Unkillable

by Patrick E. McLean

  As I lay there and thought about it, I had to admit that both scenarios were equally likely. Soon after this realization, I became aware of shapes moving in the dark mud, things that scuttled and clicked. Ah crap, crabs. Now I was going to get eaten by crabs? The hits. Just. Kept. Coming.

  I struggled frantically. Well, as frantically as I could manage. My left arm was free, but it was useless. I threw it around and clawed at the soft mud, managing to kick up some slime and sink a little deeper. With Tweedledumbest on my chest, I was going nowhere.

  But the crabs left me alone, aside from the few that crawled across my face. They were after Tweedledumbest. Sure, he might have been an asshole, but the crabs were sure glad to see him. They invited everybody to the picnic. At first it was disgusting, but after a while it got boring.

  When the sun came up, a little light filtered down to the bottom of the river. And when the tide changed, the water cleared. Now I could see the surface. I felt like I was staring up at a second sky. Lying there watching the hulls of boats go by. Hearing the rumble of great ships in the channel, but unable to see them.

  The whole thing created a sensation in me I wasn’t used to. At first, I wasn’t sure I had ever felt it before, but, as I lay there, it came to me. It was peaceful. I’m not sure I knew what the word had meant before that. I didn’t have to be anywhere. I didn’t have to do anything. I didn’t even have to breathe. All I had to do -- all I could do -- was just lie there and be.

  Dead. Yes, I was dead. But just be. And the strange thing was I couldn’t remember a time when I was alive that that was true. As a kid, we’d always been rushing somewhere. Mom would be getting us ready to move, or unpacking from a move, getting us ready to go to some event, or coming back from one. And forget high school. It was one bundle of nerves, trying to fit in; trying to figure out what impossible urge your hormones were going to throw at you next.

  Then it was rushing off to college and after college, finding a job -- the whole endless cycle of rushing from one thing to the next -- years and years of it -- and I couldn’t believe that I had never taken the time to stop and smell the roses, or watch the boats float across the sky, or the crabs devour a corpse.

  No wonder I had been so bitter.

  As I considered this, the corpse seemed to get lighter and lighter and lighter, until it just floated away. I watched it calmly as it drifted downriver towards the ocean. The stomach was bloated with gas as decomposition set in.

  I checked my stomach. I wasn’t bloating. Why wasn’t I decomposing? This was all very strange.

  I took one last look at Tweedledumbest drifting away into the black, taking the crabs for a strange balloon ride into the open water of the ocean.

  When he was gone, I clawed out of the mud. I tried to swim upward, but it didn’t work. That would have been just too easy. I shambled around in the muck looking for a way out, but the river was lined by steep walls. Eventually, I found a sewer. I don’t know how long I waded upstream against the filth. When I crawled out of the water onto the floor of some dark catchbasin, mud and river water poured out of me. It felt like I vomited up gallons of the stuff.

  A crab fell off my back and scuttled away. Part of me hated to see him go. Lonely people needed pets, right? The lonely and the friendless?

  I hadn’t been the kind of person who had friends when I was alive. But would it have mattered? Seriously, if your best friend shows up as a walking corpse, you gonna give him a hug?

  But then I realized, just like the crabs were happy to see Tweedledumbest, I knew someone who’d be overjoyed to see me.

  Like a nightmare, I worked my way up through the sewers.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 5

  You're wondering where I was going. And your first thought is something like, “If I was that screwed, I'd turn to my family. Why doesn't he go to his family?” You’re thinking that because you've got a family you can go to. Or a family that you think you could go to. Because let me tell you, people react differently when you are dead. Anyway, I had one family member, and I was way past the point that I could count on her.

  But friends, you say, surely he must have friends? Or a friend? A best friend. The kind of friend who would see you through thick and thin and to hell and back. But I didn't have any of those. In fact, now that I was dead and had developed some real problems, I began to see that I hadn’t had any friends or anything like a friend. I had probably never had a real friend in my life. What I’d had was a collection of people who liked to feel miserable together when they weren't working. Jesus, as if being dead wasn't depressing enough, now I had to see my life for what it had really been? How screwed was I?

