Young Writers Society

Short story finished 12/7

MEMENTO MORI

There was blood permanently ingrained under my fingernails, a symbolic reminder of my occupation. A scarlet letter marking me as one of the dregs of society. Though, these days, society was a loose term, because there wasn’t much civil society left.

It had been a decade since the takeover, give or take a few years. Dictators shouldn’t be allowed to rule countries—within a year, morality had disintegrated, leaving only the desperate fight for survival. It was like one of those Sci-Fi B-movie apocalypse scenarios. Frenzy. Objectively looking at it, that was a bad business decision.

Most people don’t remember the takeover, or don’t remember it well. Those alive to see it have largely been killed off if they didn’t immediately accept the changes. A lot of today’s twenty-somethings were only children. I had been eleven, and I had watched part of the news clip explaining everything before my babysitter had spirited me off to my bedroom.

What happened, exactly? A US military leader had staged what was essentially a hostile takeover. Imagine the shock. Multiply what you're thinking by about ten. Now you almost have the level of agitation people were at. Why such anxiety? The first thing good Mr. President did was make murder entirely legal.

Morality was shaky. The police brutality rates soared just before they were disbanded entirely. Dozens of bodies were found daily, and mercenaries were taking out ads in the newspaper. The free for all law was quickly amended—you couldn’t leave a body out in the open for more than a week. Things settled down. People either embraced their new amorality, or were killed off. It began to smell awful, and no one was cleaning up bodies. It might have been illegal, but so is speeding.

Stages of decomposition—within a few days, bodies enter the ‘fresh’ stage, which doesn’t really require much ‘entering’ at all, because there are little to no changes in the corpse. You might find some bugs, of course. Ideal habitat, as disgusting as it seems. You don’t have many problems until putrefaction, also known as bloating. Color changes and it starts to stink. It only gets worse from there.

Corpses smell like…well, corpses. It’s especially bad during the summertime, when the heat makes the body rot faster, and the humidity makes it smell even worse. I think when good Mr. President made murder legal, he didn’t consider the extent of the stench, or even how to get rid of the bodies. Poor planning. Some jobs are so disgusting only the dregs will do them.

And so, at the age of nineteen, I started my own cadaver disposal service. I’d always had good business sense, and I was the first person to make body cleanup a legitimate occupation. Most people treated it as a messy necessity. Most people still treated it as a messy necessity. But before my business opened, you had to troll alleys and red light districts looking for someone with blood on their hands. Nearly everyone was too snobby to do that, so…it reeked.

Now it was relatively safe, professional. I guess I can say I’ve done something useful with my life. My parents will be so proud.

The blood wouldn’t come off. Not a surprise. It gets stuck in your palms, around your fingernails, in all the little creases and crevices in your hands, like vicious red ink sinking into your skin. At the front of the building, I heard a bell ring. It meant someone had just come in, but I didn’t have to go out to meet them anymore. In the beginning, I had been consulting potential clients, answering phones, and cleaning up by myself. I love having employees.

The building was actually a renovated house that was sterilized, painted white, and fitted out like a funeral home. We even had a room with a drain in the floor and autopsy tables. I leaned against the white countertop and sighed. This was not a dream job. I didn’t go into the guidance counselor’s office one day and say, ‘I’d like to clean up bodily fluids!’ Desperation is the mother of invention. I’d probably spend the rest of my life keeping this place afloat.

“Jane? There’s someone here to see you.” I bit back a groan. It was ten in the morning. I’d been here since five last night. I work on a largely nocturnal schedule. I would be polite, I would be polite. No scaring customers away. We’d get a reputation for bad customer service.

“Yeah, Craig. I’m coming.” Most people took whoever they could get rather than asking for specific personnel. After all, we were still pariahs. Every now and then a returning customer would come back, but even the frequent visitors didn’t bother to learn our names. And asking for me, specifically? I change my name every time I work with someone, or nearly every time. It was a little suspicious, but not enough to be freaking out. I’m just paranoid.

Craig ducked out of the room, back to manning his desk. I bent over and reached under the sink for the bottle of bleach I keep there. It wouldn’t help much, but it was better than nothing, and the stinging would wake me up. I sloshed the bleach all over my hands and spent a second wiping them on a white hand towel.

I walked out into the lobby, doing my best to paste a professional smile on my face. White walls and tile flooring gave the room a super-clean hospital feeling to it. The uninspiring décor was deliberate—I freaked out if I saw so much as a dust bunny in here. I like things to say something along the lines of ‘do business and get out’. I don’t do comfortable.

Furthering the hospital atmosphere were the awkward chairs, printed in geometric shades of gray and burgundy. There were ancient issues of National Geographic on the pine end tables. You could have been in a dentist’s office. All it needed was a fish tank.

