Where the Dead Go to Die

by Aaron Dries

  “She got me this big book on origami so I don’t have to keep renewing the one from the library. And a baseball bat—can you believe it! So cool. Oh, and clothes.”

  “You needed those clothes,” Emily said, measured, defensive. Mama Metcalf had also picked up on Lucette’s dismissive tone in regards to her essentials, but only smiled. She’d been the same when she was young, rifling through presents as the snow fell outside, shaking boxes for the gold whilst leaving the soft packages until last.

  Lucette unwrapped the gift, and her eyes widened. “Oh, thank you, Mama Metcalf!”

  She held a large dollhouse with peekaboo doors and multiple rooms, a curving flight of stairs, tiny furnishings. There was even a perfect-looking plastic family within its walls—a mother, father, child, faces molded into never-ending grins.

  ***

  Emily sipped from her cup, the spiced eggnog tickling her in all the right ways, and looked at the wrapper wreckage at their feet. Mama Metcalf had given them half a dozen presents each. Some of them were interesting, to say the least, like the decorative plate that depicted the birth of Hiawatha, for example. Regardless, the woman’s generosity was touching.

  They stayed until half past nine, then gathered up their bounty, put on their coats, and got ready to head out into the cold. Lucette was more tired than she was letting on. It had been a big day, though not half as harrowing as the Christmases leading up to it. Anniversaries, birthdays, holidays—each flick of their paper calendar pages cut like a razor when the one person you longed to share them with was dead. ‘They’ said time healed all wounds when in fact it only numbed the creeping spread of gangrene. It saddened Emily to think how grateful she was for even this minor reprieve.

  At the doorway, Mama Metcalf touched her shoulder and said, “You know, about a year ago I thought I had flesh-eating virus on my face.”

  Emily had gotten used to the woman’s out of the blue non-sequesters, but this was particularly bizarre and actually stunned her silent for a moment. “Um, excuse me?”

  “Yeah, I got these blisters and rash on the side of my face, on my left cheek and down under my chin. I wasn’t sure what it was, but then I saw this news story about an outbreak of flesh-eating virus in Africa or somewhere like that. I started to worry that I’d got it, so I went to see my doctor. Turned out it was just a case of the shingles.”

  Biting her bottom lip to keep from laughing, Emily strained to understand what this story had to do with anything. “Well, I’m glad it turned out not to be anything serious.”

  “Exactly,” Mama Metcalf said in a triumphant tone that suggested the meaning of the story should now be clear. “Sometimes we think something is going to be the death of us, only it turns out to be something that hurts for a while and eventually fades.”

  Now Emily saw what the old woman was getting at, and she felt heat suffusing her cheeks and stared down at her shoes.

  Mama Metcalf touched her shoulder again. “I ain’t asking no questions because it ain’t my business, but it’s obvious you got something in your past that still haunts you and you carry a sadness with you wherever you go. I’m just saying that you should remember that sometimes what seems like a flesh-eating virus turns out to only be a case of the shingles.”

  “Thank you,” Emily mumbled. “I mean, for everything.”

  “Wasn’t nothing. Remember, you and the young’un promised to come visit with me on New Year’s.”

  “Yes please,” Lucette said, swinging the plastic grocery bag full of her gifts.

  Emily looked up to meet Mama Metcalf’s eyes. “Definitely.”

  On the drive home, taking it extra slow on the icy roads, Emily thought about what the old woman had told her. Mama Metcalf meant well with her homespun advice, but she didn’t know Emily’s secrets.

  Sometimes the rash turned out to be flesh-eating virus after all. And the wound was growing more septic by the day.

  THE UGLIES

  The first time Robby experienced a night terror, back in the early days of his infection, he had no idea what was going on. Something bitter twinkled to life in his dream, twisting the otherwise innocuous imagery into a nightmare that didn’t end with waking. This was always the worst part. The leftovers. Whatever despicable things the fever conjured in the dream—the uglies, as he’d come to think of them—followed him into reality. There they would linger.

  The uglies were with him that Christmas night. They stood at the foot of his bed.

