Authors: Craig Sargent
“Sir, sir, I—I—”
“Well, what the hell is it?” Undertaker yelled. “Speak up, man.”
“I was told to show you—show you this.” He held the basket harder against him, as it clutching a child to his chest. “But—but—”
“But what?” Again Undertaker slammed his ham-sized fist down on the table, and every bowl on it jumped around like frogs on
capsizing lily pads. “Damn it man, speak up, will you? If there’s one thing I hate, it’s people who can’t get their damn words
out. What’s wrong with this world—is everyone slipping back into Cro-Magnon days where we’ll all grunt like gorillas?”
“But you’re all eating—b-b-breakfast,” the farmer said nervously.
“What the hell does that have to do with it?” Undertaker exclaimed, his face turning red. “I said show us your damn business
or I’ll be after you with my stick, here.” Undertaker started to rise, and the man got a strange, sickly expression, then
an equally strange little smile. He looked down, opened the top of the straw basket, and grabbed hold of something inside.
Rolling his eyes to the ceiling, as if knowing something quite horrible was about to unfold, he lifted the thing out.
It was a head—a human head—and it had been severed just at the top of the neck so it was nearly round in shape and covered
in a sheen of its own blood. Its popping eyes half exploded from their sockets as they slid down the front of the face like
larvae searching for a home. Its frozen mouth was still screaming—silently—in the most terrified expression Stone had ever
seen. Blood dripped down from beneath the opening of the neck, and drops of it could be heard through the sudden and complete
silence in the room as every man, woman, and child stopped chewing and took in the horror.
Then it slipped from the tiny man’s hand, the blood on the hair making it slide from his fingers. It hit the ground with a
slopping sound, then rolled forward under one of the tables. And the gruel, so to speak, hit the fan.
T
he man who had let the head fall from his grip apologized profusely for the mess and commotion he had caused. But Undertaker
wouldn’t hear a word of it, yelling at his numerous progeny that “They’d damned well better get used to grislier sights than
a stinking head in a basket if they had any intentions of carrying along in the family business I’ve worked so hard to establish.”
After everyone was properly berated and tapped on the head with the stick, Undertaker led the man to his table from which
one of his own was unceremoniously deprived of his chair.
“Sit down, mister, sit down,” Undertaker said, motioning with his hand for one of the serving children to bring a cup of the
steaming brew he was sipping—not real coffee but brewed from a mix of sassafras, bitter herbs, and some old coffee flavoring
that he had picked up a whole barrelful of somewhere along the line. It was important to Hanson that visitors like the coffee,
as it was such a rare and unknown treat. It impressed them with his wealth and taste. He peered closely into the man’s beady
eyes as the wizened farmer took a sip, trying to calm himself down.
“Ah, good—so good,” the man said with the thinnest razor of a smile. “So long since I had—” Then he looked down at the basket
on his lap and remembered why he was there, and the smile vanished as if it had never existed.
“Ah, mister, it was horrible—the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen,” the man said. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, putting the
cup back down on the table. “I’m being rude in my fear. My name is Miguel Hernandez—I am a farmer about fifteen miles to the
north past the bomb crater. The soil is rich there—richer than many places in the territory. And a man could survive, even
raise a family and live a life. Except—except—” He looked down at the basket again and seemed about to burst into tears. “Except
for the Strathers brothers. They started making us pay a ‘tax’ about two years ago. But this tax gets bigger every month now.
Last week they told us that we’d have to give even more of what we produce. We have nothing anymore. As it is, we can barely
feed ourselves, those of us who work the land, and our children. But the additional kilos of wheat and squash they want—we
might as well all hang ourselves.…”
He paused, let his head drop for a second, and his face, which in its pure state of misery was exposed for an unguarded moment,
made the fanner look a thousand years old, with all the pain of a race contained in his lips and moist eyes.
“So we decided to organize. Or try to.” He laughed a bitter sound. “Several dozen of us met in one of the cornfields last
night to think of some way we could fight back. But the Strathers gang somehow had found out about the meeting. They were
waiting. Four of us at the meeting—their heads were sliced off while the rest of us were made to watch, Right in front of
us, and we are a close community linked in blood and marriage. They made them kneel and then slowly—slowly—cut off the heads
with handsaws while they held the screaming victims down. It was, it was—.” He looked as if he were about to burst into tears
again as his whole face sort of contorted up into quite a terrified expression.