There was a man sitting in one of the chairs, very WASP-looking. He wasn’t especially imposing, about my height at five foot eight, give or take an inch, and was trying to look innocent. The man smiled brilliantly, trying for boyish charm and almost making it. He was a good actor, even pushing sparkles into his eyes, like he had too many tear ducts, but it didn’t matter. I can spot an assassin a mile out.

I’ll admit to having a rather depressing liking for assassins, mostly because I rarely see them. They almost always clean up their own messes, unless they’re loaded. I don’t usually have to rub down hard surfaces for fingerprints and they try to avoid killing on tile floors, so no cleaning out grout with a toothbrush. It seems silly, but I’ve done that before. It wasn’t pleasant.

The mercenary stood like he was being pulled on strings. “Jane Everett?”

I nodded, hoping desperately that my smile was still in place. Jane Everett wasn’t my real name, but names don’t matter. They’re too easily changed. “That’d be me. What can I do for you this evening?”

It was only after I’d said it that I remembered it was morning. The man caught it, but didn’t linger on it too long.

“My name is Michael; I’d like your help.”

Help could mean a lot of things. He was being deliberately vague. “What exactly do you need help with?”

The bell rang again, and someone else walked in. While Michael the assassin was relaxed, or at least gave the appearance of being so, this guy was a nervous wreck. “I don’t suppose we could talk somewhere more…private?” He asked, an expression close to disgust on his face. I didn’t blame him. I don’t like hysterical people either.

The office was blank and impersonal, with the same white walls as the lobby and cream-colored carpeting. The only thing even remotely interesting was a Van Gogh—I don’t remember which piece, just the artist. A lot of artwork had become incredibly cheap in recent years. Some of my colleagues had family photos in their offices. I don’t have anyone I care about enough to frame and display.

“So who did you kill?” I asked finally. I can’t play the waiting game—I’m just too impatient. I hate having my time wasted.

“We’ll get to that later. First—’’

“We’ll get to it now,” I growled, bracing my hands on the desk. I’d given up on polite. I noticed a tiny gold cross on a chain around his neck. I wasn’t too surprised—my profession makes me pretty open minded. A religious assassin, though, wasn’t very common. Wasn’t thou shalt not kill one of the Ten Commandments?

He kept up the jovial charming thing. The cheeriness was getting annoying. “That’s just fine, ma’am.”

He started to reach into his jacket, and I had a gun pointed at his head before my brain caught up to my body. I’d had it in my hand since we’d walked into the office. Paranoia is another word for survival.

He put his hands out to show he wasn’t armed. When Michael the assassin spoke again, it was the kind of voice used to coax jumpers off of ledges and crazy people away from knives. “I’m reaching into my coat to get a file folder.”

As a rule, it’s easier to assume you're being lied to. It saves time. “Slowly.”

His heavy black jacket only opened for a second, and he really did grab a folder of some sort, but I caught a glimpse of the butt of a gun before the jacket fell closed. The jacket was tailored to hide the gun—I wasn’t sure what kind it was. Big enough to blow a hole through my head and out the other side, no doubt.

If the assassin felt any distress at the thought of having his brains smeared on the walls, he didn’t show it. Michael set the folder on the edge of the desk and pushed it towards me, barely leaning forward. He was doing his very best to not be imposing. I clicked the safety back on, but didn’t put the gun back in the top drawer where it usually stayed. It would take too long to get it back out if thing went badly.

The file was well organized and official looking, like something he’d stolen from a government filing cabinet somewhere. It turned out that he’d killed Henry R. Lichman, MD. I wondered why a doctor was important enough to pay for a professional hit, but didn’t ask. Mercenaries don’t like you poking around in their business. In fact, they have a tendency to kill you if you did.

Dr. Lichman had been a very bad boy—grainy surveillance shots of him and a notorious drug dealer I cleaned up two weeks ago. I wondered if he knew the man was deceased. Michael was talking again. Oops. “The man on the right in that shot is Andrei Romano. He deals crack cocaine especially, and supposedly a host of other drugs. The good doctor was buying from Romano, but failed to pay up.”

“So he hired you.” I should be awarded for my deductive reasoning skills.

“Yes.”

I figured it was best if I didn’t tell him Romano was dead. He’d figure it out sooner or later. I wondered if Michael did gang hits too. Kneecapped people on the orders of some Godfather mafia boss. “Where’s the body?”

“The abandoned warehouse on J Street.”

“The old brewery?” There were a lot of abandoned warehouses in this town.

“No. That cheap self-storage unit that closed out a couple years ago.”

