Come Little Children (2 page)

She checked her watch: ten minutes to landing.

The plane hit a pocket of turbulence and rattled the coffeepots at the front of the cabin. She started scratching off the black nail polish on her left thumbnail—the right was stripped bare—and wiped a bead of sweat that was bubbling below her nose. It wasn’t the flight that was making her worried. No, she was much more nervous about what would happen after the plane landed.
Everything had to go perfectly. It
had
to. She peeked outside her tiny porthole again and watched the Klondike River reappear in the glistening sun.

“No need ta’ worry, miss.”

Camilla turned to see the old-timer stretching his arms in front of him. His restlessness had apparently boiled into conversation. “Never had to use the life vests yet,” he added with a wry smile, nodding at the window.

She considered the comment for a second. “I wonder…”

“Hmm?”

Her eyes narrowed.

“Wonder what?”

“How often they replace them. I read a story once, from Nassau, where a plane went down and the jacket seams were brittle. Everyone drowned.”

The old timer’s smile went running away faster than bartender John’s from Billy Joel’s “Piano Man.” He adjusted himself uncomfortably in his seat.

“And what about defects?” she continued. “Who gets the one jacket out of a thousand—or ten thousand, or a hundred thousand—that slipped by? Of course, that assumes we
have
life jackets. They say they’re under our seats, but has anyone ever checked?”

Camilla laughed hesitantly and waited to see if the old-timer would laugh too. He didn’t.

She turned back to her window and stared out again. There was a flash of genuine curiosity on her face as she imagined the plane going down and crashing into the sapphire river below.
Our airplane is down, the life preservers are missing. What’s next?
Her eyes flitted faster, intrigued, as she thought about the potential—though unlikely—emergency scenario and ignored her real-life
problems momentarily.
There’s nothing but water and bodies. Four men, including the pilot. Maybe I can use the cadavers to float to shore?
Like a bolt of lightning in a clear blue sky, a funny image popped into her imagination: a raft constructed entirely of corpses. Arms as masts, feet as rudders, real heads as figureheads. She giggled to herself again as the old timer cinched his seatbelt tighter around his waist.

No
, Camilla reconsidered,
impossible. Cadavers don’t float until their rigor dissipates. Proteasomes, I think? Yes, proteasomes oxidizing. Best case scenario, an average body won’t produce enough gas to float in forty degree water for at least ten days postmortem. Unless…

The plane started its descent, but Camilla was too caught up in her morbid daydream to notice. She looked around the cabin and began taking inventory of the other passengers:
Thin elderly man, 150 pounds. Another man, muscular, 200 pounds. Hmm
. Her eyes locked on the large man snoring in the third row.
Obese male, 280 pounds, mostly fat. Good. Fat’s less dense than muscle and floats easily, especially in saltwater
.

A grin stretched across her face.

Mystery solved. Hang on to Mr. Mars Bars
.

Without warning, the airplane’s tires touched down on the runway and snapped Camilla back to reality both physically and mentally. Her fingers dug into the armrests and her teeth clamped together like Vise-Grips while the plane rattled and shook and gravity regained its control over all of them.

The men and the mortician had arrived in Dawson City.

The passengers stood on the tarmac as they waited for the pilot to bring them their bags from the airplane’s cargo hatch. It was hot—at least eighty degrees—which was a sultry surprise, especially to Camilla. She reached up and hid both of her ears behind
her hair, then folded her arms to protect as many ghost-white pores as possible from burning.

“Never been to Dawson?”

It was the old-timer again. He looked less pallid after arriving on solid ground.

“What gave it away?” Camilla asked, dragging the tip of an alligator wedge sarcastically across the gravel.

“Huh. All you goths this funny?”

“I wouldn’t know.” She shrugged. “I think goths emphasize mystic and romantic motifs more than I do. I just like clothes. And shoes.”

“Oh.” He half nodded. “OK then.”

The pilot came by with an armful of duffel bags and two bloated suitcases. He handed a bag to each of the men and then, with some difficulty, nudged the bigger luggage in front of Camilla. She took a seat on one of her suitcases and began scratching her nail polish again.

