Infernal Corpse

by D. J. Goodman

  “Well, fairly beautiful. You’d be much more stunning if you did something better with your hair.”

  Wait, Angie recognized that vague insult for what it was. Was he negging her? Using pick-up artist techniques? She’s read about such atrocious things in some of her many random studies. The idea was to give the woman a compliment and an insult at the same time to get her to try fishing for more compliments. It was a move that was supposed to play with a woman’s self-esteem.

  It was a shit move, and Angie no longer felt bad at all for the embarrassment she was about to cause.

  “You know what? You need to stop this,” she said loud enough to ensure that every other person in the diner could hear her. “Why can’t you take the hint? I will never have—”

  She never got to finish the sentence, because she was interrupted by the crash of a car out on Main Street.

  Three

  There wasn’t a lot to the town of Mukwunaguk. Once, in the first decades of the twentieth century, it had looked like it would rise to become a major port on Lake Superior. The Great Depression had hit it hard, though, and the majority of shipping traffic on the lake had gone elsewhere. There was still a small harbor, although poor civil planning had played havoc on that: a breakwater had been constructed to keep the worst of Superior’s winter waves from battering the boats docked in the harbor. This had led to the waves depositing large amounts of sediment in the wrong places, creating a peninsula that jutted out at a crazy angle into the water. The lighthouse, which had previously been essential to the town and ships, had consequently found itself nowhere near the actual water after a few decades. It had been abandoned for a while before being revived once Mukwunaguk became known as a nice place to get away during the summer.

  The town itself was small, with only about two hundred residents calling it their permanent home year round. In the summer though, that number swelled to a couple thousand. Businesses that were shuttered during the winter opened. Shopkeepers returned, people with just enough money that they weren’t sure what to do with it had summer homes, and a large number of people who spent the rest of the year farther south came up to Superior’s shores to fill all the tourist’s needs. Even the chopstick factory operated on a skeleton crew during the winter, mostly because they didn’t have much other choice than to make do and didn’t quite make enough money to relocate somewhere more hospitable.

  All this meant that the streets of Mukwunaguk right now were eerily quiet. Most folks were holed up in their homes, wrapped in blankets with their heaters turned up to full blast for the first time this year. Maybe farther south some people had already had their heat on for all of October, but up here in the Upper Peninsula and especially on the shores of the Great Lakes, they were used to a little cold. Weather reports earlier had said that it was likely to snow tonight, although the weather woman had said it probably wouldn’t be much more than a flurry. Anyone who lived on the Great Lakes, though, knew that the waters often had an unpredictable effect on the weather. No one would be surprised it tonight was the first real snow storm of the season.

  Even with all that, Angie was still surprised that a few other people went out onto Main Street to see the accident. Granted, the crash hadn’t been too loud, and judging from the state of the car there probably wouldn’t be any serious injuries. Still, any unexpected noise at all should have brought out more lookie-loos. All she saw was Carol from the grocery store a couple doors down, who came out just long enough to see the car before pulling out a phone and calling the police. Angie supposed that meant she wouldn’t have to be the one to make the call herself.

  Angie was the first one out the door of the café, immediately going across the street to the scene of the accident while a number of the customers gathered just outside the door and watched. The car had gone up onto the curb and hit a light post, but judging from the amount of damage, it couldn’t have been going too fast. From that, Angie would have expected the driver to be okay, yet the person in the driver’s seat appeared to have passed out. It was difficult to tell in the fading daylight, especially since the light the car had hit was out while the others had recently switched on, but Angie thought it might be a woman. In a town the size of Mukwunaguk she fully expected to know the victim, although it still surprised her when she got close enough to open the door and Megan Howzer nearly spilled out. Despite her not wearing her seatbelt, Angie doubted the young woman’s condition was the result of the crash. She was unconscious and pale, her forehead slick with sweat. Trying to touch her as little as possible just in case she was dead and this was some kind of crime scene, Angie reached out and pressed a couple fingers to the veins in her throat. There was still a pulse. Angie would have expected it to be weak, except her heart was instead racing so fast Angie wouldn’t have been able to keep track of the beats.

  She turned around and looked at the customers gathered in the door. Kim Howzer stood there behind most of the others, craning her neck in an effort to see if anyone had been hurt. As Megan’s mother she had a right to see this, but given Kim’s reputation when it came to her daughter, Angie thought it might be better for the young woman if her mother was kept at a distance for the moment.

  “Hey, I think Carol just called 911 but could someone else do it just to be sure?” Angie called.

  “Who is it?” Boris called back. He took a few steps away from the crowd as though to help. Angie would have rather not been anywhere near him, but she probably wouldn’t be able to do anything for Megan all by herself.

  “Just…shit. Boris, get over here. Aunt Jasmine, get everyone else back inside.”

  Jasmine had appeared at the back of the crowd and proceeded to herd everyone back inside. There were protests from most of them, but Angie knew people just standing around would be more likely to get in the way, even if they did stay across the street. Boris jogged on over and, upon seeing who it was, turned to look back at the café.

  “Should we tell her?” he asked in a voice that only Angie could here.

  “Not yet. Did anyone call?”

