The cemetery looms just over the next rise as we walk along the road, just on the other side of a thin strand of dead trees. A car hasn’t come by in hours, but you just never know.
Cemeteries are like that. Everybody thinks they’re always desolate and deserted but the fact is, people come and go all night long, Lionel Richie. Visiting hours be damned.
Kids hop over the fence with a cooler and a blanket, a man snaps the lock and walks in with a bottle and a note to read to his dead wife, thugs come looking for cool headstone designs to rip off. You’d be amazed what you see in a cemetery at midnight.
And that’s just with the living people. But that’s not us.
We don’t talk much, Scrim and I. Scrim; the name says it all. Equal parts scummy and just plain grim. He might as well be the poster boy for the living dead; the mascot of Team Reanimation. You look up “zombie” in the dictionary and chances are you’re gonna see a picture of Scrim.
He’s a head taller than me, but probably weighs ten or twenty pounds less. His skin is leathery gray, his cheeks hollow, lips almost nonexistent as they peel back over his rotten teeth.
His elbows stick out at odd angles and his legs are stiff – even for a zombie. He wears baggy old sweat pants and a faded black concert T-shirt and a flannel shirt from forever ago, probably when he was still alive.
It’s a long, thin, country road that leads to the graveyard and as we crest the hill and look down on the cemetery, I see a lighted wreath on either side of the wrought iron gate below. I pause, just for a moment, the dim flicker of recognition slowing my pace. Then the wreath blinks. And I blink. And it blinks again. And I don’t.
Scrim shuffles forward, ever forward, clueless.
“What day is it?” I grunt, soft and low, just in case. Then I start walking again, out of habit.
I see the shovel on Scrim’s shoulder rise slightly as he shrugs. “I dunno,” he grunts back. “Why?”
My slow brain fizzes with brief recollections. I don’t have memories anymore, not really. Just flickers of moments, good or bad. Brief images that fly in front of my eyes from time to time, like a broken film strip rattling in the projector.
I call them insights, but they’re not. Not really.
But I’m having one now. The flicker of Christmas trees past, of soft music playing in the background, the crinkle of wrapping paper, the warmth of a fire, the scent of hot chocolate and the taste of soft cookies fresh out of the oven.
My voice sounds distant and cold, even to me. “Are those… Christmas wreaths?”
We shuffle closer, looking left and right for headlights or security cameras or alarms before stepping onto the road and approaching the front gate.
The road is cold but not iced over, white snow scattered on the slick blacktop. The wreaths are big and round and plastic; green plastic holly branches, red plastic holly berries and white blinking lights.
I see an orange extension cord running from both to a tool shed off to the side of the cemetery gates. Inside, now that I’m paying attention, I can hear a generator softly humming.
Beyond the shed, up another hill, higher still is a funeral home. Two stories, sagging just a little around the edges, in need of a fresh coat of paint. In a high, tight window on the top floor I see something else blinking: a small Christmas tree.
I reach out to touch one of the cheap bulbs, just to feel their warmth. The touch sets off a chain reaction of insights: quick filmstrips of a laughing family I can no longer remember, faces blurred by time, but happy and clearly mine.
Too soon I hear the jingling of chain next to me as Scrim uses the pliers from his back pocket to snap the lock. He swings the gate wide, taking the wreath – and my fresh insights – away from me.
I turn to him and growl. That is not a figure of speech. Zombies growl. I growl. He looks slightly surprised.
“What’d you do that for?” I ask, following him into the graveyard. Little puffs of snow charging out from under my new boots tell me I’m stomping.
“Do what?” Scrim stops, shovel still atop his shoulder as a placid look washes across his thin, angular face.
Now I huff. “Yank the door out of my hand like that.”
He cocks at me and gives me a blank stare. “Uh, because we needed to get inside and the door was preventing that and be glad I did because here we are now.”
“But. I. Was. Touching. That. Wreath.” I bite off each word, inching a little closer with every syllable.
His blinking eyes are echoes of his dull, hollow brain. Why is it always the dumb ones who get reanimated? Why not the people you’d actually, you know, want to spend the rest of your afterlife with?
“What wreath?” he grunts, shifting the shovel atop his bony shoulder.
“That wreath,” I say, turning around and pointing to the open gate door. The door is still open, the wreath still blinks sadly and I look up over the gate door where the cemetery name is spelled out.
I look up, squint, then read: “Brushy Pines Cemetery.”
Something clicks inside me, cold as the frost and hard as ice but, also… warm, soft. It’s another insight. A big one, maybe even the biggest I’ve ever had since, well… since I got like this.
I inch forward, slowly at first, back toward the open gate and then faster, rushing through it to turn around, boots crunching snow and then swooshing it left and right as I pivot.
Brushy Pines. I know that name. And, suddenly, I know why I know that name.
“Get out of there!” I hiss-growl to Scrim, who is leaning on his shovel at this point, eyeing me curiously.
“What? Quit goofing off, Tanner. I can smell the brains, fresh and new, no more than a few yards away. Let’s go, before whoever turns off those Christmas wreaths each night shows up and finds us digging up his newest customer.”
“I’m not kidding, Scrim,” I bark, inching back through the gates so he can see the serious look on my cold, hard face. “Get out of there, now. No one’s digging up anyone tonight. At least, not in this cemetery.”
“What? Why?”
He’s off his shovel now, dragging the business end in the cold, hard ground as he inches my way.
“Because it’s mine. I mean, I live here. Lived here… before.”
“Here?” he asks, close enough so I can see the genuine curiosity on his normally blank face.
“Brushy Pines, yes. T-t-this, this is… where I grew up. This is where I went to school. This is where Christmas happened. This is where it happened.”
