Nights of the Living Dead

by Jonathan Maberry

  On that day, at 6:20 a.m., Elizabeth O’Toole e-mailed her cousin, a priest, to confess her sins and to say that she and her male companion were going to try to get out of Washington. The message ended with We might not make it very far. I probably won’t ever see you again. I don’t even know if you are still there to read this. I hope that you are, and I hope that God will accept a confession that comes via cyberspace. I have tried to make an Act of Contrition, but I can’t remember all the words. Absolve me if you are able.

  I think this is the end of the world. Goodbye. Your loving cousin, Beth.

  John Doe’s case file was forwarded to the VSDC by Luis Acocella, an assistant medical examiner in San Diego. The subject carried no ID. No one knew his real name. Sixtysomething and homeless, he was panhandling on Mission Bay Drive when he was startled by what sounded like firecracker pops. An old panel truck with S.O.B (“South of the Border”) plates came careening around a corner with an SDPD cruiser in hot pursuit. A coyote sitting in the truck’s passenger side had his door open and was leaning out firing an Uzi at the black-and-white. The truck swerved out of control. Rounds from the automatic whizzed wildly. Seven of those rounds took out the window at a taco joint. Four of them hit John Doe: one high on a thigh, one high on the belly, one low on the left shoulder, and the fourth low on the neck. The homeless man dropped to the pavement and tried to scream. The wound in his neck turned those screams into sounds that resembled the wheeze of escaping steam.

  The truck crashed into a telephone pole. Two more black-and-whites arrived and a gun battle ensued. Two police officers were wounded, one critically. As it turned out, there were six Mexicans in the truck, two coyotes and four illegals, all of them male. Four of them were killed, each taking more than two dozen angry rounds from police sidearms. In the end, two were captured alive.

  Purely by coincidence, Luis Acocella had been enjoying a caldo gallego at the taco joint when the window was shot out. Once the gunfire had stopped, he rushed out onto the street. When he reached John Doe’s side, the man was still wheezing. Acocella ran to his car to get his medical bag. By the time he returned, the first of three ambulances had arrived and the wounded man’s wheezing had stopped.

  Acocella glanced at his watch. It showed the time was 6:05 p.m. If John Doe was dead, it happened sometime in the last three minutes. If Acocella had agreed to fill out the standard paperwork, he would probably have approximated the “Time of Death” as 6:04 p.m. But he never wrote anything on the forms. None of the man’s bullet wounds seemed like killshots. Acocella believed there might be a chance of resuscitation if they could get the victim to a qualified hospital ASAP.

  The chief detective got in the doctor’s face, saying, “This man is dead, you hear me? And it was your kind that killed him!”

  “My kind?” Acocella tried to look innocently puzzled, though he knew exactly what the man meant.

  “Fuckin’-A, Jose,” the detective came back, not trying at all to disguise what he was thinking. “They killed him. Not us. Them! The coyotes. And we’re countin’ on you to prove it! Got that? If you don’t prove it, your ass is grass. That worthless kind of grass that comes pukin’ up from where your daddy fucked his first chicken!”

  Acocella wanted to kill the guy, wanted to strangle him, but he never so much as let annoyance show on his face. There wasn’t time. He quickly said, “I believe this man can still be saved. If we move quickly.”

  There was an audience, people had gathered, so the detective was forced to call another ambulance, though he did so reluctantly. One finally arrived, no siren, no lights. Paramedics scooped up John Doe and took him to nearby St. Michael’s. Acocella knew it was already too late.

  He forced himself to be civil with the detectives, but as he walked with his old medical bag toward his car, he kicked a bottle of Corona lying in the street and said, “Fuckin’ gringos!” He knew there would have to be an autopsy. So he knew that he would be seeing John Doe at least one more time.

  At 8:22 Acocella was in his office at the county morgue. He had just finished some overdue paperwork and was staring with some bitterness at a sign on the wall which was written in Latin; HIC LOCUS EST UBI MORS GAUDET SUCCURRERE VITAE—THIS IS THE PLACE WHERE DEATH REJOICES TO HELP THOSE WHO LIVE—when the phone rang.

