His eyes darted over to the vents near the ceiling, his nose and brow wrinkling in disgust. He fanned a bony hand in front of him as the ventilation system pulled mosquito repellent into the Freon-cooled air oozing into the clammy basement. “Man, if they’re not careful, they’re gonna kill us, too!” he cackled. When Mary didn’t respond, he raised his eyebrows and turned away.
Gangly strides took him over to a wooden coat rack in the corner, where he seized a white lab coat and threw it on. His hands shot out sleeves that were too short and snatched up his cup of Joe. He blew on it through lean lips and took another drink, never lifting his eyes from Mary’s peaceful corpse. She reminded him of his mother. A large clock on the light green wall behind him made a light clicking sound with each second that passed. The meditative ticking helped him dig up a memory with his mother at the park, where she would let him climb a small tree and ride one of its lower branches like he was the Lone Ranger. He missed her terribly, even after all these years.
The foreign medicinal smell from the bug sprayer yanked him from his sentimental reflection. “Man,” he glowered, lighting a Midnight Storm flavored Yankee Candle on a stainless steel table next to him. “That stuff is givin me a headache.” He slipped the lighter back inside his pocket and turned to Mary. He smiled and shook his head, letting his eyes travel from her rigid hair to her shiny black librarian shoes. “He really should be in show business, not dead business. Just think what he could do for Greta Van Susteren!” he said, drifting into a subdued cackle. “And that dress...” he trailed off, becoming serious. “That dress is somethin else. I tell you what.”
He glanced to the metal double doors leading to the elevator in the hall and pulled his cell phone from his belt. He set his coffee down and hit the camera button, sausage-fingering an email app instead.
“Dammit!” he said crossly, backing out of the screen and carefully hitting the camera button alone this time.
He checked the empty doorway again and shoved the phone beneath Mary’s dress. The flash lit up her Sunday best like a flashlight on the fritz inside a red tent. The camera came back out just as fast as it had slid in. He looked to the doors again and then to the phone’s screen. A wide smile broke out across his lean face.
“Wow, now those are some granny panties!” His shoulders hitched as he laughed. The laugh tapered off and Connor drew in a long breath. “But by God, I bet you knew how to party, didn’t you?” he said, returning to the serious tone and adjusting the swelling beneath his Dockers.
“Connor!” Don yelled, bursting through the double doors in a pressed black suit with a maroon tie and scaring the hell out of Connor in the process. “Is Mrs. Hanson ready to go yet?”
“Pretty close, boss-man,” he responded, nonchalantly slipping the phone into his lab coat pocket. “She looks amazing,” he said politely, grabbing jewelry from a purple cloth covering a small table on wheels.
“I want her upstairs and in her coffin by nine a.m. sharp.” Don instructed, grabbing a metal clipboard from the wall and peering at it over the top of his glasses. “The family will begin arriving at nine-thirty,” he murmured, more to himself than his gangly assistant.
“Will do,” Connor replied, sliding a faded gold wedding ring onto Mary’s left ring finger and shooting her a quick wink.
“All right, get her finished up,” Don ordered, racking the clipboard on its metal hook and straightening his tie. “And here, Mr. Hopkins’ wife just dropped off his watch.” He produced a small case from his coat pocket and set it next to Connor’s coffee. “Put it on him - before - you - forget. His wife will have a conniption-fit if that watch is not on his wrist today. And I want him upstairs at one o’clock on the dot. I get the feeling she will be arriving extra early.”
“Gotcha, boss. Hey, how’s about that Listeria report?” he interjected, sliding Mary’s horn-rimmed glasses onto her doughy face. “Sounds like we better stay away from the cantaloupe for awhile!”
Don pulled an iPhone from his slacks and checked it for any missed calls or messages. “I read about that in this morning’s paper,” he said, whisking pages across the screen with the flick of an index finger. “Interesting choice for a national cover-up. Personally, I would’ve gone with SARS or contaminated water, but what do I know?”