I’m backing out now, out of the gates, expecting him to follow.
He doesn’t.
I’m not sure why I’m so surprised.
Too many Christmas movies, I suppose.
“So what?” he shrugs, turning back around, hoisting his shovel and sniffing out the fresh grave, leaving me in his snowy footsteps. “Meat’s meat, and a zombie’s gotta eat.”
His voice is so blunt, his shoulders so thin and that stupid shovel on his shoulders, shuffling along as he sniffs out the fresh burial mound… I dunno, it just gets me.
“Stop!” I hiss, and I find myself on my knees, black jeans in the snowy earth, reaching for my backpack and sliding the shovel from its holder at the bottom.
He doesn’t.
Stop, I mean.
He walks forward, not even shrugging anymore. I leave my backpack behind, snow-mud on my knees as I stand and follow. The headstones are tall and short, leaning and straight, close together and far apart, turning the full moon into a strobe light as it passes between them, shadow and light, while I chase Scrim through the graveyard.
How did he get so far ahead?
I see the dirt flying before I see Scrim, bent to the task at the fresh grave. Suddenly I can smell the rotting flesh from below, the juices, the skin, the muscle, the meat… the brains… wafting six feet up through the dirt.
And. It. Smells. Good.
I’m hungry, but for more than just meat. “I said stop, Scrim,” I blurt, watchin
g him single-mindedly move dirt from the fresh grave to a pile just to its right. He wants what he wants, and ever since I’ve known him, Scrim has only wanted one thing: Brains, brains, and more brains.
He hardly stops digging as he growls, “I’m not stopping, Tanner. So you grew up here, so what?”
I pause on the other side of the grave, watching him jam his shovel into the dirt, scrape out a few inches of cold, hard earth and then pitch it out. The sound grows rhythmic, jam-scrape-pitch; jam-scrape-pitch.
He looks up at me every so often, in between jam-scrape-pitches. He’s smirking, knowing that once I smell that smell, once I see that flesh, fresh and gassy, all my cheap talk will fade away and I’ll join him, feasting on the freshly dead, home and Christmas and insights be damned.
“So, that could be someone I know,” I insist; jam-scrape-pitch.
Scrim snorts and looks back down as he keeps jamming, scraping and pitching. The dirt piles up beside me, cold and damp and oh. So. Fresh.
“Yeah, like who?” he chuffs. “Your—”
I slice the shovel out of his hand. That is… by slicing off his hand. It doesn’t hurt him, but he watches it clinically, like it’s somebody else’s hand lying in the dirt, fingers still twitching as the electricity bleeds out of them, inch by inch.
“The hell?” he asks, but he’s already reaching for the shovel with the other hand. I slice for that as well, but this time he’s prepared; the clank of metal on metal echoes through the headstones, one bouncing off the other as our shovel blades meet in the night.
Sparks fly, illuminating the hatred in Scrim’s eyes. He is up and out of the half-dug grave pretty damn quick for a dead guy with only five good fingers. We square off on either side of the grave, his hand lying there, gray and waxy, fingers still at last.
The stub left behind doesn’t bleed so much as ooze a thick, blackish gray slime that coats his sneakers as he stands next to it, waving the shovel.
“What’s wrong with you?” He asks it so casually, it’s like none of this has even happened. Like we’re still back outside the cemetery gates, talking and walking.
Just another night.
“I said ‘stop.’ You didn’t stop.”
Finally, he shows a little emotion, even if it is only mild annoyance. “So you cut my hand off? I need that, you know? To dig? To help protect you and the others? To eat?”
I risk a look behind me at the cemetery gate, then move slightly to my left so that I’m directly in its path. “I don’t see you eating anymore, Scrim. Not in this town, anyway.”
He swings mid-sentence, and I duck and jam the tip of my shovel – smaller, lighter, sharper – just under his knee. He grunts and goes down, landing with the tip of his shovel in the dirt and his good hand wrapped around the wooden shaft like a crutch.
More blackish-grayish goo seeps out from the tear in his sweatpants where I’ve dug a deep gash just beneath his kneecap.
“Why?” he asks, silent and poised. “What’s gotten into you all of a sudden?”
I kneel down in front of him, shovel in hand just in case he’s feeling froggy and tries to yank my tongue out, mid-stream. “You told me, Scrim, we don’t eat our own. You told me, Scrim, we never go back. Now here we are, and you’re trying to do both. On… on… Christmas!”
“The rules?” He grins, teeth crooked and yellow. “Who cares about the rules when no one’s round to catch us, Tanner?”
His voice is conspiratorial, like maybe he can talk his way out of this. Like maybe with a missing hand and half a kneecap, he’s still in the game.
“I do, Scrim. At least, I care if we’re in my hometown. What if that was my mother down there, huh? My brother? My boyfriend or my BFF?”
Scrim shakes his head, still trying to salvage the situation. “So I won’t show you who it is then. So I’ll crack open the skull when you’re not looking and scoop out the brain and you’ll never know.”
I stand then, pushing myself up on the gooey end of my shovel. “I already know, Scrim. It’s not happening. You get up now, if you can, and—”
Scrim’s shovel glances off the nearest headstone, missing me by a hair but knocking a huge chunk out of the granite grave marker that flies right at me, slicing my cheek open. I flinch and duck, instinctively, and Scrim would be on me if it weren’t for the fact that I messed up his knee.
He’s still limping, a few feet away, when I turn on him.
Goo is still dripping from his missing hand, he has no shovel – no weapon – and he’s limping; bad. I grip the shovel and start toward him, almost sad to see him go.
Almost…
* * * * *
Story # 23:
Jingle Brains