After the People Lights Have Gone Off

by Stephen Graham Jones

  He was Dell, though, right?

  We toured through the cold room. It was slab city, naked dead people everywhere, their usually-covered parts not nearly so interesting as I’d kind of been hoping. We put those paper mouth-masks on and felt like mad scientists drifting through the frost, deciding who to bring back, who to let rot.

  “Hell yeah,” I said through my mask, and, ahead of me, Dell nodded that he knew, he knew.

  I told him about who-all’d been at my place earlier, maybe lying a little, and in return, like I owed him here, he asked me for the thousandth time for my little sister’s number. Not permission, he’d always assumed he had permission to do what and whoever he wanted. But he wanted me to middleman it.

  “Off limits,” I told him, about her, trying to make my voice sound all no-joke. Because it was.

  “Fruit on the limb,” Dell said, reaching up to pluck her. Except more graphically, somehow. With distinct pornographic intent.

  “She’s not like us,” I said, but before we could get into our usual dance where my sister was involved, the lights dimmed. A second later, a painful buzz filled the place, coming in from all sides, like the walls were speakers.

  “Delivery,” Dell said. “Hide.”

  Alone in the room with the dead moments later, I looked around, breathing harder than I was meaning to. All fun and games until one of those bright white sheets slithers off, right? Until somebody sits up.

  Finally I held my breath and crawled in under one of the tables, onto that clangy little shelf, some guy’s naked ass not two feet over my face, his body bloated with all kinds of vileness.

  After ten minutes in which I got terminally sober, the double doors slammed back. They were the same kind restaurants have, that are made for crashing open, that don’t even have handles.

  A gurney or whatever was rolling through, no legs pushing it. Just exactly what I needed, yeah. Finally it bumped into a cabinet, stopped. I breathed out but then its wheels started creaking again. It lurched its way over to right beside me, parked its haunted self inches from my face. Just far enough away for a hand to flop down in front of my face. It was pale, dead, the beds of the fingernails dark blue.

  I flinched back, fell off my shelf, and Dell laughed, stepped off the belly of the new dead dude he’d been using like a knee board.

  I flipped him off, pushed him away and lit up a cigarette. Not like anybody in there was going to mind. Dell took one too and we leaned back against stainless steel edges, reflected on our lives.

  Another lie.

  What he did was haul a laser tag kit up from his locker.

  It was the best war ever, at least until, trying to duck my killshot, he crashed a cart over, a dead lady spilling out, sliding to a stop at a cabinet.

  I read her toe tag, looked up to her face.

  On her inner thigh was a chameleon.

  Everything starts somewhere, Dad.

  •

  Before you get worried, no, this isn’t some necro-thing about to happen. I never asked Dell what those puppies were for, but I’m pretty sure he’d nabbed them from about twelve different backyards—people in the classifieds give their addresses over so willingly—and would guess he sold them from a box in the mall parking lot. Meaning they all have good lives now. He wasn’t sacrificing them out on some lonely road or anything. He wasn’t trying to conjure up a buddy to rape dead women with.

  However, if what he was looking for was somebody to trade him rides and cigarettes and ex-girlfriends’ numbers for some quality time alone in his cold room with a tat gun, well: there I was.

  When you’re looking to hire onto a parlor, to rent a booth—hell, even just to lure a mentor in—one thing you’ve always got to have, it’s an art book. A portfolio. What you can do, your greatest hits, the story of your craft.

  Problem is, every two-bit dropout can pull something like that together.

  But. What if, say, you’d moved to the city only a couple of months ago. And had always just done ink for friends, but were looking to go legit, now. And, what? Did I snap pics of any of those mythically-good tats?

  Yeah, yes, I did.

  Here.

  Play with the hue a bit on your buddy’s computer, and a gecko crawling up a dead guy’s shoulder, his skin will look so alive. And there won’t even be any rash, any blood. Like you’ve got that light of a touch.

