The Professional Corpse (The Departed Book 1)

by Sean Arthur Cox

  He gives the hollow head another stomp. “And no more zombie stuff. No more Walking Dead. No more Game of Thrones. No more of those video games. You’ve got to pull yourself together.”

  I refuse to yield. “This is my mess. It’s my victim come back to haunt me. I say we dig him up and cremate him. It solves the zombie issue and it’s a lot more dignified than stomping a guy’s head trying to get him back in a grave like some stuffed animal that won’t quite fit in a backpack.”

  Houston sigh. “Fine. Whatever. We’ll call it therapy or something. If this is what it takes for you to move past this, if you need some kind of ceremonial, metaphorical closure, let’s do it. But for the record, you need help. At least admit that there are no zombies and that you dug up the body yourself.”

  I say nothing, just kick at the dirt around the body to loosen it, and then I pull at the arms. Houston joins me with the other arm, and in ten minutes, we’re able to get the body up and into the trunk of the Prius. It takes about the same amount of time to fill the hole as it did to pull the body out, and from there, we’re on our way to the rolling hills and plains of the Nebraska countryside.

  After a couple hours’ driving, we finally find a nice remote spot where our car won’t be seen. Given the body in the trunk, we don’t want to be bothered by law enforcement or farmers. I grab the collapsible shovel we keep beneath the spare tire and hoof out into the woods for half a mile until I find a decent clearing, someplace where our fire’s glow won’t be seen, and I set to digging.

  “I thought we were burning the body?” asks Houston.

  “We are,” I say, “but we don’t want to burn the woods down. We need to dig a fire pit. Plus, we probably aren’t going to get a fire hot enough to get rid of the bones altogether. We’ll need someplace to bury them.”

  “If that’s what you want,” says Houston, “but this is your circus. Don’t expect me to throw on some clown make-up and help.”

  I don’t expect him to, and he lives up to those expectations. He sits on a fallen log reading a paperback by the light of an LED flashlight keychain as I dig my pit. It takes a while, but I finally make a hole to my satisfaction, about six feet by three and maybe a foot to a foot and a half deep. Content with the size, I fill it with leaves and sticks and anything else flammable I can find. To the surprise of neither of us, Houston sticks to his log and his book while I retrieve the body. I try to convince him to give me a hand, arguing that Bill is a heavy guy, that we don’t want to leave a trail for someone to follow, that it will go quicker with his assistance, but he just keeps rattling off excuses to each one.

  “It’s your mess, kiddo. You should get in the habit of cleaning it up yourself,” he says.

  “If anyone spots the trail you make, then clearly the burial place you chose isn’t as good as you think it is and they were going to find the body anyway,” he says.

  “Nope, I just got to a good part. The pack of vampires are descending on the brothel and the old German wizard just convinced the demon’s gang of outlaws to help him save the place,” he says.

  And finally, “What did I say? I’m not putting on any clown make-up for this, Livy.”

  So, I make the long slog the half mile back through the dark woods with a one hundred and eighty-pound man slumped over my shoulder. It takes forever, and I can barely breathe by the time I get there. I must have worked up quite a sweat, because the body feels downright hot against my back.

  “Oh good, you’re back,” says Houston. “We only have a couple of hours before the sun comes up, and we don’t want anyone seeing the smoke.”

  I say nothing, just give him a death glare. Then with a final heave, I toss the body into the fire pit on the bed of pine needles and twigs that fill it, which I hope will be his no-more-games final resting place. Unlike his last final resting place.

  “Got a match?” I ask.

  “We come all this way, do all that driving and all this digging to burn a corpse, and only now do you think to make sure we have something to light a fire with?”

  “You don’t have anything?” I ask, beginning to panic. Houston taught me a lot growing up, stuff about weapons and medicine and anatomy and computers, but nothing about wilderness survival. I don’t know how to start a fire with sticks or string or whatever.

  “Of course I have a lighter,” he says as he pulls out a pack of smokes, placing one in his mouth and lighting it. He offers the Zippo to me, but withdraws it like a high school bully holding another kid’s backpack when I reach for it. “But you need to think of these things ahead of time. Just in case.”

