Zombie Pulp

CORPS CADAVRE

Midnight.

The prison mortuary.

The building was squat and cold, cut from blocks of gray stone stacked in a grim heap like a cairn made of interlocking skulls. The windows were barred and the doors were narrow, clustered with shadows. Sullen and utilitarian, it sat well away from the other prison buildings, connected only by a ribbon of winding dirt road. It flanked the potter’s field cemetery, rising above and lording over the weedy fields of the dead—the wooden crosses riding the hills and hollows, marking the graves of the unknown, the unwanted, and the undesirable.

Inside, Johnny Walsh sat at his little desk, feet up, fingers drumming nervously against his legs. Not yet forty, Johnny had already done ten years in that hardtime joint on a double-homicide. His world before maximum security was a tight working class existence and after the murders, one of rage, anger, and oppression. A world just as dark as the skin on his face, a world where poor shanty blacks and white trash busted heads to break the boredom, where black drug gangs and the white Aryan Brotherhood shanked each other over donuts.

But that was doing life.

Johnny would taste freedom roughly about the time of the Second Coming. Breathe in, you smell the despair; breathe out, you smell your life winding out in crowded, steel silence.

Johnny was humping the night shift with the stiffs because of the riot.

Four days before, the small, seething Hispanic population decided to kill every black in the joint. They squirreled away shivs and pipes and razors. At a prearranged moment, they rose up, set on the blacks like rabid dogs. When it was over, the National Guard had been called in and seventy inmates were dead, the infirmary packed with twice that many.

And now the mortuary was full.

The freezers held more cold meat than a butcher’s display case. Full drawers, gurneys and slabs packed with rigid, white-sheeted figures. You could barely walk in there now, dead heaped like firewood.

The warden decided that someone had to keep watch over all those bodies. There being so many and all, it made the old man nervous. Word had it more than one body had turned-up missing there in the past and what with the state and their impending investigation, warden didn’t want no fuck-ups this time around.

So Johnny, who had a good record and was a trustee, pulled the duty. Pulled it mainly because he was in good with LaReau, the sergeant hack. LaReau was a big, mean intolerant prick the cons called “Ironhead” because he enjoyed head-butting anyone that gave him shit and when he did, he piledrived convict-ass big and small right to the mat.

But Johnny was okay with him—yes boss, no boss, how was your day, boss, and can I wash your car come Wednesday, boss? Make the peckerwood feel like he was something special and he would be easy on you.

So the mortuary wasn’t a bad gig, all things considered.

Johnny kept the doors locked—warden’s orders—and did a lot of reading, but mostly a lot of shivering. Because it was cold in there. Johnny had a little woodstove in the corner, but it didn’t help much. The mortuary had held so many corpses in its belly through the years that the stone had sucked in all that tomb cold, let it out at night, exhaling the breath of graves.

The clock on the wall was ticking and Johnny kept hearing little sounds—poppings and crackings—but it was just the old building settling and he would not let himself think it was anything else.

Lighting a cigarette, Johnny went to the window over the little sink, started a bit at his reflection in the glass, smiled, and stared out through those rusting black bars.

A moonless, black night.

The world was caught in-between chill autumn and the promise of bitter winter, pelted by blowing leaves and a freezing, relentless rain. It turned the roads to slop and the fields to mud, sluicing and oozing and pooling in black puddles that were frosted with a scum of ice. December or not, it was miserable by the standards of northeastern Louisiana, just a stone’s throw from the borders of Arkansas and Mississippi.

Johnny turned away, didn’t like the night and certainly didn’t like that face and those eyes and what they were saying to him. Because, yes sir, he’d made mistakes and now it was all done and he was all used-up. No more fresh air and freedom, no more t-bones and certainly no more pussy. You could get both if you had the money, guards would bring in anything for a price. But for poor trash like Johnny Walsh his days of pussy were history, for guys like him there were only the queens and Johnny preferred to do without. In fact, he—

Thump.

Johnny heard it. Felt something wither and die in his guts, curl-up and tremble. That sound. Couldn’t be no sound like that here, not here. His heart pounding, that cigarette welded to his lower lip, Johnny just stood there as cold as shrimp in an ice bucket.

Thump, thump.

Johnny’s heart almost blew out of his chest on that one.

He looked around, saw his reflection again. Saw the sink and the desk and the file cabinets. Saw the waste paper basket, the girly calendar on the wall showing him a fine set of Asian tits… but right then his business was shriveled-up like a breakfast link.

