Undead

by John Russo

  The other assailant was still on the run, going out of the park toward the street. McClellan turned his body slowly, following the running man with the barrel of his revolver, patiently timing his shot. The man began running and dodging through a burst of traffic, brakes squealing as startled drivers tried to avoid the zigzagging figure. McClellan squeezed his trigger and the running man received the blast, jerking, lunging forward, and slamming head first across the hood of a parked car on the far side of the street.

  McClellan stepped over to Greene, knelt, felt Greene’s chest and came away with a bloody hand. He put two fingers on Greene’s wrist, but there was no pulse. Greene was dead. McClellan wiped his hand in the grass.

  He checked the woman. She was dead, too. Her neck was broken, her head angled grotesquely off to one side. Her clothes were partially torn, her face, shoulders and thighs bruised. Rape sickened him. What had probably started as a mugging had ended like this. McClellan had seen it too many times.

  His gun ready, the Sheriff approached the parked car where the man he had shot lay sprawled across the hood. His headlong dive had been stopped by the windshield, his head cracking against the glass and shattering it into a pattern like a spider’s web. McClellan opened the door of the car, left foolishly unlocked by its owner, he noticed, and looked at the wide-open eyes of the dead man through the cracked windshield. Was a wallet or some sex worth dying this stupid way? And the deaths of the two men could not make up for the loss of Greene. Four more dead in a day of death, thought McClellan. There was nothing to do but notify Greene’s family and phone the morgue.

  The Sheriff stayed on hand, directing traffic and keeping curious onlookers away, until the patrol cars and the morgue’s ambulance arrived. Then he went home to bed, tired, but knowing beforehand that he would be unable to sleep.

  CHAPTER 7

  Several hours past midnight, two bodies were delivered to the County Morgue. Unloaded from an ambulance, they rested on wheeled stretchers, wrapped in green clinical shrouds. Two men from the coroner’s office stood by while the morgue attendant and his assistant prepared the delivery papers for signature.

  “These the two from the park?” the morgue attendant asked. He already knew the answer to his question, but was making conversation. The attendant appreciated any company during the night shift.

  “That’s them,” one of the men from the coroner’s office replied, more tersely than the morgue attendant would have liked.

  “How about Deputy Greene and the woman?” the attendant continued, trying to prolong the conversation.

  “They’re at O’Neil’s Funeral Parlor.”

  The morgue attendant, about to sign the delivery papers, lifted his pen from the form and looked up. “You know, it’s a real shame about that Greene fellow.”

  “Yeah,” one of the coroner’s men said impatiently.

  The morgue attendant finally completed the signing of the papers. He scratched his head, looking at the shrouded bodies. “We hardly have any room, what with that busload from this afternoon,” he complained.

  “I’m sure you’ll manage,” one of the coroner’s men said, as he and his partner wearily climbed into their ambulance and drove away.

  The morgue attendant and his assistant watched the ambulance go, then turned toward the shrouded forms on the stretchers. “Let’s give ’em a free ride,” the assistant said humorlessly.

  Entering the morgue, they wheeled the stretchers into a large, cold, sterile room filled with table after sheet-draped metal table, the body of a bus accident victim lying on each one. They wheeled the new deliveries into place and turned to leave. Neither man noticed as the arm of one of the loosely covered bodies from the afternoon’s disaster slid out from under its sheet and hung down. The fingers twitched almost imperceptibly.

  The morgue attendant and his assistant returned to their office, and the attendant told the other man that it was his turn to make coffee. The small radio in the office was tuned to an all-night talk show. Someone had phoned in to say that ten years ago, when the dead had come back to life, the authorities should have made more of an effort to find out exactly what had caused it, instead of suppressing it as soon as the thing had seemed under control. The caller suggested that it could have been caused by spores or something, and added that if there was something capable of sustaining life, or at least preventing complete and total death, maybe the spores or whatever the cause was could be studied and refined and used as a medicine. Maybe it could even be used to increase everybody’s life span.

