by Tim Curran
Mitch sighed, thinking about all those stiffs that had been washed out of Hillside Cemetery. River Town was full of them. And what if not just a few came back from the dead…but all of them? Good God. “Gimme one of those cigarettes,” he said.
“No, Mitch. I don’t believe in corrupting the nation’s youth with the evil weed.”
“Gimme one, you knothead.”
Tommy did and Mitch stared at it before he put it in his lips. He’d quit four times now. This last time had been for almost three years and here he was, ready to hand himself over to the monkey again. “Fuck it,” he said and put in his lips. He fired it up and almost coughed out half a lung on the first pull. Two drags later, he was fine. His body had accepted the filth he was sucking into his lungs again. That easily.
“You’re nothing but an addict,” Tommy told him. “They ought to lock up freaks like you.”
Mitch pulled off the cigarette, studying the gray world of Witcham and looking for something unusual, something out of the ordinary, anything that would tell him he hadn’t hallucinated this afternoon. But he saw nothing. Lots of water, lots of dripping trees, lots of saturated lawns bordering wet houses, but nothing else. Nothing truly peculiar.
Tommy had not mentioned any of it beyond that weird rain and Mitch knew he was having trouble with it. No surprise there. The flooding and now the walking dead. Jesus, like starring in The Night of the Living Dead as directed by Irwin Allen.
“Hell’s going on over there?” Tommy said all of a sudden, slowing the truck.
A sheriff’s cruiser was parked at the edge of the road. A culvert emptied into a drainage ditch which wandered through a high-grassed field and down towards River Town and the river itself. Two deputies in rain slickers were down the embankment working at something with long metal poles. They didn’t look happy about it.
“Let’s see if they need a hand,” Tommy said.
And Mitch was going to tell him that he had to get home to Lily, but suddenly he was feeling in no hurry. Over on The Strip it had been a nightmare and five blocks away, just a rainy day. Nothing more.
They got out and some kid was standing up on the road chewing a mouthful of bubble gum and watching the proceedings below.
“Got a body down there,” he said like it was no big deal. “And it’s moving.”
Mitch tensed inside. It was what the kid had said. Got a body down there…and it’s moving. Not that there was somebody injured down there, but a body and it was moving.
Mitch led the way down the muddy embankment, trying not to slide on the wet grass. He knew this drainage ditch, it was one of many hooked to the rainwater sewers under the city. It was about three feet deep and maybe four wide. In the summer there was maybe a foot of water in there coursing amongst the rotting foliage and cattails, crickets chirping and frogs chortling. A dark and boggy place. Even in the spring it was never more than three feet deep. But now it had burst its banks and then burst them again, had to be an easy six feet deep. As they got nearer, Mitch could smell a dank sewer smell and then something far worse…the stink of a dead dog that had burst open with gassy decay and maggots.
It’s another one, isn’t? he started thinking. Another dead thing that ain’t exactly dead?
“You need a hand?” Tommy called out.
One of the cops turned and looked at them. His eyes were wide and his lips were trembling. He looked angry, sickened. “No, what we need is a fucking psychiatrist.”
There was a body lodged in the ribbed mouth of the culvert and they were pulling it out. As Mitch and Tommy looked on, they brought it to the bank with those long hooked poles, managed to pull it up into the grass like an especially large and especially loathsome dead catfish.
“Oh my Christ,” one the deputies said, turning away.
Mitch felt his guts trying to sneak their way up his throat in a tide of bile.
“Sonofabitch,” the other deputy said, wiping rain out of his face. “It ain’t got no legs. It’s dead…gotta be dead…but it’s moving.”
“Won’t be the first one today,” the other said and his partner shot him a look.
“What’s that?” Tommy asked him.
He shook his head. “I didn’t say anything.”
Like hell you didn’t, Mitch thought.
