The Living Dead

by Kraus, Daniel

  “Is this…?” Charlie looked at Luis. “Acocella. Luis. Is this…?”

  He did not respond, because whatever Charlie’s question was, the answer was simultaneously absolutely yes and no way in hell. John Doe, however, did respond. The corpse redirected his head in Charlie’s direction. More blood, cool and thick, syruped from the hole in his neck. His white eyes landed on hers, There was something soft there, like the cataracts of an old dog; they were also as unreasonable as stone.

  Luis’s hand again moved by instinct, not to sign the cross but to touch his earpiece. Whatever this was, it must be recorded; Jefferson Talbot might have won the election for ME, but it would be Luis Acocella who handled this right. Doing so might also save his sanity. He depressed the button.

  “John Doe is moving.” His voice was distant and pipsqueak. “That’s John Doe forwarded to the San Diego Medical Examiner’s Office by St. Michael the Archangel on October 23. It’s been four…” He consulted his binder: comforting checkboxes and fillable blanks. “Nearly four and a half hours since ETD and”—he looked at his watch—“three and a half since pronouncement. Vital organs have been extracted. But he is moving. Repeat: John Doe is moving and in a most deliberate—”

  The corpse lifted his right arm toward Charlie.

  Luis’s first impression of the gesture, one he would carry until the end, was not one of violent threat. John Doe had awakened, and his first instinct was to reach out. Who could say why? For contact, for help, for security. But his right deltoid, having been victim to first a bullet and second Charlie’s scalpel, hadn’t the integrity to finish the gesture. The arm sagged.

  Nothing was wrong with the corpse’s hand flexors. His fingers tightened, relaxed, tightened. This motion seemed radically different. This was no open-palmed yearning. These were claws out to snag, an idea worsened by John Doe’s splintered, yellow nails. However he had longed for Charlie in his first seconds, now he craved her in a different way. His half-lidded eyes bulged in her direction, and she took a step back, rattling the tray of surgical tools.

  Luis heard the zing of Charlie swiping her PM40 from the cart, Though he could diagnose her fear from her blanched face and shaking hand, she did not look to be panicking. She held the scalpel at her side. That was good, though he did not like the way she stared at John Doe’s clenching fingers. It was the expression of a woman on the edge of a dance floor being offered the hand of a poisonous man.

  Keep talking, he told himself. He hit his headset button.

  “I’ve read cases,” he continued, “of contractions. Twitches. But we’re four and a half hours in, here. The arm, the head—they’re moving in concert. This is—”

  “I know what this is,” Charlie snapped, “It’s a man staring at me.”

  “That’s … ridiculous.”

  “Put that in your report,” Charlie said.

  The corpse tried to sit up. He couldn’t, of course; the Y cut had robbed all strength from his abdominals. But there was no mistaking the effort. The flabby obliques quivered beneath a cake of drying blood. The gluteus maximus, flattened to the table, drew taut. John Doe rocked slightly, side to side, testing his equilibrium. He looked like an infant, innocent and ambitious, trying to roll over for the first time.

  This realization sliced Luis with a PM40’s ease, He thought of Rosa, in bed by now, the cherubic smile of her sleeping face. She’d been pregnant once, an event they’d celebrated with thoughtless enthusiasm until her miscarriage. Rosa had called him at work, saying she didn’t feel well. Instead of going home, he’d suggested phoning their ob-gyn. After she hung up with Luis, Rosa miscarried in the upstairs bathroom. She scrubbed the room afterward so he never had to see a spot of blood, Subsequent exams diagnosed Rosa with uterine abnormalities that made bringing a baby to term unlikely, even risky. Luis assured Rosa he didn’t mind, but sometimes when he had to navigate the bathroom by moonlight, his sleep-fogged peripheral vision caught the aborted baby coyly hiding in the bathtub, behind the toilet, in the towel closet, somehow living off trash bits, waiting to reintroduce itself to the family.

  For a moment, John Doe was that child born anew, this time right in front of Luis, where he could do something about it. If his diener got out of the way, he could slide in beside the corpse, put a gentling hand on the straining body, whisper calming words, apologies, whatever it took.

  “Charlie, step back,” Luis said.

