by Jan Strnad
Darren walked over to the corpse on the embalming table. The boys had avoided the bodies, cruising the perimeters of the room instead, zeroing in on the true target of their curiosity.
He raised the sheet over the body and peered in. The blackened thing that greeted his eyes could have been Galen or Irma Klempner or Freddy Krueger. It was still recognizably human, but the flesh had burned into a black parchment over the bones and the bones, too, were burned black. Looking closer he saw that the body parts weren't even attached properly. Pieces rested loosely on the table, connecting tissue burned away. He couldn't stomach the sight for more than a few seconds.
"Tom," he said, and Tom looked over at him. Darren nodded toward the corpse. "This thing is not coming back."
Kent angled around behind Darren and glanced at the corpse and instantly turned away.
"How do you even know it's him?" Kent said.
"There should be a toe tag from the morgue," Buzzy answered.
Tom lifted the sheet over the corpse's feet. There was no tag.
"That's weird," Buzzy said. "How does he know which one's which?"
"Maybe there's a tag on the other one."
They looked at the corpse on the gurney, head and toe, but it too was unlabeled. Looking from one body to the other, it seemed that the one on the table was larger. They decided it was Galen.
"How do you embalm something like this?" Kent asked, directing the question to Buzzy.
"You have to vat it. Soak it in chemicals. He might not even do that if they're going to be cremated."
"They're already cremated," said Kent. "Why didn't he just throw them in the oven instead of letting them sit here?"
"It's the law. You have to wait forty-eight hours."
"Man, it creeps me out that you know this shit. You ought to leave a fucking job application on your way out."
"Stupid question," Tom said, "but is everybody satisfied that he's really dead?"
"Hell, yes," said Darren, "and he's staying that way."
"It might not be Galen," Kent said.
"What if it doesn't come back at midnight?" Buzzy asked. "How long do we give it?"
"I don't know. Ten or fifteen minutes."
"This is fucked," Darren said, pacing. Tom looked at his watch. As he did so, the church bell began to toll.
The boys tensed. Simultaneously, the corpses started to jerk, one body slapping against the steel table, the other on the creaking gurney.
"Fuuuuck!" Darren said, backing toward the door.
"Wait!" Tom cried out.
Kent was the first to bolt. Tom heard him bang into something and he shined the light in the direction of the noise. Kent's face was drained white and his eyes were as big as an alien's. He was feeling his way along the wall, looking as if he might crawl right up one of the metal shelves and curl up on top of it in a fetal position. The light helped him find the door and he was out of the room like a shot.
Darren was trying to hold back. He watched the corpse on the table as scorched lungs healed and organs were born anew. Black parchment skin fell away as limbs swelled and veins filled with blood. Features appeared in the face, familiar contours. It was Galen on the table, and he was alive, dragged back painfully across the boundary that separated the living from the dead. In Galen's empty sockets, eyes were born, eyes that stared out blindly as his body continued to reflesh, jerking and writhing uncontrollably.
When he saw the eyes, Darren lost it. He turned and ran, following Kent's footsteps across the dewy grass between the mortuary and the park.
Buzzy stood transfixed. He saw blood rush through vessels and pink new skin grow across fresh muscle that flowed over Galen's body like a wave. Galen's chest heaved and his lungs drew in air through a ravaged throat. Muscles formed in his jaw and pink skin grew to cover it and Galen worked his mouth soundlessly. He drew a ragged breath and let out a tortured scream.
His shriek was joined by Irma Klempner's. Tom and Buzzy glanced over to see the old woman's body twisting in the pain of rebirth. She screamed as she had screamed from her nightmare fears.
Buzzy clapped his hands over his ears but he couldn't draw away. He couldn't take his eyes off the corpses. Hair pushed its way through new skin. The convulsions ceased, replaced by a tortured writhing as nerves knit into a network of electric pain.
Two new bodies lay among the ashes and the burnt, useless tissue of the old. Their shrieks died in their throats. They clenched and opened their fists as new blood flowed to their extremities. Buzzy turned to run, but Galen's hand whipped out and held him fast.