The body was bloated and bleached fish belly white, the remains of a camouflage fatigue shirt hanging over its mottled torso in rags. There was nothing but dirty, fleshy ribbons beneath its waist and where the skin wasn’t white, it was black and singed as if it had crawled bodily from a blast furnace. There were burnt blotches all over its chest and it had been slit open from belly to sternum. Inside that gaping wound, you could see its organs and the jutting staves of ribs. And what was most shocking of all was that it appeared to be female. It had breasts…or at least one of them which looked like a ghostly white mound with a gray nipple. The other was squashed just as flat as a flower in a book.
“Fuck is going here?” Tommy asked them.
But they had no answers. No more than they knew what they were going to do now that they had landed their trophy fish here.
She should have been dead.
Should have been dead about five times over, but she was not. Her chest was rising and falling with a bubbly, syrupy sound like Jello forced through bellows. Her right arm was intact, the hand flexing, the fingers scratching in the grass like white pencils. Her left arm, however, had been cremated down to a gnarled stick that was flaking away. A down of filthy black hair trailed down the right side of her head, but was completely burned away from the other side, the crown crushed and laid open with a gash so wide you could have put your fist in there. Inside, you could plainly see her brain, all those gray-white and bloodless convolutions nested together like pale worms.
But Mitch wasn’t looking at any of that.
He was looking at her face. The meat had been peeled or burnt from her eye sockets on down, a flap of white flesh that should have covered one cheek was tossed to the side, hanging there by threads of gristle. She looked like some hideous anatomy specimen, her face just a sculpture of red meat and pink muscle, teeth jutting from puckered gums. And her eyes…dear God…like twin black mirrors, shining and wet.
“Push her back in,” Tommy said, not trying to be funny, just absolutely offended by her…or it.
And it almost looked like the deputies were considering it.
She was looking up at Mitch with those terrible eyes, her lower jaw pulling to the side in what might have been a grin had she any skin or lips around her mouth. He felt his stomach flip over as something like an oily black teardrop rolled from one of her eyes. Rain streaked down her face. Look at the way she’s dressed, he thought, the remains of that shirt. Camouflage. Sure, could be just a fashion statement, but I’m thinking this lady was a soldier. Just what exactly happened out at Fort Providence? What exploded out there and what were they working on to create a monstrosity like this? He was not a man given over to fainting spells or dizziness, but right then he felt as if he might swoon, go right down to his knees and then face first into the grass. Rainwater had gathered in the troughs under his eyes and he wiped it away with trembling fingers.
The woman…whatever she was…opened her mouth, or at least her jaws pulled apart with a wet and sticky sound, more of that black juice running out. She was making sounds, trying to form words really, but what came out was more of a low choked growling than anything else.
And maybe Mitch was losing his mind-he was pretty sure he was-but a wild and irrational horror rolled right through him because he was almost certain that as she stared at him, she was trying to speak his name. Trying to tell him something and he had a pretty good idea that whatever it was would send him right over the edge.
“Mrrrrsshhh,” she intoned with a sound like tearing, moist cloth. “Mrrrrsshhh.”
“She’s…she trying to talk,” one of the deputies said, a crooked smile passing over his lips as if the absurdity of that had finally hit him.
She could have been trying to say a lot of things or nothing at all. There was no way to know, yet Mitch was certain she was trying to say his name. And that was the true horror of it, wasn’t it? The fact that she stared only at him and knew his name. As maybe the dead knew the names of all the living on sight, knew their secrets and pains, all those things denied them in life. Just as this woman did. And Mitch had a disturbing idea that she not only knew his name, but had things she wanted to tell him about…like maybe how he was going to die and when, or what some of her friends had done with Lily while he was gone.
He turned away as she tried to speak again, pretty certain that he was going down this time as fluttering wings filled his head. He scrambled up the embankment and held onto the guardrail, almost losing his lunch right there and maybe his mind, too.
Down at the ditch, he heard Tommy say, “What’re you gonna do with her?”
And one of the deputies said in an almost hysterical voice: “Do with her? Well, we’re gonna get her to the ER, see if they can patch her up.”
