First Kill: Part II

Maybe his neighbors were already dead, Finn thought to himself with sweat trickling down the back of his neck. His breath came hard and fast and he wondered why no one had come running out of their house to see what had happened. A bombardment of thoughts crashed through his head. Maybe they thought it was just some leftover fireworks. Or maybe they were already dead. Or they had just gone out to eat. Or they were already dead. Probably be back soon. Or the next to rise and pay him a visit.

Finn heard sirens approaching in the distance. Responding to another nearby call, he figured. These things must be all over the place. He would need more shotgun shells, he continued thinking while keeping a close eye on the placid corpse. And gas and food. Where could they go? Out of the city, he decided, and away from people. People who could turn into those things. Then he heard something. Not in the woods but in the driveway behind him. He turned, now knowing the wretched things were surrounding them.

"Drop it!" the cop yelled, pointing his weapon at Finn from around the corner of the house.

"Don't shoot!" Finn screamed, dropping the gun to the grass next to the man and throwing his hands into the air. "I'm still human!"
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"So, you're gonna stick with the whole... zombie story, huh?" Detective Bransford patiently asked, inside the claustrophobic interrogation room.

"How many times do we have to go over this?" Finn tiredly demanded.

"Until you stop feeding us this line of horseshit!" Detective Duncan yelled, pounding the table with his massive fist.

Finn jumped and opened his mouth to respond but found no words, shocked by the incredulous events that had suddenly brought him to this place.

"Finn, we want to help you," Bransford calmly began. "But we can't do that if you won't help us. Is there a chance this man may have been involved with your wife?"

"What?" Finn gasped, appalled by the allegation.

"That's what happened, isn't it?" Detective Duncan took over. "The guy was nailing your wife and you took the law into your own hands! Didn't you?"

"Listen, I am telling you guys, its eyeball was hanging out of its skull."

"Yeah, that'll happen with a shotgun blast!" Duncan retorted.

"This was before that!" Finn shot back, tired of the good cop/bad cop routine and giving the detective the evil eye.

"Do you mean, before or after you started drinking?" Duncan firmly returned.

"That thing was already dead!"

"Fuck you!" Duncan shouted in disgust. "Get him the hell outta here! Put him in twenty-six!"

Bransford looked down at his note pad and then back up to Finn. The room hummed with the silence. "Come on, let's go."

Finn glanced to his handcuffs and shivered. Despite the room's biting heat, he was freezing. He got up and followed the detective out of the room and into a long corridor, where he could hear muffled screams on the other side of a white metal door at the end of the hall. Bransford pulled out a wad of keys as they walked and flipped through them. He stopped in front the door and sighed. Sticking a key into the lock, the yelling intensified as soon as it opened and Finn looked down another long passageway. This one with door after door along each side. People were behind the doors, like a human pet store. The detective took Finn's arm and led him down the hall. People yelled things at them as they went. Vile things. At door number twenty-six, he stopped.

"If you change your mind, let me know," he told him, unlocking the door and holding it open.

Finn looked from the detective to inside the small white room with two bunk beds, a metal sink and an obese white man squatting on a stainless steel toilet with no lid. Finn turned back to the detective. "When can I see my wife?"

"I told you, she doesn't want to see you right now."

Finn snorted and shook his head, dropping his stare to the cracked cement floor. "And my lawyer?"

"Soon," the detective replied.

Finn looked back up to Detective Bransford, who stared back for a moment and then nodded towards the cell. Finn turned and looked at the large man on the toilet again. Grudgingly, he stepped inside the tiny room and heard the door lock behind him. Bransford unlocked Finn's handcuffs through a narrow slat in the door and then walked away. Finn could hear his dress shoes clomping on the cement as they faded away.