  “Lesson learned,” I say. “Now can I please have the lighter?”

  “Yes, I suppose you can.”

  Still he keeps the lighter clenched in his fist behind his back. I let out a peeved growl.

  “May I have the lighter?”

  “Yes, you may,” he says and places it in my outstretched palm. “Now what do we say?”

  “Thank you, father” I say more than a little sarcastically.

  “You’re welcome, sweetheart,” he says, seeing my tone and raising me a smug parental smile.

  I fumble around in the dark until I find a stick. Then I gather a handful of leaves at the end, tying them on with pine straw and long grasses. I don’t feel like reaching my hand into the fire pit to light it, just in case the zombie isn’t quite as dead as I think. A strong breeze kicks up, making it difficult to light the makeshift torch. Why can’t anything be easy?

  “Olivia,” Houston stammers.

  “I’m busy, Houston. Read your book.”

  “Olivia,” he says, more insistent.

  “Look, I’ll get it lit. Be patient.”

  “But…”

  “You didn’t want to help me dig the hole or move the body. I don’t need your help now.”

  “Seriously, Olivia,” he says. “There’s something you need to see.”

  My latest attempt finally takes, and as the leaves give way to fire, a warm glow spreads through the clearing, illuminating my smug look and Houston’s fearful stare. “What did you need to show me now?”

  “That…”

  I turn to follow where he points. The torch falls from my limp fingers into the pit and catches fire the kindling I’d piled up. Firelight spreads, chasing the shadows away from Bill Thompson, who has risen once more from the earth and is edging his way toward the tree line.

  Houston finally says what I’ve been thinking for hours.

  “Zombie!”

  Chapter 16

  JAMIE

  FINALLY SPEAKING TRUE

  “Don’t shoot!” I shouted, throwing my hands in front of my face. My hands had never stopped a bullet before, but instinct doesn’t care about things like that. In my experience, shouting “Don’t shoot” seldom accomplished anything either, but here I was shouting it anyway. This instance must have been an exception, because instead of gunfire, I heard voices, one young and feminine, the other masculine.

  “You see?” she said. “You see why it took me so long to kill this guy? He’s got more lives than a cat!”

  “That’s not possible,” stammered the man.

  In the darkness, I could make out little more than fuzzy silhouettes. My assassin couldn’t have known, but she shot me in the only eye with a useful contact lens. Between the bad eyes and the night, I was practically blind. Even the fire did little to help, turning things from black blobs to orange blobs.

  Before me stood two people, presumably a man and a woman by their voices. He sat far off, too far from the light to do my poor eyes any favors. Not her. She lit the flames, which put her close enough to make out the vaguest of details. She wasn’t tall, I knew for sure, and she had dark colored hair. Didn’t matter. I didn’t need to see her to know what she looked like. I had heard her voice often these past few days. My assassin. “Again?” I said, my exasperation finally beating out my fear. “Seriously?”

  “I watched your funeral on TV. You lost an arm in that crash, for goo
dness sake!” The man’s voice seemed more offended and accusing then shocked. How dare I come back from the dead after the media wasted all that time covering my demise.

  “Oh shit,” the girl said. “Bill Thompson is fucking immortal.”

  “Just like Highlander,” said the man.

  “No, he’s not,” I said, because if they were talking, they weren’t killing, and if I could get a moment to explain, maybe I could stall them indefinitely. They looked at me blankly, as though wondering who invited me to the conversation. “I mean, I am. Not like Highlander, but I am immortal. But Bill Thompson isn’t.”

  “What are you talking about?” said the girl. “I pulled you out of Bill Thompson’s grave.”

  “Do you possess dead people?” asked the man. “Or just replace them?”

  Good. They were asking questions. That meant they were curious, and curiosity would keep me alive. If Scheherazade could play this game and string along a sultan for a thousand and one nights, surely, I could keep them going long enough to make my escape, and from there, all I needed was a few minutes and a little blood and they would never find me again.

