by Andrea Judy
I heard another two of the doors rip open just before something grabbed me and jerked hard at my ankle. I groaned and toppled backwards, hitting the ground. One of the dead bodies crawled on top of me. The smell of formaldehyde curled around me as a gaping mouth opened and rotten teeth snapped at me. I felt the bone brittle fingers start curling around my throat, but before they could come close to strangling me, I rammed my elbow upwards, slamming into the creature's gut. Its spit splattered on my cheek as I rolled over and pinned it to the ground with one hand while firing my pistol with the other. It fell apart beneath me and I rolled over.
Two other bodies were just getting to their feet. One rushed toward me, grabbing my wrist and bending it backwards until my gun dropped from my hand.
"Think that's gonna do you a lot of good?" I asked, grabbing at the tools on one of the side tables. My fingers found a hammer. I gripped it and swung.
The hammer cracked the skull of the creature. It howled, releasing my wrist and stumbling backwards, grabbing at its head. It screamed and dust flew from its mouth as it dropped to its knees and exploded into a burst of its former self.
The last one lurched for me, grabbing my shoulders and slamming me into the cooler doors. One of the door handles bore into my back and I groaned, before pushing my knee up and into the groin of the dead man trying to pin me down. He growled but his grip loosened for just a split second. That was all I needed to push him off and send his head slamming into the steel plated cooler doors. Nothing but powdered corpse dropped to the floor.
I coughed and rubbed my throat.
"Jackson? It's alright now."
The doctor came rushing back into the room with a baseball bat in hand, "What? What's happening?"
I raised my hands. "Bat down. There's no need for that," I said.
She slowly lowered the bat. "What are you doing? Who are you?"
"Legitimate questions," I said, "I'm called the Pulptress and I’m here because you called."
"Well I know that much. But why are you here at all? Why did that thing have your information in its hands?"
"That I'm not sure about," I admitted, "but I intend to find out. What can you tell me about these bodies? Where were they found?”
Jackson stammered for a few moments before reaching over and pulling the hammer from my hand and putting it into a nearby sink. "Let me pull out their files," she said as she walked over to a large lateral cabinet and pulled out a collection of files. "I know they were all found within the same 24 hour period. It was a big scandal here. We don't have the kind of crime that say Atlanta or some big city has."
She opened up the first one and nodded. "They were all found not very far from Epsilon First Cemetery." She closed the folder. "I've got their belongings too." She walked over to a separate set of meticulously labeled drawers. She pulled out a few plastic evidence bags. "They all were in really tattered clothes. Police all figured they had to be homeless, probably got into a bad batch of drugs and overdosed."
"And what did your examination turn up?" I asked, picking up one of the bags and looking over the evidence and the ratty clothes.
"I didn't find any trace of drug use, but I took a few blood and tissue samples to send for a tox screen," she answered, then paused and walked over to a small refrigerator where she pulled out several labeled vials. "You have to be kidding me." She sighed as she shook the plastic vial now filled with nothing but a pale, ashy dust.
I looked over the second bag of collected items and spotted a strange sprig of green plant stuck to the bottom of a pant leg. "What's this?" I asked.
Jackson made her way back over to my side. "Hm? Oh yeah, I made a note of that. All of them had some traces of rosemary on them."
"Rosemary?" I asked. "Like the herb you cook with? So what? They all came from some kind of kitchen?"
Jackson crossed her arms. "Rosemary also grows in the wild, and it's one of the most popular plants to grow in a cemetery. Epsilon First has several plots of rosemary."
I nodded. That made it absolutely clear where the Bone Queen was, and that she was back to her old tricks, raising the dead and causing hell, but why here? Why now? I shook my head. "Well thanks. I think I'm going to go check this out. Could you give me directions to this graveyard?"
Jackson chewed at her lip for a few moments before pulling the evidence away from me and putting it back into the file drawer and locking it closed. "I'll go with you."
"Whoa," I said as I held up my hands. "What?"
"I'll go with you," Jackson repeated as she put away the rest of her files.
"I don't think you understand. This isn't a joy ride or a field trip through a cemetery. This is going to be dangerous. You saw those things right? The one just now? The one that attacked you? There will be more of those things."
"I gathered," Jackson said after a moment, "but I am willing to take that risk. Let me get my bag and we'll go." She headed back for the main area of her office and out of the morgue.
I stared for a moment, then followed after her. "You're willing to take that risk? Why?" I asked.
She sighed. "Because I need hard evidence for what just happened or else my job is gone. I've just lost four bodies in my care. Do you think that's going to go over well with the police department?" She shook her head, "I need solid proof so that I keep my job, and don't get taken to the loony bin for claiming that four bodies just dissolved into dust after raising from the dead and attacking." She walked over to her desk, and picked up her purse. "Now, if you're done asking questions, I'd like to get this done before thunderstorms roll in this afternoon."
I sighed, running a hand through my hair. I really didn't need some civilian to have to keep an eye on while trying to go after the Bone Queen, but I needed to get to this cemetery. "Fine, but you stay out of the way and the second I tell you to run, you take off without a word, got it?"
