The Mortician’s Apprentice

Now, you sit here wondering about my scar. I see you staring. There's no shame in it, my scar or you staring at it, I mean.

When my daddy was coming up, you weren't supposed to stare, so he learned how to watch out of the corner of his eye for the person he wanted a closer look at to look away. Then he'd sneak a good, long stare.

He told us bedtime stories that would curl our hair some nights. He'd break out the good whiskey and pull me onto his knee and tell my kid brother Kenny, "Load my pipe." then he'd tell us what he'd seen at our age.

"Hold your nose, you don't want to smell this," he told us one time, and we did, half expecting him to poot. Instead he told us of the man he saw in a diner one with gangrene so bad on his big ole foot that the flesh was all black and pulled back to the bone. He said that bone was white as my new permanent tooth.

We could smell the rotten frog smell of that dead foot still attached to a living man. Daddy said he went back to watching out of the corner of his eye as the man dragged that foot right out of the diner and on down the road.

So when one of us kids got a mind to climb a tree and fell out scraping up a knee or elbow, we'd run around the yard scaring each other with the bloody skin, yelling, "gangrene, gangrene!" while the rest of us screamed. We loved gore, thanks to Daddy's staring stories. I guess I write about zombies now for the same reason.

Yeah, I'm a published writer, with clippings and everything. The local newspaper lets me write the obits in exchange for printing my zombie stories. That's how I got this scar, chasing a zombie.

The undertaker at Beezer Funeral Home gave me a tip that a famous local butcher died under gruesome circumstances and I may want to check him out for research purposes. Of course, I made a beeline for Beezer.

Every time I enter the iron gates of the graveyard, the back way to Beezer, Daddy's corny joke comes to mind, "Why is the graveyard so popular? I don't know, but people are dying to get in there!" It's a comfort to hear his voice in my head, especially when I'm trudging through all those spirits. Graveyards are just lousy with ghosts. Haunted, period.

But even scarier are the undead. When a spirit hops inside a corpse, you're just asking for a staring story. That's why I have to see the goriest recently deceased Beezer has to offer, so I can stare as long as I like, imagine sticking a spirit inside that corpse, then write about it.. Bam! Zombie fic.

So I advanced on the slab. Poor Badlatch. I got the biggest steaks out of him back in the day. He gave me those little Cajun filets for almost nothing, too. Wrap them up in bacon, make my Mama's mouth water.

Now he's the meat. And not quite neat. Before Betty gets in here, I can sneak a few shots on my iPhone, I think. A little HD video. Pre-FX, he's a mess. They're talking open casket, but I'm thinking closed. Betty's magic is spectacular, she could make a fortune in Hollywood with her make-up artistry. But still...

McCullen's dead on. This corpse screams zombie. I slip him my milk money and get set up to write my best work.

Apparently Badlatch ran his hand through the thin slicer, after testing the knives. McCullen mumbled something about a domestic dispute while shoving my pair of Lincolns in his pocket. He crossed himself as he left me with the body.

I began with a headshot, a close-up of his blow to the cranium, presumably with a meat cleaver. Lots of skull, a few splinters matted in his blood-encrusted hair. I'll admit to gagging, I mean, I knew this guy.

I just stared. The iPhone clicked away as if of its own accord. Then I looked down at his massive chest, still shrouded in a blood-stained apron--cow's blood, his blood, who knew? And I saw something expand near the neckline of the apron.

A long, raspy moan filled my brain. It was probably a post-rigor gas release, I told myself. But then Badlatch's jaw started to clench and release. The rasping became intentional, like he was trying to talk.

Dead men tell no tales, but this butcher had a lot to say. In the next few seconds--on video, no doubt!--Badlatch let me know he was not the grateful dead, "no!" "Jezebel!" and "hell" were clearly audible. The poet in me admired him for rhyming.

Stock-still, holding my breath, I watched the enormity of Badlatch reanimate. He labored to breathe, then raise his wrecking ball of a head. I reanimated, too, leaping back a few feet, as evidenced later on the iPhone footage. I spied a pool of blood where his head had been.

Somewhere beneath my terror, my soul recognized his. Not quite ready to believe it, I geared up for a zombie apocalypse. Badlatch, King of the Zombies, was rising right before my eyes!