Connor snickered, admiring the way Mary looked with her glasses on. “I know they must think we go through a lot of cantaloupe,” he chuckled lightly. “I also know we’re lucky as shit they didn’t stick us in the blockade and throw away the key!”
Don let out a sharp laugh that echoed loudly against the cinder brick walls. “Pressing charges against us would’ve made it just a tad bit difficult to keep their little story afloat. Besides, how were we supposed to know such a…travesty would be the result? That kind of phenomenon only occurs in the movies, for Christ’s sake.”
Connor picked a piece of lint from Mary’s shoulder and dropped it to the tiled floor below. “But we’re gonna do what they said and stop though…right?” He swallowed before turning to Don.
Don’s eyes looked up from his phone and narrowed. “Yes, Connor,” he said softly, pocketing the cell and smoothing his coat. “We’ve been given another chance and I won’t make the same mistake twice. From here on out, everything’s on the up and up.” He turned to the empty tables scattered about the large room and sighed. “We may need a massive tornado or wildfire to keep us in business, but we’ll uphold our end of the bargain.”
Connor straightened Mary’s hand, which was already starting to curl. “If we didn’t, that Major Grundy would come back and shoot us where we stand. I’ve never seen someone so pissed off before.”
Don chuckled, a rarity in Connor’s eyes. “I thought he was going to shoot us right then.”
“He could’ve, and burned us with all those other suckers. No one would’ve ever known the difference.”
“He would have,” Don said, clasping his hands behind his back and leaning over Mary’s corpse, inspecting it one last time for any imperfections. “But that man’s humanity is what gave us another chance. That and they can’t afford a public panic striking fear into law-abiding citizens.”
A pause, nearly as bloated as Mary’s cheeks, filled the room. It mixed with the scent of embalming fluid, bug spray, decay and the burning Yankee Candle.
“Fear,” Don continued, “can make a man take desperate actions.”
Connor stared at him and turned back to Mary. “Zombies!” he snorted, fixing her collar. “What the fuck, man?”
Don turned to him and arched an eyebrow. “Connor, your elegance with the English language never ceases to amaze me.”
Connor stared at him blankly and then smiled. “Thanks, boss.”
Don rolled his eyes and returned them to the corpse.
“You think they’ll be watching us?”
Don licked a pinky and dabbed it at one end of Mary’s penciled-in eyebrow. “Probably,” he said gravely. “I would.”
Connor nodded, grabbing a pearl necklace from the tray.
“Very well then,” Don concluded, satisfied things were moving in the right direction and heading back towards the double doors. “And Connor?” he said, turning in the doorway.
“Yeah boss?”
“What did I tell you about that nasty little habit of yours?”
Connor paused, holding Mary’s gray head in the air. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as granny panties floated through his mind. “What habit is that?”
Don sharpened his gaze. “I think you know.”
Connor shifted in his stance and blinked uneasily. “Not sure I do.”
“Those cigarettes out back…clean em up!” he barked.
“Oh!” Connor blurted a little too loudly. “I was just about to do that, boss-man,” he grinned sheepishly.
Don hovered in the doorway for a moment longer before releasing a tired sounding breath and turning for the elevator.
Connor clasped the pearls around Mary’s rigid neck and gingerly set
her head back down on a disposable headrest. “Boy, somebody woke up on the wrong side of the embalming table today, huh,” he whispered, grabbing Mr. Hopkins’ watch before he forgot. Don would have his head today if he did, especially after the stress of the last few weeks. Connor cracked the dusty case open and studied the oxidized gold timepiece inside. It had to be forty years old, probably an anniversary or birthday gift that had obviously been special to Mrs. Hopkins. The band was the stretchy kind that would remove arm hairs but the time was correct. His hand rose up and down, inspecting its weight. He snorted, thankful that Dale Walters had not been wearing such a tripe accessory. For if he had, Connor would still be watching Everybody Loves Raymond reruns in standard-definition and that was no way to go through life.
