by Martin Rose
I opened my mouth to call out; the wire in my jaw clicked, amplified to movie-theater sound. My thoughts sped up and thawed and gained coherency. I was not in the basement anymore. Dust puffed from my mouth in an effort to speak. All that issued forth was a pained groan. My fingers tapped again and the persistent sound in the background became louder. Suck. Thump. Suck. Thump. I turned my head. Plastic rippled beneath me and there it was—the pump Niko used to embalm corpses.
That’s odd, I thought. There’s no one else here.
The room was empty. Gurneys lined up in rows and prepared for new intakes, but there were no corpses. Except for me.
I heaved a sigh with relief. Of all the places I expected to wake up in, the Pleasant Hills Funeral Home had not been one of them.
Niko, I thought with a twinge of regret. Her resentment would be a benediction, a face I correlated with feminine warmth, someone who could look me in the eye without fear.
I opened my mouth to call her name. Niko. A dry wind husked from my mouth, a garbled set of words. My teeth clicked together when I spoke. Numbed, I could not feel my lips move. I struggled to lift my hand to my mouth.
Bone against bone.
My fingertips tapped against my face like china plates thrown against each other. I startled, shaking, and pulled my hand away to hold it in front of my destroyed eyes.
Nothing but bones. Bones with little shreds of pink meat at the ends, here and there. Dangling ligaments and tendons snaking between the bones. The last remaining tissue holding my hands and fingers together. In places, soft tissues went missing entirely. Someone took mortuary wire and snapped together bone-to-bone in their place instead.
I wiggled my fingers. I could identify each carpal bone, the tiny bones of the metacarpals, the knuckle joints and the longer ones, threaded and connected to the wrist.
But no flesh. No fingernails. No hair filaments, no rotted skin to hold it together.
I gasped and made ready to howl, and nothing came out.
Suck. Thump. Suck. Thump.
My hand was nothing but a skeleton.
What about the rest of me?
My glance followed the line of my wrist down the length of my arm. An arm is defined by more than its motion; it has flesh, muscle, tissue. Red blood pumping beneath the surface of the skin.
All I had were bones. Long bones connected at the joints. Hint of sinew like dental floss. Thin shreds of meat by the bone surface.
I raised my skeleton hands to my face. I could not feel my face with bones for fingers but only hear their syncopated tapping against the planes of my skull, where there was no skin to pad their contact. I searched for eyelids, but there were none, only what soft jelly remained of my destroyed eyes that I could touch, but could not feel.
I screamed and screamed and screamed.
Suck. Thump. Suck. Thump.
*
I passed out.
Like a hysterical woman from a Victorian picture-show, I swooned where I was on the table, a long skeleton, a collection of bones. When I first turned into a pre-deceased monster, I must have been arrogant to believe that death was the worst that could happen, the worst that could ever be.
I was wrong. Even a zombie still has something left to lose.
*
I came to again. How quickly I mastered the art of sleeping without being able to close lidless eyes. Images present themselves, but the mind shuts down and refuses to compute. Second by second, consciousness broke the surface until I was aware, awake inside the skeleton of my body. Voices drifted from the room next door, a door of frosted glass separating the mortuary from the room outside. Words floated in with the draft.
“Don’t go. Not yet.”
Niko’s voice, pleading.
“They’re all children down there. Children alone with a pre-deceased monster.”
“They could be dead already, Owen.”
“You know why I have to go back. It’s got to be contained.”
A grim silence followed the lull of their conversation.
“You need his help. If you leave before he’s up on his own, it’ll tear him apart. I don’t think he’s got the strength for it. If he wakes up and finds out you’re gone . . .”
“What? What will happen? I’ll be back. I got him out; I’ll get back in and out again without him, easier without him, actually. I’m made for this. I’ve been doing it my whole life.”
I was filled with a rush of pride; my boy.
“I can’t leave the children there to rot. I’m going after them.”
“Owen! Don’t!”
I frowned, or felt that I did, if I had a face left to frown with. A long, uncomfortable silence spanned time and the moment of feeling pride for my boy eclipsed by a darker set of emotions—feelings of jealousy, envy. Did she . . . like Owen?
Their voices picked up again and hushed; in that moment, I could imagine a number of romantic interludes passing between them, whispered adorations of love, admiration, perhaps even stolen kisses.
Oh, you fool. You didn’t really think you had anything to offer her, compared to what Owen had? A living body, an intact soul. I didn’t even have a rotting body left to me anymore. How long had I been unconscious on the gurney while they had time to get to know each other, while she had time to appreciate the handsomeness of his features—just like mine when I had been his age. She would get the best of me, and what better way than through my would-be son?
Not that he actually was my son, after all.
That’s nice, I thought. One second, he’s the son you never had; the moment you think he’s moving in on Niko, all of sudden, he’s not your son. It would be better for everyone if you stayed dead with flimsy internal narcissism like that.
I groaned and summoned the energy from my guts. I still had a few of them nestled in my rib cage. Tapping bony fingers along the metal gurney, I grasped the rails in my skeletal hands to force myself to a sitting position.