  Anyway, at the bottom of the sewer I remembered a particular guy who I had spent a lot of time being miserable with when I was alive. His name was Bruce and his family owned a funeral home. I guess he was alright, but he always smelled like those chemicals. Whatever, misery loves company and misery clearly isn’t picky. Still, every once and a while, you'd catch him looking at you like he was thinking about replacing your fluids. Creepy. He didn't get laid much, but then, neither did I. But he once bragged to me that four generations had worked in that funeral parlor and they’d never locked it at night. “Criminals are a cowardly and superstitious lot,” Bruce had explained.

  “No, Half-Ass Batman, criminals don’t break into places where there’s nothing to steal,” I had told him.

  “I don’t care how tough they are, everybody’s afraid of dead bodies.”

  “Not you though.”

  “No man, with me it’s different, I’m a pro-fess-eee-o-nal,” he said dragging the word professional out to a painfully pretentious length.

  “Then what about a professional killer?” I asked.

  “Whoa, that’s deep.”

  Bruce wasn’t too quick. Or maybe he was too quick and did drugs to slow things down a bit. Whatever, he did a lot of drugs, and that’s why I hated him. Well, I pretty much hated everybody, but with Bruce it was special. Sure he was bitching about stuff, just like all of us. But his life, as weird as it was, didn’t have any real problems. He had a family. He was going to inherit the family business. And right now he had a job that paid well and let him stay up late and do all the drugs he wanted. He was set. He was just too whiney and stupid to see it.

  I watched the sun set through the bars of a storm drain. When it was dark I took to the alleys. It took me quite a while to even figure out where I was. The city looks different from the shadows. It’s disorienting to be the thing that goes bump in the night.

  When I got there, the door was unlocked. At least Bruce wasn’t completely full of shit. Who knew, maybe he could even help me. I pushed my way through a heavy metal door into large, tile-floored room. In the middle of the room was a large drain. On the far end several metal tables were bolted to the floor. Florescent bulbs created a pool of brilliant, greenish light.

  Bruce’s back was to me. He was standing up on a stool between the corpse’s legs. He was making small grunting noises and thrusting backwards and forwards. He was doing something pretty nasty to the corpse.

  “C’mon, bitch, c’mon!”

  It was disgusting to me, of course, but I didn’t get that stomach churning feeling that I would have gotten when I was alive. It felt like my stomach was lined in lead. It was more of an intellectual disgust.

  “Bruce, that’s just wrong,” I said from the shadows.

  “What? Who said that?”

  “After all that bitching about how you couldn’t get laid, and all the while you had a whole harem on ice.”

  Bruce turned around and his round, freckled face wrinkled as he tried to peer into the darkness. “Man, this is not cool, I’m working!” In his pale, fleshy hands he held a long metal rod that was attached to a vat of embalming fluid by a rubber tube. Surprisingly his pants were zipped up. “Who is that?” he asked, holding a hand up and squinting against the lights.

  “It’s me. Dan.”

  “Dan? What
are you doing here?”

  “Evidently, I’m watching a sicko get his rocks off.”

  “What?” said Bruce, truly confused, “What are you talking about?”

  “Sure, she’s not much of a conversationalist, but what the hell, right?”

  “No man. No. Even if I did, everybody knows, you don’t bang the fat ones.” Bruce stood aside and I could see that the corpse he was working on was huge. 500 pounds huge. Orca huge. “I think she ate herself to death,” Bruce said quietly.

  Bruce pulled a joint out from behind his ear and dipped the tip of it in embalming fluid. When he lit it, it flared brightly. He took a long drag and held it. When he exhaled he said, “Fat people man, worst part about this job. C’mon, you want a hit?”