Licking his lips, he made himself walk first this way, then that.

The gray cement-block walls were sweating an icy moisture. He saw those walls and figured suddenly that this was no easy bit, it was the worst cage of all. There were two doors in that room. One led into an entry and out into the world, the other led into a corridor that led to the freezers and the garage where all the cheap pine caskets were stored.

Thump.

Johnny knew then that the sound was coming from the corridor… or, and more precisely, from one of the rooms back there. A wild, freezing terror flooded through him and he could feel it right down to the balls of his feet. Insane. That’s what. Because, because there could not be sounds back there. Sounds meant something was alive or at least in motion and nothing back there was capable of either.

He thought: Don’t go on like this, don’t mean nothing, just the foundation contracting or some such shit, it don’t mean… it don’t mean that—

Thump, thump, thump.

Johnny let out a little involuntary cry, pressing himself up against that concrete wall that was just as cold as graveyard marble. His fingers were pressed flat, drawn taut like the rest of his body, some hot blue electricity arcing through his bones now. His eyes were wide and refused to blink.

Something in his brain reminded him of those bodies that had disappeared at the mortuary. It couldn’t be, it wasn’t possible what he was thinking. The dead were dead and nobody since Lazarus had ever gotten up and walked afterwards.

But those sounds, Jesus, what was making those sounds?

The guy who ran the mortuary was named Riker.

He was a large, heavy man with arms like railroad ties all painted-up with jailhouse tattoos. His neck was thick as a pine stump and the head it supported looked like something you hammered iron on. He’d already put in twenty-five years of a lifetime sentence and before this joint, he’d done six years at Angola for armed robbery. He was a rough customer, but years of permanent confinement with no hope for parole had sanded off the rough edges, planed him just as smooth and even as a caged violent offender can be.

He was a trustee like Johnny, but he was the senior man in the trustee system and could have had any job he wanted in the prison industries. He could’ve stamped plates and gears in the metal shop or pushed a book cart in the library or even supervised the road gangs, but he liked the mortuary.

“The dead ones are okay with me,” he often said. “You never have to push ’em on account they never push you.”

When he found out that LaReau was putting a con on the night shift, he didn’t like it much. He started swearing and spitting, saying the dead don’t need no watching, it was the living ones you had to keep an eye on. But the warden wanted it that way, so that’s how it was going to be.

When he got a look at Johnny, he just grimaced, shook his head, mumbled something. But then Johnny—using that brain his mama said was never worth a shit—offered Riker a cigarette and that warmed the old guy fine.

Riker took a drag and smiled thinly. “You up to this, boy?”

And Johnny didn’t like being called “boy”, but he got used to it. Riker was a Southerner and they called everybody “boy”. You couldn’t take offense to it like you might on the streets. And besides, even though Riker was pushing seventy, those fists still looked very capable of breaking skulls.

“I can do it fine,” Johnny said.

“Just saying, boy, ya’ll don’t look real comfortable around them dead ones. Like maybe they make you uncomfortable or some such.”

But Johnny gave him the line, telling him he liked the stiffs just fine, they were okay with him. You didn’t have to watch your back with stiffs and that was something, all right. In this place, that was really something.

“What you in for, boy?” Riker finally asked him.

“Stupidity, boss, plain and simple,” Johnny told him, none too proudly. Pride, like hope, died a quick death behind those walls. “Let me tell you about it. There I was working me a job at the foundry, sweating and straining and a-busting my ass, but pulling down a living. And feeling good, you know? Good like you can only feel after putting in your shift, working for a living. Anyhow, had me a cute little lady name of Tamara, was crazy about her. She’d been a runner up in that Miss Louisiana thing and was just as pretty as they come. So I’m working at the foundry stamping out manhole covers and she got herself a receptionist job for this white cat owned hisself an insurance company—”

“I can see where this is going, boy.”

Johnny just nodded, dragged off his cigarette. “Surely. I come home one night, twisted my ankle and had to take a few days off, and what do I see? Right there in my bedroom? Just that white ass planted in Tamara’s saddle, humping and pounding and slamming away and Tamara moaning and squealing and saying, gimme it, gimme it, oh you fucking me fine. Bitch never did nothing but lay there for me. Shit and shit. So I stabbed old whitey forty times, they said, and Tamara… something like thirty, give or take.” Johnny started laughing then, seeing his wasted life play out in his mind like some sort of cheap, unpleasant situation comedy. “Yes sir, you can just go on ahead and forget that business about going black and not going back, because—at the trial—well, I found out my Tamara was going back again and again, setting the cause back a hundred years.”