  Her eyes were locked on the corpse, her hand squeezing the scalpel.

  “Rutkowski,” he hissed. “Step back.”

  It was the miscarriage all over again: he waited too long to offer help, Rocking, John Doe achieved enough momentum to allow his torso to slip across his own bodily fluids and topple over the lip of the table. It was an ugly, profane fall, stiff limbs flailing, genitals flopping, the curtain of parted chest flesh rippling on the way down. John Doe landed on his back with a loud slap, spattering tissue across Charlie’s legs. She scuttled backward, her free hand pulling the instrument cart with her. John Doe’s arms and legs kept moving, the legs of an upturned beetle.

  “Not dead,” Charlie said. “What did I do?”

  “He is dead,” Luis said.

  “I cut out his insides!” she cried. “What did I do?”

  “You dropped his heart on the fucking floor!” Luis shouted, “He’s dead! He’s dead!”

  Was he trying to convince himself? Or the people who might listen to this recording? He looked down. The heart, flat as a purse, was two feet away. Impulse gripped him, and he kicked the heart to prove to Charlie she was talking madness. The heart wept red tears on impact and bounced against John Doe’s side, a pool-table bank shot. It got the corpse’s attention. John Doe found Charlie, now upsettingly far away. Lodged against table legs, the corpse had more leverage and was able to flop himself over. He began to pull himself along on his split belly. My baby, Luis thought wildly, is crawling already.

  John Doe pulled himself forward with first one elbow, then the other, functioning despite the dissected shoulder.

  “What does it want?” Charlie begged.

  Luis found it an astute question. Because the corpse did want; he wanted palpably, achingly. Luis pictured the pedestrians after John Doe’s shooting, how little they’d cared about life versus death, how quickly they’d gone back to the Novocain glow of the same gadgets he adored, how little they, or he, wanted anything real at all. The corpse had brought want slamming back into the world: his want to get closer to them, their reawakened want to survive.

  John Doe’s limbs, slathered with autopsy ooze, fought for traction. He slid closer to Charlie, who did not look capable of further movement.

  “Stop,” she ordered.

  The corpse did not stop. His jaw opened. Bloody drool sluiced down his chin. He heaved himself forward. His spine sank, and Luis wondered if the emptied torso and extracted ribs might result in total skeletal collapse. Not yet, anyway—John Doe’s left hand snagged Charlie’s tennis shoe.

  Charlie flung the instrument cart. Scalpels, probes, forceps, knives, and scissors all hit the floor with clacks and clangs Luis believed would reverberate forever. He watched John Doe’s right hand land atop one of the scalpels. Again, it was as with a baby: put something in baby’s hand and baby grabs it. The corpse’s fingers closed around the PM40. The blade, kept razor-sharp by Charlie, cut through all four fingers so deeply they folded against the back of the corpse’s hand.

  Luis winced with a father’s urge to console, but John Doe’s expression reflected no pain. He didn’t seem to mind losing half his fingers. He kept inching toward Charlie. Luis, meanwhile, just stood there, blandly narrating the bald facts of the matter (“He is crawling. I can see the hamstring muscles flexing through the exit wound in his thigh.”), while doing nothing whatsoever to affect them.

  Charlie did; she always did. Luis had always felt that she operated in the real world while he bobbed in the ether of ideas. Charlie never ran out of stories of youthful partying, drinking, and getting
high, all while navigating creeps and gropers, from crap-job supervisors to med school professors, She’d been mugged three times in the Bronx. She’d defended her drunken old man, Maury Rutkowski, twice in bar brawls, She’d once tackled a burglar robbing a liquor store.

  Now Charlene Rutkowski reared back and made one hell of a kick. Her sneaker struck the corpse square in the chin. John Doe’s head snapped back. The weight of his skull twisted him sharply right. His pelvic bone pivoted through his own lubricating sludge until he faced Luis. Two teeth fell from between John Doe’s lips, borne on a cascade of pink slime. As if nothing had happened, he recommenced crawling, now toward Luis.

