I said, ‘She was one of the last emergency calls we got before they shut down local services. A security guard at the state university called it in. The school had been closed down for days, but somehow this girl sneaked herself into the library. They have private study carrels in the stacks, and he found her there with her sleeves rolled up and a razor blade. It was a mess when we arrived, though she’d only been dead for a few minutes. We were meant to bring her to the county morgue, but by then they’d already issued the incineration policy, and I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t let her be destroyed.’
Grunta was scratching herself in the neck with the screwdriver, unamused.
I said, ‘Anyway, I think she wanted to come back. She took her own life in a place she thought was private, where she wouldn’t be found before three hours lapsed.’
Grunta gestured at Milo with her thumb. ‘He took only one hour for return.’
‘I’ve heard anywhere from one hour to a full day. Three hours is average.’
‘And this - this freezing is to keep her from walking dead?’
‘It was an experiment,’ I said. ‘And I think it worked, mostly.’
Grunta sneered at me. ‘Milos lets you keep her here? He agrees to this?’
I didn’t know how to answer, but my silence told all. Grunta turned on her husband and shoved him one-handed. He croaked some awful sound and reeled backward against a suspended beef carcass. The meat swayed, and the hook to which it was impaled creaked from the strain, but it didn’t drop.
‘You are lucky you are dead already,’ she barked at him. ‘Villain!’
The freezer chill was making my nose run, so I headed back to the stretcher waiting in the entranceway. I enlisted Milo to help me lift Dolly out of the crate. He took her by the legs, and I got a grip on the plastic underneath her shoulders, hoping it wouldn’t rip midtransit. We slid her onto the cot, bag and all, and I stuffed a dozen ice packs inside the bag alongside her legs and across her stomach. I didn’t leer at where the gentle slope of her pubic bone was grazed by a soft chevron of manicured hair.
Grunta led me to a loading bay and heaved up the paneled door with one arm, swinging the other as a hint for me to get out quickly. ‘Hurry,’ she said. ‘The bugs.’ I rolled the stretcher back to the ambulance with relative ease, locked it into place. The bugs were in my hair, crawling along the length of my jugular. I’d lost my beekeeper’s hat somewhere.
I worked quickly to load the alcohol I had also purchased - cases of imported Czech beer, five boxes of Russian vodka with the labels printed in Cyrillic. My coup was two entire cases stuffed with glass flasks of dark-green absinthe, wormwood infused, smuggled incognito in Heineken boxes. Myself, I didn’t drink much more than a glass of wine on special occasions, but I knew that Dolly would need all this painkiller to get by when she awoke.
Back on the road, an FM station aired the soundtrack of our foreshortened lives - the Doors, REM, Blue Oyster Cult. Christian radio had gone shrill, of course, overtaken most of the airwaves not reserved for hard news - and it was always hard. For once I was thrilled to still be alive and scheming. I was like an expectant father on his way to the hospital. I blared the siren and the lights for nobody else as I floored it back into the pestilence cloud. The bugs came at me in a green hail and popped and crackled on the windshield like a celebration.
Toward the coast, the end of the line was abrupt. Orange barrels and wood crossbeams blocked the road, topped with blinking yellow lights. The inbound lane had been breached, barrels tossed into the marshy ditches now drowned out by seawater, caught and bobbing with other garbage in the rushes. The road, broken and sand-strewn, pressed onward into the waves. A sturdy wooden welcome plaque remained, though it read only WELCOME TO. The rest was submerged in the sea, out of which peeked the upper floors of restaurants and vacation homes, windows half-submerged like the looming eyes of crocodiles. The boat storage lofts still held an armada of compartmentalized pleasure craft, though the units on the lowest visible floor were vacant, their boats most likely floating empty and silent miles beyond these washed-out barrier islands.
The flash storms came daily and savagely, pushing in like hurricane feeder bands from the east in twisted airstreams. Even now the sky brewed purple on the horizon, and I had to hurry.
I cut the siren and the engine, popped open the door. I pulled out the stretcher and the rails unfolded, wheels touching pavement. Dolly slept the same as I’d left her - but I unzipped the bag and took her hand and laid it out across my own open palm and saw that her eyelids spasmed while I watched.
I pushed the stretcher on past the broken barrier, decked out in my jacket and tie and slacks - not the suit of a pallbearer, but rather of a preacher, a baptist. I’d never known God, but I felt him there in the briny air pushing off the sea, the front guard of the coming storm. His resistance was in the sand at my feet, mucking up the stretcher wheels. Dolly jostled as we moved over the rough ground, her small breasts quivering, and I looked away from them, out to sea.
A hundred yards out, five men stood on the balcony of a drowned-out restaurant. The place was four-star nautical kitsch - weathered wood siding and fishing nets and buoys. Its balcony had become a kind of dock on the raised waterline. The five shirtless men stood there in swim trunks and cutoff jeans, watching me.
I pushed Dolly to where the ocean undulated against the pavement. The road I walked had become like a boat launch angling down into the sea. The gulls circled and dived nearby, a few touching down on a massive grey hump. It was like a smooth boulder rising up from the shoals. It was, I realized, a dead beached whale. Truly dead. The baffling resurrections seemed a curse for humankind alone. Everything else that died was dead.
Thunder bashed on the horizon. The force of it seemed drawn up from the primordial deep that man had never conquered nor would. But here I was heedless, driving Dolly into the sea as the water drenched my shoes and soaked upward through my pant legs. It was lukewarm water, heated, so the hack radio scientist claimed, by the sudden spike in volcanic fuss along the midocean ridge, abyssal mountain ranges many leagues beyond the continental shelf.