She nodded. "Yes, fine. Don't worry so much. I do know how to fire a gun, and have taken several self-defense classes. I'll be fine," she assured me as she headed out to the rusted out truck in the driveway.
I take a few seconds before I follow after Jackson as she climbs into her truck. I hesitantly settled into the passenger side of the truck. It struggled a few times as Jackson turned the key, then finally the engine turned over and it rumbled to life like a freight train. Shifting gears, Jackson backed out of the driveway and out of the area.
The dirt roads weren't quite as bumpy on the drive in the truck; I didn't feel like my teeth were about to rattle out of my head at least.
"So, what is going on?" Jackson asked.
"I don't think you'd believe it even if I did even if I did tell you." I said after a moment, "Just get me to the cemetery. That’s all I need from you.”
Jackson frowned, glancing at me before looking back to the road and taking a left down a gravel road. "So, there's dead things coming to life in my morgue and you're not going to tell me what's going on because you think it's too unbelievable? Unless you tell me you're filming some new episode of reality TV, then I think I'll believe it."
I felt a small smile tug at my lips. "Good point. All right look, there's a woman. I don't know her real name but she's known as The Bone Queen. She raises the dead by eating their bones. I fought her once in Paris, and I'm here to take her out for good. She killed someone very important to me, and I promised I’d hunt her down. That's all you need to know."
"So one person is doing all of this? Some kind of necromancer or something?" Jackson asked, turning down another dirt road filled with potholes that bounced the truck.
I braced my hands on the ceiling of the car to keep from slamming into it. "Something like that. You're taking this a lot better than I thought you would honestly."
She took a deep breath. "See, I..." she trailed off then shook her head. ”My grandfather use to tell me this story when I was little. He said there was a soldier during the Civil War that had been touched by the devil because he wouldn’t die. He told me that he was there, he sa
w the devil, shot him clean through and the man kept coming." she looked at me as she drove. “He told me that eventually they bound the man in an iron casket and buried him in an unmarked grave here in Epsilon. If there are dead things rising…”
“It’s not him. That’s some folktale. I know who is behind this and I’m here to stop her,” I said. Nothing was going to change my mind.
Those things in the morgue looked exactly like the chiffoniers I’d faced in Paris, and I had no doubt that it was that woman behind all of this. How one of them had gotten my contact information into its hand was something I still hadn’t figured out.
Jackson kept quiet as we pulled into an empty grass lot that served as a parking lot. Low, crumbling brick walls circled the cemetery with at least three old wrought iron gates around the property. An entire section of wall had crumbled to the ground around the back areas. In the distance I could make out what looked like an old church steeple sticking out just above an area of woods around the graves.
“How big is this place?” I asked Jackson as she put it in park.
“Oh a few dozen acres. It’s massive.” She said, “Heard some developers tried to buy it up but they did a land survey and found miles of tunnels under the graves. Guess it was used as some kind of barricades during the Civil War maybe, no one’s found the entrance yet. Most people just think it’s an urban legend.”
I unbuckled and opened my door before turning to Jackson and telling her, “You should just wait in the truck.”
“I’m not waiting in the truck,” Jackson scoffed and crossed her arms, “You’re hunting dead things and telling me that my story about the dead rising is some fairytale? You don’t know any better than I do why those people came back to life!”
I took a deep breath, "I do know better than you. I’ve dealt with these things before. Now I don’t know why they’re here, or why one of them had a piece of paper about me, but that’s what I’m going to find out. I can’t be worried about you wandering around with these things on the attack. Maybe you've missed this somewhere along the line but it's dangerous. There are going to be things, undead things, trying to kill me and anyone with me."
"One of them tried to kill me before I even knew you existed. It was delivered to my morgue with your name and number in its hand. I want to know what's going on just as much as you do. This is my home, and I need to know what's going on or else I can kiss my job goodbye for losing several bodies."
"We can find a way to keep that from happening," I told her. "Your life is more important than your job."
Jackson smiled. "Yeah I know that, but I think with us working together I can keep both of them just fine and figure out what’s going on."
I shook my head, but stopped arguing, it was wasting time. Getting out of the truck, it was clear that this grassy parking lot didn’t see a lot of traffic. In fact, the only car here besides us was a sleek black car covered in dust and pollen. It’d clearly been here a while without moving.
"Not a real popular place is it?” I asked.
Jackson laughed. "I don't think anyone has been buried here since...phew, maybe the 50s," she said after a moment of thought. "Most of the people buried here are in unmarked graves. Leftovers from the Civil War mainly. My grandfather's out here somewhere."
I frowned. "Unmarked graves?" I asked as I got out of the truck.
Jackson followed behind me. "Yeah, I guess maybe mass graves would be a better term. You see the uneven patches of the ground, the weird hills and valleys. Those are from graves where they just dumped the unclaimed bodies. There are a few actual tombstones, and a few families even have mausoleums." She motioned toward the east side of the cemetery. "But otherwise it's just a collection of unknowns. Historians come out here from time to time to try to make headway on who’s buried here, but most of the time they find nothing but a few abandoned churches about a mile outside the cemetery." She stepped over one of the broken sections of the wall.