  He’d gone to sleep thinking about the summer Lucette had whispered to life earlier that week. The checkered cloth across the grass, the leaves on the tree, fireflies in the eyes of the dinosaur skull. But his fatigue had been deep. His limbs had grown heavy, as though he weren’t dressed in a gown but an iron suit, like the kind deep-sea divers wore in old movies. And then the heaviness dragged him into the dark where he was alone for a while. Schools of half-memories—fickle and quick as fish—had swished about him. He tried to reach out and grab one, to savor the good times. They were too fast.

  But then the uglies had come.

  It was a terrible feeling. He wanted to wake up, only he knew that being awake was worse than the nightmare. The dream, at least, was numb. No pain. Were he to wake, not only would the uglies be there but there would be the gut-wrenching agony of the fever, too.

  No escape.

  Robby bolted upright in bed, thrashed against the mattress, yanking the IV cord from his arm. A patter of saline across the linoleum. It was pitch black. The night wasn’t done with him yet.

  It came at him then, the aches seizing his body. He saw color when he blinked, starbursts of pain. Sweat coursed down his face. It was so damn hot. Robby wouldn’t have been at all surprised if the walls started to blister and his skin bake. The uglies brought invisible fire with them each and every time.

  He blindly reached for his emergency buzzer. It wisped off the hospital bed. Fighting through pain—God how his joints screeched when he moved—Robby tried to find it in the dark. Dizziness sent everything into a spin, and for a moment he was worried he might vomit, or ‘blow chunks’ as he and the other boys at school used to say. This expression he’d learned the day he’d vomited at assembly in the fourth grade, struck down with heatstroke at the peak of July’s heat. Unlike that one embarrassing time, with the teachers swarming over him as the kids laughed and pointed, he didn’t blow chunks now. But he did tumble free of the sheets and thump to the floor.

  Robby hugged his chest, imagining that his arms were not his own but belonged to his mother. He could feel his ribs through the gown, shocking his wishes away. This couldn’t be his body. Surely not. In his head he still had a bit of puppy fat on him. Also in his head he was dressed in his father’s I’VE GOT MOXIE cap; his skin was blemished with scraped knees from coming off his bike, from the occasional schoolyard scuff—not from bedsores and trails of IV puncture marks.

  In his head, Robby was happy. Loved.

  In the real world though, here within the hospice, he was neither. Sure, he had a couple of friends, that Lucette with her pretty pigtails and old Mama Metcalf who smelled like mothballs and grandmotherly perfume, the friendly social workers and the psych. But they weren’t the one person he needed right now. They weren’t his mother, the woman who said she loved him. Once upon a time. Dad, less so. Robby remembered the way his father had snatched the Moxie cap off his head and how it had made him feel.

  The school of memories swished by. Close enough to catch glimmers within the bubble.

  Mom’s smile as she picked him up from school.

  Savory, sweet—the flavors of her homemade pasta sauce.

  The way he could smell her when she left the room. For a while, at least.

  Gone. Vanished. And in their place there was only the darkness of the room he would no doubt die in, and soon.

  It was such a strange thought. That he wouldn’t exist. He wondered if being pulled from this world and into whatever came next hurt, or would it be like waking from one
of his nightmares? Would he bolt awake in the Heaven he’d heard so much about? What if there was nothing over there? Robby wasn’t sure which concept frightened him more.

  Or maybe I’ll become a ghost. If so, I’ll haunt Lucette to keep her company, just as she haunts me here. I’ll be a friendly ghost, a regular Casper. I won’t rattle chains. I’ll play tricks on her. I’ll knock the Fruit Loops off her spoon when she sits down to have breakfast in the morning. I’ll draw shapes in the frost of her window, smiley faces, leaves. This will be my thank you.

  But until that time arrived he had this world to deal with, every slow and painful second of it.

  Robby rolled onto his side and felt around for the buzzer. Found it. Pressed the trigger. He heard the faint chime of the display board outside his door. Hopefully someone would come. They often didn’t.

  Especially at night.

