.

  Not a man prone to panic—heck, this wasn’t the job for you if you were quick to get the heebie-jeebies—Ben took a few seconds to convince himsel
f that what he was seeing wasn’t a postmortem twitch or involuntary muscle contraction. Despite her upper body being cleaved nearly in two, probably-Libby was trying to push herself into a sitting position. One mangled hand gripped the table’s steel lip. The other could find no purchase, hampered by a lack of intact bones between elbow and wrist. The dead girl collapsed onto her back, lay prone for a moment, then began to try again.

  Ben dropped the scalpel blades and shifted his focus to the other tables. The girl wasn’t the only corpse that was moving. The sheet covering the boy with the broken back and caved-in chest was slipping to the floor, pushed off by an arm that had been almost entirely stripped of flesh.

  Ben wasn’t a hysteric. He knew he wasn’t seeing things. Knew he wasn’t losing his grip on reality. He’d heard some strange stories the past couple of days. Accounts of unusual goings-on at a cemetery and funeral home in some small town. Where had that been? Georgia? Alabama? Mississippi, maybe? He couldn’t remember. But one such story came back to him. A spooked groundskeeper had called police to report what appeared to be a case of grave robbing. On the surface, that’s how it looked to the cops. Only, the evidence didn’t support that, and the groundskeeper had seen enough disturbed plots in his time to know this wasn’t like any case of grave-robbing he’d ever encountered. What quickly became clear to the crime scene techs was that all signs pointed to somebody having broken out of the grave, not into it. Had it been a recent burial, it might have been chalked up as an elaborate practical joke. But the site hadn’t been fresh. The plot had been occupied for nearly three decades. Now, it was occupied no longer.

  Ben might have scoffed at the stories, dismissed them out of hand. But they came from reliable sources. People he knew, some quite well, from the medical examiner community. Too many whom he respected to believe they were engaged in some well-orchestrated hoax.

  He wasn’t skeptical any more. Not with three such specimens laid out before him, all exhibiting gross motor skills. None of the teens had what might have been described as ‘survivable injuries’. There had been no hasty or mistaken pronouncement of death at the scene. Bodies torn nearly in half didn’t make miraculous recoveries, or begin breathing again the way some victims of heart attack or a closed-head injury sometimes did. Though exceedingly rare, occasionally the recently deceased did spark back to life, although usually that happened within minutes. Ben didn’t need to check his watch. These three corpses were several hours dead. And despite what Ben was seeing with his own eyes, he wasn’t about to change his mind or his report.

  They were still dead. Dead, but moving. And from the sounds the teenage girl’s stomach was making, they were hungry, too.

  Ben was a doctor. But in his field, the Hippocratic Oath was more of a hazy concept, not a tenet of practical medicine. Watching the sheet being clawed off by the kid with the organ trauma, part of his liver leaking through a nine inch laceration, he understood his job had changed. These kids were dead, no two ways about it. It was his responsibility now to keep them that way.

  He lifted the cordless Stryker saw from the tray and toggled the switch. It screamed to life with a high-pitched whine. The saw was used to cut through the skull, so that the pathologist could remove the deceased’s brain. Ben pried off the blade shield, the toothed steel disc gleaming in the bright, fluorescent light.

  Noise at his back. He turned, eyed the air-tight steel door. Someone was outside, trying to get in. The door was locked, but Ben went to it and threw the security bolt anyway, just to be sure. On the other side, someone—or something—threw itself against the steel.

  So, Cooper Riley had come to pick up his friends…

  Ben ignored the pounding. He could take care of Cooper Riley later. Right now, he wanted no interruptions.

  It was cutting time.

  DISBELIEF IN SHORT ORDER

  “Seein’ ain’t always believin’, Jesse. Remember that.”

  Jesse had remembered, all right. Pa had taught him that. Pa had taught him a lot of things, him and his brother both, before the day he’d gone out back and tucked the barrel of his thirty-ought-six under his chin and painted the inside of the garage with his brains. But Jesse still remembered, even though sometimes it felt like things might be better if he didn’t.

  Did Ricky? Jesse wasn’t sure, but he thought his brother probably did. Most of it, anyway. Maybe he’d ask him. Ricky would be stopping in soon, coming through on his way up from some little shit-ass town. Denton or Kenton or Trenton...something like that. No, wait. That wasn’t right. Trenton was up North, in Jersey. Jesse had been to Jersey once, wasn’t going back. He knew Trenton. Knew Rahway even better.

  “Put yer mind to yer business, boy. Let yer mind wander and you’re sure to git lost.” The voice was so strong, so real, Jesse almost turned around to look. That two of Ronald Mabry’s life lessons had floated to the surface in Jesse’s mind wasn’t all that unusual. He thought about Pa a lot, though not so much when he was at work, like he was now. There were too many other things to pay mind to when he was behind the grill at the Red Coach. Things didn’t usually slow down at the diner until the very end of his shift, and that was all right by him. It meant less time for thinking about stuff other than cheeseburgers and meatloaf and chicken fried steak and that godawful stink-cheese that people liked on the French dip. Not thinking…that kind of made the day go faster.