  At first Dell would only let me practice on the bodies that were queued up for the oven, as that would erase evidence of our non-crime, but one night he left me alone to make a burger run—it’s cliché that morgue attendants are always eating sloppy food, but I guess it’s cliché for a reason—and I unplugged my gun, plugged it back in under the table of this woman I was pretty sure had been a yoga instructor. And recently.

  Her skin was tight, springy. Most of the dead, I was having to really stretch their flesh out, then get Dell to hold it tight while I snapped the pic, so that night’s lizard wouldn’t look like it was melting off.

  With her, though. I was just halfway through the iguana’s tail by the time Dell got back.

  He had to let me finish, because who conks with only ten percent of a tattoo done, right?

  It was a beauty, too. Just like in my head, I made the tongue curl the opposite direction the tail was, for symmetry. And where it was reaching, only her boyfriend would ever know.

  Pretty as it was, though, I didn’t get any burgers—this was Dell’s punishment (like I would want to eat something his hands had been touching on)—and, to make him laugh, I inked X’s over the eyes of the guy at the front of the line for the oven. He was skinny, pale with death, still cold from the freezer, his two gunshot wounds puckered up like lips. He looked like a punk reject from 1977.

  Dell shook his head, walked away smiling. I could see his reflection in all the stainless steel, and, as it turned out, Dell’s uncle’s reference didn’t mean much when the boss man’s just-dead, honor-student, choir-singing, yoga-bunny niece he’d been saving for the morning to embalm personally turned up with an evil bug-eyed lizard of some kind trying to crawl up her side, its tongue reaching up to circle her nipple in the most lecherous fashion.

  Some people got no sense of art, I mean.

  Dell in particular.

  •

  Like he had to, he came over, did what he needed to do to my face, to my television and my lamp. The television wasn’t mine, but I wasn’t saying anything. And then, so I would remember, he dug my tattoo gun up from my backseat, came back in and pulled me off the couch by the shirt I wasn’t wearing, sat on my arms with his knees so he could drill some bathroom-wall version of a penis into my chest. Or maybe it was a novelty sprinkler, or a leaky cowboy hat, I don’t know.

  Chances are I could have bucked him off, but I kind of deserved it too, I guessed. Though if he’d been a real friend, he would have lit a cigarette for me. And maybe done a better job.

  When he was done he threw my rig into the corner, slammed through my screen door, told me to forget his number if I knew what was good for me.

  I spent the next two days turning his punishment tattoo into a Texas bluebonnet, because that’s where I’d been born. At least that was the new story I was going to have ready.

  How a flower was going to fit with the iguana theme I’d been studying on lately, I had no idea, but maybe it didn’t matter so much either. Soon I wasn’t going to have any skin left.

  A week passed, then another, and, standing outside a bar one night with my shirt already gone, I saw the last girl Dell had been shacking up with. I’d taken her to prom once upon a time, when prom still existed. She was riding by on the back of another guy’s motorcycle. Really pressing herself into him. Glaring us all down.

  “She thinks we care?” I said to whoever was beside me.

  “Probably thinks we did it,” whoever it was said back, taking a deep drag and holding it, holding it.

  I narrowed my eyes, looked over through her smoke: Sheila. From when I was a community-college student fo
r three weeks.

  “Story?” I said, offering her one from my pack.

  She held it sideways, ran her fingers along the white paper and sneered about it like she always did, like she hated cigarettes, like she was just smoking them to kill them. But she threaded it behind her ear all the same. Your monkey’s always whispering to you, I guess.

  She shrugged, told me about Dell.

  He’d been found not just normal-dead, like OD’d or stabbed or drowned in vomit in a bed across town. No, he’d been like exploded behind a club. A dental-records-only kind of thing. Smeared on the brick, important footsteps leading away, the whole trip.

  I eeked my mouth out, stood on the stoop for more smokes than I’d meant.

  The bluebonnet on my chest was waving with each inhale.

  I went home, watched it in the mirror. Added red buds in the blue, in memorium. I think that’s the word.

