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.