Free Zombie Pulp by Tim Curran Page A

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,