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  The Dead

  Mark E. Rogers

  The Judge came like a thief in the night. No one knew that the world had ended – until the sun began to rot in the sky, and the graves opened, and angels from Hell clothed themselves in the flesh of corpses…Long out of print, this murderous theological fantasy presents an epic vision of damnation and redemption, supercharged with mayhem, terror, and old-time religion. Looking for a good scare? Try The Dead, and bite off more than you can chew.

  Mark E. Rogers

  The Dead

  © 1989

  Chapter 1: Gary Gets a Call

  Dead.

  But fathers are immortal, Gary Holland thought as he swung his white Pinto wagon into the parking lot of Van Nuys and Monahan, the biggest funeral parlor in Bayside Point. Easing to a halt, he switched off the ignition.

  God. If fathers can die, who can’t?

  He stared blankly at the funeral home. The man who had raised him, taught him, shaped him, had been scythed from his life with a single stroke. Gary felt as though some part of him had been amputated; memories of his father seemed like feelings in a missing limb, bitter reminders of something that had disappeared forever.

  Unless there’s an afterlife, like Mom says, Gary told himself.

  But that was bullshit.

  He got out of the car. It was a fine summer evening, not too hot; some of the parking-lot lights had already come on in the thickening dusk, and there was a heavy but pleasant smell of flowers and green leaves from the trees lining Beichmann Avenue.

  He crossed the lot, passing his mother’s Jetta and his brother Max’s Maverick. There were few other cars, but it was early yet. His father had been an important man in Bayside Point, and Gary expected the viewing would be well-attended.

  Entering the parlor, he stopped in the lobby. He had been to Van Nuys and Monahan’s several times, once for his grandmother, twice for pals of his father. Everything in the lobby was just as he remembered it-same tacky landscape paintings and gold velvet wallpaper embossed with harps and trumpets, same expensive aquarium setup with the same dead goldfish floating at the top.

  Voices off to the left. He looked toward the office, where his mother, his wife Linda, and Max were talking to Mr. Van Nuys. Noticing Gary, Max smirked the way he always did when he spotted his little brother. Feeling like he was twelve again, suddenly forgetting where he was, Gary almost flipped him the bird, and was stayed only by the thought that his mother would see. Signing the memorial book, he headed for the chapel with the board marked “ Holland.”

  Inside, the first thing he noticed was that the coffin was closed. Strange; this was supposed to be a viewing after all. It wasn’t as if his father had had some kind of horrible accident.

  Going up the aisle, Gary settled in the front row. In his family, mourners were expected to kneel beside the coffin and pray. But having been basically agnostic since his early teens, (inexplicably, considering his upbringing) he had no intention of making the pretense, especially when there was no one else in the room to please; nor had he ever been too keen on the purely secular pleasure of gazing longingly on a preserved face.

  Yet all that was what you were supposed to do if the coffin was open. What was the procedure when the box was shut?

  Disturbed and uncomfortable, he looked at the flowers. They were arranged in the usual wreaths and crosses, the messages that you’d expect. The ironic thing was that a sizeable percentage were anthuriums, flowers with bright red leaves that looked like they were sticking their tongues-or worse-out. It was a sick joke. His father hated anthuriums. Gary had heard him joke more than once that he’d rather die than have “those damn things” at his funeral.

  Reading the ribbons, Gary saw that all but one of the anthurium displays had been sent by people who hadn’t been too close to his dad, construction-business acquaintances. Gary reasoned they hadn’t known how Max Sr. had felt about them.

  Uncle Buddy, on the other hand, had no such excuse. Gary clearly remembered his father and Buddy discussing the matter in a bar after Grandma’s viewing. Sending those flowers was classic Uncle Buddy; the old boy was a hellish pain in the ass under the misapprehension (deliberate, Gary thought) that he was a non-stop scream. Gary had seen his father’s old senior yearbook; Buddy, his fraternal twin, had given “Laff Riot” as his nickname, and had had his eyes slightly crossed in the photo. Gary cringed inwardly at the idea of talking to him, and worse yet, the probability that Buddy and Uncle Dennis would insist on taking him and Max out for a few drinks. The prospect was grim indeed, especially without his father to act as a buffer. Gary looked back at the coffin.

