Arson, while frowned upon in baseball, tennis, wrestling, and so on, is considered perfectly legitimate in Muleball, as well as some particularly corrupt forms of international soccer.
Due to the high attrition to atheism among their clergy, all major churches pulled out of Dead Donkey, usually after a few hours and in one particularly severe case seconds. The last remnant of organized religion in Dead Donkey is the Church of Particularly Cynical Atheists, which maintains a growing if deeply unpleasant presence in the city.
This was not to say everyone hated Dead Donkey. It was extremely popular in a number of select circles, but mostly among the blind community owing to very low property prices and the pleasantly musical nature of its fences. Dead Donkey therefore had a rather large blind community, although the few who had regained their sense of sight through the miracles of modern medicine had run away screaming.
This was Nathan Haynes’ home city, the city where he had been born, and the city where he had (recently) died. But, like the city’s many poets who tried to mail themselves to Baltimore, he was sent back.
Chapter 6
Nathan resurrected with a faint scrunching noise, like the sound of an autistic woodchuck chucking a log particularly hard into the knee of an unwary passerby. He blinked. He was standing back in his own living room. It was much how he had left it, except he noticed that the floor appeared to be rather bloody, and that his own dead body was inconveniently sprawled across the floor with a neat little hole in the side of its (his?) head. He sighed, scratched his head (which is to say the one that didn’t have the bullet in it and was still working) and wondered what to do. He supposed that the first order of business, now that he was back, would have to be getting rid of his body, but he guessed that people weren’t simply allowed to dump dead bodies in the trash can and forget about them. There were probably all sorts of pesky rules pertaining to the disposal of biological waste and human remains and whatnot that would get in the way. Nathan supposed he would have to call the police.
He picked up the phone. There was no dial tone.
Then Nathan remembered that the serial killer, before he had killed Nathan, had cut the phone line. Nathan frowned. He remembered objecting to the serial killer’s cutting of the phone line at the time, anticipating that it would create some sort of difficulty in the future just like this, but the serial killer had insisted that it was very important.
With a sigh, Nathan went over to his cable drawer.
Virtually every household in the world now has at least one drawer that contains all of the miscellaneous cables that its residents have collected over the years. These include power cables, modem cables, internet cables, cables for cell phones, cables for smartphones, cables for laptops, cables for cameras, cables for lamps and clocks and air conditioners, frayed cables, broken cables, straight cables, curly cables, unknown and inscrutable cables, unspeakable cables, unmentionable cables, eldritch cables coated in paint of an unknown color that siphon off power from the grid to a dead alien god with dark and mysterious purpose, etc.
Even though Nathan did not really trust technology, largely because he did not understand how it worked, he too had a drawer of cables. He waddled over to this drawer (under his desk), and began to root around inside for a new telephone cable. He was sure he had one somewhere, and eventually found it. Then, with much dark muttering about the bother, he replaced the telephone cable.
This, he reflected, was on balance a lot of trouble to go through to restore phone service to his house, particularly since Dead Donkey’s phone system barely worked anyway. Owing to the unwillingness of any reputable phone companies to risk their trucks in Dead Donkey’s streets, Dead Donkey still used a manual telephone exchange - that is, one of the big networks of boards you see in old-timey movies where a woman in a headset plugs a long metal plug into a little socket to connect your call. This was a problem because the telephone exchange operators did not really know how to operate the telephone exchange, and generally speaking had no idea which socket to plug the little plug into, and would therefore, at best, take a wild guess and connect you to someone else at random. While this was a good way to catch up with the neighbors and the pizzerias (as the case might be), it was very inconvenient for anyone trying to place an urgent call. If this didn’t work, the telephone exchange operators would sometimes pretend to be the person you were trying to call rather than connect you and carry on the conversation as best they could, all in the name of maintaining the illusion of telephone service throughout the city.