“Easy, easy,” Undertaker encouraged the man softly as the rest of the family, who were still in the kitchen, looked on, fascinated
and repulsed at the same time.
“So I can’t ask you to help us, because what can any man do?” Hernandez forced himself to go on. “There are just too many
of them. But we have come to ask you to help us bury our dead. We are poor and have even less now, as the gang of murderers
who came last night stripped many of our houses. But we have been able to scrape up some things.” He stopped and whistled,
and a second small old man appeared at the door, just as sun-beaten and shrunken as the first. He dragged an old mule behind
him that looked like it had been born around the time of Jesus, so gray and dusty was its flea-bitten hide. Atop the wretched
animal were a fifty-pound bag of corn and five live, skinny chickens all squawking like it was Judgment Day as they fluttered,
tied together by the feet, feathers shaking off into the air and down onto the kitchen floor.
“It’s all right—it’s all right.” Undertaker laughed, waving his hand toward the man. “Just tell him to take that stuff out
back and unload it. It will be payment enough. Fred—or whatever your damn name is,” Undertaker bellowed, whipping out his
hickory stick at a big red-haired lad who sat in front of the fire eating toast with dripping honey, “get the hell out there
and take in those supplies, and tell inventory to get out planking for four”—he looked at the man, who nodded sadly up and
down—“four SFs.” This was undertaking lingo for “small fries,” since from time immemorial undertakers had spoken in code to
keep the bereaved from ever really knowing just what the hell they in fact did in a funeral parlor.
“You just go get them bodies back from your cornfield and we’ll take care of everything,” Undertaker said, slapping the man
on the back so he spat out a little mouthful of black coffee. “Tonight—we’ll have the funeral tonight, before the wolves come
out. They’ve just been mating and they’ll be hungry as hell. The smell of the dead, especially with their heads off and the
blood scent drifting over the mountains for miles, will attract a small army of them. Yeah, we gotta work fast Mr. Hernandez.”
“We are ready,” he said. “My people are just waiting for your okay. The bodies are all packed up and ready to bring to you.
We will be back before the sun is down.” He took a last sip of the fake coffee, a substance he had once loved—and now hadn’t
had a sip of in five years. “And thank you, thank you from all my people for this—this kindness. If there is a God in heaven,
and I am not sure there is anymore, he will reward you someday for this.” With that the man tottered quickly from the room
and slammed the wooden door, half hanging on its hinges behind him.
“Come on, you,” Undertaker said, addressing Stone loudly so that he thought the big, bald table of a man was about to use
the hickory on him as well. But the stick apparently was reserved for immediate family, for he merely rose and started toward
the door as Stone somehow dragged his aching, medicine-coated body up and after the man. Under-taker led him out of the house
and around to the back as Stone jerkily caught up with him and walked by his side. The sun was warming things now, making
Hanson’s bald head bead with sweat like a bowling ball covered with wax—and Stone’s white coating of medicinal herbs started
to dry, harden, and crack all around his body so that he felt like he was some sort of walking mud beast.
“Come on, man, you’ve used up enough of my precious ointments on that overcooked flesh of yours.” Undertaker laughed. “Now
make yourself useful around here—help me put some of these coffins together. We’ve been busy as god-damn beavers for days
now. People are dropping like fucking flies.”
“Why is it so bad around here?” Stone asked as he hobbled along behind. “I’ve seen bad places, but that farmer looked about
as scared as they come, like a jackrabbit about to be pancaked by a diesel.”
