Four Bullets
by Neil V. Young
Visual Tasting: Head Roll by Rycke Foreman
Death is boring.
That was about the size of it, Landon thought. The screaming, the crying, and the somber mood were more than he could tolerate.
He looked over at Daniel, his partner, who stood by the back passenger side of the hearse. Daniel, dressed in an identical black suit, met Landon’s glance and rolled his eyes. Yep, Landon thought, Daniel was bored too.
Slowly, the procession of pallbearers made its way to the waiting hearse. They had to stop several times because the grief-stricken widow threw herself at the coffin. As always, some member of the funeral procession would peel her off the box and on it would go. That old lady, the Widow Hensley, had fainted three times already in the church.
God, how I want to get to the beach. The surfboard’s sitting in my truck right now.
“On behalf of the Warnisher Funeral Home you have our deepest condolences.” Landon summoned all of his strength to look like he gave a shit, with a gusto that belied his twenty-something years.
Get me the fuck out of here!
“Thank you, young man,” the widow Hensley said through her sobs. “Please look after my Bertrand.”
“Of course,” Landon said.
Slowly – far slower than Landon thought he could stand – the pallbearers loaded the coffin into the hearse. Sweat was beading down Landon’s head. It was getting hot in his monkey suit.
It was with no small satisfaction that Landon shut the tailgate and climbed into the driver’s seat. The smell of hot leather and cigarettes was overpowering.
Jesus! It’s finally over!
“Is your window up?” Daniel asked as he slammed the passenger side door.
“Yeah,” Landon said. He loosened his tie.
Daniel took off his sport coat. “Let’s get the fuck out of here. It’s hotter than anything in this suit.”
Landon put the car in gear and headed down the driveway. “I thought that service was never going to end.”
“I expected half of those old dudes to drop while carrying that coffin,” Daniel said. “And that blue-haired old bag. God! What a drama queen!”
Landon looked in the rearview mirror as he rounded the corner down the street. “Okay, we’re far enough away.”
Daniel turned on the radio and the sounds of Rob Zombie filled the car. The windows came down and the ties came off. Landon stepped on the gas, bringing the hearse into the center lane.
“Did you see that chick in the front row?” Daniel struggled with the first few buttons of his shirt.
“Not bad,” Landon recalled. “The rest of the funeral was like a Geritol ad.”
“Hey,” Landon said as Daniel changed the radio station.
“I want to hear more about those weird people walking all over the place.” Daniel hit the seek button. “They think it’s some kind of virus making people do that shit.”
“Yeah,” Landon spit out the window. “And in another hour they’ll think it’s something else. C’mon, man, turn it back to music.”
“Fuck it. Let’s just get the stiff back to the home,” Daniel said. “The sooner we dump the old codger off the sooner we can hit the waves.”
Funerals always took so damn long, and this was his second one today. They could never keep on schedule. Sometimes too many people showed up, and of course they always had to take turns paying respects to the poor slob that died. Someone needs to put a time limit on that, he thought. The crying and speeches seemed to take an eternity and it all sounded alike after awhile.
Landon turned onto an old paved driveway at the faded and chipped sign that read “Warnisher Funeral Home.” Overgrown hedges scraped against the hearse as they passed by. Landon carefully maneuvered around the potholes and bumps in the pavement. He’d gotten used to them, although he was at a loss to figure out why he bothered avoiding them at all. Daniel didn’t mind if they hit a hole and the old coot in the back wasn’t about to complain. The funeral home boss could bitch about replacing the shocks, but he rarely ventured outside anymore.
Landon brought the hearse to a stop at the back entrance. The old parking lot was full of weeds, cracks, and protruding roots. The back awnings were at one time white, Landon supposed, but were now so coated with grime and dirt they looked gray.
Stone cherubs and angels hung over the front entrance, so caked with soot as to be unrecognizable. Landon knew what they were because he restocked the promotional brochures in the front lobby. The structure was supported by four cracked, chipped, and stained ionic columns that somehow managed to hold the whole affair up.
Both Landon and Daniel stood out front, kicking loose stones across the asphalt and picking at the cracked tiles of the front walkway.
“Where the hell is Igor with the wheels?” Daniel asked. “I ain’t carrying this old fart all the way inside.”
“I don’t know,” Landon said. “Probably in the back masturbating or something. It’s your turn to go get him.”
“Hey,” Daniel held up a fresh cigarette, then shrugged.
“Fuck it,” Landon said. This wasn’t the first time that Igor had failed to show up with the cart when they arrived. He laid on the horn. “Morgan! Get your ass out here!”
Morgan, or Igor, as the staff called him, hurried the squeaking cart down the bumpy ramp. “Sorry, sorry,” he mumbled in a nasal tone as he sniffed back a runny nose.
“Just help us get the damn coffin,” Landon said.