  He wasn’t alone. The uglies were under the bed with him.

  Their white faces stared at him, all rising in unison to smile. Rat teeth. Their eyes were so black, as though they had drawn all the ink out of the shadows.

  Robby backed out from under the bed and saw more uglies crawling all over the room, across the walls, defying gravity to skirt the ceiling. They were naked. Men, women, children. A shifting, writhing tapestry of flesh in the moonlight squeezing through the window.

  One dropped to the ground and came at him. It was the man who had taken him at the fair. Long fingers, the nails sharp and dirty, stretched towards him. Robby unlocked the scream that he’d been keeping in his throat. It echoed in this cell, louder than the hisses and grunts of the uglies as they bit and chewed at each other, animals fighting for ownership over his bones.

  Robby had never hated anything in his life. Not really. Just superficial stuff. Sure, there had been bullies at school, food that left a bad taste in his mouth. Nothing pure. That was until the hatred he felt for the thing that had touched him.

  The mocking sound of safety up the ravine.

  And like true hatred, Robby hadn’t known what true terror was, either. That, too, changed Halloween night, there in the ravine with the leaves in his mouth, blood coursing down his chin from where he’d bitten his lips.

  That man was back now to make Robby one of his own. One of the uglies.

  Robby buried his head in the crook of his arm, screaming, crying. He pressed the trigger on his emergency buzzer again, the electric cord wrapped around him.

  Hot breath on his neck.

  (this can’t be happening)

  The jingle-jangle of a distant carousel. Pain.

  (I’m too young to die)

  He listened to the uglies scratch down off the walls and come after him. Pale blurs in the dim, as though they burned with their own inner light, their own personal fevers, illness that drove them to terrible and violent ends. Robby wondered who each of them had been before they ‘turned’, wondered who their mothers were, and if they were still loved in ways that he no longer was or ever would be again.

  This isn’t how things were supposed to happen.

  I was supposed to be me.

  Not this.

  Robby tried to scramble away, knocking the bedside table and sending plastic cups and forks in every direction. Something brushed against his face. Maybe one of his or Lucette’s origami attempts. The uglies skittered about him, hot as flame, boiling his blood. He smelled shit and piss in the stagnant room. His own.

  Robby was too weak to get to his feet. He lifted his head and saw the window on the opposite side of the room; it had never seemed so small. It shrunk down to a pinpoint as he tumbled onto his back again, revealing the ceiling where another ugly was poised, arching its spine to reveal its hairless face, the bone-eating grin. Robby bellowed again, louder than before, when he saw that the ugly above him was none other than himself.

  It hissed, ready to leap.

  And then the door to the room opened and one of the night nurses slammed on the lights. It was blinding. After a few moments Robby’s eyes adjusted to the glare. It was just he and the man named Mykel there in the death room. The uglies may have vanished, but they had left him feeling burnt, broken. Spent.

  ***

  Now that Mykel had settled the kid with a healthy dose of pandering and sedatives, he leaned against the FSU wall and rubbed his face through his mask. Night shifts were a bitch, and this was why. He put the shit and urine stained towels into a drawstring bag and dumped it in a trolley in the sluice room. A flick of the wrist and his rubber gloves were gone too, and he scrubbed his hands at the water station. “Happy fucking Christmas.”

  Another buzzer went off to his right, back down closer to the entrance/exit door. Still within FSU. It was the resident they all knew as Speedy.

  Oh, come on. What now?

  Mykel swanned into the room and found Speedy propped up against his pillow, the trigger of his emergency call still in his hand. As irritated as he was, Mykel had to admit a grudging respect for the man; he was tough. Speedy had been infected longer than anyone in the hospice and had been on the Final Stages Unit much longer than Robby. It might have been inspirational if it wasn’t so futile and pathetic. The old man was lingering in a way no man really should.

  Sometimes you just got to give up and let go.

  Mykel shuffled over to the bed in the dark. Doing so, his thoughts turned to his parents and his younger brother Jeremy. This shouldn’t have caught him off guard, but it did. His brother was a perfect example of someone, who like old Speedy, didn’t know when to give up the ghost.