The old-timer tipped his Stetson to the pilot and started off down the tarmac. After a dozen paces, he stopped—frowning—and turned around.

“You waitin’ for a ride?” he called back. “Town’s not for another fifteen clicks, y’know.”

“I know. I’m fine.”

A warm breeze swished over the landing strip and tossed Camilla’s hair about her face. In the distance, she could see specks of moose and caribou meandering a tall rump of dirt that towered over a trickling creek, and above them the Red Crossbills and Bay-breasted Warblers flapped lazily on the wind.

“You have a place to stay?” the old-timer pressed. He softened the question with his northerner’s smile. “Big tourist season. Eldorado and Aurora might be booked up.”

“That’s OK. I’m going to Nolan.”

“Nolan?” The man’s smile vanished as quickly as it came. “What’s a cute girl like you got goin’ on up in Nolan?”

She opened her mouth to reply but was quickly cut off by a series of
thunk, thunk, thunk
s followed by a loud
thud
. The two of them looked over to see the pilot wheeling a cardboard box marked “Human Remains” down the steps of the airplane’s cargo hatch.

The old-timer straightened up—now on edge—and appraised Camilla again, watching her eyes light up at the sight of the casket. A grim gaze clouded his features.

“Don’t worry,” she said, catching the old-timer’s worried expression. “Most commercial flights have a body or two on board. Usually it’s just…Umm, well, it’s not well advertised.”

“Wonder why.”

Camilla shrugged. “I guess it’s a bad marketing hook.” Her hands swept the air, revealing an imaginary billboard: “‘We fly dead people.’”

The old-timer parted his lips, but the sound of something else cut him off. It was a distant
crunch
coming toward them.

Crunch…crunch…crunch
.

The sound was continual—circular—like rubber on gravel, getting louder and louder…

The two of them moved in unison, turning around just in time to see a long, piano-black funeral coach come crawling around the far corner of the airport’s hangar building.

A bar of sunlight struck the roof of the hearse and broke into a dozen blinding fragments. As the vehicle slunk out of the shadows and onto the landing strip, more beams tried piercing the hearse’s windows but failed; the tinted glass sucked them up like bottomless black holes and returned nothing except
disfigured reflections. Since no one could be seen piloting the vehicle, it gave the impression that the car was moving on its own; circumstantially, it gave the even
more
twisted impression that the thuds of the human remains had summoned it like a dinner bell.

The old-timer gulped as the hearse rolled by—an ornate letter
V
glinting in a crest on its side—and slowed to a stop beside the aircraft. Camilla’s eyes were like black balloons as she watched the pilot wheel the human remains up to the tailgate and open the back doors. He slid the tray inside with a firm push, then slammed the compartment closed again and slapped his hands against his pants like they had just gotten dirty. Finally he patted the roof of the car to signal he was done.

The hearse didn’t move.

Camilla watched the pilot rub his chin and then stroll over to the driver’s door. He leaned against the roof and mouthed,
Something wrong?
to a figure through the tinted glass (a window must have cracked open since a little light was shining through and outlining a vague silhouette). The coachman bobbed his head and made a few hazy gestures.

Suddenly the pilot looked up and made eye contact with Camilla. He pointed at her and said something back to the coachman. The coachman nodded impatiently, and the pilot gave Camilla another glance, then motioned her over.

“Jesus,” the old-timer whispered. “Guess you really are going to Nolan.”

She smiled and gave a little wave with her fingers. “Yes. Nice meeting you.”

The pilot met Camilla at the back of the hearse. When she was a few steps away, the tailgate clicked and released automatically, as if an invisible person was there pulling the doors open
for her. To anyone else it would’ve been creepy—to Camilla, it was fantastic.

“He says you’re going to Nolan?” the pilot asked, reaching down and unceremoniously heaving her two suitcases on top of the box marked “Human Remains.”

“Yes.”

“Never heard of it,” he replied. “And I’ve been flyin’ Air North almost four years.”

Camilla glanced back at the old-timer across the tarmac. He was still watching her, frozen. Not even blinking.

The pilot closed the rear doors and waved good-bye, then took off toward his 748. Camilla approached the passenger side of the hearse—smoothing down her black pinafore, adjusting her shoulders—and pulled on the handle.

