Joe Schreiber - Chasing the dead

And he jumps on it. "Unless what, Susan?"

"Unless the body in the garbage bags isn't the Engineer."

She steps on the brake and the Expedition skids to a halt, the phone still clutched to her ear. Through it she thinks she can hear the voice laughing.

It doesn't even feel like she's walking anymore, or even running. It feels like she'sflying, skimming an inch above the ground, every neuron cranked to maximum performance. She swoops around to the back, yanks open the hatch of the Expedition, and stares inside at the thing wrapped up in garbage bags. For the first time since she dug it up, she pulls the bags open and looks at the face of the thing inside.

For a fathomless span of seconds she simply stares at it, her entire body petrified by raw disbelief.

The corpse wrapped in the garbage bags-the corpse that she lugged from a slimy hole underneath the bridge, ten hours ago, and dragged halfway across Massachusetts in the back of her SUV-isnot wearing blue-striped overalls with a red bandanna sticking out of the pocket.

It's not the Engineer.

No, this corpse, this body, this dead human being, is dressed in a navy blue blazer and L.L. Bean khaki pants. It wears a white oxford shirt beneath the blazer, a red silk tie, with Bass loafers. It has a silver watch on its wrist and a silver wedding band on its finger.

The face and hands are pale and bruised in the places where blood has begun pooling up under the skin. It hasn't been dead for long. The decay process has only just begun. Across its face the muscles have drawn back into a tight grin, the skin of the cheeks bunching together above the teeth. Crumbs of dirt stick in the creases. There's dirt and mud in the hair as well.

And the eyes…the eyes are black and staring.

While she's looking at them, a shiny black beetle scurries from the corner of his mouth, trundling busily across the curved expanse of skull and ducking up into the corpse's hairline. And with that Sue vomits-no warning, no nausea, just jerks her mouth open and throws up into the snow beside the Expedition. She vomits and vomits, until there's nothing left but a bitter taste in the back of her mouth and tears in her eyes, blurring her vision to a field of soggy prisms.

But of course Sue doesn't need to see in order to recognize the man in the garbage bags. She has seen enough for a lifetime.

"Phillip," she says, her voice stripped away to a hoarse and rasping gasp. "Oh my God."

And that's when the corpse lunges straight up at her, his swollen fingers locking around her throat.

"So you finally opened the garbage bags, you brainless little snatch."

Coming through her husband's mouth, Isaac Hamilton's voice is grating, rippled with caked filth and swamp slime. At this moment Sue realizes that the grin wrinkling across its face is not, as she first thought, the result of rigor mortis or some other half-fathomed notion of what happens to your muscles after you die.The thing has been grinning up at her this whole time.

She tries to twist free, but the corpse's grip is far tighter than Jeff's. And this makes sense. He's come farther along the route than Marilyn or Jeff. He's almost fully resurrected. His fingers squeeze into the soft hollow of her throat until she feels something pop, shooting a bright spike of pain through her neck.

"It fucking took you long enough," Hamilton's voice says. Crawling forward, out of the trunk, shedding the last of the tattered garbage bags, her husband's corpse jams her body up and out so that her feet are no longer touching the ground. Then he starts to shake her so hard that her legs flop and jitter, feet flying everywhere as she fights pointlessly to pry his hands off. The rotting, black-eyed face laughs at her. She fights the urge to black out, because she's certain she'll never wake up. He's going to kill her, this thing that's inside her husband, this parasite that lives in his guts.

She starts praying then, not the kind of prayer that startsDear God, but the kind that goes, "From Ocean Street in Old White's Cove," spitting the words with the blood that's now pouring into her mouth. "Across the virgin land he drove-"

Phillip goes motionless, holding her upright, head tilted back. "What the fuck do you think you're doing?"

"-to paint each town and hamlet red, with the dying and the-"

Whack!He slams his head into hers so hard that she bites her tongue, incandescent waves of green stars shimmering before her eyes, the pain itself not even a factor compared to the sheer shock of the attack. When Sue hoists up her head again he's still holding her by the throat, his head angled back. "Don't you try that shit with me, you brainless, lowbrow whore. It doesn't work. It's notgoing to w-"

"He walked through Wickham and Newbury," Sue says, except her tongue is bleeding and swollen and the words spill out mushy and malformed. "In Ashford or Stoneview he might tarry-"

Whack!Another blow, the corpse's skull clubbing hers like the back of a shovel, sending her reeling.Now the pain is here, big-time pain, an eye-popping Las Vegas of it and then in the muffled distance, very far off, Isaac Hamilton's musty cackle.

"I'm going to enjoy this," his voice is saying behind the pain, behind the funny-colored stars and constellations that flutter close to her head, blinding her. "I'mreally going to enjoy this, Susan."

"To call…child…to…knee…" she's mumbling, on total autopilot now, "where he slew it…one…two…"

WHAM!A massive blow, the worst yet, something cracking, and it pitches her whole upper body backward, the pain so intense that Sue can't help it, she feels herself start crying again, he's breaking her and she's going to let him. She's got no choice. Bright hot needles pierce her flesh from every possible angle as she feels her scalp beginning to swell with bleeding under the skin. Her mouth sags open, drooling. She can't see. She can't hear. She can only feel the pain. Unconsciousness beckons her forward as seductively as any controlled substance she can imagine and she feels herself sliding toward it gratefully, almost all the way there, when a single thought cuts through her like a bullet.

Veda.

If you black out now she's dead.

If you black out now she's dead.

If you black out now she's fucking dead.

That centers her. Blind, numb, but somehow centered, she makes her lips and tongue move. It's like a guttural foreign language that, to an uncomprehending ear, sounds more like snarling than diction, Arabic or German spoken through a mouthful of stiffening rubber cement. She pushes the words out anyway until they don't sound like any language at all. They're merely sounds. Animal noises.

"…un fum…In-sluh fuh…GuhHuhn… Whuh uhmuh… " It's such a completely debilitating effort expelling these noises and she's dizzy, fading, losing whatever's left of herself. "Whuh…uh…muh…"

Far beyond the darkness that fills her eyes, through Phillip's lips, Isaac Hamilton is laughing, laughing. Coughing on dirt. Mimicking her feeble attempts, mocking, "Uh-fuh-uh-fuh-uh-fuh-" She can hear the stuffy noises getting more congested as his hilarity crescendos. "I didn't know it was fucking barnyard night, Susan. Moo, moo, cock a doodle-doo!" As he says this, her vision clears slightly, perhaps for the sheer novelty of seeing her husband's reanimated corpse-a thing with maggots in its sinuses and worm shit on its breath-making fun of her enunciation. Through swollen eye-slits she sees Phillip's head tilting itself back again, preparing to drive forward for the blow that will no doubt turn out her lights forever, rendering whatever good intentions she might still have utterly irrelevant. She cringes away with the last of her strength, and waits for it.

Then nothing happens.

"Sue…?" It's so tentative, that familiar voice. It doesn't sound like Isaac Hamilton at all. "Honey?"