by Leod D. Fitz
I didn’t even pull around back. I was honestly frightened that if I tried driving the extra thirty feet I’d pass out and plow into the building. Instead I parked out front, at an angle, blocking three different parking spots, and stumbled to the front door, where, through some miracle, I managed to fit the key into the lock.
Immediately inside I collapsed to the ground. My final two thoughts before passing out were, first, that as long as I stayed pressed up against the door, it really wouldn’t be that big of a deal that I hadn’t managed to lock it, and two, while the floor wasn’t quite so comfortable as a bath tub or a coffin, it was quite cool, and wasn’t that nice.
Chapter 14
Thump, thump.
“Mr. Walter? Is that you?”
Thump, thump.
“Mr. Walter? Are you all right?”
I wished that the giant, rotting rabbit corpse would stop kicking me and stop talking. He was quite tasty, but I don’t like my food to converse with me, as a general rule. Plus, why was he calling me Mr. Walter? Nobody called me that.
Thump, thump.
“Mr. Walter? I’m going to call nine-one-one, okay?”
“Wuh? Call… Oh, shit, don’t let her do that!” The voice was absurdly loud, as though somebody was kneeling down next to me and sticking their lips into my ear.
Oh, wait.
Oh, wait!
“WAIT!” I shouted as I forced myself to stand up, hampered by the awkward, heavy thing sticking from the side of my neck. “Jesus, Tricia! Don’t do that!”
The door, which had been thumping against me as Trish tried to force her way in, popped open. I remembered just in time not to actually step outside lest somebody driving by see something that required an explanation. I pressed Orrin’s face against the wall and leaned my own out just far enough that I could yell at my new employee.
“Trish! Get in here!”
Tricia, who had been on her way to one of the neighboring lots, presumably to use their phone, turned and jogged back.
“Oh, thank goodness you’re okay, Mr. Walter. I was worried you’d had a heart attack or something right in front of the door. I couldn’t get in and I thought— “
She stopped talking as she walked into the lobby.
There was a heartbeat of awkward silence before she took a deep breath and opened her mouth to scream.
I managed to clamp a hand over her mouth in time to mute it.
Once she was out of breath I removed my hand from her mouth, grabbed her shoulders and shook her. “Don’t do that!”
“Um, hello. Pleasure to meet you again,” the chimera said politely.
“Shut up, Orrin,” I growled. “Tricia, what the hell are you doing here?”
“Uh.”
“Patricia!”
“But...”
“PATRICIA! FOCUS!”
She shook her head. “Uh, sorry, I, uh… you said that we’d talk about my raise tomorrow. I mean, yesterday you said that tomorrow… I mean, today, we’d talk about a raise. Tomorrow from yesterday, I mean, which is obviously today. I just assumed you wanted me to come in so we could talk about it and… uh… are you… okay?”
I closed my eyes and rubbed the bridge of my nose. “As a rule, when speaking to someone with too many heads, ‘okay’ is aiming a bit high. Let’s say instead that I was very close to being much worse off.”
“Uh-huh. So… what happened?”
“I don’t really want to talk about it right now.”
“You may not want to talk about,” Orrin said, directly into my ear, “but the fact is, we may need the girl’s help. I don’t want to sound like I’m unimpressed with everything you’ve done so far, mind you, but cutting your neck open and sticking my throat and spine in was the simple part. Cutting me out, especially at this angle, will be quite a feat.”
He was right.
“If you still had the searing blade you might have been able to pull it off, that thing had a hell of an edge to it.”
“Still had the searing blade?” Trish interrupted. “You don’t have my sword?! What happened to my sword?”
“It kind of got nabbed,” I explained.
“Got nabbed!” Trish’s voice went up an octave.
“We’re lucky you’ve got such a resilient body,” Orrin went on, ignoring both of us. “I’d recommend that you cut as much of my spine out of your body as you can, by the way. Even once I’m dead and gone the pieces of my body still in you will be fighting to become a part of you, or make you a part of them.”
“You’re not going to die,” I told Orrin. “I’ve got a body downstairs— “
“That sword was my legacy! It was an heirloom! It’s been in my family for generations! Both of them were, now you broke one of them and lost the other one. Oh my god! They were the most valuable things I owned!”
“I’m sorry, Trish, I really am, and I’ll get it back… or at least, I’ll try really hard to get it back, I promise, but— “
“No, a body won’t do. I have to attach to something living, remember?” Orrin replied. “And I’m not willing to let somebody die just so I can live. You have to kill me. Don’t worry about it, nobody will hold it against you. Just take my head to the Dryads and tell them what happened.”
“I remember about the living bodies!” I countered, irritably. “I have something downstairs— “
“Oh, god, I never should have let you have that sword. Jesus, if I’d lost it when she was alive mom would’ve beaten me to death!”
“Your mother is dead! She’s fucking dead! I killed her, I ate her corpse, I shit her out into a hole out in the woods, she is never coming back!”
The lobby suddenly became very silent.
After several long seconds Orrin cleared his throat. “You uh, you killed her mother?”
I sighed. “Yes.”