  Ordinarily, he thought about things like Pa, never going to Jersey again, Ricky Lee and how everything had changed when Mama left after he’d had a few cold ones, laying in bed, listening to Blue Oyster Cult’s Agents of Fortune. Growing up, it had been his favorite record. Now, it was his favorite CD. Nobody had records any more. He thought about that some, too. There was something sad about that, but he couldn’t quite decide what.

  Sometimes he’d swipe a quarter from the register when he went on break, pump it into the jukebox and play Don’t Fear the Reaper, the all-time best ‘Cult song ever. Jesse worked the overnight shift, and Glenda, who ran the register, didn’t mind none. Whether the quarter came out of the register or jukebox, it still wound up in the same pocket. Six of one, half dozen of the other, that’s what Pa would’ve said.

  Pa was here, all right, Jesse knew it now. Knew it just as sure as he knew that the food on the grill had gone untouched too long to be rescued. Four burgers had sizzled far beyond well-well done, and the bacon for a BLT had curled up and blackened. It reminded him of something he’d seen a couple months back, watching the old Bookman place burn down.

  The farmhouse had been empty for years. Only squatters and kids who believed in ghost stories paid it any mind. Then one night, it went up, and the volunteer fire department had to call in mutual aid from Forrester to help put it out. Half the town had turned out to watch, the sky lit up bright orange, the flames roaring like you saw on TV. By the time the cracklin’ and popping had died down, though, the Bookman place reduced to little more than a smoldering pile of ash, just about everyone had had their fill. They drifted off, either home or to the Red Coach or Bangers, the local watering hole, where they’d go on about it until last call. Having nothing better to do, Jesse had stuck around. That was why he’d seen it.

  Jim Cummings had been the one carried it out, just as curled up and blackened as the bacon on his grill.

  Couldn’t have been more than a few months old, Jesse guessed, little hands balled into charcoal fists. Nobody wanted to talk about whether the tyke had been alive when the fire started, but Jesse knew. He suspected the others did, too.

  Alive, all right. Alive and dumped ‘cause the parents needed to get rid of it. Needed to get rid of it and move on, and what better way than to find a pisshole town in the middle of nowhere and set fire to a long-abandoned farmhouse?

  Acrid smoke rose off the bacon. The stink reminded Jesse of what it had smelled like when Jim Cummings had stepped off the sunken porch, holding the dead baby out like a burnt offering, hoping somebody might take it from him. No one had.

  Alive… Jesse
was reminded again of how strongly he felt Pa’s presence. He supposed there was some sense in that, on account of what he was seeing.

  There was chaos in the diner. Through the pass-thru window, he saw what was going on, even though he couldn’t quite bring himself to react to it. In some ways—most ways, he guessed—it was like a bad tequila hallucination. The kind of thing you saw when you jumped up too quick from your bar stool to go take a whiz. Those times when reality seemed to warp, to bend out of shape. You’d reach down, put a hand on the stool to steady yourself, keep from bumping into the man next to you. Only, it wouldn’t be a man. Oh, it might have the body of a man, but you’d find yourself looking into the face of a wolf. Or the glossy black head of a scorpion. The huge, flat eyes of a creature that maybe you wasn’t meant to see. Then you’d blink, and find some guy staring back at you, wondering if it was time to throw down or abandon his stool, trying to avoid getting puked on.

  People were fighting. A group of diners was all over Cooper Riley, who had his arms around Lucy Parnell’s neck. . From where he stood, it looked to Jesse like Cooper was trying to...trying to...

  Bite her? No, couldn’t be.

  Could it? Jesse felt like he was floating, like he was hovering outside his body and watching things happen the way he would if he was sitting in the back row down at the theatre. Lucy was screaming her head off. She was kickin’ and clawing, fingernails digging into the boy’s dirty hands—deep enough to draw blood. Cooper was a mess. He must’ve come into the Coach already battered and bloody, because there was no way Lucy and a couple of patrons had done this kind of number on him. What was weird, though, was Jesse could’ve sworn there was a piece of metal, sticking out of Cooper’s face.

  He had a hold of Lucy’s smock now, and was trying to pull her close, like maybe he wanted to whisper something in her ear. Something Jesse was sure she didn’t wanna hear. And, damned if it didn’t look like he wanted to take a chunk out of one of Lucy’s hefty boobies. Nate Stebner was pulling on Coop’s shoulders, but it didn’t seem to be holding him up none. Sherry Stebner was breaking a dish over the kid’s head—the third at least. Cooper didn’t even seem to feel it.