His partner uttered a sharp laugh that was just this side of a scream.
Then Tommy was coming up the embankment and Mitch felt his hand on his shoulder. He recoiled from his touch. The idea of being touched by anyone or anything was akin to violation at that moment. The kid was still standing there, jaw hanging open, gum forgotten. Rain dripped off the brim of his baseball cap.
“You live near here?” Mitch asked him.
“Yeah,” he said, pointing towards a row of old company houses up the road, each one exactly the same. “Over there.”
“You better get home then.”
“I was watching, I was-”
“Get your ass out of here now!”
The kid took off running, splashing through the puddles, tossing a few fearful looks over his shoulder.
“You okay, Mitch?” Tommy asked.
“No,” Mitch said. “I’m not. Now take me home. I have to get home right now.”
12
Well, it was raining, goddamn yes, it was raining, but that did not mean the mail would not go through. Craig Ohlen had been delivering for twenty-three years, thank you very much, and neither snow, nor rain, nor gloom of night was about to stop him. And that included a very temperamental God with an especially weak and leaky bladder that was drowning Black River Valley like a bag of kitties.
Take more than some rain to keep me off my route, Craig told himself. If the blizzards of ’84 and ’96 didn’t stop me, rain sure as hell will not.
Craig was taking his job even more seriously since the flooding began and had even suggested to the assistant postmaster-that uppity, ass-kissing squeeze of hot shit Wally Morrow-that just because Bethany and River Town were flooded, did not mean the mail should not get through. Because people were living down there by the river and that goddamn water would have to rise pretty damn high to wash them out. The National Guard had tried. Many went. Many were already gone. But some? No, they refused to move. And it was to these people Craig had been speaking. All I’m saying, Wally, is that if these people are still there, they have a right to their mail. You get me a rubber boat with a motor on it and a bullhorn and I’ll see to it that they get it. Of course, Wally Morrow had looked at Craig like his fly was unzipped and something was dangling out in the wind.
No surprise there.
Wally had gone to hell ever since he took the assistant’s job and quit the union. Now he wore a suit and a brown little nose, had his head so far up postmaster Hebert’s rosy-cheeked bunghole that every time Hebert smiled, you saw Wally’s goddamn dentures grinning at you. Craig’s suggestion of getting the mail through was promptly-and not necessarily politely-shot down.
And Hebert, of course, wasn’t much better.
He was a hell of a taskmaster and universally despised by members of the Postal Worker’s Union, not only for his stinginess and his radical attempts to cut jobs and pay and benefits, but for his constant spying and route changes, and his encouragement of union members to tattle on one other. Hebert was pushing sixty and maybe, God be praised, he’d retire, but that was probably wishful thinking. Adlar Rose, the former postmaster, had been practically senile before he was put out to pasture-pissing his drawers and picking his nose with the tip of a pen (leaving plenty of telltale pen-marks at the edges of his nostrils) and then, of course, there had been the legendary incident of the turd on the floor of the office Men’s Room. Adlar-who had shit his pants more than once, usually when he sneezed-had heard about the mystery turd (a big one, too, Bobby Frieze had said, about the size of toilet paper tube and evil-smelling), had gone straight in there, sighted the offending log through his bifocals and picked that sucker up with a tissue. And, also according to Bobby Frieze, had said, “Must be fresh…kind of warm and squishy.” So, there was little doubt who had shat out that particular brown bomber, given that most people have a taboo about handling adult turds. But the burning question at the time, one that was even broached at the monthly union meeting was this: How could a turd that size roll out your ass without you being fully aware of it?
Anyway, Craig was thinking that if tradition held, they’d have to wheel Hebert out.
About the time Tommy Kastle and Mitch Barron were hearing from Hot Tamale and Herb about the weird and possibly dead woman outside their car that had sent them running right back to the Sadler Brother’s Army/Navy Surplus, Craig Ohlen was on Kneale Street, making his rounds.