  “Rudy did, I think.”

  “Come on, help me get her out of the car.”

  “Are you sure we should do that? I thought you weren’t supposed to move an accident victim just in case they had a back problem or something.”

  Angie stopped and took a closer look at Megan. There wasn’t anything that suggested Megan’s state had come from the accident. It looked like something had been very wrong with her beforehand. In fact, there seemed to be some kind of wound in the cleft between her right shoulder and her neck. Angie moved in to take a closer look but recoiled at the stench of burned flesh that permeated the car. Holding her breath, she tried again and found what might have been a bite and might have been a burn. Or it could have been both, or neither. Whatever it was, it certainly hadn’t been caused by the crash.

  “I think she has other things to worry about than her back,” Angie said. “We can’t just leave her out here. It’s getting colder by the second. She’ll freeze to death before the paramedics can get here.” And truthfully, she wouldn’t even have the benefit of true paramedics. At this time of year, the best Mukwunaguk had was a volunteer fire department. They would give her basic first aid and then try to get her to the nearest hospital, which was about a half hour away if the person driving there ignored the speed limit.

  Boris saw what she was looking at and tried to get a better look himself. “Holy shit. What even is that?”

  “We’ll ask that question later. Now are you going to help me or what?”

  In order to pull Megan out of the car, they had to stand shoulder to shoulder, Angie taking ahold of her arms while Boris tried to dislodge her feet from where they were tangled in the peddles. Angie braced herself for Boris to make some kind of inappropriate move while they touched, but to his credit he kept his mind off of Angie’s proximity and on the injured woman in front of him. Now that they were so close Angie took notice that Megan’s coat looked like it was burned throu
gh in multiple places going all the way to the skin. The bits of skin that showed through the ragged clothing, though, didn’t have nearly as much damage as her neck. In fact, those slightly red patches seemed incongruous with something that could sear right through fabric. As bad of shape as Megan was in, Angie couldn’t help thinking that she should have been worse.

  Once they had her free, they both gently laid her on the ground long enough for them to get a better grip on her legs and arms. While Boris took one last look inside the car for any other clues, Angie noticed that something had rolled out of Megan’s coat pocket. Angie instantly recognized the small brownish-orange bottle for what it was and considered shoving it back into the pocket without even looking. Curiosity got the best of her, however. Angie picked it up just long enough to see what it was. A depression med, she knew right away. It looked like a pretty low dose, the kind that someone would be given when they were just starting. Angie knew this because she herself had a few very similar bottles in her own medicine cabinet. She’d been on this exact same med since around the time her father had died, although she herself took a larger dosage. Looking up to make sure Boris still hadn’t seen it, Angie tucked the bottle back in the coat pocket as securely as she could, given the coat’s state. This kind of thing was Megan’s own story to tell, if she lived long enough to do so.

  “Anything?” Angie asked as Boris pulled himself back out of the car.

  “Her gloves on the on the passenger seat. They look like they’ve been burned, too. Christ Angie, was this an accident or did someone do this to her?”

  He looked genuinely upset at the possibility of anyone harming someone else. It made Angie ease her judgment on him a little. Not anywhere near enough to sleep with him, though.

  “Don’t know,” Angie said. What she could guess, however, was that whatever had happened, it was somewhere near the lake. The parts of Megan’s clothes that weren’t charred dry had a dampness to them, especially her shoes and the ankles of her jeans. She’d been standing in water recently. But considering how much of Mukwunaguk was on Lake Superior, that didn’t narrow down her location much.

  On three, they both picked her up and carried her across the street. They had to stop once and set her down when her legs began to slip from Boris’s grip, but setting her down in the middle of the street was hardly the worst thing that could happen when there was zero traffic. They made it the rest of the way into the café without incident. While everyone had gone back inside, not a one of them had sat down, all of them straining for a choice spot at the windows to see the action. They saw what Angie intended to do and cleared away from a spot on the floor, giving them a place to set her down. Kevin Kincaid was the only one who didn’t back away immediately, instead stripped off his precious Packers coat and balling it up to for a makeshift pillow for Megan.

  “Megan?” Kim Howzer said. She was still standing near the back of the group, and Angie expected her to come barreling through at any moment. Instead, she stayed where she was, although she was visibly trembling. “Megan, honey, are you okay?”

  Megan was very obviously not okay but no one had the heart to say it. Once Angie and Boris stepped away from her, she began to shiver violently, as though possessed by a frost permeating deep into her body. Yet Angie knew she couldn’t be cold. She’d brushed the woman’s skin as they had brought her in and it was uncomfortably hot to the touch. Megan was running a fever unlike anything Angie had ever seen. She didn’t think it was even supposed to be possible for a person to be that hot and still live. Yet Megan was still clinging to life, proof that there was still a fierce will to live in that short, skinny body of hers.

  “What should we do?” Becca asked. She fidgeted nervously, as though being so close to someone so obviously sick made her uncomfortable, but at least she didn’t draw away.

  “Who called 911?” Angie asked.

  “I did,” Rudy replied.

  “And are they on their way?”

