Free Psychopomp: A Novella by Heather Crews

him. “What do you mean?”
    “You’re a strong girl,” he said. “You have a good head.”
    “Will you pay me extra to go with you?” she demanded. “Otherwise I won’t do it.”
    He laughed, a soft, rumbling sound. His dark eyes glittered. “Of course.”
    “And you can’t touch me. Nothing inappropriate.”
    “I would never dream of harming you or making you uncomfortable. You have my word.”
    Dominique stared at him; he seemed sincere enough. “All right,” she agreed at last, reluctance hanging on her tone.
    “Excellent,” Hiram Bartholomew said. “I look forward to this event, Dominique.”
    She looked forward to it too, but she wasn’t going to let him know that.
     

13. las cenizas
    The wind blew harshly, sending up billows of dust. Brittle curls of paint flaked off beneath my fingers. There was nothing to see in the waving western fields except a pair of distant trees clinging to life with the certainty of years. Their bony branches probably grew barer with each tearing wind. Their tall, leaning forms looked like a gateway to a long-abandoned world.
    They lived. Their roots were much deeper than mine would ever be. One day my tree would fall and die, gnawed by serpents.
    An orange-striped cat with one blind eye and a coat made ragged from unseen scars darted in front of me. He disappeared before I could see where he went. I’d have to remember to save some food for him.
    “Nobody ever comes here,” Gabriel told me. “You and I—we’re all alone.”
    “Good,” I said.
    Apparently someone at the asylum on the hill had died that morning, so he showed me how he disposed of the body using a process called alkaline hydrolysis. There was a machine in the far back of the morgue, draped with a large cloth when not in use. Cylindrical and made of steel, it looked like some kind of futuristic space chamber.
    The body he’d brought down from the asylum lay pale and cold on the steel table, fresh enough not to smell yet. It was a man, naked and fleshy, free of bruises or blood or any other outward sign of how he’d died. Fresh lines of sutures mapped his torso.
    “What happened to him?” I asked.
    “He died in his sleep. As most of them do. Heart attack. Organ failure. Loss of will to live.”
    “Organ failure? Doesn’t the asylum give patients medical treatment?”
    “If it’s not too expensive, sure. But they don’t really care about the patients, Marlo, and it’s naïve to think they do.”
    I frowned. “Did you cut him open?”
    “I always take the organs, if they’re still good. I inject them with a preservative and put them in the freezer.” Gabriel gazed at the body and sighed. “Thin or large, long or short, man or woman. They all look the same.”
    The man looked pretty distinctive to me, but his was the only dead body I’d ever seen up close.
    The mortician opened the machine’s hydraulic lid. Then, with a deceptive strength in his gaunt frame, he rolled the body right into the opening. Something about the way he moved struck me as familiar.
    “Now, the water and lye,” he said. He shut the lid and pushed a button. The machine made a quiet whirring noise as it filled. “The chamber will be heated and pressurized until nothing is left of the body but liquid and bones so brittle you could crush them with one hand. Lye makes the process sterile, so all the leftover liquid can go right down the drain to be recycled later. We recycle the bones, too, and anything else left behind. Jewelry, prosthetics, implanted parts.”
    I listened, fascinated and horrified. I hadn’t ever thought much about how the dead were disposed of until just then.
    He flipped the switches, smiling to himself. I shuddered. “This thing makes a horrible smell. But you get used to it, eventually.”
    I covered my nose, just beginning to detect the scent of ammonia in the air.
    “We still bury people,” he continued, “but only to help create fertile soil for the greenhouses. No coffins or