I followed behind her and took a quick look around the cemetery. The ground sloped and fell in chaotic, unnatural patterns, and in the distance I could see a few dark shapes that must have been the tombs and graves Jackson had mentioned. Of all the mass graves in the world, why was the Bone Queen here in Epsilon, Georgia?
Jackson walked away from the wall and into the cemetery. She took a deep breath. "Rosemary is this way," she called over her shoulder.
I let my hand rest on the butt of my gun and headed after her. "You think the rosemary will lead us to where those things came from?"
She nodded. "It's a good place to start unless you'd rather just wander the cemetery looking for dead things."
I frowned but didn't respond as we tracked through the graveyard. I caught the scent of the rich, warm tang of rosemary crisp against the humid air and pushed past Jackson, taking over the lead.
Over a hill we came to a patch of wild, overgrown rosemary, thick spiked plants grabbing at the edges of my pants and sticking to them. Jackson knelt beside me and pulled a small plastic Ziploc bag from her purse and carefully collected a few pieces.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"If I can get a match of this to the plants that were on those bodies that will confirm they came from here inside the cemetery. It's a start at least," she said, putting the evidence back into her bag.
Overhead dark clouds rumbled. Jackson pulled her white leather jacket tighter around herself. "We need to find something and get out of here before the storm breaks."
"I'm not going anywhere," I said, reaching into the bushes and trying to feel through the tangles of branches and clinging pine-like needles to see if there was any sort of hole or trap door hidden there. "This isn't a mystery that needs to be solved. This is a simple case of finding the person doing this and stopping her."
Jackson huffed. "Alright, fine. You want to putz around a cemetery in a thunderstorm, that's-"
I froze as something seized my arm and jerked me forward. I nearly toppled into the rosemary bushes, but Jackson grabbed the back of my shirt, then my arm and pulled me back. Another hard yank and me and the thing holding onto me flew backwards and crashed into the ground into a pile.
I scrambled for my gun as Jackson and the thing still holding onto my wrist, struggled to get upright.
Abandoning trying to get to free my gun from my hoodie, I finally settled for my knife and slashed at the hand holding onto me. It jerked backwards and I followed, pressing my blade into the pale neck of a gaunt, blonde man.
"Wait a second!" Jackson grabbed my arm, "Wait, don't just-"
“Who are you?” I demanded.
The man was dirty with a sickly yellow coloring to his skin. He didn’t move like one of those dead things, but he didn’t seem totally alive. His eyes were dark and the cut on his hand from my knife didn’t bleed. I tightened my hand on the blade and readied it to plunge into his chest, “Speak now if you can.”
He spoke with a faint smirk. "I thought I saw an angel."
I sputtered and the knife pressed against his chest, ready to pierce him as I said, "What did you just say to me?"
"If you are not interested, that's all you had to say." He offered a smile “I can handle ‘no’.”
“Stop!” Jackson hissed. “Get your knife away from him!” She grabbed at my arm but I easily avoided her grasp.
I pulled the blade to his throat. "Stop with the cutesy act. You can talk, so talk. What are you doing here? Where did you come from?"
"Oh, shall I tell you about my childhood? What an awful time that was," he said with a grin. A very faint French accent hid under his words.
“Jackson, check him for a pulse.” I said, pulling my knife off of his throat, and instead taking out my gun to aim at him. “One wrong move, and you’re gone.” I told him.
He just smiled and stayed still as Jackson pressed her fingers to his throat, then his wrist, and finally to his chest. She leaned back, looking to me and then to him. “I can’t find one. I swear he doesn’t have one.”
"Then how are you talking?" Jackson asked.
"Ah, well, there's the trick. I may be technically dead, but my body keeps on moving. What is that saying? The spirit is willing but the body won't? Something like that?" His smile split crooked across his face.
"Who are you?" I pulled back the hammer on the gun. "Tell me."
"Name's Aramis," he said, looking up at me. "And you must be The Pulptress."
"How do you know me?" I demanded.
"It isn't hard. You've earned a reputation, particularly your bone hunting ways," he said with a wink.
"You know about her? About what happened in France?" I dropped the gun down just an inch.
“Est-ce que je connais la France?" He laughed, “Oh, I know more about what happened in France and about her than you ever will. I know that she killed someone very dear to you in Paris. Do I need to say more than that?" He tilted his head faintly.
"What is going on?" Jackson demanded.
I took a deep breath and reluctantly put the gun away. "The woman I told you about who killed my mentor.”
“I know that woman," Aramis added, "Well, knew," he corrected. "We haven't spoken in oh a good thousand years or so at least. Since the last time we tried to kill each other probably." He shrugged.
"You've tried to kill her?" I asked, "How? How do you kill something that's already dead?"
"That's the problem," he said. "I can't."
“But?” Jackson prodded.
He smiled. “First I think getting out before it rains might be in order. Rotted skin and water don’t mix well.” He pointed up toward the sky then slowly got to his feet. He stumbled and Jackson steadied him.
He closed his eyes with a faint groan as thunder rumbled again.
“I think we have guests,” he said.