  The talk show host chuckled nervously and said the spores or radiation or whatever had caused the terror ten years ago, had been thought to have come from Venus, and scientists believed now that there was no life on Venus. If there was no life there, he continued, how could the planet possess a substance—or force—that could give eternal life? The man who had phoned in said that he didn’t know, but it certainly ought to be studied.

  The morgue attendant got up and spun the dial of the radio, hunting for music.

  At O’Neil’s Funeral Parlor, Mr. O’Neil wheeled a casket into place in the chapel room. O’Neil was a neat, slender, conservatively dressed, cheerful-looking man in his mid-fifties, and most people seeing him away from his place of business would have guessed him to be a bank teller or an accountant. Having maneuvered the casket to where he wanted it, he lifted the lid to reveal the embalmed body of Deputy Greene, dressed in a crisp black suit with a red carnation in the lapel.

  O’Neil stepped back from the casket, satisfying himself that his work was all it should be, and stooped to move a flower stand into place to the left of the coffin. He decided to bring up the kneeler and the rest of the paraphernalia later. He wanted to do a particularly good job for Greene, as he had been acquainted with the family for some time. He had worked quickly and efficiently throughout the night to get Greene ready, so the family would not have to endure a long, agonizing wake before the man could be buried. Dawn was still a few hours away.

  O’Neil bent over the flower stand, and could not see the slight tremor in Greene’s face, a quivering of the jaw muscles accompanied by just a hint of flutter in the eyelids. If O’Neil had seen these things, he would doubtless have dismissed them as the workings of some of the dying nerves, or the work of his own imagination.

  A loud noise from the basement shattered the silence of the chapel and O’Neil turned in alarm, heading for the staircase, muttering to himself. He descended the stairs quickly, passed through a basement storage room housing folding chairs, caskets, flower baskets, stands, boxes of funeral flags, candles—all the stock of a funerary establishment neatly arranged and ready for sale or use by clients. O’Neil continued briskly into the embalming room, where the bright light revealed a black and white cat standing on the body of the young woman who had been killed in the park. A sheet covered the still form up to the chin. The pieces of a broken bottle lay next to the body on the marble slab, the last few drips of fluid still dripping onto the floor.

  What had taken place seemed obvious to O’Neil and he yelled exasperatedly at the animal, “You bad cat! Now come away from there.”

  He shooed the cat away with his arms, wiped up the fluid and then dried his hands. His movements were slow and deliberate; it was late and he was very tired. But he had a full day ahead of him, beginning with an early-morning burial, and he wanted to get all the embalming done during what remained of the night.

  Still wiping his hands dry, he moved to the counter where his equipment was spread: scalpels, needles, tubes, bottles of fluid, makeup. There was also a half-eaten sandwich on one end of the counter, the sandwich resting on its crumpled waxed paper wrapper. O’Neil had not eaten in the presence of Greene’s body, although he reasoned that there was nothing really wrong with doing so. But at one point during the long night he became hungry and had brought the sandwich with him into the basement. Spotting its remains, he wrapped up his unfinished snack and threw it into a wastebasket, sweeping the crumbs with
his palm and making sure they went into the basket too. Then he reached up and flicked on a radio, found some light music and turned the volume down low.

  Upstairs, in his casket, Deputy Greene’s eyes were open wide. The body lay still, unmoving, its eyes fixed and staring toward the ceiling.

  In another of the chapel rooms of the funeral parlor, a second body was laid out. The casket contained the remains of a middle-aged black man. Its eyes were open also.

  O’Neil stood at his work table, his back to the sheet-covered body, mixing liquids with a steady hand, the soft music soothing his tiredness. He was humming quietly with the melodies. Flask in hand, he turned around to walk to the slab on which the corpse rested. The still basement vibrated with the loudness of the man’s horrified scream. He backed up into the counter, his elbows knocking bottles and tools to the floor, the beaker in his hand crashing in a fountain of glass.

