Authors: Patrick E. McLean
He was bigger than the guy I'd just killed. He bellowed again and charged. Bloodlust was on him, and I didn't have time to explain that I didn't have any blood to sate him. The beast of a man hit a busboy so hard the poor kid spun around twice before he fell down.
I'd like to tell you I did something really cool. That I calmly pulled the screwdriver out of the dead guys’ skull, and then, with the precision of a James Bond villain, threw it the length of the diner and stuck it right between Tweedledumbest’s eyes. That I just stood there, ice in my veins as his corpse slid to a stop across the tile, mere inches from my feet. And then, after a moment of stunned silence, the jaded late-night crowd had roared in applause at my display of skill and daring. That the turbulent adulation of strangers came crashing down upon me in waves because I had released two evil men from the world.
But you and I both know the world doesn’t work like that.
I stood there, with a stupid look on my face, as he tackled me. We crashed through the plate glass window and tumbled onto the sidewalk.
When I picked myself up, I had just enough time to notice shards of glass sticking out my forearm.
Tweedledumbest roared again, and then he kicked me out into traffic. I turned into the glare of the headlights. I think I heard the horn – I'm not sure. There had to be a horn, right?
* * * * *
I was sure I was dead. Again. I mean, you get hit by a car and you're done for, right? But I had already been done, and nothing was what I had expected. In the cartoons, when somebody gets hit by a car, the car runs over them and then the car goes on without them. In fact, the character usually peels themselves up off the pavement and is little worse for the wear.
That didn't happen to me. I was dragged. My left arm was caught up in something. I tried to pull it free, but I couldn’t. In my defense, I was a little distracted by the noise the side of my head made as it ground along the tarmac.
The car and I hit a pothole. I heard my left arm snap, and I broke free of the car. Then I was tumbling, sliding, tumbling again.
As I struggled to my feet, another car swerved to miss me. Its mirror caught my arm and spun me around. By the time I stopped spinning, I was pointed back the way I came. Somehow, I was still standing. Somehow, I was still, what, alive? Whatever, I didn’t have time to deal with existential confusion.
Five blocks away, I could see Tweedledumbest running towards me down the middle of the street, bellowing in rage.
What could I do? He was huge, he was angry, and pieces of me were falling off. My left arm didn't work. One of my knees was all funny. I ran.
I guess I didn't run so much as shamble. I realized there was no way I could lose him, and no way I could take him without the element of surprise. Worst of all, I had run out of island. Half a block in front of me was the waterfront. I had no place to go.
So I stood with my back to the water. As my heels dangled over the edge, I lifted my arms to him like a pure icon of Christian forgiveness. As he charged, blinded with rage for the loss of his friend or twin or lover (What did I care or know?), I hugged him close and I let my corpse fall into the black water of the harbor.
He clawed for the surface and I clawed for him.
We struggled and made white foam amid the oil and the bits of trash. He fought to stay afloat, and I fought to keep a hold. With my right hand, I grabbed his belt and let myself dangle. He was a big man carrying extra weight, but still he had a lot of muscle. He was pretty dense.
The cold black water began to take its toll on him. I slung my left arm around like a club and hooked a finger in his eye. As we sank, his face was the last thing to go under.
What did I care? It's not like I needed to breathe. I was dead, remember?
He struggled, hard at first, and then less and less. As we settled into the thick muck at the bottom of the river he gave a few final twitches. I figured that meant my work was done.
I tried to get up, but it was no use; I had 275 pounds of dead Slav on my chest, and he wasn't going anywhere for a while. I was trapped and sinking into the mud. But that’s just the way it was with the afterlife, it just kept getting better and better.
How screwed was I?
* * * * *
How screwed was I? Sure, I’d killed two of the three guys who had murdered me, but where had that gotten me? Now I was being pressed into the black mud at the bottom of a dirty river by a corpse that was too heavy for me to move. Tits ahoy and Hallelujah, didn’t this just taste of victory?