I caught my reflection in a mirror by the wall. Horrified, I took in the face of the monster I had become. Eyeballs nestled in the bone sockets of my face. Missing nose. Only a gaping, triangular hole marking the center; the awful, permanent wolf’s grin of every serrated tooth revealed behind long lines of sinew remaining along the cheekbones; other than that, most of the tissue erased from the skull. I looked like a discarded skeleton from a laboratory study.
How can anyone love a pile of bones?
I shuddered. Bone from bone to bone clattered upon one another. Through the white slats of rib I could see parts of myself as through a curtain. My blackened lungs were still in place and wound with dark snarls of red tissue and veins inside the center of me. Niko had pushed a tube into me to send embalming fluid through the center of what little remained.
I saw my heart. A tough, sinewy muscle, it beat artificially with the rhythm of the embalming pump. I considered the irony of Niko making my heart beat again as I swung my legs over the gurney and out over the cement floor. Fluid gathered and swirled down a drain by the gurney wheels. Beside the slotted drain, several maggots lay still and dead, soft white grubs rendered into curled commas.
She killed them with the embalming fluid. Clever girl, I considered. She must have hooked me up to the machines as soon as Owen brought me here. It was not hard to piece together how events dovetailed and coalesced. Maggots don’t keep eating when there’s nothing left to eat, do they? No doubt Owen had followed me ever since the Rogers showed up at my door, so he knew I came here. The flies pumped out with the rest of the dead blood inside me, but what had been the point, really? What was left of me worth saving?
I heard the knob turn, the door open.
Reflexively, I shielded myself, holding my arms up above my head. But they were not arms, not anymore. Two bones shielding a skull. My eyeballs peered out over them, looking at her. Niko. Black hair piled up on her head. Her face was paler than I remembered, her eyes were red, as though she had been awake for many hours. She wore a cobalt blue dress that accentuat
ed her goddess figure as though she’d stepped off an Egyptian stele. She looked lovely.
I looked like a horror film reject.
Ashamed, I turned away from her. Bones clicked, joints popped, alarmingly loud without flesh to muffle the sound. I struggled to leave the gurney and pull out the embalming tube from my middle with a violent jerk of my skeletal fingers. The tube was difficult and fought back until she stepped across the floor and hurried to help me.
“No!” I hissed, jerking away from her.
She ignored me, turning off the pump and reaching for the tube I already clutched. Our fingers brushed, her small hand, fleshy and ripe like peach skin; my own hard bones, whose touch I imagined as cold as bullets, white as snow.
I was inhuman; how could she stand it, to look at me like she did, with her intact eyes? I saw a skeleton reflected back at me from her pupils. Nothing about the skull resembled me anymore. There was nothing left of the man I had been.
“You should put me in a box and bury me.”
“Maybe,” she returned, “but not yet, and a little thanks for all this work I do on your behalf for free would be nice every once in awhile.”
The embalming tube slithered between us, spewing fluid to the floor. My bone thighs dangled from the gurney, connected to a bone ankle, to bone foot carpals and little bone toes.
“We’ll have to hook you back up to the machine tonight to get your dose to you. Owen has been crushing up pills and we added it to the fluid, hoping it would work.”
“Are you satisfied with the result?” I asked her bitterly.
Under better circumstances, I could have made an effort at kindness; this newest atrocity left me with no civility, no remaining sense of empathy. Privately, I wished they had not resurrected me. Better to have left me a ravening monster without the self-awareness to understand what Jessica had done to me with her maggots. Lord of the Flesh Eaters, indeed. What purpose did it serve to bring me back to life, a new monster, as nothing but a skeleton? I was a Halloween nightmare.
“The result sucks,” she responded, her words matching mine, tone for tone.
I bowed my skull. I deserved as much. My last words to her had not been so kind.
“Vitus.”
The door opened. Owen entered, garbed in black—in stalking gear—once more. Niko ignored us, cleaning scalpels at the sink. She did it to give us a semblance of privacy, and I waited as Owen came forward into the room. Watching him approach, I was struck by the contrast between us, the vitality that informed his steps, the smoothness of his skin, the rippling muscle beneath his clothes. He exuded a life force that had been extinguished from me long ago, and looking at him was like studying a mirror image of myself: that is what I looked like once.
I looked away, gathering myself.
“I wondered where you were,” I said.
He stopped before the gurney with several feet between us. He was polite to a fault, understanding without being told that I desired my privacy and my distance.
“I came for you as fast as I could. The whole place erupted into panic once Jessica made it out of the room they were holding you in. I didn’t quite understand what was happening, the children were . . . they lost their purpose once Jessica lost her reason. It was as though she snapped; there was nothing left holding her coherent thoughts together. She ran from corridor to corridor, and I saw her. There was nothing left of her face, just this—”
“You found me,” I cut him off.
I dreaded the thought of hearing him describe what I had already seen. She was still my wife, even if she were dead, or crazy, or damned to Hell for eternity. No language spoken could match the power of standing witness before her corrupted, maggot-eaten form.
“I tracked you down. I would have been there sooner, but I was clearing the way through an old ventilation shaft. I could not get through the door where they had blocked it off, and I fear they are all still there.”