  The movement broke Luis’s paralysis. Unlike Charlie, he had no hero in him, but if he held it together, he could still be of use—his recording of this event, whatever it was, must be delivered before the next impossible event prevented it. He whipped off his earpiece and rushed to the computer. He jumped on the stool so fast he nearly bounced off it. His gloved hand smeared blood, a hallucinogenic red, against the mouse’s white plastic. He cursored for the VSDC app, overshot it, tried again, overshot in the other direction.

  “Sux!” Charlie cried, “We’ll shoot him with sux.”

  “Get it,” he confirmed.

  Luis heard bootie-coated shoes rush away, followed by the creak of an opening autoclave. A small clink indicated the removal of a hypodermic. A squishing noise drew Luis’s attention, and he glanced to the left to see that John Doe had followed him. Behind the corpse trailed a foot-wide smear of blood and fluids. Luis cursed, then single-clicked the VSDC app, then triple-clicked it, neither of which did squat.

  “Shit!” he shouted.

  A blur: Charlie darting past Luis. He heard her keys jangle as she unlocked the glass door of a pharmacy. With hands this unsteady, it would have taken him ten tries to do the same. He looked back at John Doe. The thing had halved the distance toward him, ten feet away now. The dead man’s back was beginning to droop into his vacant body cavity, his spine becoming a reptilian ridge. The milk white of the corpse’s eyes glowed as the monitor brightened with the VSDC app.

  Luis hissed in victory and stabbed his earpiece with a cable connected to the desktop. He cursored across the interface, clicked open a menu, and slid down to choose an option. Too far, the wrong option.

  “Shit shit shit shit!”

  He clicked Back and was met by the Circle of Hell, that ubiquitous, pulsing wait symbol. He swung his head back. John Doe was six feet away, having trouble with the corner of a cabinet jabbing into his side. The left flap of his chest had adhered to a dry patch of floor. The flesh stretched as John Doe struggled. Luis watched hairy epidermis rip unevenly, revealing beige fat beneath.

  Back to the computer: the Circle of Hell still circled.

  A crisp crack, a scream. He looked up to find Charlie in a posture of comic terror, both hands clutching the air beside her ears, the hypodermic shattered at her feet.

  “Fuck me!” she wailed.

  “Plastic!” he shouted. “Use a plastic one!”

  “Don’t yell at me!”

  “You dropped the heart! You dropped the syringe! Stop dropping things!”

  Charlie ran for another needle. Back to the monitor. The app’s home screen again. Luis pulled down the menu with arduous care and clicked to load the VSDC’s entry page.

  A meaty ribbon of flesh lay by the cabinet corner like a dead snake. John Doe had pulled his love handle straight through it. The dead body was five feet from Luis. John Doe used his good arm to pull himself a few inches closer and reached for Luis despite the distance. When his fingers closed on nothing, he returned to crawling. The thing was stupid, Luis realized. For some reason, the idea stung, as if he’d just indicted himself and everyone he knew.

  Now beside Luis, Charlie inserted her fresh needle into a drug bottle and raised the plunger, filling the translucent hypodermic with liquid. Succinylcholine, a neuromuscular paralytic that took mere seconds to kick in, was used by anesthesiologists to relax a patient’s muscles to allow insertion of an endotracheal tube. Too much could be fatal. Tonight, Luis had lost all sense of fatal. He watched Charlie fill the entire barrel.

  Back to the computer once more. The icon of his transcribed voice file was waiting, as innocuous as the hundreds of others he’d sent during his time on the job. He clicked it and hit Send. He waited for the confirmation, prayed for it, but never got to see it.

  Cold flesh enveloped his ankle.

  John Doe had grabbed Luis with his right hand, the one sliced by the scalpel, When Luis kicked, the front halves of the corpse’s fingers, attached by strands of flesh, flopped like loose shoelaces.

  This corpse couldn’t hurt him, Luis thought, feeling a thin rod of scientific curiosity seep through his panic, Maybe he’d sent the file to the VSDC too soon. Maybe there was more to learn here. Something historic. Isn’t that what the sign in his office suggested? THIS IS THE PLACE.

  John Doe’s head jerked forward. Teeth clacked, chiming like china, along Luis’s pant cuff.

  Luis retreated a few feet from his stool.

  “The fuck was that?!” he yelled.

