Resurrection

by Curran, Tim

  Harry wiped rain from his face. “Shit-work. That’s why we pull it.”

  It was bad right from the start.

  The rain was hammering down, the ground turned to sluicing mud. Your feet sank three or four inches into that sodden clay every time you moved. The graves rapidly filled with water as Harry and the others dug down, opened them up. The caskets were old and rotten, fell apart as you tried to lift them free. And inside them, inside those shattered and moldering boxes, just skeletons, mummies, cadavers sewn with some muscle or ligament, maybe some corded meat, not much else. Some of those poor bastards had been in the ground for years. Now and again, they’d find a few fresh one…and the stink of what was inside, Jesus.

  Thirty minutes into it, all the cons were soaking wet and black from head to toe with mud. The only color on ‘em was the orange clay on their hands.

  Some of the recent burials had been stripped by rats and Harry saw plainly the elaborate tunnel system the vermin had dug, pawing their way right into the boxes. If there was anything in this world that was more determined to stay alive than cons, it had to be those goddamn rats, Harry figured.

  Not that he was surprised, really.

  After the first few corpses they found peeled down to the muscle and sinew, he got used to it. Rats. Working the mortuary detail, you were always beating those pricks off with broom handles. First day on the job, Jacky Kripp showed him how to set traps and poison to keep those scavenging ghouls out.

  But that was above ground and this was below…seeing their determination to get at the corpses was just sickening.

  “I ain’t gonna have an appetite for a week,” Roland Smyth said.

  “Just stiffs, man,” Harry told him. “Let’s just get it done with.”

  “Just stiffs, my black ass,” Smyth called to him from an open grave. “I ain’t talking stiffs, motherfucker, I’m talking worms.”

  And they were finding plenty of those.

  According to regulations, all the exhumed caskets had to be recorded along with their contents. That was the worst part. The old ones smelled yellow and aged like moldy carpets buried in moist loam, but those that had been in the ground less than a year just reeked to high heaven. Several cons went to their knees when the lids were popped and roiling pockets of corpse gas blew out at them and they got a good look at the mildewing, collapsing things inside.

  That was bad, but the worms were worse.

  They gave a lot of the men—Henry included—bad cases of the creepy-crawlies.

  You’d pop a box, just not knowing what you might see. Maybe just a stiff dissolving to a gray jelly of putrescence or a pile of bones laced with grave fungi or maybe even a few dead rats that never found their way out again boiled right down to clots of fur. But now and again, you’d find a skullish face threaded with long, slinking red worms that, yes, looked very much like living licorice whips. Great knots and bunches of them feeding from eye sockets and into mouths, worming tangles of wet red wires looped around rib staves and roped around vertebrae like climbing vines. Some skeletons—or things on their way to becoming skeletons— had hundreds of the worms matted and snarled over their bones and some of the fresh ones had split open from crotch to throat, bundles of those worms coiling in their bellies or lacing up the edges of their autopsy incisions like a woman’s corset.

  It was disgusting.

  And maybe even that didn’t quite cut it.

  Harry and Roland Smyth were down in a grave that was rapidly filling with mud as the rain continued to fall and water seeped in dank rivers from the slick clay walls. Using a crowbar, they snapped open the lid, and right away that moist green smell rose into their faces making them gag. Inside, the body was actually moving as the worms nested happily in it. Harry moved quick to work the lid back on, but slipped in the muck and fell, his left arm sinking right up to the elbow in the spongy abdomen of the corpse. And that was sickening enough in its own right, like sinking your arm into wet leaves…but what was possibly worse was, for that instant his arm was in there before he drew it back with a cry, he could feel those worms in there sliding over his forearm like slimy shoelaces. When he yanked his arm out, just offended, physically offended, two or three of those worms were caught in the sleeve of his shirt.

  “Jesus and shit,” Roland Smyth said. “Get rid of them.”

  Which was what Harry was trying to do. The feel of them coiling and slithering against his flesh was almost enough to slit his mind right open. Finally he shook them free and one of them plopped right on the chest of the corpse. And as he stood there, wanting to vomit, that long red worm slid right back inside the body with a rubbery sound like thread pulled through a cuff.