"Tom!" Buzzy yelled, and Tom shined the light on Buzzy and saw Galen's hand clutching a fistful of Buzzy's shirt. Galen turned his face to look at Buzzy. He moved his mouth, his lips forming words that his newborn throat struggled to voice.
Buzzy tugged at his shirt, trying to free it from Galen's grasp. Galen's mouth took on its signature sneer and his voice croaked, "Date...with an angel?"
"Go!" Tom yelled and Buzzy pulled away with Tom shoving him toward the door. Cloth ripped and Buzzy was free. The boys reached the doorway and Tom paused, shined the light back at Galen. Galen still clung to the scrap of shirt. He swung his legs off the embalming table, moving like a paraplegic, grinning. Nearby, Irma Klempner sat up on the gurney. Tom spun on his heels and ran.
Darren and Kent were already hightailing it in their cars when Tom and Buzzy reached the fence. They launched themselves at the chain link and climbed up as if rottweilers were snapping at their heels.
Buzzy dashed for his Vega and Tom hopped onto his Honda and put his weight into the starter. He heard Buzzy's Vega roar to life and Buzzy peeled out in a cloud of dirt that stung Tom's eyes and made them water as he followed closely behind.
Tom shot one quick glance back toward the mortuary. He could barely see, through the dust and tears, in the near darkness under the crescent moon, two figures standing near the mortuary door. Galen Ganger and Irma Klempner.
Running toward the mortuary from the house was Jed Grimm, the undertaker.
Day Four, Monday
Sixteen
It was supposed to be the man who fell off to sleep and the woman who lay awake, her brain buzzing, but Peg and Brant had exchanged roles somewhere along the way. Peg slept with her head in her pillow, her butt snuggled against Brant's side, and he lay on his back, eyes wide open, worrying about Tom.
The further it got past midnight, the more Brant stewed. He should've made some excuse to Peg and pursued Tom to the dock to poke around for bodies. Instead, while Tom was confronting the forces of darkness, Brant was safely under Tom's roof boffing his mom.
He'd gone from anticipating Tom's report to dreading it to fearing that Tom wouldn't come back at all. Now his mind was exploring the possibility that Haws or someone else had found him snooping around the dock and shot him, and he'd come back, and he'd show up and tell Brant that everything was fine, and they'd been worried about nothing. How would Brant know if Tom was Risen? This idea scared him more than any others. He should have gone after him, damn it, and might've if he hadn't been thinking with the wrong head.
He looked over at Peg and knew that he was being too hard on himself. It wasn't just sex with Peg. This was the real thing, the love that had eluded him through his big city life and big city marriage and divorce. He hadn't come to Anderson looking for it, he'd come to get away from everything he knew wasn't what he wanted, but here it was. It had been right here waiting for him to get his mind clear enough to recognize it.
Now that he had it, he was going to be damned sure it didn't slip away from him.
He checked the clock. Twelve-fifteen. He'd heard the church bell. He wondered if Franz Klempner had heard it, too, and what he thought of it. There were secrets locked in that silent farmer's head, secrets so deeply buried that Franz Klempner himself couldn't divine them. Somehow Brant had to dig them out. He had to find Eloise. Maybe there was a photo album stored in a trunk or letters that Irma kept hidden in a drawer that would
provide a clue. He needed a last name. He could search public records for every "Eloise" in the county and hope that it wasn't a long-lost cousin in another state or an old school friend who'd gone away to college and never come back. Tom could help him.
Where was Tom anyway? What was he doing? What had he seen? What did he know?
***
The boys hadn't planned to rendezvous at the reservoir. They hadn't planned anything to do after the mortuary. Tom realized that, in his mind's eye, he'd seen them milling around at the mortuary until a few minutes after midnight, after nothing had happened, with Darren bitching about what a waste of time the whole thing had been and how stupid it was to think for one instant that Galen would come back from the dead, and then they'd all go their separate ways and that would be that. It would be over. It would turn out that Haws was never really dead and Doc Milford was drunk when he diagnosed John Duffy. Whatever happened between Haws and Galen, it was settled with Galen's death. It would all have been a bad dream, something Tom cooked up in his imagination, fueled by Brant Kettering' desperate need for a story.