  “Neither? Or both, but mostly neither,” I said, keeping things vague. Vague led to more questions. More questions meant more time. “It depends.”

  “On what?”

  “The thing is, I’m not exactly immortal,” I said.

  “But you said…”

  “Yes, I did, but mostly because I’m like those TV immortals. I can die. I die a lot. Hell, your girl killed me twice in the last however long it’s been.”

  “Twice?” she asked. “The car crash and the cemetery?”

  “You caused the car crash?” I said. “Then I guess three times. You also killed me in the hospital with that stuff that shut my lungs down.”

  “The succinylcholine,” she said. “That killed you?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “and if you hadn’t forgotten to reset the heart monitors, someone might have even noticed.”

  “What about the stairs?” she asked.

  “That just hurt a lot, but it didn’t kill me.”

  “So, you don’t heal quickly like immortals on TV?”

  “Nope,” I said. “I heal just like a normal person. Unless I’m dead. Then I can come back from anything.”

  “Anything?” asked the girl. “Like even if I cremated you or you were devoured by a thousand piranha?”

  “Anything.”

  “Even cutting off your head?” asked the man.

  I hoped he could read the condescension on my face. As though getting decapitated were somehow a more difficult heal than being charred to dust and scattered on the breeze. “Anything.”

  “But only if you’re dead?”

  I nodded.

  “So, what you’re saying,” said the man, “is if we shoot you in both legs we could leave you here and make good our escape?”

  Damn. I had overshared. I really didn’t feel like hobbling on two bad legs through the woods until I died yet again. There might be wild animals that devoured me before I woke, and that would take forever to come back from. Thankfully, the coffee killer had my back.

  “Remember what you said to Mister Johnson about pissing off the killers?” she asked the man. “I think the same goes for immortals.”

  He nodded. “Good point.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief.

  “If we’re going to ever get rid of this guy, we have to bury him in concrete.”

  Damn it again.

  “Or!” I shouted before I even knew what I might say. The both turned their gazes to me, waiting to hear whatever offer I might have to make.

  “Or…?”

  “Or we could just forget about the whole thing,” I said. “I understand you were just doing your jobs. Everyone has to make a living. So how about this. You drive me back to town. You go your way. I go mine. No harm, no foul.”

  They seemed to consider it for a while. They gave each other meaningful stares, communicating wordlessly the way only people who have known each other most of their lives could.

  “No deal,” said the man.

  “What? Why?”

  “We got paid to kill you,” he said. “What happens if our employer sees us driving into town with you alive in the back seat?”

  I nodded. I hadn’t considered that. “A legitimate concern,” I conceded.

  “Besides, how do we know you’ll keep your end of the deal? What if you come for us later, or finger us for the murder?” said the girl.

  “Another good point,” I said. “You two really are professionals, aren’t you? Sorry, I’m still new to all of this.”

  “New?”

  “This is the first time I’ve worked a job like this.”

  “A job like what?”

  “Remember how I said I’m not Bill Thompson?”

  They nodded.

  “I’m not him. He saw someone, I guess you,” I said and indicated the man. “He saw you following him and feared for his life. He hired me to take his place, so if someone tried to kill him…”

  “You mean he’s still alive?” asked the girl.

  I nodded, and the girl sighed in relief. It seemed as though a weight had literally been lifted from her back. She even stood a little taller.

  “I guess we still have work to do,” said the man.

  Fuck. Overshared again. “I don’t see how that’s necessary. Whoever wanted him dead got what they wanted. There’s a death certificate. They get to enjoy the sweet satisfaction of revenge if that was their motivation. You got paid. Everyone wins.”

  “And when the real Bill Thompson shows up again?”

  “I can make sure that doesn’t happen.”

  “You would kill him?” asked the girl. “Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of what you did?”

  “Kill him? No. But I can make him look like someone else, just like I made myself look like him. It’s a win, win, win.”

  They considered my proposition for a moment. Houston and Olivia both approached, examining me. They prodded my wrists, my skull, checking me for injuries.

  “You can’t stay dead?”

  I nodded.

  “And you can perfectly mimic other people?”