  “He tried to bite you,” Charlie said in astonishment.

  “The fuck!”

  “Move.” Her voice had gone hard, “I’m loaded.”

  She lifted the syringe, thumb to plunger, and began to crouch. Luis coiled his right arm around her waist to hold her back.

  “Charlie,” he said, “wait.”

  John Doe kept coming. His left hand happened upon a leg of the stool. He pulled experimentally, The stool tipped onto a single leg before settling back. The corpse’s white eyes studied the curious development. Baby stuff again, toying with objects, observing outcomes. No, Luis couldn’t think that way, not if they were going to put this thing down.

  “Don’t get close,” Luis said. “You could get infected.”

  “You think this is some kind of disease?”

  The stool fell, the loudest crash of the night. John Doe didn’t flinch, though it hit the tile an inch from his face. He stared at the stool for a few seconds as if evaluating prey. His neck cranked again, and he looked at Luis and Charlie. His mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, strands of mucus stretching from upper to lower jaw. He planted his hands on the floor and moved toward them.

  “I’ll get him from behind,” Charlie said. “Intramuscular.”

  “Do not do that!”

  “Why the hell not?”

  Luis drew back a few feet, out of John Doe’s range, tugging Charlie with him.

  “What if it doesn’t work?”

  “Acocella! There’s enough curare in here to drop a T. rex!”

  “Think! He’s not breathing. He doesn’t have lungs. He doesn’t even have a heart! What’s sux going to do?”

  “What’s he on, then? Batteries?”

  Luis scolded himself for his sharp tone. There are answers. Be calm. Be professional. He scrutinized the thing—no, the cadaver. John Doe’s eyeballs shifted their weird white gaze between him and Charlie. His lips wrinkled back from his teeth. A muscle along his side spasmed uncontrollably, Batteries: Charlie had to be correct. Some kind of power source had plugged into this thing’s cerebellum. Following the trail of the corpse’s grotesque slither to the beginning, Luis noticed his smartphone resting on the counter, aglow from missed alerts.

  “What about wireless?” he whispered, “We’re all holding little computers, soaking up who knows what. Maybe some kind of bad signal gets sent, hits this John Doe like a tuning fork.”

  “This is crazy enough,” Charlie said, “without you going crazy too.”

  She was right, Luis told himself. This wasn’t something to be strapped to a table or slid onto a rack for study. It was a miscarriage, if not the Miscarriage—a flawed rebirth on a tidal wave of rotten amniotic fluid. Like Rosa in the bathroom, perhaps Luis’s job was to take care of this miscarriage so no one else had to see it.

  “You won’t think les
s of me,” he asked softly, “if I kill it?”

  Charlie turned to face him. Her smock crinkled against his.

  “It’s like you said,” she replied simply. “He’s already dead.”

  Luis looked toward the northeast corner of the room and felt Charlie following his gaze. Though she’d never asked about it, she had to be aware of the cabinet there, black-and-yellow striped and labeled SDPD. Some questions had obvious answers, especially in a country where mass shootings barely crested the news-feed froth. Luis remembered voting against the need for the police magazine, saying he’d rather have a bigger latex-glove budget. Now he needed what was inside. It felt like failure, capitulating to a savage mind-set that had always been his job, as a doctor, to fight against.

  He gently took hold of the key ring in Charlie’s hand. He pulled, but she pulled back. It had the same effect as some scenes in the romances he occasionally watched with Rosa, when a woman pulled a man’s tie to bring him closer.

  “Let me do it.” She smiled as best she could and shrugged, “I’m your diener.” She pronounced it perfectly, Luis realized she’d known all along how to say it and had been doing it wrong for comic effect—or to feed his ego. He hated that he’d ever thought an iota less of her than she deserved.

  His effort to smile back was disrupted by the hard, wet smack of John Doe’s hand on the tile.

  Luis broke toward the corner. His hands, as predicted, were less steady than Charlie’s, but on the third try, he slotted the key into the cabinet lock. Unlatching a bolt burred with rust from nonuse, he opened the door. He knew what was inside, expected to see what he saw, but still paused before peeling off his gloves. He didn’t dare wear latex when he needed a grip this sure.