He wrapped the watch in his fist and strutted over to the metal clipboard on the wall. A long finger ran back and forth across the front page while his lips muttering unintelligible words along the way. The finger stopped halfway down the page and so did his lips. “C2,” he murmured, setting the clipboard down and walking over to a wall of square coolers on the other side of the room.
The coolers were three high and six across and C2 was slightly ajar. “What the hell?” he mumbled, hesitantly reaching out and pulling the silver door open. The smell of roses and dirty feet assaulted his senses but he didn’t flinch. Frantically, he pulled a long stainless steel table from within. It rattled as it slid out. Deep wrinkles carved through Connor’s face. “What the...?” he sputtered, staring at the empty table. He bent over and looked into the deep compartment, stale cool air caressing his twisted face. He straightened back up and power walked over to the clipboard, leaving the cooler door wide open.
His eyes zipped back and forth across the paperwork, his finger stopping at the same spot as before. “C2,” he confirmed, glancing back to the open cooler. “Sonofabitch!” He dropped the metal clipboard on Mary’s stomach and hurriedly crossed the room to begin yanking open cooler door after cooler door.
Other than twenty-two-year-old Tyler Stewart - now residing in B6 after rolling his Ford Explorer on his way home from Grizzly’s Grill N Saloon - the coolers were all empty. The smell still inhabited C2, but no sixty-seven-year-old Carl Hopkins: recent heart attack victim. Connor scanned the empty room with flustered eyes, his hands on his hips. He snapped his head to the left and dashed over to another wall with a large walk-in cooler. He whipped it open and stepped inside. The cool air felt good against his sweaty skin but other than some floral arrangements and two bare tables on wheels, it was empty.
A long sigh ruffled his lips as he shut the door and leaned up against it, exasperation stealing across his face. His eyes scoured the room again and came back empty. Reluctantly, he went to pull his cell phone from its holster and panicked when it wasn’t there. “Goddamn it!” he yelled, patting himself down like he was on fire and finding the cell inside his lab coat pocket. He took a deep breath and released it before tapping the touch screen. He pressed the phone to his ear, his heart thumping loudly inside his chest as it began to ring.
“Yes?” Don snapped, demonstrating his heightened lack of patience. The sound of a spoon stirring cream or sugar into a coffee mug in the background broke the awkward silence that followed. “Connor?”
“You’re not going to believe this, boss, but Mr. Hopkins…” He trailed off to swallow, his eyes taking one last sweep around the room, just to be sure he wasn’t missing something so blatantly obvious that Don would never let him live down. “Mr. Hopkins is gone.”
The spoon stopped rattling against the porcelain mug. Connor cringed as the large clock on the wall grew louder. His eyes bounced from the empty tables to the open cooler doors.
“Gone?” Don finally blurted. “What do you mean gone?”
“I mean, he’s not in C2 so I checked all of them. He’s not in any of the coolers down here.”
Don paused, once again giving the floor to the ticking clock and buzzing lights above. “That’s impossible!”
Connor mopped his brow with his hand and began pacing. “Believe me, I know! I had him all ready to go in a blue suit and yellow tie before I left yesterday. I thought maybe you moved him!”
“Well of course, I didn’t move him! Where am I going to take him? To the drive-in?” Don scoffed, making Connor hold the phone out. “I’ll be right down!” Don shouted, hanging up before Connor could reply.
“Man,” Connor groaned, staring at the phone’s screen and leaning up against Mary’s table. He slipped the cell back into its holster and took the clipboard from her bloated belly, flipping through pages and shaking his head. “Woke up in a great mood and I don’t know what the hell happened.”
The mosquito repellant wormed its way into Mary Hanson’s dead brain, poking at her neurons with a sinister finger that could only belong to the Devil himself. Synapse explosions rippled through her body, sending electrical signals bolting through her nervous system, triggering her bloodshot eyes to pop wide open beneath her horn-rimmed glasses. She stared at the cracked ceiling without blinking, her hands - riddled with brown liver spots - still folded across her chest.