Kneale was a pretty good run. There were more than a few nuts, but that was part of the job. The rain was coming down hard and it didn’t seem that you could hear much else. Craig kept going, stuffing letters and circulars in mail slots and wishing that leaky bladder overhead would take a breather already.
He cut through the Fisher’s yard and into the Boyne’s.
The Boyne’s weren’t bad people, when you got to know them. Margaret Boyne was a pissy old bitch who regularly reported people in the neighborhood for not cutting their grass or fixing their fences, and when she wasn’t doing that she pretty much liked to sit on her dead ass and feel sorry for herself. She had herself a job at a factory downtown, claimed she was some kind of production manager, but Craig had heard firsthand that the only production she managed involved a dustpan and a broom. She was too damn stupid and too damn lazy to do much else. Even so, word had it she had a hell of a time figuring which end of the broom you held onto and which actually moved the dirt.
Still, Craig figured, she wasn’t a bad sort.
Her son Russell lived with her. He had a kid somewhere, was pushing forty, but didn’t work on account of his bad ticker. Funny, that, because Russell smoked like a chimney and was one hell of a bowler, could throw a curve like you wouldn’t believe.
As Craig came up to the Boyne’s, he began digging through his bag, getting the delivery ready. When he reached the roof overhang, he dug out the Boyne’s mail. A gas bill from WisCon, a letter from Margaret’s sister in Clintonville, a big manila package from International Correspondence Schools for Russell-he was learning animal husbandry or mortuary science or something in his spare time, something he had a lot of-and a Priority Mail envelope from some law firm in Madison. Craig knew what that was all about. Frank Boyne, Margaret’s deceased husband, had gotten his arms chopped off from a sheet metal guillotine at Wisconsin Tool amp; Bearing over in Bethany, bled to death long before the ambulance arrived. The safety mechanisms were faulty and Margaret had promptly sued the manufacturer, Quisby Manufacturing Equipment, Inc. She received a nice fat check twice a year from them and would until the day she died.
As Craig made to stuff the mail in the box, he saw Russell watching him through the screen door. “Come on in,” Russell said.
Craig did, stepping into the screened-in porch after shaking the water from his slicker.
“You feel like a cup of coffee?” Russell asked.
“Can’t and you kno
w why.”
Russell did. It was Hebert, the postmaster, he sent out spies to see if his letter carriers were working or screwing off. Craig had told Russell and more than once that he felt like he was being watched all the time.
Russell was sitting there, leafing through a magazine. It wasn’t Thursday, so he wasn’t off to pick up his mother. He never missed on Thursdays. Thursdays were paydays and Russell liked to help his mother spend her paycheck.
“What you reading?” Craig asked him.
“One of those Watchtower magazines.”
Sure, the Jehovah’s Witnesses were out in strength since the flooding began, prophesying the end of the world as they did every few years. Those damn JoHo’s. Craig had had to order them off more than one porch when they got in his way.
Russell was very enrapt by the magazine. “Says here, says right here how them UFO’s people see aren’t alien ships or any of that.”
“No? What the hell are they?”
“Says here they’re angels riding in the sky, keeping watch over the flock.”
“No shit?” Craig said. “Well, I’ll be damned. Them angels better start identifying themselves or the Air Force is going to shoot one of ‘em down.”
Russell, who usually got a kick out of Craig’s mouth, didn’t say anything. He was in a mood. Lots of people were in moods these days and lot more were finding religion now with the rising water. People were saying some nut was even talking on the radio about how to build your very own ark, of all things. But Craig was not surprised by any of it, not really. It followed the usual cycle; he’d seen the same damn sort of crazy thinking as Y2K approached. People started losing their heads when the weather got funny, when there was doom and gloom in the forecast. Craig had been hearing all kinds of wild shit since the flooding began.
He bid Russell good-bye, wondered if he’d get sucked in with the JoHo’s and start knocking on doors. Wouldn’t have surprised Craig a bit. The Boyne’s were okay, but they were soft upstairs. Whole family was like that.