  I shuffled into the light. “I don’t think it’ll do me any good.”

  “Whoa,” said Bruce, “I mean WHOA. You look awful, I mean.” Bruce had one of those pleasantly round faces that seemed immediately trustable. This effect was counteracted by the fact that Bruce also had a lazy eyelid and eyeball to match. They would both wander off on their own from time to time. But now, both his eyes were wide open and his mouth made an O shape. It was almost funny. “Did you get hit by a car?” he asked.

  “Yeah, and then some.”

  “What happened?”

  “Some asshole killed me.”

  I slumped into a chair and told him the whole story. He took it pretty well, but then he was stoned to the gills. I can’t even imagine what embalming fluid does to you when you smoke it.

  “Whoa. Like Wo----hoh-oh. So what are you going to do now?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know why I came here.”

  Bruce’s head lolled over to the side. Like talking to somebody on a long distance call, there was an unnatural lag in his response. “Well that’s easy, man. E-e-e-e-e-e-verybody comes here when they die.” Bruce said this with such a natural, cheesy smile that I had to laugh.

  “Are there Vampires and Werewolves?” Bruce asked, exactly like an idiot would.

  “How am I supposed to know that? I do know there are talking rats.”

  “Yeah, the one who gave you these powers?”

  “Powers? You gotta be kidding me. Power is being able to fly, or being able to turn invisible. Power is having a lot of money or being able to order a nuclear strike. I don't have power. I have a liability. I have a deadline. I can’t even walk straight. Car shattered my kneecap.”

  “Let me see that.”

  “Are you sure you--”

  “C’mon, I’m a pro-fess-see-o-nal. Fully Licensed and Bonded.” He looked at my kneecap for a minute and then said, “Get on the table.”

  I began to realize just how much Bruce was into his job. As he checked out my knee, he talked about ligaments and anatomy, the nature of the embalming process, everything. In a way, I would have been more comfortable if he was into having sex with corpses. But no, he got off on being an embalmer.

  “The body is a fragile thing, so fragile. And life is so precious,” he said as he lit another joint, “It’s a temple, you know what I’m saying? People should respect it more, ‘cause when life is gone, it’s just gone.” The joint did its work and he was overcome with a coughing fit.

  “Then what’s with the left-handed lung rocket?”

  “This? Oh no man, this is just to take the edge off. You know, some creepy shit happens around here. There’s ghosts.”

  “Ghosts?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah, they’re around all the time. That’s what I thought you were at first. This place has been a mortuary for over 200 years. Sometimes it’s like Grand Central Station for ghosts around here. Do ghosts creep you out?”

  “No. I don’t really get creeped out anymore. I mean, I just don’t feel the same inside anymore. I’m different.”

  “Yeah you’re different. Way different. What happened to your blood?”

  “Ask the rat.”

  “This shouldn’t even be possible. You don’t have any blood left. There’s really not any fluid of any kind. That’s seriously messed up, like the fat girl,” he said, pointing to the large female corpse on the slab next to me.

  “That’s no way to talk about your girlfriend, Bruce.”

  “Yeah, yeah. She’s so fat, her circulatory system collapsed under her own weight. I don’t know how the bitch didn’t have a heart attack. Normal person, you can just stick a tube in their neck, fill them up with embalming fluid, whoosh, all the blood and lymph goes out the other end. You just flush them right through.

  “But her, you’ve gotta do each limb separately to make sure there’s nothing left in her.”

  “Why? Why do you embalm people at all? Why not just bury them?”

  “Well, it’s so people can look at the corpse at the funeral, that’s really it, right? And if there’s any blood or lymph or anything, it will decompose and start to smell. But that’s not the real problem. The real problem is that pockets of gas build up in the body. So, say I miss a spot in her gut, right? Gas is going to build up inside of her, until pretty soon –” He made a popping noise by sticking his index finger into his mouth and levering it against the side of his cheek. The sound was surprisingly loud and echoed in the tile room.