  When I searched Dell up on the newspaper site, two hits came up.

  One was his obituary, the funeral I’d missed, and the other hit was about impropriety with the dead.

  The blotter had nothing at all about the late-night, involuntary tattoo on the owner’s car-wrecked niece—I guess I could have been famous, started a career right there—but it did mention how Saddleview was getting the funeral home version of an audit. Evidently, one month it had taken in more bodies than it had buried.

  I shook my head, clicked away. Dell.

  He’d probably got the orders wrong. Pushed one too many into the oven one night, then tried to fix the manifest, had to burn a to-be-buried stiff as well.

  It didn’t have anything to do with me, anyway.

  That part of my life was over.

  Lie number ten thousand, there, I guess. But who’s keeping count.

  •

  As for why Dell had turned inside out behind the bar, I had no clue. He’d always been high-strung. In junior high, he’d always been the first one to put his lips to the Freon tube, the first one to spray thinner into the rag, press it against his mouth, so I figured it was some accumulated chemical reaction. Something the military would probably pay big bucks to the get the formula for. They should have been monitoring us the whole time. Every night, we were out there, experimenting.

  And, just because Dell was gone, that didn’t mean the lab was closed.

  One night maybe three weeks after the funeral where I probably should been a pallbearer, there we all were, miles out of the city, in a field with a bonfire, like the bonfire had always been there, waiting. There were sparks and, when the wood started to run out, everybody had to donate one article of clothing. And then two.

  It was interesting in a decline-of-the-world kind of way. I was kicked back in a lawn chair, zoned out, just mellow, my shirt burning, keeping us all warm. I was watching this one girl named Kelly, already down to her pink clamshell bra, and thinking I might have to wait this situation out when another car pulled up and we all kind of sighed.

  Too many cars meant the cops wouldn’t be far behind.

  Then, too, depending on who was in that car, it could all be worth it.

  I shrugged to myself, leaned back to see who the new victims were going to be: first was a guy who could have been a surf bum in a movie ten years ago, second was his clone, and third was a red-headed girl I thought I knew from somewhere.

  When the fourth stepped out, I knew where I knew Red from: my sister’s friend from down the street at the old house.

  Gigi was here.

  “Hey!” my non-buddy Seth called out, dancing behind her, pointing down to her with both hands.

  I settled deeper into my chair, looked back to the fire like maybe I could blind myself by staring.

  Soon enough she found me, stood there with a silver can in her hand and said, “Dad’s been trying to reach you.”

  “Dell?” I said.

  “You were his best friend.”

  “He was a punk. A wastoid.”

  “And what are you?”

  “You should leave,” I told her.

  “I’m the one who should be doing things, yeah,” she said, and that was it.

  For a while some guys were running at the fire and jumping over it, but that was short-lived. It was mostly quiet and surly, at least for me. Just music and muttering, and too many snapshot flashes of my sister with surfer boy two, his arm draped over her in a way that was making me swallow hard.

  Before the night was over, there were going to be words. And probably more. But first I’d need to make sure he was eighteen—too old to press charges, according to Dell, who would have learned the hard way.

  I was nodding to myself about how it was all going to play out, how I was about to step across to the cable spool they were using like a love seat, and was even halfway counting down in my head when a chainsaw pulled up to our little gathering in the sticks.

  It was Dell’s ex. On her new guy’s motorcycle. She stepped off—dismounted, more like—and he just sat there still holding the grips, inspecting us all, the fire dancing in the black glass of his helmet.

  I swallowed, looked away like I’d never seen them, tried not to track Gigi even though I did register the t-shirt she’d had on at one point. It was in the fire. The first chance I got I went to pee in the tall grass, never came back, just stopped at a convenience store, called the party in.

  You do what you can to save your little sister, I guess. Even cash your friends in.

  In my living room the next morning, still awake—I hadn’t planned on coming home this early—I ran my hand over the elaborate, dragon-scaled salamander on the right side of my left calf.

