Faint Pulse
an excerpt

Sam couldn’t believe it when he heard it. After Clark closed the door behind him he expected silence and maybe the raspy breath of the corpses that drifted in front of him. And then he heard it laugh. It wasn’t a gravelly dry kind of laugh. It was not lethargic or weak. It was a hearty laugh, loud enough to be heard in the hallway, though Clark was already a good distance away.

Vic was standing a few feet behind Larry, wavering side to side as if at any moment eh would topple sideways. The stiffness of his knee joints seemed to be preventing this. Larry’s dry dead mouth was widened into a wry smile that exposed his teeth, which were black with what may have been clotted blood. His eyes seemed to be closed, but that was just the appearance of someone who had his eyes ripped out. The whereabouts of his eyes were unknown.

“What a douche bag,” said Larry. His voice was not nearly as dry and raspy as it had sounded minutes ago.

“What?” Sam’s confusion was obvious. He could only formulate that one word question that represented dozens of longer questions he had looming in his head. But his mind was working too slowly for his mouth. “Wait. What?”

“Elliott Ness over there,” said Larry. He seemed to be looking Sam in the eye with his empty bloody sockets.

“You can talk,” said Sam. He wasn’t stating the obvious, but he was trying to ask a dozen more questions with the statement. “But you’re undead.”

“Oh come on,” said Larry’s corpse, giving Sam a dismissing wave. “Just because I’m dead doesn’t mean I’m stupid. Like him.”

Larry motioned a pale dead hand toward Vic who was still wavering somewhere closer to the bedroom.

“Something must have hit him pretty hard during the transition,” said Larry. “I guess if you had your nuts ripped off in your previous life, you really don’t have much to talk about.”

Sam was backing slowly away, which was hardly noticeable.

“Why are you here?” he said.

“Same reason why he’s here,” said Larry, pointing over his shoulder at Vic. “And that reason is I have no idea.”

More questions than answers, thought Sam. He couldn’t help but feel the dull and annoying throb of disappointment but at this point he was accustomed to answers turning into more questions.

“Who killed you?” said Sam. “Was it Jeremiah?”

“No,” said Larry, gravely. He looked as if he was suddenly aware of his own death and status as an undead corpse. “It’s like the pig said. Jeremiah was not a murderer. He was something else.”

“Then who murdered you. And who murdered Vic?” Sam said. He had to choose between asking about the murders or about Jeremiah’s past. He figured that he would be able to learn about Jeremiah’s allegedly shady past any time, but having a corpse in his living room who had information was not something everyone had the luxury of.

At that moment, Sam noticed Larry’s face was still oozing a purplish substance. It raised more questions as to why the corpses seemed to rot, but did not seem to stink. Sam decided he would ask that some other time. There were more important matters.

“Do you mind not dripping that on my floor?” said Sam. He couldn’t resist.

“It was her,” said Larry. “The dead lover.”

This sounded too poetic for Sam. It sounded like something out of a gothic horror story or an Edgar Allen Poe short story. It wasn’t something he thought he would hear applied to reality. Maybe, he thought, Larry was lapsing into some kind of undead prose, similar to the whole “do not get involved” urgings.

“Who is the dead lover?” said Sam.

“I don’t know her name,” said Larry. “But the locket. It has a clue on it. Did you not look at it?”

Sam pulled the locket out of his front pocket and examined the palm tree engraving one more time. He did not see anything special that was not there previously. Larry leaned over the locket, which was face up in Sam’s palm. Vic grunted somewhere in the background.

“Can not see,” said Larry. “One minute.”

As he stood erect, a series of pops and crackles came from Larry’s back. He groaned as if in great relief.

“My chiropractor was never that good,” he said. “Now hold still.”

Sam looked up from the locket and saw that Larry had Vic’s chin clamped in his hand and with his other hand he looked to be gouging one of Vic’s eyes out.

“What… what the hell are you doing?”

“Hold on,” said Larry.

There was a wet squishing sound followed by a rip and a crack. Then there was a low popping sound as something in Vic’s skull came loose. Vic was standing there obediently as Larry told him to stay still, his face still clamped between Larry’s thick dead fingers. Vic started to struggle a bit, but Larry held tight and turned his head to look at Sam with those bruised mounds of flesh where his eyes were supposed to be.

“A big lovable lug, isn’t he?” he said. “Like that big retarded guy from that Steinbeck novel. Ahh there we are.”

Larry held a white round object in his hand. There were pieces of black flesh hanging from it, but no blood. Sam stared, his jaw dropping open. He remembered the lesson from his mother again and closed his mouth. Larry noticed his astonishment and disgust.

“Oh don’t worry,” said Larry. “He was drained out at the medical examiners. He’s not oozing.”

Larry then popped the eyeball into one of the sockets, and blinked a few times. Sam looked at him. He looked even more of an abomination, one eye closed in a puffy purple mess, and the other eye popped open. He looked like a massive head trauma patient seen on the Learning Network. He looked like what a George Romero remake of Popeye would look like.

“Much better,” he said. “Now let’s have a look at that locket.”

Larry did not pick up the locket or even touch it. He leaned over it and peered over it with his one good eye, the one he had stolen from Vic. In life, Sam would have never noticed what color Vic’s eyes were, and now that he was dead and another dead guy was using his eye to examine the locket, he noticed Vic once had blue eyes. It was an awful way to notice such nuances, Sam thought. He was not even sure he ever wanted to know Vic’s eye color.

Sam also was not sure he wanted to be this close to a dead man’s head. He could only see the top of Larry’s head as he examined the locket. It looked just like any other living man’s head, but once in a while he would look up at Sam’s face to reveal the true horror of what was before him.

“It looks like,” said Larry. “The locket is dear to someone. It was used in a spell.”