  An intern informed him that the homeless man had been pronounced dead at 7:18 p.m. in the hospital’s ER.

  “An intern.” Acocella spit this out angrily as he slammed down the receiver on his fifty-year-old, rotary dial telephone. He knew that John Doe died at 6:04. He picked up the heavy receiver and dialed a familiar number.

  “Complainer!” Charlene Rutkowski—friends called her Charlie—tossed this barb over the phone at her boss.

  “I complain because you’re not ever here.”

  “Gimme a break, I’m always here. What, are you kiddin’ me?”

  Charlie was a total Bronx bombshell. From Parkchester near the Whitestone, she had Marilyn’s body and Judy Holliday’s brain. Not that Judy Holliday was ever quite as dumb as she was able to make herself look.

  “You complain all the time,” Charlie went on. “You enjoy complaining.”

  “Because nothing—nothing—satisfies. Not often enough. If you have a taste for, say, caviar, foie gras, Château Latour, you get enjoyment one, two, maybe three times in a great while. A Cuban cigar hand-rolled on a woman’s thigh … sex itself … maybe once a year! The secret to a satisfying life is to take enjoyment from something that you can have as many times as possible. Once a day. Several times a day. Now, what might that be?”

  “I dunno.” She paused. “I have to pee several times a day.”

  “Well, urination is, for the most part, quite a pleasant experience, involving, as it does, our most intimate parts. But more than that, each and every day—each and every day—there are a hundred moments that are, to say the least, irritating. So if we want to get the most out of life, we must learn to enjoy the act of not enjoying!”

  “Okay, so what are you not enjoying right now?”

  “An intern. A fuckin’ intern! Who logged in a TOD over an hour after the stiff bit the crang!”

  “How d’ya know, over an hour?”

  “’Cuz I was there when the poor guy was shot!”

  “Get out.”

  “No bullshit, I was there!”

  “So … what, they brought him in too late?”

  “Yeah. Too late.” He thought back, remembering the crime scene. “They outranked me. Do you believe that some asshole detective outranks a medical examiner?”

  Acocella was, to some extent, playing a role. Playing to Charlie. In his heart, he didn’t blame the detectives for what happened. He blamed his own weakness. But he wasn’t ready to admit that to Charlie.

  He pulled open a drawer and rooted around until he found an old pack of Marlboros. He pulled out a stale cigarette, then did more rooting around looking for a light.

  “You’re smoking again?” Charlie heard the sounds.

  “No. I’m not ‘smoking’ again. I’m just going to have a cigarette! One cigarette. If I can figure out how to light the fuckin’ thing!”

  He finally came up with an old pack of matches. Tried to strike one.

  It snapped in two. He tried to strike another.

  Its tip came off.

  A third left a residue on the striker but never ignited.

  “Jesus Christ,” he complained, “you used to be able to rely on these things! A pack of matches! They used to make them differently. Used to make them better! They must be cheaping out or something. They—”

  His rant was interrupted when his fourth match produced a flame. Acocella quickly, needily, lit his Marlboro and took a deep puff. It made him dizzy.

  Without taking a second puff, he dipped the lit end of the cigarette into yesterday’s coffee and pitched it into a garbage can.

  “Fuck!” he said.

  Then repeated, more loudly, more angrily, “Fuck!”

  Then, calming himsel
f a bit, he circled back to what was most bothering him. “I’m telling you, I don’t think this guy was dead tonight. Not when I first got to him, anyway. They weren’t killshots. I really think I might have been able to save the guy!”

  Charlene was Acocella’s diener. She had always liked the sound of the word. “Diener.” She thought it sounded French. When she pronounced it, improperly, it came out like “DNA,” which, in her not-so-analytical mind, took on a certain importance. Acocella never told her that the origin of the word was not French, but German, and that it meant “servant.” He knew that being called a servant would not please Charlie one little bit.

  Luis told his diener what had happened outside the taco joint, how authorities had insisted on an autopsy, and how he was stuck having to perform one. She empathized, as any Bronx bombshell is expected to do, especially if she has a heart of gold … and Charlene’s heart was twenty-four carat.