But things hadn't gone that way at all. Tom had witnessed the miracle of rebirth, and it had been horrifying. Emotionally, it was like being in an earthquake. They'd had one once, a couple of years back. It hit from out of the blue, no warning, in an area not known for earthquakes or faults, and it had scared hell out of everybody. The earth wasn't supposed to move. The roaring that came from nowhere and everywhere spoke to some ancient memory that resided deep inside Tom's soul. He'd wanted to run, but with the floor and the walls and the ceiling shaking, with objects hurling themselves off shelves, with the awful roaring in his ears, where could he run? Where a moment ago had been solidity and strength and order, was now chaos. Nothing made any sense. What could he do in a world that, in one fraction of a second, suddenly changed all the rules? The earthquake had lasted fifteen seconds, and those seconds changed Tom's outlook forever. You couldn't count on anything, not even the ground beneath your feet.
He felt that same disorientation now. The one great certainty of life was that it was temporary. Death waited at the end. Maybe the soul lived on. Maybe there was a world beyond. But bodies died, flesh died, cells died, and they didn't come back.
Until tonight. He'd seen it for himself. He'd actually seen it happen, and it sent his mind into the Blacklands. He sat at the edge of the water with the chill night air stirring the hairs on the back of his neck, on the edge of a black lake in a black, scorched world obscured by smoke. The cicada buzz filled his ears like a mantra, transporting him beyond the world of men and out to the barren plain of nothingness. Voices spoke around him but their words had no meaning, like the water lapping at the shore, like the cicada thrum, like the dark thoughts buzzing around inside his skull.
"Fuck you, man!" Darren screamed, but Tom sat with his back to the other boys and didn't flinch, as if he hadn't heard.
"He's out of it," Buzzy said, pacing, wiggling his fingers.
"Fuck you!" Darren yelled again, practically in Tom's ear.
"I've seen him like this before. He's spaced."
Kent was shivering.
"That wasn't natural," he said. "That was freakin' weird."
"You didn't see shit," Buzzy said. "You were out that door so fast!"
"I saw enough."
"This is so incredibly, incredibly fucked!"
"We should go back."
Darren and Kent looked at Buzzy like he was nuts.
"Galen's our friend," Buzzy said. "This isn't some horror movie where zombies start eating people's brains. He came back and we ran. What're we gonna to do when he calls us? Hang up? Not answer the door when he comes around? We should be glad he's back. We should have a party or something."
Kent stared uncomprehendingly at Buzzy.
"You are so weird," he said.
"What do you think, Tom?" Darren asked loudly, speaking to Tom's back. "Should we throw a party for Galen? Put up a big banner...'Welcome Home From Hell?'"
"Leave him alone, Darren."
Darren walked over to him and Buzzy was sorry he'd opened his mouth. He was sorry, but he was tired of Darren's shit.
"What're you gonna do about it?"
"Back off, Darren." Apparently Kent was tired of Darren's shit, too. "Leave him alone."
"I don't believe this," Darren said. "Look at you guys. Sitting around like bumps on a fucking log. Do something, for Chris'sakes!"
"Like what? What are we supposed to do?"
"Something! How the hell should I know what?"
"Galen would know what to do," Buzzy said.
"Galen!" Darren said. "It's Galen that's got us all fucked up!"
"He would know! If it was one of us instead of him that got killed and came back...he'd know what to do about it!"
"Well it wasn't! And Brain Boy over there's gone into the asshole zone, so that leaves you and me and Kent to figure things out!"
"The blind leading the blind leading the blind," Buzzy said.
"Just shut the fuck up."
"I'm going home," Kent announced. He picked himself off the ground, dusted his behind. "Tomorrow, whatever happens, happens." He headed for his car.
"That's it? 'Whatever happens, happens?'"
"That's it," replied Kent.