  “Pop?”

  “Oh yeah, it will blow a coffin apart. It’s some ser-i-ous-ly nasty boom.”

  “Okay, so what’s going on with me?”

  “I don’t even KNOW man! That’s what’s so cool. This shouldn’t even be possssssssssible.”

  “So is my knee gonna heal?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t see how it could. It’s not like you’ve got living cells. But if they’re dead,” he shook his head in disbelief. “We need a microscope, man.”

  “I need a knee that works, and an arm that isn’t all fucked up.”

  “Oh, your arm. That’s easy; I think it’s just dislocated.” And with that, he lifted it straight up. I felt something slip and grind inside my shoulder. There was a hollow thunk as my shoulder joint slipped back into place. I moved my arm around and it seemed to work pretty well.

  “Cool,” Bruce said, “I wasn’t sure that was going to work.”

  “That’s not reassuring.”

  “What’s the worst thing I can do, you’re dead already, right?”

  “Rip my arm out of the socket.”

  “Oh, that’d be cool. Do you think you could still move it?”

  “Let’s not find out. What about my knee?”

  “It’s fucked. You have trouble walking on it because you’ve got no lateral stability.”

  “What?”

  “You can’t stop your knee from bending sideways. I think you ripped some tendons. I could cut you open and see if I could sew them back together.”

  He was way too eager to cut me open. I was getting the idea that my afterlife was all about going from bad to worse, but I didn’t want to accelerate that journey. “What do you think the odds are of you getting that right on the first time?”

  A huge grin split Bruce’s moon-face and he shrugged, “I don’t know man, but it’d be cool to try.”

  “Try it on somebody else. What else you got?”

  Bruce thought for a minute. “Let me see if I still have it.” He rummaged around for a while and came back with a hinged knee brace in his hand. He strapped it on to my leg. He also took a minute to apply some make up and cover up my cuts and scrapes. When he was done, I looked in the mirror and was amazed.

  “Jesus, didn’t he look like himself?” I ask.

  “What?”

  “Nothing, you do good work. I look almost -- human.”

  Bruce smiled another smile. “Thanks man, I’ve never had a friend I could talk about this stuff with before. Everybody just thinks it’s gross.”

  “No, it’s still gross,” I said “but at least you’ve got something you’re good at.” I practiced moving with the leg brace. It was heavy, but it gave me enough stability that I didn’t look like something out of a George Romero mov
ie. Still, I was pretty sure if I saw my reflection in a mirror I would have jumped.

  “Yeah, well you’re a talking dead guy. That’s got to count for something.”

  “Doesn’t get me a discount a Starbucks.”

  “Taxes,” he said all spacey like.

  “Whaddya mean, taxes?”

  “Gets you out of paying taxes.”

  “Whatever. Look, if I don’t figure this out, a rat is going take my soul.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t believe in all that religious bullshit?”

  “Yeah, well I didn’t believe in life after death, that’s for sure. But now I’m having to re-evaluate a few things.”

  Bruce snapped his fingers. “I know somebody who can help you.”

  “Who?”

  “Let me put her away,” he jerked his head towards the corpse, “And we’ll go.”

  As we wheeled her into the freezer Bruce said, “Such a waste, she was so young. Even though she was overweight, you could see how she was pretty.” He brushed a strand of hair out of her face and said, “You know, the dead are very seductive.”

  “Dude, that's sick.”

  “No, man, not like that. It’s the peace. The pain is over. She’s never going to say the wrong thing again. She can never make a bad choice. Nobody is ever going to look at her again and think that she didn't live up to her potential. She is exactly who she should be and she’s doing exactly what she should be doing. She is at peace.”

  “Then what about me? I’m not at peace. Why don’t I get a helping some of this rest in peace bullshit?”

  “Man, that’s what I’m sayin’. That’s what I’m saying we are going to find out. I think we need to see an expert.”