  God, Dad, he thought. You can’t really be in there, can you? How can you be dead?

  He wondered when the others would join him, surprised Linda and Max Jr. hadn’t already. He doubted a chat with old Mr. Van Nuys could be all that interesting.

  He realized that he couldn’t hear them anymore. When he first entered the chapel, their voices had carried quite clearly. Now there was only the low hum of the air conditioner.

  Momentarily, even that stopped. A disquieting touch, but air conditioners did that from time to time…didn’t they?

  He laughed and looked down into his lap. His hands were a horrible shade of pink. All the corpses he had ever seen in funeral parlors had been that color. It was the lights of course, those strange pink lights installed along the sides of the ceiling. Born with a talent for seeing through things, he had guessed during his very first viewing that the purpose of the lights was to make the stiff’s skin-color look more lifelike-or perhaps to make the live folks look more like the stiff, so it wouldn’t suffer by comparison. The effect was very peculiar. It reminded him of when he had gotten red tempera on his hands back in high school and had been unable to rinse all the paint off. There had been this thin pink film-

  There came a faint sigh of rushing air, then a click. He stood and turned. The chapel doors were closed. Had the staff shut them by mistake? The room was definitely supposed to be open-just like the coffin. Had Max done it? All those years in the Corps hadn’t dimmed Max’s sometimes outrageous sense of humor.

  This simply wasn’t his style, though. Not in a funeral home, at any rate. There wasn’t enough of Uncle Buddy in him. Max was funnier, for one thing. But now that Gary thought about it, if Buddy was out there…

  He heard a hollow thump, and turned again. Where had it come from? Air conditioner, he thought. There was a vent in the wall, right above the hanging cross.

  Another thump.

  Not from the vent, he decided. His gaze drifted downward.

  To the coffin.

  “No way,” he laughed-just as a third thump, louder than the others, sounded insistently in the shining bronze casket.

  Can’t be alive. He’s been em-

  Thump

  – balmed.

  First horror, then hope rushed through Gary. There had been a mistake. He ran to the coffin.

  “Mom!” he cried. “Mr. Van Nuys!”

  He tried to pry the latches open. They might as well have been welded to the bronze.

  He’s going to suffocate, Gary thought. He spun and dashed up the aisle, shouting for help. Reaching the doors, he tugged on them shouting, but they were locked. Panic mounted inside him; were those shrieks from the coffin now?

  He threw himself against the doors. Heavy paneled oak, they didn’t budge. Lunging against them, he doubled, tripled his efforts.

  He heard a crack; something gave. A bark of triumph burst from his lips.

  It was only when he crashed once more into the wood and felt a tremendous shout of pain inside his shoulder that he realized what he had done to himself.

  Panting, grimacing, he fell back. Starting at his fingers, hot tingling numbness spread up his arm and out into his chest, smothering the agony from his broken bone.

  The thumping in the coffin grew louder and louder, the screams unmistakable now.

  He won’t last long, Gary thought. Nearly resuming his assault on the barrier in front of him, he remembered the service door at the front of the room…it stood open, beckoning.

  He stumbled back down the aisle, paused by the coffin, saw it trembling and shaking, rocked by the struggles of the prisoner inside. Gary bent close to the vibrating bronze surface, shouted: “I’m going for help! Save your air!”

  He was answered by a shriek that stung his ears even through the coffin lid.

  Continuing toward the door, he cried out in horror and anger as it began to close, slamming shut before he could reach it. A lock snicked. He tugged on the handle. The door remained frozen in place. He pounded on it, shouting his throat raw. No answer.

