Excerpt: Good Friday

Excerpt from Chapter One: The Burning Fields

Something glinted in the dirt. The sun, just kissing the horizon, kicked up a flash of something silvery and metallic. Takeshi bent and fingered it, a small silver chain coiled like a drowned worm around a hard chunk of earth. He pulled it free and brushed at the attached medallion with one work-roughened hand. It was a silver crucifix, a rough-hewn thing featuring one of those agonized caricatures of Christ that Catholics seemed to like so well. Takeshi grimaced. He was a Baptist who went to church in Marysville, and graven images didn't sit well with him. On the other hand, silver jewelry tossed out by accident by some trash-burying gaijin, silver that could be sold for a tidy sum at the local pawnshop, why, that sat with him just fine. It could be considered poetic justice, even.

Thinking that there could quite possibly be more where that came from, he began shoveling clods of earth out of the hole with renewed vigor, attempting to heap shovelfuls that were impregnated with sodden paper off to one side.

There! The afternoon sun caught something else, something coppery and round like a coin. Takeshi grinned with avarice and jammed the shovel down into the refuse pile. He bent and tweezed the shiny disc between his fingers and pulled. It caught for a second and then came away. It was a cuff link, a beaten copper disc that was still attached to a shirtsleeve, a shirtsleeve that still held the arm of the headless migrant worker buried at the bottom of the trash hole.

To his credit, Takeshi didn't scream or scramble out of the hole, which was his first impulse. Instead, all that escaped his mouth was a kind of a surprised grunt. He tried to get out of the hole slowly and calmly, but as he did so he heard a sloughing sound as the corpse sat up and leaned towards him. This time he did scream, and was about to go pelting off through the fields in a blind panic when he realized that the reason that it had done so was that the cuff-link was still tweezed between his grasping fingers. He let go of it and it slumped back into the hole with a little puff of dirt.

Takeshi got on his ATV and drove back to the house as quickly as he could. After a fortifying shot of bourbon (no sake for him, he wasn't a total stereotype), he stilled himself and dialed the number for the sheriff.