Risen (6 page)

They drove six miles down the road and then onto a pasture road and stopped when they crossed a creek. They hauled the body down the bank, each boy except Galen hanging onto one corner of the sleeping bag. They carried it along the creek a few hundred yards and then up to the bank again.

Darren had to go back for the camping shovel he'd left in the car. Kent passed the time by dry heaving at the creek. Buzzy gave up and just sat down on the ground and bawled his eyes out.

Galen paced angrily, nervously sweeping the hair from his eyes every few seconds. He kept up a steady stream of invective directed at Deputy Hawg whose fault this whole fucking unbelievable mess was. Now and again he'd kick something, often as not the deputy.

Tom retreated into the Blacklands where nothing mattered, not even shooting a cop. The world around him vanished as if swallowed by fog. He watched from a hundred miles away as his hands dug a hole by the embankment. After awhile someone else took his place and he sat down and didn't see anything, nothing at all but shades of blackness swirling and roiling before his eyes in all directions.

He was caught up in events larger than himself by far. It was useless to fight them, useless to try to plan a course of action, useless to think, useless to do anything at all but to float on the wind like an expended husk.

After the deputy was planted and Galen had elicited the necessary oaths of silence, the boys headed home. Tom steered the Honda over roads so familiar he could have navigated them in his sleep.

He left his muddy shoes on the back porch, stripped off his clothes and climbed under the covers. As he closed his eyes it occurred to him that he had no recollection of the trip at all. He didn't remember entering the town limits or pulling up at his own house. He didn't remember anything after leaving the creek.

Except....

One thing. Something he hadn't even noticed at the time.

When he'd passed the church, someone was ringing the bell. Funny. Who would ring a church bell at that hour? It must have been midnight, at least.

***

Franz Klempner woke in a sweat. He didn't think he'd been having a nightmare but the sheets were damp and twisted as if he had. He heard Elmer downstairs, barking his fool head off.

By habit, not quite awake, Franz reached over to touch Irma and discovered only the empty bed.

"Irma!" he called out, and by now the fog in his brain had lifted and he began to connect his wife's absence with the frantic barking of the dog downstairs.

He rushed out of the bedroom and down the stairs, calling out her name. For some reason he paused at the foot of the stairs. Elmer the dog was in the kitchen and Franz could see that Irma wasn't in the living room. That's where he'd find her, for certain, in the kitchen. Then what impulse told him to take it slow? It just felt wrong, he couldn't say why.

Then the bell stopped ringing. The church bell, ringing in the middle of the night, calling to the faithful.

"Irma!" he called again. Elmer's insistent barking was ominous, intense. It wasn't like when he treed a possum or found a raccoon digging through the trash. There was a hint of fear in it.

"Irma!"

Franz padded on bare feet through the living room and toward the kitchen. The glowing hands of the mantel clock told him it was just after twelve.

He thought about turning on the light but the lamp was clear across the room. He wished he'd brought the shotgun but it was upstairs in the bedroom closet. He'd like to have felt something heavy in his hand...his flashlight would be good, but it was in the kitchen drawer. Why was everything always in the wrong place?

He reached the kitchen door. Elmer was going crazy inside. Franz reached his hand around the corner and felt for the light switch. Slowly his fingers inched along the wall until they found what they were looking for. He flipped the switch and the light came on just as the butcher knife stabbed the wall between his fingers. His middle and index fingers split open and trailed blood through the air as Franz instinctively jerked back his hand, screaming.

Franz looked up in horror at the terrified face of his wife. Her eyes were wide as she wrenched the knife from the wall and came at him again. The knife struck at Franz and his arm flew up in self defense and the blade sliced through his sleeve and bit into his wrist.

"Irma!" he yelled as she pulled the knife back to her ear and struck at him yet again. He grabbed her wrist and twisted. The knife fell and embedded its point in the linoleum.

Irma squirmed free and ran to the back door. She whined in panic as she fumbled with the lock. In moments Franz was behind her and had hold of her shoulders.

"Irma, it's me, Franz!" he said, "It's only me! There's nothing to be afraid of!" He managed to turn her around and commanded her to look at him. "Look," he said, "it's only me!"

She glanced at him. "Look," he said again. She found the courage to meet his gaze. He smiled at her. "It's just Franz. I won't hurt you. You know I won't hurt you."

She stared at him for several long seconds, and he kept smiling at her and telling her that everything was all right. Elmer's barking deteriorated to a sullen afterthought and then died out altogether. Silence embraced the room, then was broken by the reassuring lap of Elmer at his water dish.

Tears welled in Irma's eyes. She threw herself into Franz' chest and wrapped her arms around him and clung there for dear life.

Meanwhile, not many miles away in the morgue of the Cooves County Hospital, John Duffy, whose jugular had been severed by his wife less than twelve hours before, bolted upright on the autopsy table and wondered what in the devil was going on.

Curtis Waxler was not warm to the idea of mopping out the morgue at midnight.

It seemed to him to be tempting fate, like walking through the cemetery on Halloween night or driving a car in Transylvania when the forecast called for rain. It was the sort of thing the obvious victims, the people Curtis and his friends referred to as "dead meat," do in monster movies.

But Doc Milford, who was also Chief Administrator of the Cooves County Hospital, was expecting the coroner to show up early for the autopsy on John Duffy and he wanted his facility to make a good impression.

They didn't perform many autopsies at Cooves County Hospital. It was usually pretty obvious what killed people when they got caught in the hay baler or had the tops of their cars peeled back like sardine cans and their heads sliced off by slow-moving combines driving the highway during summer harvest. It seemed obvious to Curtis, when he lifted the sheet over John Duffy's face and peered at the parted flesh and the exposed veins in the neck, what had killed the man. You didn't have to be a forensic scientist to figure it out. But the law required an autopsy and the coroner had been called and he would be there by eight a.m.