I still had no idea what was up with that rat, and believe me; I had time to think about it. I had time to think about everything. Jesus, I was dead. Granted, getting killed had been quickly overshadowed by being brought back to life, but one step at a time. I was dead. What did that mean? There’d been no light, no feeling of universal peace, and no choir of angels. Just that rat, the dirty alley and a lot of confusion. So either there was none of that Hosanna Heysanna afterlife bullshit, or I had gotten the shaft yet again.
As I lay there and thought about it, I had to admit that both scenarios were equally likely. Soon after this realization, I became aware of shapes moving in the dark mud, things that scuttled and clicked. Ah crap, crabs. Now I was going to get eaten by crabs? The hits. Just. Kept. Coming.
I struggled frantically. Well, as frantically as I could manage. My left arm was free, but it was useless. I threw it around and clawed at the soft mud, managing to kick up some slime and sink a little deeper. With Tweedledumbest on my chest, I was going nowhere.
But the crabs left me alone, aside from the few that crawled across my face. They were after Tweedledumbest. Sure, he might have been an asshole, but the crabs were sure glad to see him. They invited everybody to the picnic. At first it was disgusting, but after a while it got boring.
When the sun came up, a little light filtered down to the bottom of the river. And when the tide changed, the water cleared. Now I could see the surface. I felt like I was staring up at a second sky. Lying there watching the hulls of boats go by. Hearing the rumble of great ships in the channel, but unable to see them.
The whole thing created a sensation in me I wasn’t used to. At first, I wasn’t sure I had ever felt it before, but, as I lay there, it came to me. It was peaceful. I’m not sure I knew what the word had meant before that. I didn’t have to be anywhere. I didn’t have to do anything. I didn’t even have to breathe. All I had to do -- all I could do -- was just lie there and be.
Dead. Yes, I was dead. But just be. And the strange thing was I couldn’t remember a time when I was alive that that was true. As a kid, we’d always been rushing somewhere. Mom would be getting us ready to move, or unpacking from a move, getting us ready to go to some event, or coming back from one. And forget high school. It was one bundle of nerves, trying to fit in; trying to figure out what impossible urge your hormones were going to throw at you next.
Then it was rushing off to college and after college, finding a job -- the whole endless cycle of rushing from one thing to the next -- years and years of it -- and I couldn’t believe that I had never taken the time to stop and smell the roses, or watch the boats float across the sky, or the crabs devour a corpse.
No wonder I had been so bitter.
As I considered this, the corpse seemed to get lighter and lighter and lighter, until it just floated away. I watched it calmly as it drifted downriver towards the ocean. The stomach was bloated with gas as decomposition set in.
I checked my stomach. I wasn’t bloating. Why wasn’t I decomposing? This was all very strange.
I took one last look at Tweedledumbest drifting away into the black, taking the crabs for a strange balloon ride into the open water of the ocean.
When he was gone, I clawed out of the mud. I tried to swim upward, but it didn’t work. That would have been just too easy. I shambled around in the muck looking for a way out, but the river was lined by steep walls. Eventually, I found a sewer. I don’t know how long I waded upstream against the filth. When I crawled out of the water onto the floor of some dark catchbasin, mud and river water poured out of me. It felt like I vomited up gallons of the stuff.
A crab fell off my back and scuttled away. Part of me hated to see him go. Lonely people needed pets, right? The lonely and the friendless?
I hadn’t been the kind of person who had friends when I was alive. But would it have mattered? Seriously, if your best friend shows up as a walking corpse, you gonna give him a hug?
But then I realized, just like the crabs were happy to see Tweedledumbest, I knew someone who’d be overjoyed to see me.
Like a nightmare, I worked my way up through the sewers.
* * * * *
You're wondering where I was going. And your first thought is something like, “If I was that screwed, I'd turn to my family. Why doesn't he go to his family?” You’re thinking that because you've got a family you can go to. Or a family that you think you could go to. Because let me tell you, people react differently when you are dead. Anyway, I had one family member, and I was way past the point that I could count on her.