  “Okay, so what are you gonna do?” she asked. “You don’t wanna be in this mess. I for sure don’t wanna be here with you, which I automatically am. But, hey, what’s either one of us gonna do? Am I right?”

  It was 9:42 when a bell went off indicating a delivery. Within three minutes, two gum-chewing paramedics had wheeled John Doe into the autopsy room, plopped his body onto an insulting steel slab, taken their gurney, and left.

  “Charlie?” the doctor called.

  His diener appeared from out of the washroom.

  “He, er … he’s here,” the doctor said.

  “So I see,” said Charlene, fresh and ready for work. She started to collect sharp tools from hard metal drawers.

  The corpse would normally have first been photographed wearing the clothes in which it had died. But it had been sent over from St. Mike’s unclothed, so it was naked when Charlie maneuvered an overhead arm that enabled a digital Pentax to shoot angles front, right, and left. The body had to be turned onto its belly for the camera to photograph its back. Acocella helped with the turning, but Charlene performed all other tasks.

  The table on which the body rested was also a scale. John Doe weighed 186 pounds.

  Other measurements were taken.

  X-rays were zapped.

  Charlie had done similar duties for more than six years. Seen and handled hundreds of corpses, yet she still found it disturbing, frightening, to be in a closed room with a dead body.

  She had a recurring nightmare. At the outset, she would always be in a different place, an office building, a supermarket, a friend’s house. At some point, she would walk through a door. After that the dream would always be the same. Exactly the same, but for two small details which were to change in time.

  She would step into an autopsy room. It would always be very dark, except for a point at the center of the room where a dead man lay on the examination table. It would always be the same dead man, always formally dressed in a tuxedo. His face would always seem vaguely familiar, but Charlene, the dreamer, could never identify it, not at first. Above the table there would always be a high-intensity surgeon’s lamp that called to mind some sort of show-biz spotlight. It made the corpse shine like a misshapen sun in the darkness of space.

  It would take a moment or two for the dreamer to realize that the place was sealed. There were no windows, or doors, not even the one she had just used to enter the room. There was no escape. (After having experienced the dream a dozen times, she no longer bothered to look for a way out; she knew from past experiences that there wasn’t one. This was the first of the small details that changed over time.)

  The corpse would always speak before it moved. “Hello, Charlene,” it would say in a soft, pleasant-sounding voice. “Wanna dance?”

  Then it would sit up.

  The dreaming Charlene would instantly start to race around the room, slapping at walls, looking for something, anything—a hidden seam that she might be able to tear open. As she searched frantically, fruitlessly, she would glance back over her shoulder and see the corpse swing its feet down onto the floor. She would see it stand. See it beginning to shamble toward her with the slow, uncertain movements of a body whose limbs had atrophied.

  Charlene would always, in the end, find herself trapped in a corner. She would think to herself, “How stupid! Next time I have to remember. I have to get out into the middle of the room. If I’m in a corner, it gets me every time. If I’m out in the middle, I can run away so it can’t get me!”

  She would try to escape …

  Always a moment too late.

  The corpse would be there, inches away. “Wanna dance?” it would say, as it reached out for her with a smile.

  No. It wasn’t a smile. Well, it was for a moment. Then it would morph into a snarl. Then, a moment later, become a smile again.

  That morphing business … smile, snarl, back to smile … was the most frightening aspect of the dream for Charlene. Once the corpse was on its feet, once it had started to come after her, she knew that the moment would come soon, the terrible moment when the corpse would say “Wanna dance?”

  After having the nightmare at least once a month for more than a year, Charlene, while visiting her mother one day, focused on a picture of Jesus hanging on a wall in the dining room. Charlene moved her head slightly to the left, then slightly to the right. The picture changed. Slender strands of tubular plastic allowed a benign, almost smiling Jesus to appear from one angle, while from three inches to the left or right Jesus was seen to be bleeding and in agony.