  I nodded.

  “So, we help you get back to town, or…?”

  “Or you spend every waking moment for the rest of your life constantly worrying, wondering if every person you encounter, old or young, male or female, is me waiting to have my revenge.”

  “I think a car ride sounds like a good deal for peace of mind,” said coffee girl.

  “I think so too.”

  They walked me back to the car, the man making the girl take point while he brought up the rear, ready to kill me in case I should try anything funny. Not that he needed to worry. I’d died over a thousand times in the past week at least. The last thing I wanted to do was spend another minute dead.

  In the back of the car, I patiently endured their game of twenty questions as they grilled me about what dying felt like, how long it took to resurrect, how old I was, how I changed appearance. It was kind of nice being able to talk openly about it with someone other than the Marquis. It wasn’t like they could tell anyone, not without having to tell the circumstances, and they couldn’t afford to do that in their line of work.

  “Know what I would do if I were in your place?” said the man. “I would commit crimes.”

  “You’re already a contract killer,” I said. “I don’t think you need my magic to do that.”

  “No,” said the man. “I would commit, like, so many crimes. Rob a bank, change my face. If I get shot, no big deal. Come back alive. Change my face, go to another town, and do it all over again.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  “So damn many crimes.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I tried that, and it doesn’t work out as well as he’d like to think it does, that often you die on the getaway and all that stolen money gets confiscated before you resurrect.
That changing appearance isn’t as simple as deciding to change, that you can’t just use any old blood because you turn into the person as they were at the time you drew blood. Stabbing someone for a sample will only turn you into someone with a big nasty stab wound. Best to let him dream and preserve at least a few of my secrets.

  “What about you?” I asked coffee girl. “What would you do?”

  “I think I’d learn things,” she said. “Like hobbies or skills or stuff. I bet you can do all sorts of things.”

  “Some,” I said, “but not as much as you would think.”

  “Come on,” she said. “I saw Groundhog Day. I’m sure you’ve mastered all sorts of things over the course of your life.”

  “I have,” I said, “and I bet when you were a kid, you could play cat’s cradle like it was nobody’s business.”

  “I never played cat’s cradle.”

  “Really?”

  “I had a strange childhood,” she said.

  “Very strange,” the man added.

  “Still, there were some kid things you used to be able to do. Name all the Cabbage Patch Kids or all the types of dinosaurs or recite theme songs to your favorite shows.”

  She nodded. “Yeah, so?”

  “Could you still do it now?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “I mean, I know a couple of the things. Not all of them, but a few.”

  “But you’ve forgotten most of it?”

  “Yeah,” she admitted.

  “And that was only, what? Ten, fifteen years ago? Imagine how much I’ve forgotten. I haven’t needed to know how to forge a horseshoe for over a hundred years at least. How much do you think I remember?”

  I waited for a guess, but none came.

  “Forever is a lot of time to learn things,” I said. “It’s also a lot of time to forget.”

  Chapter 17

  OLIVIA

  AS I SHAPE THE WORLD AHEAD

  “So…,” I say as we pull out of Nebraska hopefully for the last time, “is your world blown like my world is blown?”

  Houston says nothing. Neither of us had said a word since we dropped off whoever or whatever that was. The drive into Iowa feels dangerous, as though the slightest peep might bring our delicate new reality crashing down on us. I don’t know if it’s a conscious decision not to speak until we cross the state line and leave that madness behind us like so much road dust, but by this point it’s obvious we both signed on to that silent agreement. I can’t imagine what’s running through Houston’s mind right now, but I feel like my world has forever changed in ways September 11th couldn’t touch. The terrorist attack made the world a more terrifying place, one in which entire cities could be brought to their knees by a handful of coordinated, backwater fanatics. It made the world a more paranoid place with twenty-four-hour surveillance and a loss of privacy and freedoms people couldn’t even imagine on September 10th. These are profound changes, but the world is still the world at its core. It just wears a different, scarier suit. But this, an immortal shapeshifter? Magic? The world just took off its mask, a mask I never knew it wore, and I have to wonder if it ever was what I thought it was.