  “Quit fucking around down there, you morons,” one of the hacks said. He was watching the backhoe swing its boom into place. “Let’s get this done with.”

  And that’s pretty much the sort of repulsive, nightmarish job it was. Like some kind of exhumation assembly line. The backhoe’s boom would be swung over a grave, the chains secured around the box, and the casket brought up to what passed for the light of day.

  It was hard, dirty work, but they kept at it.

  The boxes were just cheap pine affairs slapped together in the carpentry shop and most rotted right out in a few years. Mostly, they were light and fairly easy to stand up so they could get the chains around them. But some had burst open from gases and they had to dig through the muddy bottoms of graves, sorting mummified human anatomy from coffin wreckage. A few others had absorbed so much moisture that it took three grunting men to get them up enough so they could be winched out by the backhoe’s boom. Many of them, encrusted with clay and mineral deposits, were nearly impossible to move and others were tangled with tree roots that had to be chopped free…from the outside and the inside.

  They could throw another five years at me, Harry thought, and I’d jump at it rather than do this. Fucking graverobbers. Goddamn worms and mud and stink.

  He figured he’d never get the smell off him. On a good day, things didn’t smell real sweet at Slayhoke, but come tonight, there was going to a group of cons that were going to smell like open graves.

  Mo Borden didn’t seem to mind it.

  Him and a couple of big bikers, a few of the blacks and Indians that were always working the iron pile out in the yard—the lot of them too damn big to squeeze down in the graves—manhandled the boxes once they were out of the ground, hefting them up onto the flatbeds of waiting trucks like movers handling pianos and sofas. Mo, he was especially impassive about it all. The bodies meant nothing to him. Maybe it was being a farm boy and seeing the kind of shit those boys did. Mo had once told Harry how they buried cows when they died and how one time, how they’d had to disinter one that was poisoning a pond with its run-off. Dead summer and they had to dig it back up…it was so soft, they actually had to shovel it out of its hole.

  Watching him with a decayed bag of bones thrown over one shoulder while he dragged a casket with his free hand reminded Harry of those newsreels of the concentration camps. Those crazy bastards there, pulling a corpse from a heap with one hand while chewing on a sandwich with the other.

  Just absolutely desensitized.

  “Okay,” Krickman finally said,” take five.”

  “About fucking time,” a con named Joey Creet said. He was a pudgy little guy who had a thing for knives. Something his wife found out about when he caught her in bed with another man.

  Creet walked over to the truck for a cup of coffee…and let out a shriek. A sunken grave had collapsed right beneath him, probably from subsurface subsidence. He sank right up to his belly in the ground, shouting and swearing and trying to wriggle his girth free.

  “Lookit that,” Jacky Kripp said, “he’s a fucking Jack-in-the-Box.”

  Both cons and hacks laughed at that one, but Creet wasn’t thinking it was too goddamn funny. A couple cons pulled him up and he was just brown with mud.

  Harry got his cup of coffee and had a cigarette. He stood befor
e an open grave with Roland Smyth. They were both fouled with mud and clay. The rain kept falling in a cold drizzle and neither man could remember now what it was like to be dry or warm. The graveyard which had been weedy and overgrown a few weeks before, was now just a rank sea of yellow, sluicing mud. Far as the eye could see, nothing but crude markers and wooden crosses riding those low hills and sloping hollows. The flatbed trucks were heaped with muddy brown coffins piled up like Christmas presents. Another truck was heaped with the dead whose boxes had rotted away or fallen apart. Somebody had thrown a tarp over all that hollow-socketed deadwood because it was giving some of the cons the creeps. But even with the tarp in place, a few fleshless arms and trailing stick fingers hung out. There was a heap of casket wreckage arranged like the wood for a Boy Scout bonfire and Jacky Kripp said they’d have one hell of a wienie roast in a few weeks when things dried up.

  But nobody thought that was funny but the hacks.

  “Fuck,” Harry said, “this’ll take weeks to do. I mean weeks.”

