things inside.
That was bad, but the worms were worse.
They gave a lot of the men-Henry included-bad cases of the creepy-crawlies.
You’d pop a box, just not knowing what you might see. Maybe just a stiff dissolving to a gray jelly of putrescence or a pile of bones laced with grave fungi or maybe even a few dead rats that never found their way out again boiled right down to clots of fur. But now and again, you’d find a skullish face threaded with long, slinking red worms that, yes, looked very much like living licorice whips. Great knots and bunches of them feeding from eye sockets and into mouths, worming tangles of wet red wires looped around rib staves and roped around vertebrae like climbing vines. Some skeletons-or things on their way to becoming skeletons- had hundreds of the worms matted and snarled over their bones and some of the fresh ones had split open from crotch to throat, bundles of those worms coiling in their bellies or lacing up the edges of their autopsy incisions like a woman’s corset.
It was disgusting.
And maybe even that didn’t quite cut it.
Harry and Roland Smyth were down in a grave that was rapidly filling with mud as the rain continued to fall and water seeped in dank rivers from the slick clay walls. Using a crowbar, they snapped open the lid, and right away that moist green smell rose into their faces making them gag. Inside, the body was actually moving as the worms nested happily in it. Harry moved quick to work the lid back on, but slipped in the muck and fell, his left arm sinking right up to the elbow in the spongy abdomen of the corpse. And that was sickening enough in its own right, like sinking your arm into wet leaves…but what was possibly worse was, for that instant his arm was in there before he drew it back with a cry, he could feel those worms in there sliding over his forearm like slimy shoelaces. When he yanked his arm out, just offended, physically offended, two or three of those worms were caught in the sleeve of his shirt.
“Jesus and shit,” Roland Smyth said. “Get rid of them.”
Which was what Harry was trying to do. The feel of them coiling and slithering against his flesh was almost enough to slit his mind right open. Finally he shook them free and one of them plopped right on the chest of the corpse. And as he stood there, wanting to vomit, that long red worm slid right back inside the body with a rubbery sound like thread pulled through a cuff.
“Quit fucking around down there, you morons,” one of the hacks said. He was watching the backhoe swing its boom into place. “Let’s get this done with.”
And that’s pretty much the sort of repulsive, nightmarish job it was. Like some kind of exhumation assembly line. The backhoe’s boom would be swung over a grave, the chains secured around the box, and the casket brought up to what passed for the light of day.
It was hard, dirty work, but they kept at it.
The boxes were just cheap pine affairs slapped together in the carpentry shop and most rotted right out in a few years. Mostly, they were light and fairly easy to stand up so they could get the chains around them. But some had burst open from gases and they had to dig through the muddy bottoms of graves, sorting mummified human anatomy from coffin wreckage. A few others had absorbed so much moisture that it took three grunting men to get them up enough so they could be winched out by the backhoe’s boom. Many of them, encrusted with clay and mineral deposits, were nearly impossible to move and others were tangled with tree roots that had to be chopped free…from the outside and the inside.
They could throw another five years at me, Harry thought, and I’d jump at it rather than do this. Fucking graverobbers. Goddamn worms and mud and stink.
He figured he’d never get the smell off him. On a good day, things didn’t smell real sweet at Slayhoke, but come tonight, there was going to a group of cons that were going to smell like open graves.
Mo Borden didn’t seem to mind it.
Him and a couple of big bikers, a few of the blacks and Indians that were always working the iron pile out in the yard-the lot of them too damn big to squeeze down in the graves-manhandled the boxes once they were out of the ground, hefting them up onto the flatbeds of waiting trucks like movers handling pianos and sofas. Mo, he was especially impassive about it all. The bodies meant nothing to him. Maybe it was being a farm boy and seeing the kind of shit those boys did. Mo had once told Harry how they buried cows when they died and how one time, how they’d had to disinter one that was poisoning a pond with its run-off. Dead summer and they had to dig it back up… it was so soft, they actually had to shovel it out of its hole.
Watching him with a decayed bag of bones thrown over one shoulder while he dragged a casket with his free hand reminded Harry of those newsreels of the concentration camps. Those crazy bastards there, pulling a corpse from a heap with one hand while chewing on a sandwich with the other.
Just absolutely desensitized.
“Okay,” Krickman finally said,” take five.”
“About fucking time,” a con named Joey Creet said. He was a pudgy little guy who had a thing for knives. Something his wife found out about when he caught her in bed with another man.
Creet walked over to the truck for a cup of coffee…and let out a shriek. A sunken grave had collapsed right beneath him, probably from subsurface subsidence. He sank right up to his belly in the ground, shouting and swearing and trying to wriggle his girth free.
“Lookit that,” Jacky Kripp said, “he’s a fucking Jack-in-the-Box.”
Both cons and hacks laughed at that one, but Creet wasn’t thinking it was too goddamn funny. A couple cons pulled him up and he was just brown with mud.
Harry got his cup of coffee and had a cigarette. He stood before an open grave with Roland Smyth. They were both fouled with mud and clay. The rain kept falling in a cold drizzle and neither man could remember now what it was like to be dry or warm. The graveyard which had been weedy and overgrown a few weeks before, was now just a rank sea of yellow, sluicing mud. Far as the eye could see, nothing but crude markers and wooden crosses riding those low hills and sloping hollows. The flatbed trucks were heaped with muddy brown coffins piled up like Christmas presents. Another truck was heaped with the dead whose boxes had rotted away or fallen apart. Somebody had thrown a tarp over all that hollow-socketed deadwood because it was giving some of the cons the creeps. But even with the tarp in place, a few fleshless arms and trailing stick fingers hung out. There was a heap of casket wreckage arranged like the wood for a Boy Scout bonfire and Jacky Kripp said they’d have one hell of a wienie roast in a few weeks when things dried up.
But nobody thought that was funny but the hacks.
“Fuck,” Harry said, “this’ll take weeks to do. I mean weeks.”
Smyth didn’t argue the point. “Gotta be a thousand graves here. Shit and shit.”
It would have honestly been hard to imagine a more despicable and abhorrent job and you could see it on those grime-streaked, rain-spattered faces. The realization that this was the kind of duty you pulled for breaking society’s laws. This is what it got you. It got you wet and dirty and sickened in a flooded cemetery.
And wasn’t that just peachy?
“All right, you faggots,” Krickman announced, “back to it.”
Shovels and picks were grabbed and the slow, backbreaking process of digging through that slough of muck began again. A couple of bikers opened a casket and it was filled with rats…big and greasy-looking and pissed-off. One of the bikers got bit and another jumped out of the hole with two rodents clinging to his pants. Krickman and the other hacks unloaded their riotguns into that infested box and that was that. The bitten man was sent to the infirmary.
The rain really started to pour down then, coming down in sheets and curtains and you couldn’t see more than twenty feet in any direction. Even the gray concrete hulk of the mortuary itself disappeared. The rain pounded the earth and the graveyard continued to swamp, mud bubbling, a fetid mist boiling off it like steam rising from a witch’s cauldron.
A black dude named Ty Lauder was down squaring off a grave, trying to clean away enough mud so he could get the box open for inspection. A crowbar was passed down to him and the lid came open with a creaking, groaning sound.
“Contents A-okay,” he called up out of the hole, hammering the lid back in place. Then he made a funny gasping sound, said, “Something…something happening down here, man.”
“Sure is,” Krickman said, “you’re gonna be in solitary for a week you don’t get your black ass moving.”
There was no laughter coming up out of that hole and for some reason, this gave everyone pause. Picks and
