Resurrection (27 page)

But that was Slayhoke sometimes, Harry figured, like a big hen party.

5

Jacky Kripp was one of the top dogs over at the mortuary. He got to pick and choose the cons that worked with him, so guys were always kissing ass on him, always trying to get a job working the cold cuts. Because, honestly, it beat the living hell out of the boiler room or the metal shop, the mattress factory with its swarms of insects or the roadcrews and their attendant hardcase hacks.

At first, Harry didn’t want any part of shuffling the cold meat.

He told Jacky as much. So, Kripp fixed it so he could get a sampling of those other prison industries and wasn’t long before Harry decided he liked the dead just fine. Of course, at first he lost his lunch a few times. You had lots of dead cons moving through there, some that had been beaten to death or sliced up or even burned. Sometimes you’d get a con you knew that had been fed strychnine with his hash and had died with the contortions, vomiting white foam. Men died violent, dirty deaths at Slayhoke and very rarely was it of natural causes. A lot of medical students from North-Western U worked at the mortuary. Under their instructor’s watchful eyes, they learned how to perform autopsies and very often when Harry and the others wrestled the remains into pine boxes, they were completely mutilated. Just slit and plucked and dismembered.

So it took a strong stomach to work the mortuary detail, but more often than not, the work was light. Harry, Jacky Kripp, Roland Smyth, Mo Borden, and a half dozen other guys would spend eight hours a day in the mortuary, mostly playing cards, smoking dope, and eating gourmet foods Kripp had smuggled in.

But, now and then, there were some really awful jobs to perform. And if they involved stiffs, they involved Jacky Kripp and his crew.

The very same afternoon that Mitch Barron and many other residents learned that the dead were rising in Witcham, the hacks shook Harry and the others out of the mortuary like dirt from a rug, marched them and about thirty other cons out into the pouring rain, gave them shovels and picks. They wanted them to dig up the stiffs in the old potter’s field graveyard where the convicts nobody claimed were buried. The DOC wanted to put a new administration building there, so the bodies had to be moved.

The cons pulled it, of course.

The hacks weren’t about to dirty their hands with shit like that.

Jacky Kripp, who had half a dozen hacks in his pocket, took Krickman, the sergeant hack aside, and said, “What’s this shit, sarge? What the fuck is this about? How come I didn’t know about this three days ago, a week ago?”

Harry knew that Kripp was usually told everything well before it happened. Lots of guards at Slayhoke had kids in college or fat bank accounts, and Jacky Kripp’s deep pockets were the reason. For even behind those walls, Kripp was running a multi-million dollar operation in Southern Wisconsin and the Chicago area. He dabbled in everything from heroin trafficking to extortion to internet porn. Owned scads of legitimate businesses like restaurants and movie theaters and car lots, was a high scale loanshark with as much as ten million dollars on the street at any one time. His personal income was very often in the seven digits monthly.

“They just told us this morning, Jacky, I swear to God,” Krickman said.

“I thought we were friends, sarge? I thought I helped you and you helped me? What the fuck is this shit? Why are you fucking with me like this? You don’t like me? You’re trying to piss me off?”

“Jacky, please, I swear to God, they didn’t tell us…”

It went back and forth like that while all the cons stood out in the rain sucking up the water like sponges. It was kind of funny, because Krickman was among the most hated hacks at Slayhoke. He was basically a violent, ignorant redneck who liked to dish out the shit. The day he broke kneecaps or skulls with his stick was a good day to him. And here he was, the tough psychotic sonofabitch, practically sucking the piss out of Jacky Kripp’s shorts.

Finally, some kind of agreement was reached and Kripp turned to the cons soaking in the rain, all those hard white and black and Hispanic faces, a few Ojibwa and Sauk Indians sprinkled amongst them. “Listen, boys, we gotta do this thing. It’s fucking dirty work and a shitty day for it, but we gotta make the warden happy.”

Not that Kripp actually got his hands dirty.

He stood around with the hacks telling them dirty jokes and stories about all the pussy he’d had in Milwaukee, most of it barely legal. The hacks ate it up and the cons went to work.