“How long have I been here?”
“Two days. I had to . . . wrap you in a blanket. I feared to lose the parts of you that were falling off.”
I raised a skeleton hand before my eyes and flexed the finger bones. Wires interlaced the smaller ones, and it occurred to me that it had been painstaking work to connect my bones in such a way, like shattering a puppet and then sewing it back together. Hours and hours of labor on par with that of a master craftsman, just to give me back the most basic of articulation.
I glanced at Niko. Had she even had time to sleep? Or had she spent the last forty-eight hours working on me? My shame expanded.
“I’m going back, Vitus,” he announced.
“Oh?” I turned my attention from my hand. Niko had finished washing the surgical instruments some time ago. She occupied a dark corner in silence as she watched us.
“I can’t leave them. I can’t leave the children there with that . . . thing.”
“What makes you think I would let you go back into that place with that thing that is my wife?”
Niko said nothing; no gasp of surprise or shock. No doubt Owen had relayed everything to her while I had been passed out in the intake room. That, too, evoked a sense of shame, Niko having to hear from a stranger that I had not, in fact, succeeded in killing my wife, but only maimed her. And what did she think of Owen? Had he presented himself as my son? Oh God, I groaned, what did she think of me now?
Owen sighed. His expression held a poker face, but he was an inexperienced player; he struggled to contain himself. Of course, a skeleton does not have half the complications involving duplicity a living person with a face and human expressions does.
“You can’t stop me, and you can’t do it yourself.”
He pointed out my obvious helplessness, an incapacitation I refused to accept.
“So you’re the great martyr, hm? What happens when a fly lays claim to your flesh? Have you thought about that?”
“Your flesh was rotten, it made for an opportunistic—”
“Infestation? Perhaps. You do realize there are a thousand varieties of flies, and there are those that feast on live flesh as well as dead? Sure, mine was the most convenient. But you’ve got no way of knowing you’ll be able to find your way out once you make it back in. Plenty of time for anything to happen.”
His features hardened, perhaps even irritated by my calm explanation of what awaited him in the dirty, damp basement with the hundred damned children of the Flesh Eaters.
“I assure you, Owen, when you are dead, you will have many hours to ponder all the fear a maggot may hold; until then, I forbid you to go.”
His face suffused with red from the collar of his neck to the roots of his blond hair. It made me wonder if that was how I had looked when I was angry, when I was told things I did not like to hear.
“You know I’m going anyway.”
I leapt off the gurney. I should have reconsidered. My skeleton feet connected with the concrete and rattled me all the way up my spine. I groaned with the pressure it sent through what little remained of my body and took two steps to stand before Owen.
The red blooms in his cheeks faded, turned into ice; his eyes widened and he stepped back, his lips parting.
He was afraid of me.
“For what purpose did you bring me back here, Owen?”
“Purpose? I’m your son—”
“Like hell you are, and you know it. Try me again, with an answer that makes sense.”
Niko’s glance flicked with interest between the both of us, and I hoped a day might come when I could explain it all to her. For now, explanations would have to wait.
“I couldn’t leave you there!”
I stared at him, but he held steady.
“You would have been better off leaving me for dead or killing me yourself. If you walk out that door, you’d better be prepared for what I’m going to do to come after you. Everyone so fucking eager to save me and then discard me when it turns out I’m not here to be your personal yes-man. You don’t like what I have to say, kill
me. I’m serious. I keep asking for it, and everyone keeps not doing it, and I’m not sure how much more self-destruction I can pull out of my ass to prove it to you, because I don’t even have one of those anymore!”
He swallowed. A thick, muddy sound in his throat as his Adam’s apple bobbed in fear.
“Kill me.”
I invaded his space, snapped the gun out of his holster, and returned it to him, pressed it into his hand. My skeleton fingertips reduced to squares of alabaster against his palm. He startled with the sensation, which sent his skin crawling as goose bumps ran up and down his arms and every little hair lifted off the flesh.
His hands trembled. But he would not pull the trigger.
At last he pulled away with a violent jerk, his breath hitching in fast.
“You can’t even pull the trigger with a monster standing in front of you,” I whispered, “and you think you can handle what’s waiting for you in the basement?”
I didn’t try to stop him—what could I possibly do? I was a collection of bones. He slammed the door shut behind him as he left, leaving Niko and me in silence.
“He’s not your son, then?” she asked.
“No,” I sighed. “My real son would have killed me. No, he did exactly what Jamie did. Everyone and their fucking misguided conscience.”
I turned, a skeletal foot tapping against the floor, and studied her face closely. I hoped to catch something, any kind of reaction at all to Jamie’s name, wondering how many family secrets she shared now; at any point she could have asked what I was talking about, but she remained silent.
*
Fluorescent lights flickered and I looked upward, listening to the bones in the back of my head creak and balance my skull on the occiput.
“Turn out the light,” I begged her.
She watched me, her eyes as large as tea saucers, and flicked the switch off, plunging us into dimness. Feeble light poured in between the blinds and cast half-shadows around us like prison bars. The darkness relieved me and set me at ease. I was more naked than naked—no clothes, no flesh.