It didn’t open. She tugged again—nothing.

She cupped her hands around her eyes and squinted through the window, but she couldn’t make out anything past the impregnable glass.

Click
.

The sound barely registered. She was still staring into the passenger window when something caught the edge of her vision and she turned around in time to see the rear doors of the hearse hovering open again. Puzzled, she looked from the back of the car to the front, then front to back.

It kept waiting.

She walked to the tailgate and eyed the empty space beside the box of human remains.
Spectacular
. Her hands led the way into the compartment, and when she was fully inside, she reached for the doors behind her and slammed them shut with a finite
thud!

The old-timer, a grim expression still etched on his face, watched the funeral coach circle around and take off west down
the Klondike Highway. As it vanished down the quiet road, he closed his eyes and tipped his Stetson hat in respect, both to the box of remains and to the strange girl whom he would never see again.

2

Nolan

A
s Camilla Carleton rattled along in the back of the hearse, the first lines of an old song popped into her head:
Oh never laugh as the hearse goes by, for you may be the next to die
.

The rhyme brought back a sharp memory from almost a year ago. She was sitting in a pub called The Konnerkauhn on St. Patrick’s Day, chanting the song with a totally straight face, while Vickie—her lab partner—and Vickie’s roommate, Jasmine, leaned across the table and called out the most ridiculous garbage they could think of: “Mister Rogers in a thong!” “Two ostriches making love!” “Shampooing your uncle’s chest hair!” She tried blocking the hecklers—”Sneezing pandas!” “Hitler milking a cow!”—but her breathing changed and a forbidden smirk brimmed on the edge of her lips. Finally everyone burst into laughter and screamed, “Drink! Drink!” while she downed the rest of her beer and watched them cackle through the bottom of her heavy mug.

Leave it to two Funeral Services majors and a Dark Ages nerd to make a drinking game out of “The Hearse Song
,” she thought.
Of all folk tunes
.

To be fair to Jasmine (the Dark Ages major), they were
all
nerds. Konner’s wasn’t their regular stomping ground—that would have been Alkaloids Anonymous, the chemistry building’s oxygen bar—but on St. Patty’s Day, it was a decent place to be. “Never mind that it’s run by a group of American franchisors who didn’t even pick a real Irish word when they named the place,” Vickie, who actually had some Celtic blood in her, had informed them. “The beer is green and the nachos are greasy, and that’s as close to Irish as anyone born after 1985 in North America cares about anyway.”

As Camilla jerked along in the back of the hearse, the dizzy memories of the Konnerkauhn’s emerald décor—and its toilet stalls toward the end of the night—wobbled in front of her eyes. Another wave of nausea swelled up, and she pulled open the curtains to try to stabilize her motion sickness.

Outside the sun was shining over the Yukon’s lush hills. Following the road was a long, lazy stream, its brackish current rippling over a bedrock of smooth creek stones that glinted like glass marbles. Farther ahead, planted in the watery shallows, was the shell of an abandoned gold-mine dredge. Its metallic exterior, which once shone like blinding-white armor, was dull and forgotten, and a hundred years of oxidation had roasted the walls to a dirty brown color that bled down the corrugated siding and into the water’s current. The empty building, along with its crumbling waterwheel and shattered windows, was an eerie fixture on the innocent green landscape.

Camilla kept massaging the car’s curtains—
velvet, still plush
—comfortingly between her fingers. Perking up, she looked around and began noting other subtle details in the belly of the hearse. The rollers under the air tray were brass (as opposed to steel), and the caulking around the windowpanes seemed fresh
and spongy. She sniffed—no mothballs either. Impressed, she nodded and continued humming “The Hearse Song” while picturing how jealous Vickie and Jasmine would be if they knew she was cruising down the highway inside an authentic 1940s landau.

They wrap you up in a big white sheet
,

From your head down to your feet
.

They put you in a big black box
,

And cover you up with dirt and rocks
.

Her thoughts stayed with her friends. She could hear them chiming in with the tune: Vickie’s high-pitch soprano punctuated with witchlike giggles and Jasmine’s snide quips added into the rests.