  I tried to keep the hair there shaved down, to really show it off, but, running my hand over it, it was crackly. And smelled worse than bad.

  I sleuthed through my head, made the necessary connection: this was the leg I’d had kicked up on the cooler, close to the fire. On purpose, to show off my work, show what I could do. I’d even been wetting down the scales with beer when nobody was looking, just waiting for anybody to say anything.

  Nobody had.

  Instead I’d just curled all the hair on my leg, and singed the heel of my favorite shoe.

  Everybody had to have seen, though. It was beautiful, it was crawling, it was alive.

  I smoothed it down, passed out on the couch with that lizard warm under my hand, its eyes open for me, wheeling in their orbits, the pupils just slits, like rips you could climb through, into another world.

  I should have tried.

  •

  I woke at dusk and flinched back hard, deeper into the couch.

  There was a black motorcycle helmet on my coffee table. Watching me.

  “Recognized your work,” a guy said from the kitchen, and punctuated it by closing my refrigerator hard enough to rattle the ketchup.

  Dell’s ex’s new boyfriend.

  “Be still my heart,” I said, clutching it, sitting up.

  “Don’t be stupid,” he told me, and stepped in, my tub of butter in his left hand, his right index finger smeared glossy yellow.

  He ran it into his mouth, pulled his finger out like he was sneaking frosting off somebody’s saved-back cupcake.

  “Dairy,” he said, running his finger along the edge of the tub again, then shaking his head to get his oily bangs out of his face.

  I nearly screamed.

  His eyes.

  There were two crude X’s tattooed over them. Two X’s I’d done. When he was cold and dead on a rolling cart, two bullets punched through his chest.

  “Been looking for someone with your particular…talents,” he said, downing another fingerful.

  I shook my head no, no, saw Dell smeared on a brick wall and stood to crash my way to the screen door, escape out into the night, into some other life.

  The boyfriend’s helmet caught me in the back like a bowling ball, threw me into the wall by the door, the whole house shaking when I hit.

  He turned me over with the toe of his boot, stared down at my chest
. Eating butter the whole while.

  “Thought you were into reptiles,” he said, about my bluebonnet, his accent tuned to the UK station, and just dialed over all the way to it.

  I coughed, turned to the side, threw up.

  He stepped his boot out of the way.

  When I was done he kneeled down, jammed his butter finger into my mouth, smearing yellow all around inside. It was cold, wet, tasteless.

  His face so close to mine.

  “I’m sorry?” I said.

  He laughed, pushed my head down, bouncing it off the carpet.

  “You know cow milk is ninety-eight percent the same as cow blood?” he said, dipping his finger into the tub again.

  I was just trying to breathe.

  He shrugged, said, “Close enough,” and set the butter down on a speaker.

  From my angle on the floor, he was forever tall, and still pale like a junkie. But he did carry himself something like a British Invasion reject, definitely. Something self-consciously waifish and bad attitude about the way he caved his shoulders in around his chest. The hollow where his stomach should be. His lowslung jeans, like he was just daring you to trace his belt line.

  There weren’t supposed to be any of his kind anymore, though. Them and the dragons, they were on the extinct list, right? All there were that was even close anymore was all the goths, I guess, the Sandman dreamers, the Bauhaus die-hards, the velvet vest crowd who’d read too much Anne Rice, were probably going to grow up into good little steampunk rejects one day.

  This boyfriend, though, I had a sense he was their original. That Neil Gaiman had seen him at a party in the UK, that Anne Rice had followed him through the streets of New Orleans one night, that Sid Vicious had taken a cue or two from him.

  “This,” he said, giving me some jazz hands action over his face, his eyes, those X’s, “this isn’t just permanent, you know? With me it’s kind of forever, now, yeah? Get what I’m saying? What do you think of that, Jamie Boy?”

  I pushed myself up against the wall, let some butter dribble from my mouth, down onto the bluebonnet.