“Oh. Did, uh, did she already know about that?”
“He did it in front of me.” Trish replied quietly.
“Huh.” Orrin cleared his throat.
The room was quiet again for several seconds.
“All right,” I said at last. “Patricia, I lost the sword. I’m sorry. If I can get it back somehow, I will, but, let’s be honest, Andres is all kinds of scary, so the odds of me getting that chance are pretty slim. I’ll try to make it up to you somehow, but if you’re going to be mad at me about this, be mad for your own sake. I don’t want to hear what your mother would think, or what your mother would do. Okay? The bitch is dead, and good riddance to her.”
Trish bit her lip, dampness welling up in her eyes. Maybe it was over the memory of her mother. Maybe she was just upset that I had shouted at her. I decided not to think about it too much.
“Orrin. You’re not going to die. Not at this exact moment, anyway. I have a living corpse downstairs. Some kind of minor Aztec god, or something.”
The morgue phone rang.
“A god?” Orrin whistled. “I haven’t met many of those. And I’ve certainly never had the balls to try to steal a body from one.”
I grimaced. “Well don’t look at me. Someone dropped it off for me a few days ago.”
I turned towards Percy’s office as the phone rang again.
Trish raised an eyebrow. “You just happen to have a living body on hand? That’s a bit convenient.”
“Honestly, it’s not that convenient. If I didn’t have that, I’d have an excuse to cut Percy’s head off. That would be convenient.”
“Let me see this body,” Orrin interjected as the phone rang for the third time.
“Just, let me get this first!” I marched towards the office, ignoring the impatient sigh in my ear.
In the office, I picked up the phone and started bringing it to my right ear, which caused me to smack it directly into Orrin’s face.
“Ouch!”
“Sorry!” I switched the phone to the other hand and lifted it to my left ear. “Elysium Mortuary.”
“Walter?”
“Sherry!” I felt a rush of relief.
I’d been fairly certain she’d gotten away cleanly from the motel, but having not heard from her since, I was starting to get a little worried.
“I spoke to him,” she intoned politely, but with a touch of disdain.
Either she was still pissed at me about the motel, or she was worried someone was listening to our call. I cleared my throat and forced myself to keep my excitement out of my voice. “Yes?”
“He said that your problem is none of his concern.”
I was tempted to say Aldred’s name over the phone. That was a big no-no. One did not say the names of important people where they might be overheard, especially by mortal authorities.
Instead I rolled my eyes. “And the fact that it might become his problem does not trouble him?”
“No.” She paused. “He believes that if you can handle the problem on your own, it will reflect poorly on those who would do him harm. And if you cannot, he will have a reason to take action against them.”
I blinked. Of course. If Gregor’s attempt to kill me failed, he would look that much more foolish for having failed against someone as low as me twice. If he succeeded, then Gregor would be responsible for the death of someone under his protection, and instead of standing around plotting and scheming, he would just need to prove that Gregor was behind my murder, and engage in direct warfare.
I’d be dead, but that would be a mild inconvenience.
“I see. Well, why don’t you tell him— “
“He has no interest in opening a dialogue. I was instructed to give you this message, nothing more.”
“Of course you were.” I shook my head. “Well, thanks. For nothing. Officially.”
There was a click as the line went dead.
Orrin cleared his throat. “So, bad news, I take it?”
“Oh shut up.”
Five minutes later the three of us were in my refrigerator.
“This,” I intoned, “is distinctly not convenient.”
Orrin gnawed on his lip. “I thought you said it was alive.”
“It was, last time I checked.” I shook my head. “She said she had a ritual to perform on the head, to kill it. The ritual must’ve worked and the body died when the head did.”
“Well, I guess we’re back to plan A. Cut me off and give me to the dryads to use as compost.”
It was beginning to bother me how quickly and happily Orrin accepted the possibility of death.
“No, not yet. There’s one thing we can try.”
“Really?”
I nodded. “Okay. Trish, these are the keys to my truck. You are going to drive it around to the back of the building and, very carefully, back it down the deep slant that leads to the bay doors.”
“I am?”
I nodded. “You are.”
“Should we maybe talk about my pay first?”
I grimaced. “Oh, god, you’re going to want me to pay you minimum wage, aren’t you?”
“Minimum wage?” Trish made a face. “To hell with that, I want… I want… twice minimum wage!”
I shook my head. “You don’t even know what minimum wage is, do you?”
She pursed her lips in annoyance and gave me a defiant look.
“Be reasonable, man, give the girl what she wants!”
I turned, doing my best to look Orrin in the eye. Instead I got a good look at his hairline. “You stay out of this.”
I turned back to the girl. “Look, it’s not that I don’t appreciate how hard you’re working and how… well, weird this job is getting, but I don’t make enough to pay you that well. I just don’t.”
“Oh come on! I’ve seen the prices you charge people. You can’t tell me that you don’t make good money here.”
“It’s my understanding that the funeral business is very profitable in the United States,” Orrin contributed. “Not to say that the job is easy, but it does tend to make money.”
“For most people, that’s true,” I admitted. “My situation is different.”