But friends, you say, surely he must have friends? Or a friend? A best friend. The kind of friend who would see you through thick and thin and to hell and back. But I didn't have any of those. In fact, now that I was dead and had developed some real problems, I began to see that I hadn’t had any friends or anything like a friend. I had probably never had a real friend in my life. What I’d had was a collection of people who liked to feel miserable together when they weren't working. Jesus, as if being dead wasn't depressing enough, now I had to see my life for what it had really been? How screwed was I?
Anyway, at the bottom of the sewer I remembered a particular guy who I had spent a lot of time being miserable with when I was alive. His name was Bruce and his family owned a funeral home. I guess he was alright, but he always smelled like those chemicals. Whatever, misery loves company and misery clearly isn’t picky. Still, every once and a while, you'd catch him looking at you like he was thinking about replacing your fluids. Creepy. He didn't get laid much, but then, neither did I. But he once bragged to me that four generations had worked in that funeral parlor and they’d never locked it at night. “Criminals are a cowardly and superstitious lot,” Bruce had explained.
“No, Half-Ass Batman, criminals don’t break into places where there’s nothing to steal,” I had told him.
“I don’t care how tough they are, everybody’s afraid of dead bodies.”
“Not you though.”
“No man, with me it’s different, I’m a pro-fess-eee-o-nal,” he said dragging the word professional out to a painfully pretentious length.
“Then what about a professional killer?” I asked.
“Whoa, that’s deep.”
Bruce wasn’t too quick. Or maybe he was too quick and did drugs to slow things down a bit. Whatever, he did a lot of drugs, and that’s why I hated him. Well, I pretty much hated everybody, but with Bruce it was special. Sure he was bitching about stuff, just like all of us. But his life, as weird as it was, didn’t have any real problems. He had a family. He was going to inherit the family business. And right now he had a job that paid well and let him stay up late and do all the drugs he wanted. He was set. He was just too whiney and stupid to see it.
I watched the sun set through the bars of a storm drain. When it was dark I took to the alleys. It took me quite a while to even figure out where I was. The city looks different from the shadows. It’s disorienting to be the thing that goes bump in the night.
When I got there, the door was unlocked. At least Bruce wasn’t completely full of shit. Who knew, maybe he could even help me. I pushed my way through a heavy metal door into large, tile-floored room. In the middle of the room was a large drain. On the far end several metal tables were bolted to the floor. Florescent bulbs created a pool of brilliant, greenish light.
Bruce’s back was to me. He was standing up on a stool between the corpse’s legs. He was making small grunting noises and thrusting backwards and forwards. He was doing something pretty nasty to the corpse.
“C’mon, bitch, c’mon!”
It was disgusting to me, of course, but I didn’t get that stomach churning feeling that I would have gotten when I was alive. It felt like my stomach was lined in lead. It was more of an intellectual disgust.
“Bruce, that’s just wrong,” I said from the shadows.
“What? Who said that?”
“After all that bitching about how you couldn’t get laid, and all the while you had a whole harem on ice.”
Bruce turned around and his round, freckled face wrinkled as he tried to peer into the darkness. “Man, this is not cool, I’m working!” In his pale, fleshy hands he held a long metal rod that was attached to a vat of embalming fluid by a rubber tube. Surprisingly his pants were zipped up. “Who is that?” he asked, holding a hand up and squinting against the lights.
“It’s me. Dan.”
“Dan? What are you doing here?”
“Evidently, I’m watching a sicko get his rocks off.”
“What?” said Bruce, truly confused, “What are you talking about?”
“Sure, she’s not much of a conversationalist, but what the hell, right?”
“No man. No. Even if I did, everybody knows, you don’t bang the fat ones.” Bruce stood aside and I could see that the corpse he was working on was huge. 500 pounds huge. Orca huge. “I think she ate herself to death,” Bruce said quietly.
Bruce pulled a joint out from behind his ear and dipped the tip of it in embalming fluid. When he lit it, it flared brightly. He took a long drag and held it. When he exhaled he said, “Fat people man, worst part about this job. C’mon, you want a hit?”
I shuffled into the light. “I don’t think it’ll do me any good.”