  Jeremy had always been the golden child. Muscular, athletic, straight, a track star in high school, married the perfect young lady from a well-to-do-family. He had the Midas touch and could do no wrong. Unlike Mykel, the quintessential black sheep.

  And yet Mykel hadn’t been the one dumb enough to get bit by a bone-eater. No, that was perfect Jeremy with his good Samaritan routine. Driving home from the gym after nightfall, pulling over to help some old lady wandering down the centerline of the road in her nightgown. Even though it was the early days of the outbreak, it had still been stupid of Jeremy to compromise himself like that. The world had changed and his brother had been rewarded for his kindness with a single snap to his forearm.

  “We’d prepared ourselves, deep down, to maybe lose you, Mykel,” his father had confessed one night. A fair amount of imported beer already consumed, the bottle overturned between them, dripping onto the kitchen table they had shared so many dinners at. “You know, to AIDS or something. But not this. Not Jeremy.”

  That was the first and only time Mykel told his father to fuck off. His promise to never do so again was written in bruises.

  Just let go.

  Feigning that things were going to be okay was unhealthy. Sometimes you had to walk away from something good, sometimes you had to hurt the ones you loved. Pretending didn’t help anyone. As far as Mykel was concerned, the moment you were bitten you were as good as dead. A walking corpse. And that was how Mykel managed to detach himself from the insanity of his job; his guests weren’t people. They were things.

  And the thing on the bed turned toward Mykel, spoke. “Is the boy all right?”

  “For now, Speedy.”

  “I heard him screamin’. Is that what I sound like when the fever takes me?”

  “Look, what is it I can help you with? I’m a busy man.”

  Speedy grabbed Mykel’s forearm. “I can hear Tammy crying through the wall. I want to go see her.”

  “What?” It took Mykel a moment to realize Speedy was talking about the bag of bones that he thought of as Skeletora, the one Mama Metcalf was always playing cards with. “Why?”

  “We’ve been—” Speedy paused, his ashen tongue sneaking out to try to moisten his dry, cracked lips. Each word came with great effort, exhausting him. “Close.”

  “Really?” Mykel said with a cocked eyebrow. So maybe the infected weren’t completely dead after all, though how anyone in Speedy’s condition could even think about thi
ngs of a romantic nature was beyond him. If Mykel had the sniffles, he didn’t want anyone to come within fifty yards of him. But Speedy was alone now, his wife having done what Mykel would have done, and let go. She hadn’t been to see him in weeks, nor could he blame her. Infection killed the people you loved three times over. There was the initial bite and the way it severed all ties to the future you’d planned out for one other. There was the physical warping of the body as you watched everything that made someone identifiable as the person you committed yourself to rotted away, and then, after all this, there was the turning itself, the final nail in the coffin. Each phase tortured the surviving partner, forcing them into a self-preservation mode in which you either sunk or swam. The smart ones jumped ship and paddled for shore long before that, which is what Mykel had done, and if Jeremy begrudged him this from the grave, well, such was life. And death.

  “It’s just comfort,” Speedy said. He was alert that night, an unusual change from his drooling, incontinent self. Mykel thought about candles and about how they burned brightest just before they went out.

  “I don’t know if Woods would approve.”

  “Just half an hour. Help me walk in. I’m weak. She’s scared. The little one’s dying.”

  “Look, you should be resting.”

  “I’ll rest when I’m dead, boy,” Speedy said, letting go of Mykel’s arm. “And you’ll rest too someday. ‘Til then, let us live. No woman should cry alone in the night, not on Christmas.”

  INTERLUDE FIVE

  Fold both legs of the model upwards, crease with great pressure, and then unfold again. Inside reverse fold the legs along those creases you just made.

  Sally parked her station wagon under an elm, its branches as old as any of the buildings in the city, its roots stretching back through layers of soil to a time when the ground was less bitter. Those days were gone, yet the determined though foolish tree lingered on. It offered shade to a world doomed to burn anyway, and not all the chicken soup in the universe would change that.