Two flatbed trucks were pulled up on the winding dirt drive. These to haul the exhumed coffins the inmates pulled from the earth like rotting teeth. There was also a backhoe that would open the graves to a level of about four feet. That was as close as they dared go with the backhoe’s bucket without risking damaging the caskets themselves. The cons would shovel out the rest of the earth by hand.

“I ain’t got no problem putting stiffs in the ground,” Roland Smyth said. “But digging ‘em back up…fuck kind of work is that?”

Harry wiped rain from his face. “Shit-work. That’s why we pull it.”

It was bad right from the start.

The rain was hammering down, the ground turned to sluicing mud. Your feet sank three or four inches into that sodden clay every time you moved. The graves rapidly filled with water as Harry and the others dug down, opened them up. The caskets were old and rotten, fell apart as you tried to lift them free. And inside them, inside those shattered and moldering boxes, just skeletons, mummies, cadavers sewn with some muscle or ligament, maybe some corded meat, not much else. Some of those poor bastards had been in the ground for years. Now and again, they’d find a few fresh one…and the stink of what was inside,
Jesus.

Thirty minutes into it, all the cons were soaking wet and black from head to toe with mud. The only color on ‘em was the orange clay on their hands.

Some of the recent burials had been stripped by rats and Harry saw plainly the elaborate tunnel system the vermin had dug, pawing their way right into the boxes. If there was anything in this world that was more determined to stay alive than cons, it had to be those goddamn rats, Harry figured.

Not that he was surprised, really.

After the first few corpses they found peeled down to the muscle and sinew, he got used to it. Rats. Working the mortuary detail, you were always beating those pricks off with broom handles. First day on the job, Jacky Kripp showed him how to set traps and poison to keep those scavenging ghouls out.

But that was above ground and this was below…seeing their determination to get at the corpses was just sickening.

“I ain’t gonna have an appetite for a week,” Roland Smyth said.

“Just stiffs, man,” Harry told him. “Let’s just get it done with.”

“Just stiffs, my black ass,” Smyth called to him from an open grave. “I ain’t talking stiffs, motherfucker, I’m talking worms.”

And they were finding plenty of those.

According to regulations, all the exhumed caskets had to be recorded along with their contents. That was the worst part. The old ones smelled yellow and aged like moldy carpets buried in moist loam, but those that had been in the ground less than a year just reeked to high heaven. Several cons went to their knees when the lids were popped and roiling pockets of corpse gas blew out at them and they got a good look at the mildewing, collapsing things inside.

That was bad, but the worms were worse.

They gave a lot of the men—Henry included—bad cases of the creepy-crawlies.

You’d pop a box, just not knowing what you might see. Maybe just a stiff dissolving to a gray jelly of putrescence or a pile of bones laced with grave fungi or maybe even a few dead rats that never found their way out again boiled right down to clots of fur. But now and again, you’d find a skullish face threaded with long, slinking red worms that, yes, looked very much like living licorice whips. Great knots and bunches of them feeding from eye sockets and into mouths, worming tangles of wet red wires looped around rib staves and roped around vertebrae like climbing vines. Some skeletons—or things on their way to becoming skeletons— had hundreds of the worms matted and snarled over their bones and some of the fresh ones had split open from crotch to throat, bundles of those worms coiling in their bellies or lacing up the edges of their autopsy incisions like a woman’s corset.

It was disgusting.

And maybe even that didn’t quite cut it.

Harry and Roland Smyth were down in a grave that was rapidly filling with mud as the rain continued to fall and water seeped in dank rivers from the slick clay walls. Using a crowbar, they snapped open the lid, and right away that moist green smell rose into their faces making them gag. Inside, the body was actually
moving
as the worms nested happily in it. Harry moved quick to work the lid back on, but slipped in the muck and fell, his left arm sinking right up to the elbow in the spongy abdomen of the corpse. And that was sickening enough in its own right, like sinking your arm into wet leaves…but what was possibly worse was, for that instant his arm was in there before he drew it back with a cry, he could feel those worms in there sliding over his forearm like slimy shoelaces. When he yanked his arm out, just offended, physically offended, two or three of those worms were caught in the sleeve of his shirt.