  Smyth didn’t argue the point. “Gotta be a thousand graves here. Shit and shit.”

  It would have honestly been hard to imagine a more despicable and abhorrent job and you could see it on those grime-streaked, rain-spattered faces. The realization that this was the kind of duty you pulled for breaking society’s laws. This is what it got you. It got you wet and dirty and sickened in a flooded cemetery.

  And wasn’t that just peachy?

  “All right, you faggots,” Krickman announced, “back to it.”

  Shovels and picks were grabbed and the slow, backbreaking process of digging through that slough of muck began again. A couple of bikers opened a casket and it was filled with rats…big and greasy-looking and pissed-off. One of the bikers got bit and another jumped out of the hole with two rodents clinging to his pants. Krickman and the other hacks unloaded their riotguns into that infested box and that was that. The bitten man was sent to the infirmary.

  The rain really started to pour down then, coming down in sheets and curtains and you couldn’t see more than twenty feet in any direction. Even the gray concrete hulk of the mortuary itself disappeared. The rain pounded the earth and the graveyard continued to swamp, mud bubbling, a fetid mist boiling off it like steam rising from a witch’s cauldron.

  A black dude named Ty Lauder was down squaring off a grave, trying to clean away enough mud so he could get the box open for inspection. A crowbar was passed down to him and the lid came open with a creaking, groaning sound.

  “Contents A-okay,” he called up out of the hole, hammering the lid back in place. Then he made a funny gasping sound, said, “Something…something happening down here, man.”

  “Sure is,” Krickman said, “you’re gonna be in solitary for a week you don’t get your black ass moving.”

  There was no laughter coming up out of that hole and for some reason, this gave everyone pause. Picks and shovels paused in dirty, wet hands. All you could hear was the rain coming down.

  “No, something’s really happening here,” Lauder said and there was a note of panic to his voice. “The lid…the lid popped back off…motherfucker, that body moved.”

  “Full of worms,” one of the hacks said.

  There was laughter from the cons…but strained and unpleasant sounding as if maybe they were beginning to sense something, too.

  Lauders let out a small, economical scream that made everyone start paying attention. “No, no…this stiff moved…I saw the hand move,” he said, that panic really settling into his voice now. “Help me out of here! C’mon, help me the fuck out of here!”

  He was trying to climb back out, but the sides of the grave were so sodden they just came apart in his hands and he kept sliding back down. “Get me out of here! Get me out of here! Goddammit, get me the fuck out of here! Get me out! GET ME THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!”

  By then, half a dozen cons were over there, looking down into the grave. A dozen more pushing in for a look. The hacks kept telling them to break it up, but they weren’t listening. Harry and a couple others reached down and grasped Lauder’s flaying hands, started yanking him out of there as that grave just seemed to collapse in on itself. But his hands were slick with clay and they kept losing their grip and he kept sliding back down, just out of his head with fear. His eyes were bulging and mouth contorted in a silent scream.

  And Harry could feel it spreading amongst them in a cold wave: fear. It jumped from man to man and you could see it in the widening of eyes and lips pressed tightly together, bodies scrambling to get away from that open grave.

  Harry and another got a good hold on Lauders and pulled him up and out. He ran right over the top of them. Down in that hole, a form sheathed in a membrane of sucking gray mud was sitting up in its coffin.

  And then…madness.

  Later, Harry thought that you could actually feel something happening. Like standing beneath high tension lines and feeling all the power flowing and feeding and arcing. It was like that, except this energy was coming from the ground. The earth beneath their feet was thrumming, vibrating. And right then, white and scabrous hands began to emerge through the layer of mold like spidery orchids blooming. Not just blooms then, but white roots and limbs and gnarled shoots, trunks and boles and spreading branches until the entire graveyard was alive with the resurrection and a cadaver forest blossomed and thickened and covered the ground in a noxious, seeking growth. Pallid, mossy faces rose from the mud and skinless fingers stretched. Like worms drawn to the surface by rain, the dead were squirming up from their graves, more all the time.