Nathan knew all this, but he felt there was at least a sixty percent chance that the telephone exchange operators knew which plug was the police, so he felt it was worth a try.
He plugged the new cable in and dialed the police. As far as he could tell, they connected him properly, but then you never could tell. The operators could be tricky. Nathan’s half of the conversation went like this.
“Hello,” he said. “I would like to report that I have been murdered.”
There was a pause.
“Yes,” he confirmed. “I was murdered just about a half-hour or so ago, and I wondered if you could come by and pick up my dead body. I’m afraid I don’t really know what to do with it.”
There was another pause.
“No, I’m not hurt. A serial killer came in and shot me in the head and I died. That’s how I was murdered.”
There was yet another pause.
“Why yes, I do have a history of serious mental illness. Hello? Hello?”
The emergency operator (or quite possibly the telephone exchange operator), had hung up.
Nathan scratched his head.
He stooped down and grabbed his dead body under the armpits and dragged it out into the backyard, where he had a wheelbarrow that he’d partially filled with dirt for some purpose of gardening that he could no longer remember. Nathan heaved his corpse onto the wheelbarrow, where its arms remained hanging loosely over the side. He clapped his hands together to get the dirt off and stepped back into his house.
He was just trying to work out whether the undertaker or a one-way pre-paid freight shipping label to Baltimore was cheaper when there was a knock at Nathan’s door. Nathan stood up and blinked, then his brain said something like this.
“Oh, maybe that’s the serial killer come back to kill me again. I’d better go get it in case it is.”
Then another part of his brain said something like, “But if it is the serial killer then he’ll just have to go to all the trouble of killing you again and that’s no good because they’ll probably send you right back.”
Then the first part of his brain said something like,
“Well, if it is the serial killer then you’ll just have to explain things to him and tell him he’ll just have to go find someone else to kill, because I think that was my last telephone cable, and it will be very inconvenient if he cuts it again and you have to go down to the store to buy another one. Not to mention,” it added impetuously, “that there’s rather a lot of blood over your nice clean carpet and you still don’t know how to get rid of the old dead body from last time.”
It waited for the second part of his brain to respond, but no response was forthcoming because the second part of his brain had started playing the cereal jingle again and had gone so far as to co-opt his mouth and lungs into whistling some of the catchier bits. He got pretty well caught up in the whistling until a loud knocking sound disrupted his train of thought.
“Oh dear,” went the first part of his brain. “What was that?”
Eventually, after several more whistles and knocks, Nathan exhausted his immediate repertoire of cereal jingles and managed to stagger over to his door. He opened it. There was a single tall policeman standing on his porch.
“Good afternoon, sir,” the policeman said politely. “Are you Mr. Nathan Haynes?”
After a quick check with himself, Nathan confirmed that he was.
“You called us and said something about a murder,” the
policeman said.
“Oh yes,” Nathan said brightly. “Maybe you can help me get rid of the body. Come in, come in.” He ushered the policeman into his living room and directed him to sit in the least bloodsplattered of the several green chairs he owned. “Can I offer you something? Cerea- er... coffee? Tea?”
“That’s very kind of you, but no thank you, sir,” the policeman said quietly. “Could you just tell me what happened here?”
Nathan launched into his explanation. He told the policeman about the nice serial killer who had knocked on his door and then shot him in the head, and his subsequent trip to the strange bureaucrats’ offices, and the frumpy woman, and Donna, and Ian, and Director Fulcher, and how they had decided to send him back to life. He showed the policeman where the serial killer had shot him, and subsequently where Nathan had dumped his own corpse in his backyard wheelbarrow, and explained about the phone cable and how it would be awfully inconvenient if the serial killer had to cut it again while killing him, since he would have to go out and buy a new one, and he would therefore have to borrow one of his neighbor’s cars to go to the store since it was too far to walk and the buses only ran in one direction and the city’s only car rental place was only accessible by helipad and all the taxis were a shade too hideously orange to be used by any but the city’s large blind population.