It is intrinsic in science to try to prove our beliefs. If I had paused a moment, I may have cut myself on Occam's Razor, but my body was already following my belief in the undead. I found myself on the defensive.

Badlatch lifted his hand to his head and howled at the bloody patch where he'd been struck hours earlier. A huff like a lion's roar began deep in his throat. His eyes still closed, he hoisted his body from the slab, knocking it over as he scrambled to stand. The instruments on the table next to him sprayed the wall above my crouched form, a scalpel nicking my forehead.

Watching Badlatch from the corner of my eye, I groped for a weapon among the sharps. Then, puny scalpel in hand, I righted myself, squinting through the ribbon of blood from my own wound.

My iPhone in one hand, my weapon in the other, I paused for his next move. Badlatch whimpered. Something inside my fear softened. I pushed away compassion with a grunt of will. You can hear that in the recording.

Then it began, the blind howling of a wounded animal. Looking back, I think, poor butcher. But at the time, I'm ashamed to say I took the opportunity to advance upon the creature with a pathetic threatening swish of my tiny blade.

That's when his eyes opened. Taking in the scene, Badlatch beheld my form with a look of fright. "Mary," he cried, before crumpling into a heap at my feet.

We had a game when we were coming up, I guess to break the tension. When one of us kids would whine, another would try to think of a song to match. Usually we sang to Johnny, because he was the baby and whined a lot. So in that moment, Hendrix echoed through my mind, "and the wind cried...Mary."

I bolted out the door to find McCullen, and ran right into him. “Zombie! Badlatch!” I tried to explain. McCullen, cool as a cucumber, sauntered past me into the room and knelt beside the giant. On his way, he handed me a handkerchief from his pocket without looking at me in a practiced display of automatic decorum, presumably to wipe away the blood from my nicked forehead.

McCullen calmly gained control of the catastrophic happenings with the skill of a man accustomed to zombies. His purposeful motion of rolling Badlatch onto his back, checking his neck for a pulse, and stepping away dial 911 on the landline gave me a moment to begin to feel ashamed.

“—and bring that Rookie Calhoun, he needs to recall his latest delivery.” McCullen hung up the phone and placed his hands on his hips to survey the destruction. “This happens sometimes,” he explained. I nodded, still not sure what had happened, but fairly positive that Badlatch was headed for the hospital when the paramedics arrived.

“Sometimes they come back,” McCullen shrugged, as if the dead could make the conscious decision to spring back to this life after making the journey to the afterlife. He sighed. Badlatch groaned. “Good thing you were here to prevent the wrong spirit from getting to him first.”

What? My mind reeled. What wrong spirit? The words “this happens sometimes” took on a new meaning. What happens other times, I wondered. I thought of Betty the post-mortem makeup artist working with McCullen to prepare the body, drain it of blood, the key to life. Is that why the tradition of preserving the body had gained popularity? I’d ask her over coffee sometime.

The idea of embalming as zombie prevention struck me. As if the veil had been lifted at last, I was seeing behind the Funeral Director’s curtain. Suddenly McCullen was a general on the front lines of holding back the zombie apocalypse. No wonder there were no undead out there in the cemetery digging themselves up and terrorizing the town.

So standing there in the middle of the mortuary with dried blood on my forehead where this scar is today, I had an epiphany. I began to center my stories on the true hero of zombie prevention, the mortician. My stories would forevermore include the zombies fleeing morticians wielding embalming fluid, the foil to their folly.

Those spirits I sensed out in the graveyard were lurking, just waiting for a moment to catch an un-embalmed victim unsupervised. Because, like Daddy used to say when we passed the graveyard, “that’s where the dead people live.”

Well not on that day. No, we’d fought to reunite the right spirit with his body and won. Badlatch lives. OK, he’s a little less generous with his cuts of meat these days. And he has been known to toss a meat cleaver at the occasional customer who complains about it. But he’s mostly back to normal.

Badlatch’s ex-girlfriend, Mary, was the next body I examined at the mortuary that year. It was all a great mystery how she managed to trap herself in her own basement only to be gnawed to death by rats. But staring at her chewed flesh was quite inspiring. I have a clipping of the zombie fic about her predicament it if you’d like to read it. Because whoever said truth was stranger than fiction had never read one of my stories.