"Well hey there, sugar tits!" the fat man hollered, then releasing what sounded like a bad bout of diarrhea into the metal bowl. "Looks like I got myself a new Friday night playmate," he said, grabbing some toilet paper from the roll on the wall. "And a cute one too!" he happily noted, wiping and smiling. The smell was horrible.
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"Did you miss me, honey pie?" Connor muttered with a grin, hitting the switch for the lethargic fluorescent lights in the chilly room. "Oh wow, he did a great job on you!" he remarked, holding a steaming cup of coffee in a mug that read Women Dress Me With Their Eyes on the side.

He took another sip of the thick brew, set it down on the stainless steel table and bent over Mary Hanson's body, careful not to bang his head on the round light fixture above like he had done so many times before. The eternal tall man's curse.

"Boy, I wish I would've known you before the heart attack," he whispered, admiring her from head to toe. "You and I could have had some real fun together, sweet pea," he smiled. Unlike most people, Connor loved coming to work. This was his family. A revolving door of inanimate strangers. He preferred the weak, silent type.

Turning from Mary, he took gangly strides over to the coat rack screwed into the light green wall and seized his white lab coat. Securing the coat's black buttons, he reached out of sleeves that were too short for him and snatched up his cup of Joe. Blowing on it first, he took another drink, never taking his eyes off Mary. She reminded him of his late mother. The large round clock on the wall behind him read 7:24 and made a light clicking sound each time the second hand jerked forward in time. He was dazzled by Don's work.

"He really should be in show business, not dead business. Just think what he could do for Larry King!" he said, drifting into a subdued cackle. "And that dress..." he trailed off, getting serious now. "That dress is somethin' else. I tell you what."

Quickly looking over to the double doors, then back to Mary, he pulled his cell phone from its black canvas holster on his belt and glanced back to the empty doorway. He hit the camera button and sausage-fingered the voice command button instead. 'Say a command,' rang out in a woman's voice from the phone's speaker.

"How's about shut the hell up!" he angrily ordered, backing out of the voice command screen and hitting the camera button alone this time.

Checking the doorway once more, he lifted Mary's red dress, shoved the phone beneath it and snapped a picture with the flash illuminating her Sunday best like a flashlight on the fritz inside a tent. Pulling it back out as fast as he had slid it in, he looked to the doors and then to the cell.

"Oh wow, granny panties under pantyhose," he observed. "What a surprise! But by God, I bet you knew how to party, didn't ya?" he said, back to the serious tone again and adjusting the swelling beneath his long black Dockers.

"Connor!" Don yelled, swiftly entering through the silver double doors in a perfectly pressed black suit with a maroon colored tie and scaring the hell out of Connor in the process. "Is Mrs. Hanson ready to go?"

"Pretty close, boss," Connor fleetly responded, nonchalantly slipping the phone into his lab coat pocket and quickly grabbing jewelry from a purple cloth covering a small stainless steel table on wheels.

"This is going to be a very busy Saturday, so let's keep it moving. I want her upstairs in her coffin by nine a.m. sharp." Don instructed, pulling a metal clipboard off the wall and peering at it over the top of his glasses. "The family will begin arriving at nine-thirty."

"Will do," the assistant replied, sliding a wedding ring onto Mary's left ring finger and giving her a quick wink. He picked up her glasses next.

"Alright, get her finished up," Don ordered, racking the clipboard back on its metal hook. "And here, Mr. Hopkins' wife just dropped off his watch." He pulled a small case out of his coat pocket and set it next to Connor's coffee. "Put it on him before - you - forget. I want him upstairs at one o'clock on the dot."

"Gotcha boss. Hey, how's about that murder just around the corner from here yesterday?" he interjected, sliding Mary's black horn rimmed glasses onto her pasty looking face. "Sounds like that guy just went nuts, huh?"

"I read about that in this morning's paper. Horrible scene."

"Yeah, with zombies and everything!" Connor laughed.

"Sometimes you just never know, do you?" Don remarked, leaning over Mary's corpse and inspecting it one last time for any imperfections, his hands clasped behind his back. "Unfortunately, that's what keeps the food on our table."

"You think they'll bring that poor bastard here?"

"I have no idea, Connor. Alright, keep at it and don't forget we have the Tyler Stewart service at four."

