Things just started getting weird. Stories started making the rounds at Slayhoke like clap at a convention. You could hear just about anything you wanted to, depending on who you listened to and what your particular bullshit level was. Crazy shit about yellow rains killing a group of trustees and a few guards outside the wall. Stiffs sitting up in the prison mortuary. Rats that had eaten two guys in a cell in K Block, rats with funny red eyes. Yeah, it was all there, loony stuff about the prisoners being experimented on, about ghosts walking through walls and sucking people’s blood, and, of course, the requisite stories about all those corpses and coffins from Hillside Cemetery washing down into the streets of Witcham. What that was like. And how when the rains finally stopped and the water retreated, it was the cons from Slayhoke that would have to clean up the mess. Another favorite topic was Ft. Providence down the road and the crazy-ass shit they were doing with dead soldiers shipped back from Iraq.
But that was Slayhoke sometimes, Harry figured, like a big hen party.
5
Jacky Kripp was one of the top dogs over at the mortuary. He got to pick and choose the cons that worked with him, so guys were always kissing ass on him, always trying to get a job working the cold cuts. Because, honestly, it beat the living hell out of the boiler room or the metal shop, the mattress factory with its swarms of insects or the roadcrews and their attendant hardcase hacks.
At first, Harry didn’t want any part of shuffling the cold meat.
He told Jacky as much. So, Kripp fixed it so he could get a sampling of those other prison industries and wasn’t long before Harry decided he liked the dead just fine. Of course, at first he lost his lunch a few times. You had lots of dead cons moving through there, some that had been beaten to death or sliced up or even burned. Sometimes you’d get a con you knew that had been fed strychnine with his hash and had died with the contortions, vomiting white foam. Men died violent, dirty deaths at Slayhoke and very rarely was it of natural causes. A lot of medical students from North-Western U worked at the mortuary. Under their instructor’s watchful eyes, they learned how to perform autopsies and very often when Harry and the others wrestled the remains into pine boxes, they were completely mutilated. Just slit and plucked and dismembered.
So it took a strong stomach to work the mortuary detail, but more often than not, the work was light. Harry, Jacky Kripp, Roland Smyth, Mo Borden, and a half dozen other guys would spend eight hours a day in the mortuary, mostly playing cards, smoking dope, and eating gourmet foods Kripp had smuggled in.
But, now and then, there were some really awful jobs to perform. And if they involved stiffs, they involved Jacky Kripp and his crew.
The very same afternoon that Mitch Barron and many other residents learned that the dead were rising in Witcham, the hacks shook Harry and the others out of the mortuary like dirt from a rug, marched them and about thirty other cons out into the pouring rain, gave them shovels and picks. They wanted them to dig up the stiffs in the old potter’s field graveyard where the convicts nobody claimed were buried. The DOC wanted to put a new administration building there, so the bodies had to be moved.
The cons pulled it, of course.
The hacks weren’t about to dirty their hands with shit like that.
Jacky Kripp, who had half a dozen hacks in his pocket, took Krickman, the sergeant hack aside, and said, “What’s this shit, sarge? What the fuck is this about? How come I didn’t know about this three days ago, a week ago?”
Harry knew that Kripp was usually told everything well before it happened. Lots of guards at Slayhoke had kids in college or fat bank accounts, and Jacky Kripp’s deep pockets were the reason. For even behind those walls, Kripp was running a multi-million dollar operation in Southern Wisconsin and the Chicago area. He dabbled in everything from heroin trafficking to extortion to internet porn. Owned scads of legitimate businesses like restaurants and movie theaters and car lots, was a high scale loanshark with as much as ten million dollars on the street at any one time. His personal income was very often in the seven digits monthly.
“They just told us this morning, Jacky, I swear to God,” Krickman said.
“I thought we were friends, sarge? I thought I helped you and you helped me? What the fuck is this shit? Why are you fucking with me like this? You don’t like me? You’re trying to piss me off?”
“Jacky, please, I swear to God, they didn’t tell us…”
It went back and forth like that while all the cons stood out in the rain sucking up the water like sponges. It was kind of funny, because Krickman was among the most hated hacks at Slayhoke. He was basically a violent, ignorant redneck who liked to dish out the shit. The day he broke kneecaps or skulls with his stick was a good day to him. And here he was, the tough psychotic sonofabitch, practically sucking the piss out of Jacky Kripp’s shorts.
Finally, some kind of agreement was reached and Kripp turned to the cons soaking in the rain, all those hard white and black and Hispanic faces, a few Ojibwa and Sauk Indians sprinkled amongst them. “Listen, boys, we gotta do this thing. It’s fucking dirty work and a shitty day for it, but we gotta make the warden happy.”
Not that Kripp actually got his hands dirty.
He stood around with the hacks telling them dirty jokes and stories about all the pussy he’d had in Milwaukee, most of it barely legal. The hacks ate it up and the cons went to work.
Two flatbed trucks were pulled up on the winding dirt drive. These to haul the exhumed coffins the inmates pulled from the earth like rotting teeth. There was also a backhoe that would open the graves to a level of about four feet. That was as close as they dared go with the backhoe’s bucket without risking damaging the caskets themselves. The cons would shovel out the rest of the earth by hand.
“I ain’t got no problem putting stiffs in the ground,” Roland Smyth said. “But digging ‘em back up…fuck kind of work is that?”
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