“Jesus and shit,” Roland Smyth said. “Get rid of them.”

Which was what Harry was trying to do. The feel of them coiling and slithering against his flesh was almost enough to slit his mind right open. Finally he shook them free and one of them plopped right on the chest of the corpse. And as he stood there, wanting to vomit, that long red worm slid right back inside the body with a rubbery sound like thread pulled through a cuff.

“Quit fucking around down there, you morons,” one of the hacks said. He was watching the backhoe swing its boom into place. “Let’s get this done with.”

And that’s pretty much the sort of repulsive, nightmarish job it was. Like some kind of exhumation assembly line. The backhoe’s boom would be swung over a grave, the chains secured around the box, and the casket brought up to what passed for the light of day.

It was hard, dirty work, but they kept at it.

The boxes were just cheap pine affairs slapped together in the carpentry shop and most rotted right out in a few years. Mostly, they were light and fairly easy to stand up so they could get the chains around them. But some had burst open from gases and they had to dig through the muddy bottoms of graves, sorting mummified human anatomy from coffin wreckage. A few others had absorbed so much moisture that it took three grunting men to get them up enough so they could be winched out by the backhoe’s boom. Many of them, encrusted with clay and mineral deposits, were nearly impossible to move and others were tangled with tree roots that had to be chopped free…from the outside
and
the inside.

They could throw another five years at me,
Harry thought,
and I’d jump at it rather than do this. Fucking graverobbers. Goddamn worms and mud and stink.

He figured he’d never get the smell off him. On a good day, things didn’t smell real sweet at Slayhoke, but come tonight, there was going to a group of cons that were going to smell like open graves.

Mo Borden didn’t seem to mind it.

Him and a couple of big bikers, a few of the blacks and Indians that were always working the iron pile out in the yard—the lot of them too damn big to squeeze down in the graves—manhandled the boxes once they were out of the ground, hefting them up onto the flatbeds of waiting trucks like movers handling pianos and sofas. Mo, he was especially impassive about it all. The bodies meant nothing to him. Maybe it was being a farm boy and seeing the kind of shit those boys did. Mo had once told Harry how they buried cows when they died and how one time, how they’d had to disinter one that was poisoning a pond with its run-off. Dead summer and they had to dig it back up…it was so soft, they actually had to
shovel
it out of its hole.

Watching him with a decayed bag of bones thrown over one shoulder while he dragged a casket with his free hand reminded Harry of those newsreels of the concentration camps. Those crazy bastards there, pulling a corpse from a heap with one hand while chewing on a sandwich with the other.

Just absolutely desensitized.

“Okay,” Krickman finally said,” take five.”

“About fucking time,” a con named Joey Creet said. He was a pudgy little guy who had a thing for knives. Something his wife found out about when he caught her in bed with another man.

Creet walked over to the truck for a cup of coffee…and let out a shriek. A sunken grave had collapsed right beneath him, probably from subsurface subsidence. He sank right up to his belly in the ground, shouting and swearing and trying to wriggle his girth free.

“Lookit that,” Jacky Kripp said, “he’s a fucking Jack-in-the-Box.”

Both cons and hacks laughed at that one, but Creet wasn’t thinking it was too goddamn funny. A couple cons pulled him up and he was just brown with mud.

Harry got his cup of coffee and had a cigarette. He stood before an open grave with Roland Smyth. They were both fouled with mud and clay. The rain kept falling in a cold drizzle and neither man could remember now what it was like to be dry or warm. The graveyard which had been weedy and overgrown a few weeks before, was now just a rank sea of yellow, sluicing mud. Far as the eye could see, nothing but crude markers and wooden crosses riding those low hills and sloping hollows. The flatbed trucks were heaped with muddy brown coffins piled up like Christmas presents. Another truck was heaped with the dead whose boxes had rotted away or fallen apart. Somebody had thrown a tarp over all that hollow-socketed deadwood because it was giving some of the cons the creeps. But even with the tarp in place, a few fleshless arms and trailing stick fingers hung out. There was a heap of casket wreckage arranged like the wood for a Boy Scout bonfire and Jacky Kripp said they’d have one hell of a wienie roast in a few weeks when things dried up.