Landon, Daniel, and Igor pushed the coffin up the ramp. The elegant patterned carpet, once rich and thick, was now sun-bleached and frayed with a heavy track of dirt running down the center. The carpet in the main lobby wasn’t fairing any better. Landon often thought the dump might make a great haunted house for Halloween, but the rest of the year it was just ugly. Landon knew that cheap prices and bribes to the Health Department were the only reasons it was still operating. It had been decades since anyone had pumped a dime into the place, and the latest owner wasn’t likely to do any more.
Landon helped guide the coffin past an older woman at the front desk.
“Do you have an appointment?” She looked at Landon like she had never seen him before.
“Dora,” Landon held his hands out in front of him, palms up. “It’s me, Landon. I’ve been working here for eight months.”
“Oh,” Dora looked at Landon with a blank face. She was the boss’s mother. He’d given her the position so he could keep an eye on her. “You’re Edgar’s friend. Go right ahead.”
The smell of embalming fluid and ammonia greeted him as he stepped into the back room. The boss-man, Edgar, was there, working on another stiff, this one an attractive woman. He always took the time to work on any good-looking female cadavers that came through. The rest were Igor’s responsibility. The boss didn’t even look up when Landon walked in.
“We got the one from the Hensley funeral.” Landon stood in the doorway, not really wanting to venture any farther into the morbid embalming room.
“The crematorium,” Edgar said and pointed, without looking up from his work.
Landon, Daniel, and Igor guided the coffin down the hall to the double metal doors stenciled ‘Crematorium.’
“Don’ go in there!” Igor said as he pushed the coffin along. “Ya can’t! Insurance, ya know.”
“All right, relax,” Landon said. Igor and the boss guarded the crematorium as if it were Fort Knox. They didn’t want anyone going in there and kept it locked with keys only Edgar had. Insurance. Since when had the Warnisher Funeral Home cared about the insurance company, or the Health Department, or the Better Business Bureau? They parked the coffin next to the doors and set the brakes on the cart.
“We need our paychecks,” Daniel stuck his head into Edgar’s room.
“Wait in the break room,” Edgar’s muffled voice echoed into the hall. “I have to sign them.”
Typical, Landon thought. Edgar had to control everything, right down to manually signing the paychecks, which he used to lord over his employees.
The break room was a shrine to Edgar’s stinginess; a retrofitted bathroom scarcely bigger than a prison cell, half filled with boxes of embalming fluid and formaldehyde. Entertainment consisted of an old television jury-rigged to a DTV conversion box and a few out-of-date issues of Mortuary Management left on a broken chair.
“We could be here a while,” Landon said. “Let’s see if there’s any news on those guys walking all over the place.”
The aged television crackled to life. The anchorman was visibly sweating and nervous as he read and shuffled the papers in front of him. “No one knows how this happened or what’s causing it,” the anchor said. “In a scene reminiscent of Dawn of the Dead it appears as though corpses are coming back to life…”
“Get the fuck out of here,” Landon said in disbelief.
The screen switched to a scene filmed from a helicopter. Shambling forms made their way down the streets of a city. Hundreds of people ran away from the shuffling, stiff figures, their fluid motions in sharp contrast to the lumbering forms that pursued them.
“…we have reports coming in from all over the county of disturbances at city morgues, mortuaries, and hospitals. We’ve just learned that authorities have closed all regional medical schools.”
“Shouldn’t we be worried about this?” Daniel pulled another cigarette from his pack. “I mean, we are right in the middle of cemetery country.”
“Nah,” Landon waived the possibility away. “Think about it. Those stiffs are buried under six feet of dirt in a burial vault, and the coffin is hermetically sealed. Nothing could get out of that. Besides, all we do here is cremate bodies. What, are the ashes going to come after us?”
Daniel took a heavy drag on his cigarette. “What about the one we just brought in?”
The coffin was right where they left it.
Landon placed his ear to the side.
Nothing.
“This is bogus. Let’s get our paychecks and get out of this place before we go nuts. There won’t be any walking dead at the beach.”
“Help!” Igor came running into the room, his face white with fear. “It’s alive! The damn thing is alive!”
“This I have to see,” Landon said. He could hear Igor and Daniel running behind him as he raced to the embalming room.
He rounded the corner and saw it.
Its lifeless eyes bored into him as it writhed and struggled against the straps that held it to the table. Its inhuman wail pierced Landon’s soul. Edgar stood a few feet away, watching.
Landon came in closer. At this angle, Landon could make out surgical openings held open by clamps in the cadaver’s abdomen. Instruments and a steel bucket on the tray nearby were all the evidence he needed to see what was going on.
“What the fuck?” Landon asked. “You’ve been harvesting organs?”
“They were just homeless people picked up by the city.” Edgar’s eyes never left the creature. “No one was going to miss them! Look at it! It knows what I was doing to it!”
“Calm the fuck down,” Landon said. The homeless cadaver the city brought in was a good-looking woman with finely manicured nails. Landon didn’t want to know how she got there. “That thing is strapped in. She’s not going anywhere.”