After I waded waist-deep into the water, I moved alongside Dolly’s body and unzipped the bag down to her toes, folded it behind her shoulders, and lifted her head into the crook of my arm. I wrapped my other arm around her hips. Her flesh was dimpled like plucked chicken skin, but I ignored the chill of her body and slipped her into the water. The ice packs scattered and bobbed around us.
The nimbostratus front line had begun to eclipse the sun and lay its shadows like an early dusk. I freed Dolly from her baggage and held her naked above the water, one arm beneath her shoulders and the other behind the backs of her knees. She was stiff at first, but every second her body relaxed itself into my grasp. Her loosened knee joints lowered her bare feet down into the water. I waded out farther, my necktie draped modestly over her breasts.
The water came up to lap at my elbows and then to ease the burden of her weight from my arms. Lightning sputtered through the clouds, gilding their purple masses. Traces of that electric rush drove into the sea current. It shivered up through my groin and fired into my throat and made me laugh like God had finally blurted the punch-line.
My five-man Greek chorus had descended from their restaurant balcony onto a speedboat tied to the railings. One of them kept yanking the starter cord while the other four sat patiently in their seats. They were coming ashore ahead of the storm, skirting certain death. Or maybe they were already dead. Or they were live men coming for Dolly and me, eager to do whatever sick men do when laws no longer stifle their appetites.
I knelt into the oncoming waves and went under, kept my eyes open and felt that liquid-salt sting. I clenched her around the waist and pressed her chest against mine to keep her submerged where the amniotic warm could soften her chill. My lungs convulsed for air. My will dashed any whim I had to stay under and drown. My heart heaved blood through veins to remind me I was not yet together with the revenants.
I pressed my fingers to her face, wanting somehow to feel the moment of her consciousness, that current of thought trapped under ice, incubated. In my asphyxiating daze, I saw where two thousand miles north the frozen corpses of long-lost Arctic explorers now faced their eternal second consciousness without hope for motion, not until the ice caps melted off. I saw the bones of the decades-dead that hummed in their buried coffins but couldn’t lift the lid, cursed instead to ruminate in that cramped and noiseless dark. I saw Ukrainian nuclear towns where cancers bred wild and where fetuses presumed to be stillborn were quickening again in their mothers’ wombs. I saw African genocide fields of dead rising up like wheat at dawn, the burning pits spewing forth their charred offspring—
—and then I reared my head from the sea and breathed.
The five men had puttered their boat to within a few yards of us, two men at the fore peering down over the gunwale to catch sight of obstructions - street signs, the roofs of underwater houses. Behind them the dark skies brewed thicker shadow. The men were smoking cigarettes, so they were not among the dead. Unwelcome news for Dolly and me. One of them stood and pointed toward me and said ‘There!’ A moment later, the boat veered more precisely toward us.
The waves rushed harder now. They slapped my face and worked to shove me off my feet and drag me away on a riptide. I stole more oxygen and dipped back underwater with Dolly. I brought her face within inches of mine to see her more clearly. All at once her body lurched and her legs scissored through the churning current.
I turned back toward shore. My shoes sought vainly for traction on the underwater pavement. Hardly five feet deep and the sea believed it could claim us. The backwash rushed against Dolly as I held her. She clutched at my jacket lapel. I didn’t want to rise up and give those men a clear sign of my whereabouts.
I moved forward with each surge and held my ground as best I could. I kicked off one shoe and with a socked foot dug my toes into pavement cracks. When my lungs clenched for air again, I stood upright. My chin barely broke the surface, and panic hit. I was farther from shore than I’d been before.
An outward swell upended us. I was tumbling with her. Some impulse told my arms they had to fight, they had to let go, but even as she was sliding out of my grasp, I resisted.
Even Dolly kicked, flailed her arms. This was not the birth I had hoped for her. I screamed into the surf and got a windpipe full of saltwater for it. I coughed and gasped and thought,
Somebody’s backyard pool, a hotel Jacuzzi, even a warm shower could’ve done the trick
. But like always, I’d overreached for the sake of the dramatic.
My arms clutched at nothing. Dolly gone. Lungs heaved. No breath. I spun and lost my sense of up as the storm dark draped down over.
Grips like fishhooks jammed under my armpits. I was caught and hoisted. I squeezed my fist with something inside it - flesh and bone that was, mercifully, Dolly’s wrist. I had her, but someone else had me, lifting, a clamp along my gut so sudden I gagged away the water I had breathed. Hands pulling at my jacket, hands ushering me onto the speedboat deck. I sprawled across a thwart. The shirtless men dragged Dolly from the sea. She was onboard with the rest of us.
Above, spirals of grey churned inside the purple clouds like coiling, electric eels flashing their charges through the ether. The boat tossed and men bellowed, and the rain on my face brought stinging pain with its drive. I smelled smoke and gasoline and the acrid sweat of men who hadn’t bathed in quite some time. One of them slapped my face around. ‘You all right, buddy? You with us?’ His bearded face blotted out the sky.
‘All right,’ I said, coughing. ‘The girl?’
The bearded man cringed at the rain bearing down on us. We were rushing toward shore, but the sea yet grabbed for us, crested over the hull, strived to capsize.
Someone said, ‘Jesus—’
And: ‘She’s not - she’s dead - she’s one of the Dead—’
I tried to sit upright, but something held me down against the cushioned thwart.
‘Leave her alone!’ My voice.
‘Look at her wrists. She ain’t breathing. God, her eyes—’
Even with their shouting, the roar of the sea, and the boat engine, even with the constant thunder overhead - all that noise and still I heard something else coming on, like a lake of water coming to a boil.
‘Aw, God,’ somebody said, ‘hail.’