The police officer listened to all this in silence and wrote it down in a large notebook. When Nathan had finished his story, the policeman scratched his head.
“It seems to me that you basically need to stop the serial killer from coming back and get rid of the body in your back yard.”
“Yes,” Nathan agreed vigorously.
“Well, we can take care of all that for you, Mr. Haynes.”
“Oh, you can? Good.” Nathan was happy that the policeman was taking this in such good stride.
“Yes, we can get your old body taken away to the morgue and post a patrol outside your building so if your killer comes back, we can have him caught in a jiffy and employed.”
For readers not familiar with Dead Donkey’s criminal justice system, Dead Donkey does not have any municipal prisons. Minor offenders, like jaywalkers, litterers, and guerrilla artists are instead packed off to live in the bad neighborhood of Dead Donkey, where they are condemned to spend the rest of their days complaining loudly to one another about how bad crime has gotten all of a sudden. Major offenders, like murderers, are employed and put to work in the mayor’s office.
The mayor of Dead Donkey is not very popular.
Nathan, who didn’t pay much attention to civics and hadn’t picked up on this particular point (and was in fact listening to the cereal jingle play inside his own head again), simply went, “oh good.”
The policemen then recited much of the information that Nathan had told him to check that it was correct, making a few notes here and there when Nathan interrupted him to point out inaccuracies.
“Good,” the policeman said when they had finished doing this. “Now I just need you to sign this witness statement.”
He handed Nathan the witness statement and a pen.
Nathan clicked the pen. His hand hovered over the signature box.
The print was small. Very small.
The cereal jingle playing in Nathan’s head stopped. He frowned.
“Wait a minute. This is a 21B.”
The policeman’s eyes suddenly became dodgy and evasive.
“If you could just sign the witness statement-”
“You’re a bureaucrat, aren’t you!” Nathan exclaimed. Suddenly everything fell into place. This explained why the policeman hadn’t seemed surprised when Nathan told him his story. It also explained why the “policeman” was wearing a badge that read “Temporary Badge Pending Request For Badge” and why his uniform was yellow rather than blue. Also, he had actually responded to a call, which was rather suspicious for the Dead Donkey police - they usually ran and hid until the crisis was over.
“Blast,” the fake policemen murmured, throwing off his cap and jacket. Beneath, he was wearing the unmistakable stiff off-brown suit and tie of a low-level bureaucrat.
Chapter 7
About an hour earlier, back in the office of Director Fulcher, Ian had escorted a very normal looking young man into the room. This young man was wearing the unmistakable stiff off-brown suit and tie of a low-level bureaucrat, and was in fact the same young man who would attempt to deceive Nathan into signing a 21B about an hour later. The young man’s name was Brian Dithershoes.
Brian hated his parents. He hated his name. He hated the laughs and jeers of the other boys that he’d had to bear when he was young, and the jibes from the other bureaucrats now that he was a bureaucrat.
He hated being called Brian.
He longed to be called Andrew, in his opinion a vastly superior and much more respectable name as compared to the miserable mockery of a first name that was Brian.
“Brian!” Director Fulcher boomed.
Brian winced at the sound of his own name.
“Yes, Director Fulcher?” he called back, gritting his teeth.
“I have a job for you, and if you do it right, I will grant you what you’ve always wanted.”
“You mean it?” Brian asked, his face lighting up.
“Yes. I’ll give you a name change,” Fulcher said. “Then you can be called whatever you want. Panny or Fulump or Gwash or Bupper or Adolph. It doesn’t matter to me.”
Brian’s eyes lit up.
“Or Andrew?”
“Yes. Or Andrew.”
“Whatever it is, I’ll do it.”
“Good,” Fulcher said. “You will need this.” He handed Brian a small, official satchel, which - going by weight alone - felt like it had several large and particularly obese elephants inside it.