“What cause is that, boy?”

“Freedom for my people, mister, what else?”

Riker thought that was hilarious. “Freedom? What fucking freedom, boy? You a convict, case you didn’t notice. We all work for massah here. We all just trash society put out to the curb.”

Johnny told him that was certainly true.

And then Riker admitted he was doing life for multiple homicide. Had waltzed into a bank, planning to rob it. Guard saw him and went for his piece, so Riker drilled him and then, feeling funny that day, he killed four more people so they wouldn’t be able to identify him.

“My head was full of kitty litter back then, boy,” Riker told him, “and I ain’t so sure they’s not a few turds still stuck between my ears even now.”

Stories told, Riker gave him the grand tour.

Took him down that grim concrete block corridor that smelled like wet steel, tears, and pesticide, showed him the freezers. Behind iron doors, bodies crowded under stained white sheets, arms hanging out all gray and blotched from lividity. Riker showed him the cold cuts, how bad it had all been. Here a couple blacks with slit throats, there a Hispanic that had been kicked to death so that his jaw was planted by his left ear now, and here some dumb white guy who’d decided to intervene and had his head split clean open. The dumb and the dumber. In the drawers, no better. Eyes punched out and faces erased and bones sticking through dirty canvas skins like broomsticks.

Then Riker showed him the garage out back where all the caskets were piled up—cheap pine things hammered together in the carpentry shop.

“They two kinds of dead here, boy. Them what get claimed by their kin and them what end up out in potter’s field. Most of these boys will end up out there on account they families is ashamed of ’em.”

Back in the office, Riker parked Johnny at the desk, gave him some fuck books and a few paperback westerns, told him to just pass the time, keep the doors locked. That was it.

Then he gave him a Thermos of whiskey.

“Drink your fill, boy,” he said. “A little taste is one of the benefits of sorting out the dead ones and they troubles.”

But now Johnny was alone.

Riker said he wouldn’t be back before first light.

Thump, thump.

No foundation settling or walls groaning, this was something else. Something bad. Something big and angry that did not care to be ignored. Johnny kept telling himself that there was a very good reason for what he was hearing. Maybe some con had gotten himself bagged up alive or such… but he didn’t believe that.

Sucking in a sharp breath and wiping cold sweat from his forehead, he went to the door that opened into the corridor. He touched it with his hand. Cold, damn cold was how it felt. He could feel that cold seeping in through his pores, locking down everything within him in a blanket of ice. He could hear that damn clock ticking and the blood rushing in his ears.

He heard the sound again and his heart hitched painfully in his chest.

Something, something alive back there.

His face was tight as cellophane against the skull beneath, the flesh prickling unpleasantly at the back of his neck. Sweat ran into his eyes and he shivered and breathed and licked his lips slowly, slowly, feeling a sudden rushing weight settle into him and knowing it was madness. That insanity had a physical, ominous presence. His eyes studied the door, bulging and white and unblinking.

All right, then, all right.

His hand found the doorknob, eased it open. A well of shifting, damp blackness billowed out at him, fell over him, got up his nostrils and down his throat, tasted like wormy coffin silk on his tongue and stank of wet, dripping crypts. He turned on the light switch before that blackness suffocated him, drained him dry, whisked him off into the freezer like a chop put up for next Sunday’s cookout.

There was a single light bulb and it created crawling shadows, made things even worse.

Outside the freezer room, staring at that riveted iron door painted the color of old blood and thinking it was like the door to some old vault, Johnny listened, brought his fingers to the latch.

Sound in there… not that thumping, but a whispering sound.

Johnny’s breath clogged in his throat like grave dirt.

Open it, open it for chrissake.

The latch sounded like thunder in the corridor, clanking and groaning. The door opened soundlessly. Johnny’s fingers—twisting whitely now like worms dying in the sunlight—found the old-fashioned switch and brought light into the world.

Nothing.

The drawers were all closed, the slabs still occupied, the gurneys still squeezed in-between and all available floor space was thronged with shrouded figures waiting for burial.

Johnny’s fingers put a cigarette in his mouth, lit it.

He took a deep, long pull, knowing what he needed here was some strength, some balls and not those playground marbles that had sucked up into his body cavity.

The freezer room was green-tiled, stank of dirty backwaters and quarry slime, vomit and frozen meat. Johnny went in there, stepping over and around the ones on the floor, pausing—for reasons he was even unsure of—before a slab.