  “Yeah, but they might not be here that quickly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Tina said Bob and Louie were investigating another 911 call out by those tourists still near the lake,” Rudy said. Tina was both the city hall secretary and 911 dispatcher. Neither was a job she usually had to do much in, but dispatcher was definitely her less common role. Bob and Louie were the police chief and his partner, two of only four actual law enforcement professionals the town bothered to keep on the payroll during the winter months. The other two typically worked the night shift, and likely would only now be waking up for the day.

  Rudy’s words immediately set off an alarm in Angie’s head. During the summer, the town kept a much larger police force and a fully trained paramedic and fire team because there was actually a need for them. Tourists had a tendency to do stupid things in the name of summer fun, after all, and they often paid for it in the form of broken bones or drunk driving tickets. During the winter, however, it was considered eventful to have all of three reasons to call the police at all, with one of them inevitably being Kim Howzer calling in her latest conspiracy theory and demanding Bob do something about it.

  For there to be two urgent 911 calls in a single day was simply not how it worked in the off-season months. Angie couldn’t imagine any way that the two events weren’t related.

  As she looked around at the others, though, none of them seemed as worried as she did. It would probably be best to keep her suspicions to herself for the moment, especially how half-cocked a couple of these customers would likely act at such a theory. Kim would declare it all an invasion by Big Government, while Old Bert would pull out his concealed-carry piece from its not-so-concealed place in his jacket and start waving it around in the name of “protection.” Angie didn’t hold with the idea that there was anything inherently wrong with guns and had met a lot of responsible gun owners over the years. Old Bert was not one of them. Whenever he drove Mukwunaguk’s small tour bus from the museum to the lighthouse, he insisted on carrying the gun with him just in case one of the “city folk” tried to rob him.

  “Did Tina say how long it might take for anyone to get here?” Angie asked.

  “She didn’t say much of anything,” Rudy said. “She sounded rather flustered. She did say she would call in the volunteer fire fighters, but apparently several of them went out with Bob and Louie.”

  “Several” firefighters, in off-season speak, meant the majority of the volunteers. Help might arrive shortly, but it wouldn’t be more than one or two people.

  If that was all Angie was going to get, though, she would take it. All she needed to do now was make sure nothing happened to Megan in the meantime. The young woman still shivered, although not as violently as before. When Angie bent down and put a hand to her forehead, though, she had to pull it away. Whatever was wrong with her, it had beyond anything that could be called a mere fever.

  “Maybe we should try sweating her fever out,” Johnny Hammerling said. “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do for a fever? Keep them covered until the fever breaks?”

  None of the others had touched Megan yet so none of them understood exactly how bad this was, yet Angie didn’t have any better ideas at the moment. She had multiple people strip off their coats and cover Megan up until she was in her own little cocoon, like a caterpillar preparing to turn into a butterfly. As a metaphor, it made Angie uneasy. Whatever was happening to Megan, she sure wasn’t turning into a butterfly.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t wait for someone to come get her,” Beth Kincaid said. “It might be faster for one of us to just drive her to the hospital.”

  “That might not be a bad idea,” Angie said. “Who has a vehicle we could use?”

  Becca raised her hand. “I could do it. I’ve got a Mustang. Probably won’t find anything faster around here.”

  Old Bert snorted, muttering under his breath that his tour bus was faster than a Mustang could ever be, but no one else offered up anything better. Becca fished her keys out of her purse and ran out
the door. Her car would probably be a couple blocks away at her home. Even with the cold weather, Mukwunaguk was small enough that driving down to the café wouldn’t have been worth it.

  “Help,” someone muttered. The word was so quiet that Angie almost missed it. She stooped down next to Megan again and moved her ear closer to the woman’s mouth so she could hear.

  “Did you say something, Meg?” Angie asked.

  “Oh. Angie. I thought you were gone. I was afraid you weren’t coming back.”

  Well, Megan was obviously delirious but Angie took it as a good sign that she recognized her. “I’m here. We’re trying to get you help. Just hang on.”

  “Help. That what’s she wanted.”

  Angie blinked. “That’s what who wanted?”

  “The woman. Except I don’t think…maybe it wasn’t a woman. There was nothing between her legs. Not a pussy, not a dick, nothing.”

  Megan’s mother gasped at hearing that kind of language from her daughter. Angie herself didn’t hold much esteem for people who threw a fit over any kind of cussing. Language was a beautiful thing to her, even the words that were intentionally ugly. The exact nature of the words didn’t make sense, though.

  “Maybe she’s trying to describe who did this to her,” Boris said. Angie was about to say that they didn’t know that a person had did this at all. She reconsidered when she took another look at the mark on Megan’s shoulder. It really did seem to look vaguely like a bite, but not from any animal. It was, however, the perfect size for a person.

  “She wanted help. I don’t think…”

  Megan trailed off, making Angie afraid that she was about to die, but it looked more like the effort of talking was tiring her out.

  “You don’t think what?” Angie asked.

  “I don’t think she was in trouble,” Megan muttered. “I think she wanted help with…something…else.”

  Megan stopped talking and closed her eyes yet continued visibly breathing. Angie didn’t think that would last for much longer though. Angie had seen death when her dad had died. It looked a lot like this.