“Ah, it
is
bad around here—you could say that two or three times. One gang of slime would be enough, but no, we have to have two trying
to control the same territory. Trying to suck the blood out of the same body twice would be more like it. There’s two gangs
of murdering swine who between them run things for about a hundred square miles in these parts—the Strathers brothers and
the Head Stompers, a local version of the Guardians of Hell. But just as mean and nasty as the original—if not more so. Neither
gang has really been able to do the other one M. The Strathers boys are mostly made up of mountain bandits who’ve hit the
big time. They’re dumber and not as tough as the bikers, but there are nearly a hundred of them—all armed to the teeth. The
Head Stompers, who showed up about a year no, are as bad as they come. They carry, among other things, razor-sharp scythes
they swing around at the ends of long chains. They can come in on their big bikes standing up on the goddamn seats, spinning
those things around their heads. I seen ’em once just practicing-it’s a sight I wish I could forget. But there are only about
three dozen of them. So it’s a standoff between the two gangs. A stalemate.” He paused.
“But that doesn’t go for the people around these parts: the farmers, the townsfolk of Cotopaxi, which serves as head-quarters
for both bunches of bastards. The place is like a battlefield—so tense, you can cut it with a knife. Everyone—in town and
out—is subject to both gang’s ‘taxes,’ and after stealing their money and goods, the gangs force them to spend their remaining
pennies in the whorehouses and gin mills of the town to drown their sorrows—and they’ve got plenty of sorrows to drown. Since
the bastards showed up, life has gone from being hard to being a living hell. I’m the only goddamn person making any money
around here—other than them. And that’s because the murderers always pay their funeral bills. It’s a tradition going back
to Al Capone. You bumps ’em off, you pays for their little condo in the ground.”
As he talked, Undertaker led Stone around to one of the two big red barns. The structure had obviously been used at one time
for agricultural functions but now was relegated to the dead. Or rather their preparation for the trip into that realm. Undertaking
equipment stood everywhere, embalming fluids in ten-gallon glass bottles lined a whole wall, planking from local trees rough-hewn
with bark and splinters erupting from them like a rash were piled up along one wall. Bandages, saws, needles, paint, everything
that one might need to make corpses look friendly and happy for their bereaved families. Giving them the opportunity to say,
“Doesn’t Tom look nice,” or, “How peaceful Fred went out,” when in fact Tom and Fred and Jervis and the whole bunch of them
had gone out screaming and howling, had had to have their guts and noses and tongues sewn back on, or their blue skin painted
with rouge and blush to make them look like they had just been out chopping wood in the yard when in fact they were already
starting to rot, to stink up the place. Like most service industries, a business of illusions.
Stone did a double take as he reached the center of the place, and in the semidarkness saw a whole row of skeletons sitting
up on the back wall.
“Jesus Christ,” his mouth grunted involuntarily. There was something at seeing what all of one’s flesh was hung on—just sheer,
fading bone with a thousand cracks, already during to dust—that made you feel that you were in fact just a passenger in this
body. And two dozen skeletons sort of magnified that feeling.
“Oh, them,” Undertaker said, seeing Stone staring at the several dozen ex-members of
Homo sapiens
. “They’re deadbeats ”
“I’ll say they’re dead,” Stone replied, managing a half grin, which hurt his puffy lips. In fact, everything he did hurt some
part of him.
“Didn’t have no money on ’em—no one would pay for them. Now, I’m a generous man,” Undertaker said, folding his arms in front
of him as he stood in front of a long metal worktable. The bloodstains and dents of a thousand cuttings and choppings were
evident, even in the dim light of the place. “But I run a business, not a welfare center. Man wants to die—that’s his business.
But if I bury him, that’s my business. You gotta pay something—even if it’s just a damn chicken or a ring from your little
finger—but you gotta pay something or else—”
“What do you do with these?” Stone asked, pointing to the rows of ex-citizens, which he noticed as he looked closer were not
actually all skeletons—some were only half rotted away, the skin on their frames turned to something leathery and dark like
licorice. The lips shrunken back to threads, the eyes squeezed down into little perfect marbles of carbon, green molds growing
over them.
“Tell you the truth, don’t really know what the hell to do with ’em.” Undertaker laughed, scratching his bald head with one
of this thick fingers. “Just ’cause I can’t bury ’em don’t mean I’m going to throw ’em out with the trash now,” Undertaker
explained in the same sort of lecturing We that he immediately took on whenever he began quoting one of his many “truths of
life and undertaking” to his children, and whoever else he could get to listen to him. “So I just started putting them up
on the wall a few years ago, thinking I’d figure out something sooner or later, but I ain’t figured it out.” He laughed.