  He stumbled back toward the coffin, wondering what to do. The volume of the screams swelled excruciatingly.

  “Dad… Dad…” he moaned, hardly able to hear his own voice.

  A tremendous impact boomed against the coffin lid. The coffin’s front end jounced up off the catafalque and dropped back with a dull heavy clang. A fist-sized dome of metal showed in the lid.

  Gary’s jaw dropped. This is just not poss-

  Another dent bulged up.

  Nothing human could-

  BOOM.

  The coffin seemed to lunge toward him, falling over the edge of the catafalque. He dodged backward. The hurtling mass just missed his foot as it struck the carpet.

  He retreated slowly, staring at it. Almost as if in pursuit, the casket jolted forward an inch or two.

  Gary shrilled a hysterical laugh, his terror no longer for his father now. What in Hell
was in that box? It couldn’t be Dad.

  Yet even if it was, was that any less reason for fear? Was the strength of madness, of raving insanity, at work on that coffin lid?

  The booming stopped as these thoughts flashed through Gary’s mind; the shrieks faded. Had his father-had whatever was in the casket-succumbed at last to lack of air? Such furious exertion certainly would’ve-

  Another earsplitting shriek.

  A crashing thump.

  A squeal of split metal.

  “Jesus!” Gary cried, trying to shield his face from flying bronze fragments. One stung his palm, another his forehead. Blood crawled into his left eyebrow.

  Lowering his arm, he saw that something had smashed up through the coffin-lid. His first impression was that it was a knot of dark shining wood. Then he realized it was a fist, its knuckles like studs on a club. If it was human at all, it looked like it belonged to someone long dead, mummified, petrified, not a man two days gone.

  Not Dad, Gary told himself, not knowing whether to be relieved or appalled. Can’t be. Surely it was just coincidence that the class ring on one of those desiccated fingers looked just like his father’s…

  The fist jerked back down through the crown of ragged metal, stabbed up in another place. Gary had never heard anything so piercing as the shrieks now pouring unmuffled through the holes. His skull rang, his ears thrummed with pain. And the cries were so raw with rage that any remaining doubt that he was in terrible danger was ripped clean away.

  He rushed back to the service door and flung himself against it with his good shoulder, thudding into it again and again, praying to a God he didn’t believe in, cursing Him for putting him in such a trap…

  Behind, the hammerstrokes kept bashing into the coffin lid. He could hear the bronze stretching, parting, the fissures widening with a terrible yawning screech that scraped him to the marrow. The thing in the coffin would be free any moment.

  But the door was shuddering now under Gary’s onslaught. Weaker stuff than the front doors, it began to give.

  He took a last glance over his shoulder. The catafalque blocked his view of the casket; two spindled chunks of coffin lid arced into view above it, one landing among the seats in the second row.

  The door rocked forward at Gary’s next thrust, attached only by its bottom hinges. Another slam knocked it free. Charging on to it even as it struck the floor, he snagged his trouser-cuff on the handle and tripped, palms smashing onto the carpet beyond the door. Instantly his numb arm gave way, and he went down hard on his face. Dazed for a moment, he ripped his leg loose and scrambled to his feet. There was another door ahead, at the end of a hallway.

  Back in the chapel, the booming had stopped, but not the shrieks; barely audible beneath the cries, footbeats slammed in pursuit.

  Gary never dared to look back. He sprinted along the hall, pulse beating in his temples, lungs burning. He got to the door, yanked on it. The handle turned, but the door was stuck-or locked.

  The footbeats pounded closer. The shrieks set his teeth rattling. Any moment now and the thing from the coffin…

  Daddy?

  …would be upon him.

  He gave another tug, certain it would do no good. To his astonishment, the door swung open. Even though the shrieks were right behind him now, it took him a moment to start forward, onto a descending ramp.