"Works for me," Buzzy said. He walked over to Tom, patted him on the shoulder. "Hey. We're going home. You coming?" He went around and waved a hand in front of Tom's face. "Hey!" he said.
Tom started, blinked. He saw Buzzy's face looking down at him, asking him if anybody was home.
"I spaced out," Tom said.
"No shit," said Darren.
"Listen," Buzzy said, "we're calling it a night. Can you get home okay?"
Tom nodded.
"Okay, then. We'll see you tomorrow. You going to school?"
"I don't know."
"Give me a call, okay?"
Tom said he would. He heard the cars start and drive off. He waited until he could no longer hear the engines, then he stood up, threw a rock into the water and watched the ripples spread.
He wondered what Anderson would make of Galen's rise, of Irma Klempner's. He and Buzzy and Kent and Darren had all seen them come back. Jed Grimm saw them, too, was probably one of them, another Risen. Would they try to keep it a secret and deal quietly with the boys the way Haws had dealt with Galen? Or would they figure that the cat was out of the bag?
It was late. Brant would be wondering what happened to him. He should go home and tell Brant what he'd seen, get some rational advice.
Unless someone had gotten to Brant in the meantime. Haws could've killed his mom and Brant both, before midnight. They could be Risen by now.
He shouldn't have left Brant behind. Now Tom didn't know who to trust again.
The ripples on the water were dying out. Tom thought: What if they didn't stop? What if, instead of getting weaker as they spread, some force made them stronger? What if they kept spreading and spreading, and nobody could do anything to stop them?
Tom felt a sudden longing to be somewhere familiar and safe. He wanted to be someplace where the basic rules of the universe hadn't been turned upside down and inside out, where corpses slept the big sleep and you knew who your friends were.
But he no longer knew where that place would be.
***
Brant was about to fall asleep despite himself when he heard Tom's Honda pull up. He slid out of bed and pulled on his pants and shirt. He'd decided to play it cagey with Tom. He'd ask him about how it went and appear to take him and everything he said at face value, but he'd watch for blood stains and suspicious holes in his clothing, anything suggesting that Tom might be Risen. If he decided that Tom could no longer be trusted, Brant would tell Peg that Doc had called and they should come to the hospital. That would get her in the car. Then he'd hit the highway and tell her everything he knew while she had no choice but to sit there and listen, and he'd hope for the best.
He heard Tom rustling around
in the kitchen, fixing himself a snack. Tom dropped a knife when Brant entered, asking, "How'd it go?" The kid was jumpy. What did that mean?
Tom tried not to stare at Brant, but it was hard to act casual after all he'd been through.
"He came back," Tom said. He cut himself a slice of roast for a sandwich. "So did the Klempner woman."
"You saw it?"
"Yeah."
Brant walked up and pulled out one of the kitchen chairs, sat down. "Well, what was it like? Tell me!"
Tom concentrated on digging bread out of the plastic bag, cutting the meat to fit, spreading it with horseradish.
"It was awful. The bodies were so burned, you couldn't tell which one was which, not really. I mean we had an idea, but they were in bad shape. Skin all black or burned off. Hardly more than skeletons."
"Did it happen at midnight?"
"On the dot. The church bell rang. Then the corpses started jerking and flopping. Some of the guys ran right then."
"But you stayed."
"I had to know. Then after it started, I couldn't take my eyes off it. The old, dead, burned stuff just fell away. I saw
muscles reforming, new skin growing over it. It was like some weird time-lapse movie or something."
Brant's heart was beating fast and he had to remind himself to breathe. Tom seemed to be taking it so calmly--was that a normal human reaction? He just stood there making a sandwich and talking about it as if giving a book report in school that day.
It was now one o'clock. Tom had had an hour to react. Maybe he'd been sick to his stomach at the time, maybe he screamed or cried and was hiding all that from Brant under a facade of teenage stoicism. Or maybe he was Risen and was trying to downplay the whole thing to catch Brant off guard.
"You're taking it well," Brant said. "I'd be reaching for a bottle right now."
"You want a beer?"
"At one in the morning? No thanks. Got any whiskey?"