“Well maybe your situation would improve it you hired more people,” Trish suggested. “And paid us well.”
“It does seem to be a business that requires more than two employees to function.”
“You’re not helping, Orrin.”
“Come on, Mr. Walter, I’m only a couple months away from getting out of that home and I need a job I can support myself with.”
“And you need to invest your profits into your company if you want to get your finances to a more stable place.”
“Oh dear god, will you both shut up? I swear, if I’d known you were this talkative I’d have attached you to my pit so I could clamp an arm over your mouth! If you must know, the reason I can’t afford more employees is because I don’t actually own this establishment, alright? I mean, I do, but I don’t.”
Trish gave me a bewildered look. “You do but you don’t? What does that mean?”
“Look, when I first decided that I wanted to go into business for myself, my mother offered to put her house up as collateral so I could secure the loan for this place. Only, when I looked into doing that, I found out that I couldn’t, because she didn’t own her house. My parents, for all of their qualities, were really, really bad with money. Basically, the bank was a few months away from repossessing the house. So instead of being able to get a secure loan through the bank, I had to go another direction.”
Orrin and Patricia glanced at each other.
Orrin cleared his throat. “What kind of ‘other’ direction?”
“His name is ‘The Pig.’ And no, I don’t mean that people call him that behind his back. That’s what he calls himself, okay? He’s some kind of golem creature made out of the flesh of a bunch of dead animals, and he’s the only loan shark around who would give me an unsecured loan big enough to start my business, and buy my mother’s house back. Only now pretty much all of the money I make goes to him. I have to visit him every other month to deliver the money and show him my books to prove I’m not holding anything back. And I’m going to be doing that for the next twenty years or so. Back when I hired Percy, The Pig spent twenty minutes screaming at me, all right? And given how little work Percy does, and how little my business has increased since hiring him, I’m going to have a bitch of a time explaining how I had the nerve to hire ANOTHER employee. That’s my situation. So, when I say that I’ll pay you minimum wage, please understand, what I’m really saying is that I’m not going to be using the heater in my trailer this winter.”
Trish blinked. “Oh. Well. Okay then. I guess minimum wage will do.”
I huffed. “Glad to hear it, now will you please bring my truck around?”
The drive was made somewhat less bumpy than expected by the presence of the mattress I’d used for my encounter with Sherry earlier in the week. Tricia covered Orrin and I, the headless corpse of a minor deity, and the ravaged mattress, with a tarp, which I held firmly over us for the duration of the ride.
Trish parked the truck with two wheels on the sidewalk so I’d spend as little time exposed as possible.
When we walked through the front door of the dead man’s saloon with a second head on my shoulders, dragging a headless corpse behind me, everybody stopped and stared.
Everybody except the dead man.
He gave us a cursory glance, grabbed the bottle of dross, my preferred drink, and poured me a glass.
I guess when you live as long as the dead man, you do reach the point where nothing surprises you anymore.
I dragged the corpse up to the counter, one arm wrapped around its midsection to hold it up while I grabbed the drink with my other hand and downed it all in a go. “Oh my god, that hits the spot.”
Orrin made a gagging noise. “Oh gods! I can taste that in the back of my throat!” He gagged again.
Without blinking the dead man grabbed three bottles off the shelf behind him, mixed a splash of each together in a shot glass, and held it up for Orrin, who wrapped his lips around the edge of the glass and jerked his head back to swa
llow it.
The dead man caught the glass as Orrin spit it out.
“Thanks.”
“So,” my favorite bartender said with an off-centered smile. “You’ve been having an interesting day, I take it?”
Tricia, who’d followed us in, took the seat next to me and smiled. “Gin and tonic, please?”
“ID?”
She frowned. “Come on, you’ll serve a two-headed man, but I have to show you my driver’s license?”
The dead man snorted. “Nice try kid.”
Tricia huffed in aggravation, but didn’t say anything.
The dead man turned back to me. “So, are you looking for a place to sell the body?”
“Uh, no.”
“Too bad. The body of a god, even a minor one, can be worth good money.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that. “Uh, do you know how to bring a dead god’s body back to life?”
The dead man smiled. “As it happens, I do. Though it would be a little easier, not to mention less expensive, if it had a head attached.”
I grimaced. “As long as it doesn’t need to be his original head, I think we can make that happen.”
“Oh good. I thought you might, but, you know, I didn’t want to assume.”
“Just, one quick question.” I cleared my throat awkwardly. “About how much is it going to cost?”
“Relax,” Orrin said. “I’ll cover it. You don’t live as long as I have without saving a little something for a rainy day.”
“Oh, thank god.” I breathed a sigh of relief. “Um, not to sound too pushy, but could you also cover the drinks too? I’m at a whole other level of broke at the moment.”
Orrin nodded. “I can probably swing that.”
After that, things quickly became a confusing blur of activity.
The dead man led us through the door to the back room, down into the basement, through a hidden trap door to his sub-basement, and behind a false wall that led to a staircase made out of hewn stone, which led down to what appeared to be a naturally formed cavern which had been converted into what I can only describe as the lair of a mad scientist.