  The dead woman had raised her shoulders off the slab, her back arching, the sheet sliding down over her breasts as she sat up further. Her head began to rise, her hair lifting from the cold marble surface, her eyes open wide. Finally she was sitting upright and, turning her head, she spied O’Neil. The man watched, his mouth open in frozen terror, no sound coming from his throat. Sluggishly, almost looking like a woman sleepily getting out of bed, she pushed herself from the table, put her bare feet on the floor, and began walking toward O’Neil.

  Upstairs, Deputy Greene moved a finger, then a hand, gradually sitting up stiffly in his coffin. He blinked once or twice, moving his head slowly from side to side and up and down, as if examining his surroundings. At one point he cocked his head to one side as if he heard the scream from downstairs in the embalming laboratory.

  The black man sat up in his coffin. He leaned heavily to one side, and he and the casket fell off the platform at the front of the chapel, knocking over and smashing the stands of flowers. The black man’s body lay for a while amid the broken vases and mangled gladiolas, unmoving, as if it could not get up. Then, slowly, almost as if in pain, he pulled himself to his feet. He stood up and walked through the chapel door with his eyes straight ahead of him, then turned and continued down the corridor to the chapel where the body of Deputy Greene was still sitting in his coffin.

  Bent backward over his worktable, O’Neil screamed from the deepest reaches of his soul. The body of the dead woman leaned over him, her hands clawing at his throat and at his face, her eyes staring wildly and insanely and hungrily at him. Then, awkwardly grabbing a handful of sharp instruments, she began stabbing at O’Neil, over and over. His agonized screams echoed and reverberated in the embalming room. Again and again she drove the scalpels into his face and chest. Finally the screams stopped. O’Neil’s eyes bulged and blood gushed from what had been his face, as the creature over him continued to stab and stab long after the stabbing had accomplished its terrible purpose.

  The strange, unwordly sounds of teeth tearing and chewing newly dead flesh mingled with the sounds of low, sweet music in the embalming room. The dead woman continued to sink her teeth into O’Neil’s flesh, gnawing at his face and neck, until her own face was covered with warm blood.

  Upstairs, Greene’s body had slowly crawled out of his coffin and was staggering about, following the figure of the black man who had headed for the front door and was pounding against the glass with the ornate metal flower stand that he had taken from next to Greene’s casket. The glass broke, the heavy metal dropping from the black man’s hands. The door opened, and the body of what had been Deputy Greene followed the striding form of the black man out into the dark street.

  The two dead men moved as though they were conscious of each other’s presence but indifferent to each other. They were both pulled by the same force, had the same wants. Indeed, they both did crave the same thing. And what they craved was living human flesh.

  The sky over the County Morgue was beginning to lighten. The corridors of the building were quiet except for the faint strains of an all-night country music program coming from the office of the morgue attendant and his assistant. The cold holding rooms were silent, the tables still covered with the sheet-covered bodies, thirteen covered bodies of those who had died so violently that afternoon. The thirteen who had had spikes driven into their skulls that afternoon. Twenty-three tables lay empty.

  The office of the morgue employees was not quite empty. It was filled with the chewed, bloody pieces of what had once been two men. Their bones, hair and flesh lay scattered around the room in congealing puddles of blood: red, smeared handprints mute testimony to their struggle to live in a fight with the dead.

  In mid-morning Sheriff McClellan was at the morgue, examing the scene of the tragedy. He had made his way inside through a cordon of eager, curious reporters and TV camermen. The police had the entire building roped off, and were not allowing any reporters inside the morgue. Still, the reporters knew what had happened. They had talked to patrolmen, medical examiners and other officials on their way in and out of the building. It was no secret that only thirteen corpses remained in the morgue, not counting the remains of the attendant and his assistant, and the thirteen corpses that remained were the bus accident victims which had had spikes driven into their skulls immediately after the accident by persons who had thus far not been identified or apprehended by the police.