"I'm on it, boss-man," Connor pledged, grabbing a pearl necklace with one hand and holding Mary's head up with the other.

"Very well then," Don concluded, satisfied things were moving in the right direction and heading back towards the double doors. "And Connor?" he said, stopping in the doorway.

"Yeah boss?"

"What did I tell you about that nasty little habit of yours?"

Connor paused, still holding Mary's head in the air. Apprehensively, he looked over to Don. "What habit is that, boss?"

"You know the one."

Connor nervously thought about it for a moment. "Not sure I do."

"Those cigarettes out back, clean 'em up!" Don barked.

"Oh," he blurted in relief. "I was just about to do that, boss-man."

Don hesitated in the doorway, sighed and went back upstairs.

"Boy, somebody woke up on the wrong side of the embalming table today, huh," he whispered to Mary, gently setting her head back down on the table and grabbing Mr. Hopkins' watch before he forgot. Don would have his head today if he did.

"C2," he murmured, scanning the clipboard and going over to the wall of small square coolers on the other side of the room where he opened C2 and slid out the long stainless steel table from inside.

"What the...?" he said perplexed, staring into the empty compartment which smelled like roses and dirty feet. "Huh!" he uttered, walking back over to the clipboard for another look.

"C2," he confirmed, staring at the paperwork again and looking back to the open cooler door. "Sonofabitch!" He set the clipboard down on a polished table and began opening cooler after cooler. There was seven year old Tyler Stewart and there was sixty-four year old Bob Clark and there was seventy-seven year old Ruth Meyer and there was thirty year old Todd Campbell and on and on but no fifty-eight year old Matt Hopkins, recent Leukemia victim.

Warily, Connor went to pull his cell phone from its holster and momentarily panicked when it wasn't there. "Goddamn it!" he yelled, frantically patting himself down like he was on fire and finding the phone inside his lab coat pocket. He took a deep breath, and started hitting buttons.

"Yeah, what is it?" Don snapped, answering his cell phone upstairs in the funeral home's kitchen.

"You're not going to believe this, boss, but Mr. Hopkins... is gone."

"Gone?" blared out of Connor's earpiece. "What do you mean gone?"

"I mean, he's not in C2. So I checked 'em all. He's not in any of 'em."

"That's impossible!" Don argued, clearly irritated.

"I know! I had him already to go before I left yesterday; pinned a yellow carnation on him and everything."

"Well, he can't have just gotten up and walked away!" Don screamed, causing Connor to wince and hold the phone away from his ear. "I'll be right down!" he yelled, hanging up before the lanky assistant could reply.

"Man," Connor groaned, holstering his cell phone back onto his belt and leaning up against Mary's table. He went over the clipboard again and could only shake his head, baffled by the mix up.

"Woke up in a great mood and I don't know what the hell happened, Mary," he said over his shoulder, scouring the pages.

Eighty-nine year old Mary Hanson suddenly popped her bloodshot eyes wide open and stared up at the ceiling. Unmoving.

"I mean, this ain't like losing someone's dinner reservation!" he snorted, sliding into another cackle.

Slowly, she sat up behind him.

"He was right here!" Connor insisted, scratching his head. "Boy, oh boy, oh boy..." he grumbled.

Looking straight ahead, Mary gingerly turned her freshly styled white hair, and looked over at Connor through hollowed out, sunken peppers.

He flipped through the papers, urgently searching for the error, as Mary grabbed him from behind and sank her dentures into his long, skinny neck.

He was so caught off guard, he didn't even have a chance to scream. Blood began squirting out like a pulsating lawn sprinkler on a hot summer's night. Connor fought back with everything he had and was shocked by her overwhelming strength. His coffee mug fell to the floor and shattered into pieces as he struggled to get away. But it was too late. And just before he slipped to the other side, he heard fists begin frantically pounding on the inside of the cooler doors against the wall. Tyler, Bob, Ruth and others. All desperate to be released. All of them, except Mr. Hopkins.

The End.