Frankie & Formaldehyde

Chapter Two: The Happy Restful Afterlife Home

But there was no time for a loud, booming Shirley tirade. Larry barrelled into the staff room, a torn nylon fishing net in his hand, a cattle prod in the other, its tip blinking red and stinking of freshly seared, rotted flesh. Without a word he sank against the door, and crouched there for a few minutes in an effort to catch his breath. "Mr. Crone just about got me," he said, in between gasping for air in both fear and relief. He balanced the still live cattle prod in his hand. "If it weren't for this and the good ten whacks I gave him I'd be a goner for sure. You'd be spending an extra hour after work mopping me up."

"You could mop up your own ass," Shirley said, sizing him up. "Besides, you're too skinny to take an hour. Fifteen minutes clean-up, tops."

"There's a more serious problem here." He tapped the side of his head with his forefinger. "This side of Mr. Crone's cranium is all mashed in. His left eye is just about ready to fall off his cheek."

Shirley cursed. "Just when you thought a day couldn't get better. Thanks for nothing, Larry."

"Come on, Shirl, what was I supposed to do? He broke free of the arena and tried to rip my damned head off. Unlike Mr. Crone, whatever the hell he is, mine can't get sewn back on."

"Don't know why we'd even bother since you don't use it anyhow." Shirley heaved her large, muscular bulk out of her chair. "Guess I got to make a phone call. Mrs. Crone's going to be pissed."

***

The Happy Restful Afterlife Home is anything but what its name suggests. The residents—and the term was used loosely—weren't exactly the type of people who could wile away their golden years watching Barney Miller reruns and contemplating purchasing items from the Shopping Channel. There were no libraries full of Reader's Digest condensed books in hardcover editions, no Scrabble boards, no Bingo, not even the occasional 1400 piece puzzle.

These residents never slept, they always had an air of suffering about them that wasn't caused by boredom but by a strange, almost psychic sense of being wronged. They seemed to be in great pain, if all that moaning meant anything, but it was difficult to discern if they ever did feel emotions. Certainly, they ripped into a dead cow with a remarkable enthusiasm that was rarely seen in human beings, and if fully digesting an adult bovine within five minutes was a form of happiness, then these beings were ecstatic.

Most of the people working at the Happy Restful weren't doctors or nurses before the Osmosis 37 enzyme was developed and made commercially available to the public. The people in those professions, along with morticians and funeral directors, were the first to go. Shirley used to be a butcher before she got work here, and Larry had spent his productive days at the local meat processing plant in the factory up the street from her. Frankie had worked as a full-time cashier at Wal-Mart for twenty years, which was in its own way a kind of human meat grinder, full of odds and ends of grumbling need. She'd never run into any rogue reanimates during her time there, because in those days such monsters simply didn't exist. She'd never thought her time working cash at Wal-Mart would have been remembered as the good old days.

She'd been retired for three years before the Osmosis 37 enzyme had been unleashed on the world.

Shirley was the one who was all too happy to talk about her first run-in with a rogue. They all had stories now, but Shirley took a special delight in it, as though it were a badge of honour displaying how ballsy she was. "Car crash," Shirley would say, her words sliding over her big, white teeth. "Walked out from underneath that crunched up car with most of his face missing and his right hand mashed up to a pulp and flattened out like a big pita bread. Pedestrian versus Hummer, that's what the cop said. Before that poor soul got up and started walking they were getting ready to scoop him off the road with a spatula. He walked pretty close to me, he did, and I could see his lips moving, wrong place though they were. Do you know how weird it is, seeing someone's lips moving across their mashed up forehead?"