“Edgar,” Dora came to the doorway. She clutched the left side of her neck as blood oozed out of a massive wound and cascaded down and stained her dress. If she was in pain, Landon couldn’t tell, even as she slid down the side of the wall. “There is a Mr. Hensley to see you.”
Behind her, Hensley appeared. His pale skin contrasted with his black burial suit as his bare feet smacked against the tile floor. His mouth was wide open, spilling Dora’s blood through his teeth and down his chin. His pale, colorless eyes set on the four men as he lurched forward.
Landon’s heart thumped in his throat. To his left there were empty shelves. To his right he saw only an embalming pump. With nothing to defend himself he felt naked. His boss must have been thinking along the same lines; the stingy old bastard produced a wild-west style pistol from a drawer. Edgar fumbled around with the weapon.
“Shoot that thing!” Landon yelled.
“It won’t fire!” Edgar pulled the trigger. “I think the safety must be on.”
“It’s a revolver,” Landon said. “It doesn’t have a safety.”
“Then how do you work it?”
“Look, just give it here,” Landon reached over and snatched the handgun. He’d been taught about firearms at an early age. Although he didn’t own any himself, he never lost the skill.
Landon pulled the hammer back and aimed at the shambling form of Hensley. He took a deep breath and pulled the trigger.
The old weapon belched a cone of smoke and flame as it jumped in Landon’s hands. The bullet hit Hensley square in the chest. A geyser of embalming fluid shot out of the bullet hole and the corpse staggered backwards.
It shifted forward again, this time straight at Landon.
“Shoot it in the head!” Daniel cried out from across the room as the echo of the gunshot receded. “That’s how you kill zombies.”
Like in the movies? Landon wasn’t sure, but with Hensley shuffling towards him he wasn’t going to debate on the subject.
Landon stared down the sites of the old gun, drawing a bead on the thing’s soulless eyes. At first he saw them as blank, lifeless. But now he saw an almost carnivorous glint in them, like a tiger eyeing a gazelle. It looked hungry and it looked like it wanted to eat him.
Not going to happen.
Landon fired again. The shot hit the Hensley zombie right between the eyebrows. It sheered off the top portion of its head in a splatter of grayish-red goo. The animated corpse contorted and shook, then fell backwards.
“How did you know?” Landon was shocked it had worked.
“The only way to kill zombies is to shoot them in the head,” Daniel said. “Every movie I’ve ever seen, that’s what happened.”
“I guess George A. Romero knew something we didn’t.” Landon looked at the semi-headless form of his target lying in an expanding pool of pus and grayish-pink fluids on the cracked tile floor.
“Okay,” Edgar assumed his usual air of authority. He reached out, “Give me the gun.”
“Fuck you,” Landon pulled the weapon close. “I just killed that damn zombie with it. You couldn’t even figure out –”
Landon stopped his tirade. A rhythmic pounding was getting louder. How long it had been going on he didn’t know. The moans. The shrieks. More banging.
The crematorium.
Gun leading, Landon cautiously crept towards the banging sounds that grew louder with each passing step. Glancing back, Landon saw that Daniel, Igor, and Edgar followed single-file behind him.
Sure, the old man is not about being the boss now, Landon thought. Soon as the shit hits the fan he lets all of us go into danger first.
The thumping and wailing got louder and louder. Landon peered around the corner. The double metal doors were locked, but they shook as if holding something back.
“How many stiffs are back there?” Daniel asked Edgar. “You were supposed to cremate them.”
“The furnaces haven’t worked in years,” Igor said.
“Shut up!” Edgar yelled.
“No,” Igor said in a hesitant voice. “We just store them in there. Then at night we dump them in the woods by the river.”
“How long has this been going on?” Landon grabbed Edgar with his free hand. “First you harvest organs, now this?”
“I told you they would come back to haunt us,” Igor shivered. “You can’t treat the dead that way. Now they’re coming back to take revenge on us! It’s the Day of Reckoning!”
“Shut up!” Edgar screamed. “Just shut up, you damn fool!”
“How many?” Landon asked. “How many have you dumped out back?”
“Well, I –, I –,” Edgar struggled, glancing around.
“How many?”
“Do you know what it costs to replace all ten of those burners? I couldn’t afford it.”
“How many?” Landon grabbed Edgar and shook him.
“Three hundred.”
“Oh my fucking God,” Daniel said.
“You son of a bitch,” Landon ran to the front lobby and looked out the main entrance. In the tree line and brush he could make out the lumbering, shuffling forms as they plodded towards them. Several more of the animated dead were walking up the driveway. They came from all angles. Soon they would be in the parking lot. Soon they would be at the funeral home. How much did they remember? Did they know how Landon and Daniel had treated them? How many were stiffs the two of them had driven to the home? Most would be out for Edgar and maybe Igor, but how about Daniel and himself?
Landon checked the pistol. Only four bullets left.
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