  Too late. A hard mummified claw flailed down on his shoulder like an eagle’s talon, yanking him back, nails ripping through fabric into flesh. Blood spewed past his face, and-

  The phone rang.

  Bathed in sweat, he sat up in bed, screaming at the top of his lungs in the echoing darkness of his room.

  “What’s the matter?” Linda demanded groggily, rising on one elbow beside him.

  Cold perspiration sluicing off his forehead, he stopped screaming and looked at her, mouth working silently. Her face was a silvery blur in the streetlight filtering through the curtains.

  The phone rang again.

  “Want me to get it?” Linda asked.

  “I’m all right,” Gary said. Turning, he fumbled for the phone. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed the display on the clock-radio.

  Three-fucking-thirty in the morning, he thought, picking up the receiver.

  “ Gary?” came his mother’s voice. With sudden, chill certainty he realized why she was calling.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked mechanically.

  She kept control just long enough to say, “Your father’s dead.” Then the weeping began.

  Chapter 2: Father Ted

  Gary and Linda taught at Delaware University in Newark, his field English, hers, history. Both were presiding over five-week summer cram-courses, and could ill afford to take three days off to go up to Bayside Point for the funeral; but luck smiled on them, and they found colleagues willing to handle the classes. They taught their Monday morning sections, packed up the car after lunch, and headed north on I-95, Gary behind the wheel. Crossing the Memorial Bridge, they swung over onto the Jersey Turnpike.

  For a long time neither spoke. Gary was lost in his own thoughts, memories of his father, and worries about his mother, particularly whether she’d be able to handle the funeral arrangements. But just north of Camden, he was roused by the sight of a State Trooper parked just behind an overpass; he slowed immediately. It occurred to him that he had no recollection whatsoever of the forty miles they’d come since the bridge.

  “Why do you always do that?” Linda asked.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Slow down when you see a speed trap. You weren’t even doing the limit.”

  “Guilty conscience. I always get nervous when I see a cop.”

  Gradually he sped back up.

  After a while, he looked over at Linda. She had the window down, and her long dark hair was blowing in the wind; her high-cheekboned, pretty face was pensive.

  “What are you thinking about?” he asked.

  “Your mom,” Linda said.

  “What about her?”

  “How she kept loving your father.”

  “He was a lovable guy.”

  “I wouldn’t have been able to.”

  “You weren’t married to him.”

  “When you’re married, your husband’s supposed to act married-”

  “That’s enough,” Gary said. “The man’s gone, and I don’t want to hear about it.”

  “Okay,” Linda said.

  In the silence that followed, Gary noticed the sign for the I-195 exit and swung into the far right hand lane.

  “Why did all that piss you off so badly, anyway?” he asked angrily, almost without thinking. “It’s not as if he did anything to you.”

  That’s it, jerk, he told himself. Start it up again…

  “I have taken it awfully personally, haven’t I?” Linda admitted.

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe it’s because I like your mother so such. Better each time I talk to her. She may be the only really good person I’ve ever met. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I mean, if there’s a Heaven, your mother’s going.”

  Linda said it innocently enough; still, it touched a nerve.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Gary demanded.

  “That it’s much worse when somebody like that gets abused,” Linda answered. “What did you think I meant?”

  “I thought you were comparing her to my father.”

  “What?”

  “Saying he’s burning in Hell, or something.”

  “No,” she said.

  Despite his anger, he believed her; now that he thought about it, she’d certainly said nothing of the sort. Strange how that idea had popped into his mind…

  He paid up at the toll booth, and they continued on their way.

  “Hell’s just a fairy tale, anyway,” Gary said.

  “Did I say it wasn’t?”

  He laughed, shaking his head. “No, you didn’t, did you? Guess all that 700 Club crap hasn’t sunk in.”

  She laughed too. “I don’t watch the show that much.”

  “Watching it at all is too much.”

  “It’s not all that bad. The first part, with all the politics and stuff, is usually kind of interesting, even when I disagree with it-”