“This contains forms you may need to fill out during your trip to make sure all the paperwork is in order. The form 21B is particularly important.”
Brian found the form 21B near the top, right on top of a form EEE - Report of Incident Pertaining to Mr. Travis Erwin Habsworth, of 2388 Shillington Road, Albany.
And then Director Fulcher explained the whole thing to him.
About five minutes later, Brian was on the way to the world of the living, and for him the future had never looked brighter.
No matter what would happen, he would break this Nathan Haynes man. He would force him to sign the 21B, no matter how cruel or treacherous the method, no matter the cost. The form would be signed.
Chapter 8
“Won’t you please sign it?” Brian begged.
“No!” Nathan said.
“Please?”
“No!”
“Pretty please?”
“I told you NO! Get out of my house.”
“As I have already explained, I can’t leave until you have signed your 21B. Please sign it.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Well, for a start, I’m not even dead anymore. Why should I sign a form that acknowledges I am dead when I’m not even dead anymore?”
“It would be doing me a very big favor,” Brian said truthfully.
“Too bad! I won’t sign it. Now get out!”
“Perhaps you would like to call the police again to get them to throw me out,” Brian suggested shiftily.
“Oh no. I’m not falling for that again. Now leave my house before I call the serial killer.”
“Do you have the serial killer’s phone number?”
Nathan had to admit that he didn’t.
“But if you don’t leave,” he added, “I will go and get my toothbrush!”
The object called a toothbrush in Dead Donkey would nowhere else in the world be identified as a toothbrush. It is in fact, between its crude, unnatural contours and razor-sharp bristles, an instrument to unleash terrible torture on the gums of an unsuspecting victim. The residents of Dead Donkey use them exclusively for self-defense, which accounts for both the extremely high volume of mouthwash s
old in the city and the reluctance of even hardened Dead Donkey criminals (or mayor’s aides, as they prefer to be called) to conduct home invasions in the early morning or evening, particularly into their victims’ bathrooms.
Brian, who was not from Dead Donkey, did not understand this threat and stared blankly at Nathan.
Suddenly, the loud crack of a gunshot made Brian jump.
Nathan sipped his coffee indifferently.
“That’s my neighbor, Mr. Fletcher. Very noisy, isn’t he?”
“Was that a gunshot?”
“Oh yes, I expect so. I might as well go and see what he’s up to, just to make sure that he isn’t shooting out streetlights again.”
“Why would anyone shoot out streetlights?” Brian asked, mystified.
“He claims that they are much too bright for him to use his night vision goggles,” Nathan said matter-of-factly.
Brian was still processing this statement when Nathan put down his cup of coffee and walked out the front door. Brian quickly followed him.
Nathan’s neighborhood was very unusual. Maybe it was the collection of run-down cars parked on both sides of the street, at least half of which were on fire, or the graffiti strewn sidewalks, or the empty shell casings that littered the grass, but something somehow suggested to Brian that Nathan did not live in the best neighborhood. The buildings themselves consisted of identical one-story post-fabricated housing units. What made them post-fabricated was that while pre-fabricated units are built ahead of time, broken into pieces, and then assembled, these housing units were all marked to be unassembled, broken into pieces, and then destroyed in a furnace, preferably a particularly hot furnace - hence post-fabricated.
Mr. Fletcher turned out to be an insane-looking scrawny old man in a night gown standing on the balcony of the second floor of the housing unit adjacent to Nathan’s own. What made Mr. Fletcher look insane was the rather large pump-action shotgun he was holding, and the spent cartridges that littered the floor of his balcony. Mr. Fletcher had found out about the post-fabrication plan and responded to it with some annoyance, shooting at the post-fabricators who had arrived to drive them off. In so doing, he’d discovered he rather liked the whole yelling and shooting at people from the balcony bit, and resolved to start doing it regularly. These days he shot at teenagers, birds, plumbers, salesmen, tourists, and anyone else who he felt didn’t belong on the street.
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