“I mean, this ain’t like losing someone’s dinner reservation, for God’s sake,” Connor mumbled, flipping back to the front page.
Mary sat unmoving, focused upon the humming light above, taking it all in. Her blue eyes were no longer blue, blackness had taken them instead. The light flickered, as if trying to flee the evil before it. Then she blinked, awareness creeping into her body like rigor mortis had done just hours ago. Quietly, she sat up behind Connor and stared straight ahead without moving a saggy muscle. Her glasses slid down her pasty nose, covered with a thick application of non-thermogenic make-up that won’t crumble or blotch on dead skin. A dry tongue peeked out from her pale, pink lips and slowly went back inside its hole.
“He was right here!” Connor insisted, scratching his head. “Boy, oh boy, oh boy...” he grumbled, resigning to rub his forehead. “We are in the doghouse now.”
Mary turned her freshly styled head to Connor and studied him with sunken eyes.
“It just doesn’t make any sense,” he said, turning back to C2’s open door. “What a cluster-fuck,” he moaned as Mary grabbed him from behind and buried her dentures into his skinny neck. He didn’t even have a chance to scream before blood started squirting from his jugular like a lawn sprinkler on a hot summer’s night. Connor saw Mary’s librarian shoes wrap around his waist and things suddenly made a whole lot less sense. The clipboard slipped from his fingers and clattered to the shiny floor as he struggled with the firm grip around his neck, shocked not only by the fact that Mary was alive, but by her strength as well.
He clawed at her face, piling make-up and dead gray skin beneath his fingernails. But it was too late. Everything turned fuzzy around the edges. He gasped for air that wouldn’t come. Just before he slipped to the other side, he saw Tyler Stewart push himself out of his cooler and stand up. Connor’s eyes bulged in their sockets and blood vessels burst across his corneas as Tyler’s naked body began limping closer.
Chapter Twenty-Six
White spots danced across Rory’s field of vision when he saw the old man tear a chunk of Rachel’s flesh from her neck with his teeth. The intruder threw his bald head back and chewed, dripping blood onto his yellow necktie while Rachel lay twitching on the living room floor with blood gushing from her neck like a fountain. Rory stopped breathing, watching the events unfolding before him in slow motion. He blinked, the only action he could force his body to take, as the man went back down for another bite and tore a hole in one of Rachel’s milky white cheeks. The stiff glanced at Rory out the corner of his bloodshot eye and growled as he chewed, like a dog when someone stands too close to their food bowl.
Rory gathered himself and snapped out of it, yanking his gun from its holster. His finger wrapped around the trigger and pulled five times, sending the old coot tumbling. Rory rushed to Rachel’s side, the gun still in his hand, and slid to his knees. “
Rachel!” he finally spoke, setting the gun down in her blood and cradling her head. He stared into her panic-filled eyes, her body trembling in his arms. “Rachel?” he said faintly, his voice cracking.
She stared at him with frightened eyes and opened her mouth to speak, but only blood came out. Her hand found his arm and squeezed tightly.
“It’s okay, just relax,” he said, pressing his hand against the jagged wound in her neck, which only seemed to make the blood spurt from her cheek that much faster. “Shit!” he said, glancing to the old man’s crumpled body. He turned back to Rachel, who was growing paler by the second. The pooling blood slowly crawled across the wooden floor and found his knees. He gasped at its volume and turned to the open front door. “Help!” he screamed, his pulse pounding thickly in his temples. He turned back to Rachel, trying to catch his breath and figure out his next move.
On his knees, the engagement ring inside his front pocket felt as big as a shoebox. His mind reeled faster as Rachel squirmed on the living room floor. He screamed for help again. Then his cell phone started ringing, reminding him that he even had a cell phone. Carefully, he set Rachel’s head down in the crimson pool, turning her blond hair red, and dug the phone from his pocket. It was his boss, Sheriff Hooper. Rory managed to hit the talk button but couldn’t find his speech.
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