  The stacked caskets began to shift and move. Lids clattered open and skull-faces were washed by chill rain. Every casket was in motion, meatless fists beating against lids. And in the other truck, the tarp fell away as dozens and dozens of corpses rotted down to rawboned scarecrows came alive and began to slide free to the ground in a grim army, grinning and whispering and chattering blackened teeth.

  The graveyard seemed to explode.

  The dead slid from the earth and broke the surface of deep, muddy puddles, water running from empty eye sockets and numerous worm-holes. Markers tumbled and fell, shadows slinked forward, charnel voices screeched into the storm. The hacks started shooting with their riotguns and the sound was of thunderous death knells and funeral bells gonging.

  Harry saw men being pulled screaming down into the mire of mud like jungle explorers sucked into quicksand, others simply dragged down into submerged graves by clutching hands.

  But then he was running with Jacky Kripp and this was surely the point where reality ripped the seat out of its pants and showed him its scaly, dirty behind.

  The rain continued to fall.

  Men continued to scream.

  By the time Harry and the others made it to the mortuary and slammed the great door shut against the world, there was only a silence in the cemetery. A silence punctuated by rain filling puddles and the shuffling of feet as the dead moved towards the prison itself with squishy, slopping sounds.

  6

  “Someone’s coming,” Miriam Blake said. “Be ready, girls.”

  “I know him,” Rita Zirblanksi said as she saw Deke Ericksen walk up the sidewalk in front of the Blake house. “He used to deliver our papers, he—”

  Miriam pulled her away from the curtain. “There you go again, dear, and luckily for you, hear I am to set you straight. You don’t know any of them. They may look like people you know or went to school with or who even delivered your paper, but believe me, they are not any longer who they were. Things are getting desperate and dangerous out there and anyone, anyone, would do the most awful things to you to get what you have. They’d slit your throat, they’d rape and rob you and that’s because order has broken down because of liberals empowering all the crawly things in our society. All the dregs and effing bottom-feeders that should have been content to live in the sidewalk cracks and dirty, low places just as God intended.”

  Rita tried to swallow. “This is gettin
g creepy.”

  “Creepy, you think?” Miriam said, grinning like a cardboard Halloween witch taped to a window. “Do you think it’s creepy, child? Well, indeed it is, I suppose. But this is only the beginning! You wait, you just wait until nightfall, then you’ll see! When all the crazy ones are howling in the streets and those pale horrors begin slinking about knocking on doors and scratching at windows! Then you’ll see and you’ll be glad I’m here to protect you.”

  Rhonda had tears in her eyes; she didn’t know what to think.

  First, Mrs. Blake had invited them in, given them a lecture about fighting, and then filled their heads with lots of weird politics, and now…now this. Rhonda knew none of it was right. Rita was getting flushed and that meant her temper was rising. It was only a matter of time before she got out of hand and Rhonda figured on getting out of hand with her.

  “We should go…go and see if our parents are home yet,” Rita said, fully expecting Miriam to come down on her.

  She was not disappointed.

  “Oh, no, no, no,” Miriam said. “I won’t hear of it. You’re safe here and I’m not about to let you go. It’s not safe. It’s simply not effing safe out there.”

  Rhonda and Rita looked at each other. This was all getting to feel like they’d been kidnapped or something. Were being held against their will. Like they were Hansel and Grethel being held by the hag in a candycane cottage. And with the way Miriam’s eyes were lit up with some dirty, dim light, maybe that wasn’t too far off the mark.

  Rhonda sighed. This was going to be up to her and she knew it. People were of the notion that both Zirblanski twins were hotheads and savages, but that wasn’t necessarily the case. They both had their moments, but more often than not Rita was the one who lost control first. It was boredom, maybe. Rita was very high strung and when she had no outlet for the energy that surged inside her, she had a nasty habit of striking out at whatever was near. More often than not, that happened to be Rhonda. Not that Rhonda was above giving it back in spades when that little witch started it, but she was the calmer of the two. The more reasonable. You pushed Rita into a corner, she’d scratch your eyes out; you pushed Rhonda into a corner, she’d warn you to back away before she scratched your eyes out.