His heart thudded dully in his chest.

He took hold of the sheet like the page of a book, pulled it back carefully, a chilly earthen smell coming off the body. Most of the flesh was missing from the face, what was left an ashen gray speckled with dirt and dried blood. A bullet had gotten this one and a high-caliber by the looks of it. Tower guard. Gums were shriveled away from teeth, the left eye blown clear away with its attendant orbit of bone. The right eye was open and staring, glazed over.

There was something nestled on the chest.

Johnny thought at first it was some big spider… but no. Just a little figure molded from black mud and sticks. Like a little doll. How in Christ did that get there? Johnny dropped the sheet, checked two more bodies. No dolls. But a third had one and so did a fourth.

What the hell were they? What was going on here—

Thump, thump, thump.

From the drawers then. Like something in there was trying desperately to get out, hammering and pounding. Johnny went cold, went hot, felt his skin crawl and a tornado of white noise whip through his brain.

Something was happening now. There was a cool, crackling electricity, a sharp smell, a motion, a sentience, a heavy thrumming awareness. Johnny’s mouth went dry as sawdust, he could not open his lips—they had been sewn shut.

He stumbled back, fell over a body, his hand brushed a fleshy arm that felt like thawing beef. He sat there on his ass, unsure, unknowing, unable to do much but shake and gasp and wonder. He could not move, could not breathe. The drawers—many of them now—thumping and banging and rattling in their housings. Their metal faces were bulging, dented out from the inside.

Then all around him, as if stirred by some secret malefic wind, sheets began to tremble and rustle and shift with motion beneath them. Arms slid out, fingers clutching madly in the air like snakes.

Johnny heard a voice whisper, another grunt, another make something like a dry barking sound. He sat there, suppressing a demented desire to start giggling. The bodies were sitting up now, sheets sliding from gray, bloodless faces and bodies like sloughed skins. Shadows crawled up from the corners, twisted like thick serpents, hissing and slithering.

A voice as brittle as crunching straw said: “Watch out, George… that sumbitch got a big knife he…”

But the others were talking now, too, speaking in those dry voices that were merely snarling, guttural noises that made Johnny want to scream. They were like cold steel at his spine, the flats of knife blades dragged along his belly and groin. Echoes. Just echoes. That’s what they were. The worn spools of those decayed brains repeating and repeating their final living thoughts until the room was alive with a ghastly murmuring.

They had risen up all around him now.

Grinning, frowning, smirking. Those faces were hideous moons with ragged, black impact craters for eyes. A dozen morgue drawers burst open, slid out on squeaking casters, sheeted forms rising, fingers twisting and tearing at their shrouds. Oh and dear God, those eyes—blanched and discolored, staring and hollow and so utterly empty.

The dead were on their feet now, stumbling and staggering and shambling. Some were naked, others clothed in bloody prison issue or filthy hospital gowns.

Johnny crawled on hands and knees out the doorway and they followed, a ragged, grisly throng of chattering teeth and wiggling fingers and whispering voices. Ligaments popped like rusty hinges. Muscles snapped and bones splintered. They stank of tombs and drainage ditches and body pits. One of them looked at Johnny, tried to speak, but a flood of black bile oozed from his lips, hung from his jawline like ribbons of mucus. His voice became a bubbling, gargling sound.

Screaming, Johnny found his feet, scrambling madly not towards the office, but to the garage and the outside door. His fingers had gone stupid and numb and rubbery and he could barely work the lock, barely throw himself into the black wet night before they were on him. Shouting and hollering, he fell out into the rain, coming to rest in a muddy pool. Thunder rumbled in the sky and lightening flashed, painting the landscape in lunar brilliance.

They had not followed him.

Johnny sat there in the muck, rain pounding down on him. The air was cold, but the mud around him was warm and sluicing like blood. He looked frantically off towards the prison itself, could see the high towers, the buildings, the wall… but not much else.

The whispering throng was coming out now.

They paid no attention to Johnny.

Balanced atop their shoulders, they carried caskets. Single file, they pushed through the muck and rain with their coffins, a funereal parade of contusions and slit throats, stab wounds and shattered skulls. A collection of stiffly animate rag dolls trailing stuffing from snipped stitches, bearing torn limbs and dangling shoebutton eyes. And making, yes, making for potter’s field. At least thirty of them, keeping an almost military cadence.

Johnny sat there for awhile, drenched and dirty and shaking.

The rain fell and the susurration of the ghouls faded into the distance and although Johnny wanted to run and 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…”