  When McClellan left the morgue building he had to face the reporters and the news cameras once again. As a path was cleared to his patrol car, he was barraged with shouts and questions. He knew complete silence on his part would only fire speculation and inspire panic—possibly leading to mass hysteria—so he stopped to answer some of the reporters’ questions.

  Microphones were jammed into the Sheriff’s face, and the shouting of questions rose to an incomprehensible babble, making it impossible for him to distinguish any particular question. McClellan shouted for quiet and order, then stood still and refused to say anything until the din subsided and the reporters calmed down.

  When the shouting stopped, McClellan announced that he had decided not to answer any specific questions, but that he would make a statement if they were willing to listen quietly. On hearing that, the voices of the reporters rose to a clamor again, briefly, but subsided in favor of hearing what the Sheriff had to say rather than not hearing anything at all.

  The Sheriff’s speech was intended to have a calming effect, but it did not entirely succeed. He recited the events of the preceding day, toning them down, and refusing to connect them with the murder of the undertaker, O’Neil. He admitted not having a clue as to who would want to perpetrate the sort of thing that had been done at the morgue. In the face of a further barrage of questions after his statement—which had concluded without giving the reporters any real satisfaction—McClellan stuck to his guns, refusing to say that the phenomenon of ten years ago was definitely repeating itself, and insisting that bodies had disappeared and had been stolen, certainly a bizarre and unsettling state of affairs, but one which could be explained rationally. He added that an investigation was already underway.

  McClellan did not believe the things he was saying. He knew he was backpeddling, trying to gain time, not wanting mounting alarm to build to a frenzy too quickly, a state of affairs that was unavoidable if the phenomena continued.

  The Sheriff had one fact in mind that gave him some consolation: They had brought this…this plague…under control once before. If it was happening again, they would know how to deal with it.

  Unless, maybe, this time it was going to be a whole lot worse.

  CHAPTER 8

  Bert Miller had his eyes riveted to the television.

  He had watched the interview with Sheriff McClellan and had scoffed at it. Now he was watching an interview with the pastor, Reverend Michaels, who, Bert thought, was speaking forcefully and intelligently. That morning, the Reverend had phoned a TV station, told them who he was, and confessed to having led a group of church members to the scene of the bus accident three days before and that it had bee
n their intention to drive spikes into the skulls of all persons killed in the accident. He admitted that they had succeeded in spiking only thirteen of the dead before being frightened away by the arrival of police and ambulances, and it was clear, the Reverend pointed out, that those thirteen corpses must have been the ones that did not rise with the others who had risen and killed the morgue attendants.

  “Yes, the dead are rising again,” Michaels was saying. “This is the work of the Devil, in his battle against God’s will. We live in a pagan society. We worship witchcraft and astrology and other forms of Satanism. Now we must call on the Lord to help us change our evil ways. No one wants to admit that what happened ten years ago is happening again. We try to hide the horrible events from our memory, finding them too terrible to accept. But we cannot hide from the Devil. Now he’s forcing us to face reality again. The dead must be spiked. The body must be permitted to return to dust, as the Lord intended. Only then can we rise, when the Lord calls us, on the Last Day. Only the soul is sacred—”

  Sue Ellen jumped up from her chair and turned off the television.

  Angrily, Bert reached for the knobs, yelling, “Now stay away from it!”

  Sue Ellen stood in front of the set and confronted her father. “No…please, please leave it off. I can’t stand all that talk anymore. It’s all crazy. What you made us do—carrying all those dead bodies—I can’t stand it!”

  Bert rushed toward his daughter, grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. “Didn’t you hear what the Reverend said? It’s that plague comin’ back and we’ve all got to get ready for it. It’s the Devil’s work—and maybe we all deserve it!”

  Sue Ellen began to cry. Annoyed, Bert looked around the living room, where some of the windows had been boarded up. He had been sawing and hammering and pounding all morning, while his daughters stayed in their rooms, too scared to come downstairs. Bert resented their not coming down and helping.