run, he could not. He got to his feet, brushing mud from his arms. Then he followed them, knowing deep down he had to see this.
Through the swampy, sunken landscape he went until he caught sight of them gathered at the far side of the cemetery. In the flashing lightening, he could see they were working. Yes, they had shovels now. Dead men digging their own graves and not slowly, mindlessly, but with great effort and concentration.
Johnny could see there was someone with them.
Someone with a flashlight barking out orders.
Johnny came forward and soon enough saw Riker there, yelling at the dead men, kicking dirt at them, drumming them on the heads with the barrel of his flashlight. “Dig, you bastards!” he was screaming at them. “Dig, dig, dig! Dig ‘em down deep, you know what you have to do! You know the way!”
Johnny, wordlessly, stood by the mortuary boss for some time, watching the gray rain-swept figures digging and widening and squaring off their holes. When they were done, they lowered their caskets down…and climbed into them. Within a half-hour, all the graves were dug and the last of the lids slammed shut with a brutal finality.
Then there was only silence. The sound of rain, distant thunder.
Riker, his face wet with rain, said, “See, boy, how it works is, the guards, oh they love me, on account I handle the mortuary so they don’t have to. I see that the dead are registered, the graves dug and filled and I do it all by myself. I do it with them.”
“Dead men,” Johnny managed, his mind drawn into a soundless vacuum now. “Living dead men.”
Riker clapped him on the shoulder. “That’s it, boy! That’s it exactly! See, years ago, when I started at the mortuary they was this Haitian fellow ran it, a drug dealer. He taught me about the walking dead. Corps Cadavre, he called ‘em. He showed me how it was done. How to make the powder, the dolls, to make with the mumbo- jumbo ju ju talk-”
“Zombies,” Johnny found himself saying incredulously. Because that’s what they were. Dead men summoned up to dig their own graves. Just like the dead men you heard about, worked those cane fields in Haiti and Guadeloupe and those places.
Riker gave him a shovel and for the next hour or so, they filled in the graves, marking them with simple wooden crosses. Then it was done and they both stood there in that dank cold, in that brown sloppy soup of mud.
“Boy, you’d drank that whiskey like I told you,” Riker said, “you’d have slept right through all this, see? I put enough seconal in there to put you into dreamland for six, eight hours.”
Sure. That’s why he didn’t want anyone in the mortuary that night, things had been all set. The cadavers that hadn’t been claimed were given that powder and the little dolls, told when they were to open their eyes and get to work. It was almost funny…if it hadn’t been so damn depraved, so horrible and, yes, disgusting.
Zombies, Johnny’s brain thought, zombies.
Empty as a tin can, he turned away from Riker and that was a mistake.
Riker hit him with a shovel, opening his head. Johnny sank into the mud like a drowning man. Fingers of gray slop ran from the open crown of his head.
“Sorry, boy,” Riker said, “but I can’t have you telling what you saw.”
Taking Johnny by the feet, he dragged him back towards the mortuary, wondering what sort of story he might concoct. Figured it would be a good one.
*
Two nights later.
The prison mortuary.
A morgue drawer.
Tagged and bagged, Johnny Walsh lay in his berth in that cool, easy darkness. His hands were folded over his chest, the fingers carefully interlocked. He had no family, no one to claim him. Just more refuse of the state that the taxpayers would no longer be burdened with.
There was a little mud and stick doll stuck between his knees.
Johnny’s eyes snapped open.
He began to speak about zombies in a dead voice, spinning out the last things his brain remembered. He clawed at his sheet, kicked his feet at the door. The drawer slid open then, Riker standing there.
“C’mon, boy,” he said somberly. “Nobody’s claimed you. Time to prepare your place…”
EMILY
When Emily came out of the grave, Mother was waiting there for her. She saw little Emily and began to immediately shake and sob. A broken cry came from her throat as the immensity of her daughter’s resurrection hit her. She went down to her knees in the sluicing muck, gasping and staring, her mouth unable to form words.
Emily just stood there, her white burial dress dripping wet and dark with graveyard soil that fell in clots. Even in the wan moonlight, her face was pale as tombstone marble, her eyes huge and black and empty.
“Emily?” Mother said, caught in some sucking, manic whirlpool of utter joy and utter horror. “Emily?”
Emily just watched her, completely indifferent to the scene. Raindrops rolled down her pallid face like tears. Finally, she grinned because it was what Mother wanted. She grinned and Mother recoiled like she had been slapped. Emily had not grinned in awhile and it came out a bit too crooked, a bit too toothy. “Mother,” she said, her voice dry and scraping like a shovel dragged over a concrete tomb lid.
Mother came forward, uncertain at first, but that endless week of mourning had drained everything from her and she could no longer see how this was wrong, how this was unnatural and insane. So she stumbled forward and collected Emily in her arms, squeezing her in the rain, paying no mind to the fetid stench that came off her daughter.
“I prayed for this, baby! I prayed and I wished and I hoped and I never, ever, ever lost my faith!” Mother said. “I knew you would come back! I knew you would come back to me! I knew you weren’t really dead!”
Emily did not hug her back.
In fact, the warmth of Mother’s flesh slightly repelled her…even though the smell of it was appetizing. She felt Mother’s arms around her, but it did not move her. Emily came out of the grave with certain things, certain needs and desires, but love and affection were not among them.
But Mother did not see any of this and mainly because she did not want to. Grief had shattered her and mourning had laid her bare. The madness that comes with losing a child is a special madness, stark and numbing, seamless and all-encompassing. So Mother simply accepted. There was nothing more. Just acceptance.
Mother rambled on and on about how she had prayed and wished for Emily’s resurrection, how she had sat in her bedroom grim night after night after night, staring into the flame of a single candle and wishing her little girl alive again. And how last night she had dreamed that Emily had opened her eyes in the cloying darkness of her little pearl-white casket and that’s how she had known to come tonight with a shovel to set her baby free.
“But you weren’t dead, baby!” Mother said again and again. “I told them at the wake and I told them at the funeral and they wouldn’t believe me! They wouldn’t believe that my little girl wasn’t dead! But I knew! I knew! I knew you weren’t dead!”
“Yes, I was, Mother,” Emily said.
But Mother didn’t hear that either.
There were only her delusions now which were a high, sturdy brick wall that things like reason and decency could not hope to break through. She had her Emily back and that’s all that mattered, that’s really all that mattered. Emily was back…or something that looked like her was.
“Help me, baby,” Mother said, on her hands and knees, pushing wet earth back into the grave. “We have to cover this up so people don’t ask questions. You know how they ask questions. But I won’t let them take you away from me again.”
But Emily did not help.
She just stood there, still grinning, watching Mother fill in the grave, watching her cry and sob and make funny, high-pitched sounds deep in her throat. Emily did not honestly see the point of filling in the grave. She had