So here was Curtis and his bucket and his mop at the witching hour, down in the hospital basement with the corpse, doing as fine an impression of "dead meat" as any frustrated actor in Hollyweird ever dreamed when John Duffy's voice boomed out, "What in the hell...?" and the corpse sat up, flailing its arms under the sheet and banging its head on the light over the examining table and groaning and cursing a blue streak.

The effect on Curtis was profound.

He shed the ballast in his bladder and ran so hard for the half open door that he reached it before he was ready and banged smack into it, slamming it shut. He grabbed the door handle with sweaty hands and wrenched it open but he couldn't help but glance back over his shoulder to see if something was gaining on him. He saw John Duffy writhing on the table, still kicking at the sheet over his legs and looking as perturbed as a badger in a gunny sack. Duffy and Curtis locked eyes.

"You there!" Duffy bellowed, and Curtis whined as he dashed through the morgue door. His shoes squeaked on the linoleum as he made a ninety-degree turn in the hallway and ran like Jim Thorpe had run in Stockholm in 1912 but with less grace and a lot more volume.

Curtis punched the elevator button frantically and gave the doors one half-second to open. When they didn't he headed for the stairs with the slap of Duffy's bare feet resounding down the hallway and Duffy's voice calling after him, "You! Hey you!"

To the night nurse on the first floor, Curtis was only a flash in the corner of her eye as he streaked past her station.

"Get out!" Curtis yelled, and then he was gone, leaving behind bewilderment and the faint odor of fresh urine.

Duffy appeared moments later. He'd wrapped the sheet around his waist and tossed the rest of the material toga-like over his shoulder, which may be why Claudia White, the night nurse, stammered out "Great Caesar's ghost!" rather than any of a hundred other possible exclamations. Later she would think it was funny, but it didn't strike her that way now. What did strike her was the corner of the counter as she fainted dead away.

***

"Sheriff?" Doc Milford said into the phone. "I think you'd better get out here to the hospital right away.

"No, if I told you what it was, you'd think I was drunk.

"No, I am not, thank you very much.

"I don't know if it's an emergency. I don't think so.

"Just come, Gene, please. I want somebody to tell me I'm not going crazy."

***

They had found Duffy's underwear by the time Sheriff Clark arrived. The rest of his clothes were bloodstained and were being held as evidence by the Sheriff's Department.

Duffy sat in Doc Milford's office in his boxers and a blood pressure cuff. He looked up when the Sheriff entered.

"Am I under arrest?" he asked.

It took Sheriff Clark a full fifteen seconds to summon up the word "no." Then he sat down to have a serious chat with the deceased.

They determined the facts of the case pretty quickly, as completely as they could without the input of Curtis Waxler, who had vanished like a vapor into the night. Duffy was informed that his wife had murdered him in his sleep and that he had been officially pronounced dead by Doc Milford. Then Duffy had been taken to the morgue awaiting an autopsy where he appeared to have returned to life.

"Thank Christ you didn't cut me open!" Duffy exclaimed.

"John," said Doc, "believe me—it wouldn't have made any difference. You were as dead a man as I've ever seen. Livor mortis had set in. Primary flaccidity of the muscles. You weren't in a coma, you weren't catatonic, you were dead."

Sheriff Clark flashed suddenly on an image of John Cleese pounding a dead parrot on the counter of Michael Palin's pet shop.

"I don't know about any of that," Duffy snarled.

Doc swiveled to his computer and clicked through a number of photos documenting his diagnosis.

"Here. Look. This is how you were brought in twelve hours ago. Your throat was slit practically ear to ear."

Duffy glanced at the photos and turned away with a snarl. Sheriff Clark noticed the tightness in Duffy's jaw and the dark look in his eyes and was glad that Duffy wasn't drunk. With liquor in him, Duffy argued with his fists.

"I don't know what you're trying to pull," Duffy said, "but if you think I'm paying you dime one for this horseshit, you're wrong. My throat's fine. I've never felt better in my life."

"Sometime around midnight, you apparently returned to life," Doc said. "Your wound was completely healed."

Duffy snorted. He looked up at Sheriff Clark.

"You say Madge did that to me?" he said, gesturing toward the computer screen.

"I have her taped confession at the station. She says you got drunk, beat her up and passed out on the sofa. While you were asleep, she cut your throat."

Duffy shook his head.

"I don't remember any of that."

A few moments passed in silence, during which Doc and Sheriff Clark exchanged looks and shrugs. Doc fought down an overwhelming urge to apologize, but what did he have to apologize for? For declaring a dead man dead?

"Where's she now?" Duffy asked.

"She's in a cell."

"But you got nothing on me?"

"We don't file charges against the victim, John, or against corpses. If Madge wants to file a domestic abuse complaint"

"I don't remember any beating. I want to see her."

"I don't think that would be a good idea."

Duffy's mouth curled into a smirk. "Sheriff," he said, "you're gonna have a hell of a time convincing a jury that Madge killed me with me sitting there on the bench saying it ain't so. So you just let her out of that jail of yours and take her home and tell her I'll be there waiting for her."

Doc said, "I think you should stay here, John, at least until we can run some more tests. There will be no charge. But something awful damned strange is going on and we need to get to the bottom of it."

Duffy shook his head. He rose slowly and drew himself up to his full five feet and nine inches of height. He stood there in his boxer shorts and looked down his nose at Doc Milford.

"No, you might just decide I was dead again and I'd wake up in a pine box. You've wasted enough of my time. Now who's giving me a ride? I'd catch my death walking home like this."