  The same picture had been hanging in the same spot since Charlene was born. She had walked past it a thousand—a hundred thousand—times as a little girl. Fascination with it had worn off before Charlene was three years old. The picture itself had been forgotten long before adulthood, long before Charlene became a dinier. But it had obviously made enough of an impression to earn a starring role in her most popular nightmare.

  Once she had made the connection, once she had realized that the shifting in the corpse’s face was basically a replay of that old Jesus picture, that part of the dream became less intimidating. This was the second detail that changed over time. The rest of the dream, however, remained trapped in a sealed space inside her mind, where a corpse that was coming after her never changed, and never became any less terrifying.

  At the end of the nightmare, just before Charlene would snap awake, when the corpse was inches away from her, she would finally recognize its familiar-looking face.

  It was Fred Astaire.

  “Wanna dance?”

  Charlene’s mother, Mae Rutkowski, still lived on the Grand Concourse, that old Jesus picture still on the wall when Charlene told her about the dream. Her mother asked, “Why do you stick? Doin’ what yer doin’, formatics.”

  “Forensics.”

  “Why do you stick if it’s givin’ you nightmares?”

  “Good money,” Charlene replied, pouring herself another green crème de menthe—the only booze in her mother’s house. “Hey, it’s a job, right? Remember Carol Springer? Became a flight attendant, right? Told me she has bad dreams every night. Her plane goes down! Every freakin’ night! The worst that happens to me is that Fred Astaire invites me to dance.”

  “I always loved Fred Astaire,” said Mae a bit dreamily.

  “I never did,” said Charlene. “By me, he always looked a little bit like a—” She stopped, sipping syrupy green. “—a bit like a dead man.”

  By 10:17 p.m. John Doe’s corpse was in the process of being dissected. Charlie dutifully made the necessary Y-shaped incision, shoulders to mid-chest and down to the pubic region. There was virtually no blood, not on the surface.

  A dead heart doesn’t pump it. The Bronx bombshell, looking entirely out of place, reflected back the soft tissues on the front of John Doe’s chest. It was as if saloon doors were swinging open. Inside, the man’s bones resembled sauce-covered racks of pork at Damon’s, “The Place for Ribs.”

  John Doe was old enough that his cartilage had begun to morph into bone. Charlie used a serrated kni
fe, essentially a small saw, to cut through cartilage that had fused to the breastplates. This enabled her to enter the corpse’s chest and begin to explore. Very shortly she discovered something that the man wasn’t born with.

  “Bogie,” she said as she used forceps to remove … “a bullet.”

  “Vital?” asked the doctor.

  “Nyet. Stopped by a rib. A week and some Darvon, this dude goes home. What’re we lookin’ for here anyway?”

  “For whatever killed the guy.”

  “Wrong place, wrong time. Bad luck. City living.”

  “Mmmmm.” Acocella made handwritten notes in a loose-leaf binder. Certain that it wasn’t a bullet that ended John Doe’s life, he was content to let his diener be the “prosecutor.” The written notes were for his own files. Occasionally he reached up to press a button on a small microphone that depended from a plastic mounting he wore on his head and spoke essential bits of information out loud. His words were wirelessly transmitted to a computer that sat on a dry table at the side of the room. A voice-recognition system translated those words into readable text. That text was then forwarded to a prescribed list of city and county agencies. It became the ME’s official autopsy report.

  The voice-recognition processor was meant to make the pathologist’s job easier, but the system was, to say the least, imperfect. Acocella knew that once the autopsy was finished, when the corpse had been rebuilt and rolled into the freezer, he would have to check the text for errors. It wasn’t an entirely fruitless process. Most of the resulting texts were eighty percent correct. So on this night, while Charlene did the wet-work, Acocella, a rules-follower if nothing else, dutifully wore his microphone and occasionally spoke into it.

  “White male,” were the first words he eventually dictated. Then he took his finger off the microphone button and said privately to Charlene, “Let’s see how that gets fucked up. How’s it gonna come back? ‘Why,’ ‘wire,’ ‘write’? ‘Mail,’ ‘mole,’ ‘mule’? Computers, I’m telling you.”

  “You have an accent, what d’ya want?”

  “I do not.”