Hmm. “How did you kill him?” When his eyes narrowed, I amended my question. “How much of a mess is there?”

“Why do you need to know?”

“I need to assess whether this is a baby-wipes-and-a-body-bag situation, or something that requires shovels and a lighter.”

His mask slipped a moment, very American Psycho. I ignored him and paged through the file. There was nothing overtly interesting—Lichman was in his forties, had a history of disreputable conduct and worked at a medical clinic before it closed down. He was married then divorced, lost a little girl to the takeover. Bought dopamine and heroin from Romano on a bi-monthly basis. Missed payments a little too frequently. Sounded a little like my dad.

Michael sat back in his chair and sighed heavily, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Execution style, two shots to the back of the head.”

“So there’ll be blood and possible brain matter.” Great.

“Definitely brain matter.”

“Yuck.” Oops. Hadn’t meant to say that out loud. Inside voice, inside voice. “How long has the body been there?”

“Since—’’ He checked his watch. “Eight hours ago. Can you clean it up by tonight?”

“I’m leaving here to get some sleep. Now. Five o’ clock is when I come back in. Meet me at the warehouse. Say, six-thirty?”

We did the nod/shake hands/make polite small talk thing. Social norms remained intact, despite everything that had happened in the last few years. Too bad, really. Societal regulations I could have done without.

I live in what could be considered, by a stretch of imagination, an apartment. It’s beat up and older than those glossy glass things, a renovated brick building. The door to my unit has a reddish-brown stain on it where somebody had nailed a rat to it. Yeah, nobody likes me. The door will open if you push it too hard, even with the bolt lock, so whenever I’m inside, I have to prop a chair up against the doorknob. I don’t bother when I’m out—what is there to steal?

I passed Al when I was walking up to the front door. Al isn’t bad for a homeless person—he doesn’t beg for money, just plays this guitar with frayed strings outside every day. “Hi, Al.”

“Good mornin’ Jane.” He replied merrily. He was always happy. It made no sense. “How was work today?”

“Okay.”

“Home later than usual.”

“Yeah.” I liked Al, so I wasn’t going to yell at him. I wouldn’t, really.

He gave me a disapproving look. “You oughtta take a day off, Jane. You look like roadkill.” I almost smiled.

I walked up the stairs slowly, weighed down with exhaustion and years of insomnia. There was an oft-used hypodermic needle on the rotten stair. A different filth was coating it today than yesterday, so it had been used again. I wondered how many diseases it carried and shuddered. I’d rather not think of that. Not a good think of think of before going to bed.

The interior of my apartment wasn’t any better than the outside. The futon was a rescue from a swap meet and most of the other furniture came from a garage sale. The newest thing in the entire place was a shovel I keep in the closet near the hall. Shovels are very useful—you can hit someone in the head with one and give them a concussion, and bury the body with it. Very convenient. Wrenches are good for that too—not the burying part, but if you hit someone with one, it hurts like hell. I speak from experience.

I set the coffee maker up to start brewing at four. Coffee was my only addiction. I went without it for a day once, and I got migraines so bad I had to go home. I’d learned not to screw with it. I hummed a little while I puttered around the kitchenette. I don’t have kitchen skills—I can boil water sometimes. I can use the microwave. I’ve been living off of Campbell’s soup and pretzels for years.

I was seeing how long I could go without breaking down and taking a nap. I hadn’t realized it until then—God, this was stupid. If I kept pushing my own limits just to see when I cracked, I’d be dead in a few years. Of course, I’d probably be dead in a few years anyways, but that wasn’t the point. Crap.

I crashed on the futon. Set the alarm. Woke up. Drank coffee. It was normal. Nothing monumentally strange about today. I would go in later and clean up a body or two, then I’d come home and sleep and do it again tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, and probably every day until I died, which, if I kept it up, would probably be in a few years. It wouldn’t be a terrible loss.

Night fell, and I found myself driving to an abandoned warehouse in what was once the industrial section of the city. Most of the city had fallen into various states of disrepair after the takeover. Certain areas were still maintained, though, grass trimmed and Tudor houses freshly painted with the blood of all the poor idiots that weren’t smart enough to survive.

The industrial area was decrepit, dilapidated. The cement-block buildings had been tagged so many times the gray cinderblock could barely be seen. This had once been a crappy self-storage unit. It seemed like a good place to kill someone. On the building the body was supposed to be in, one phrase stood out above the rest. The spray paint was that horrid shade of orange that the gaudy Day-glo pink fades to after a while. Memento mori, it read. Remember you will die.

I hoped it wasn’t an omen.

The inside looked very much like the outside. Over privileged teenagers had left their mark here, and some squatters had definitely been inhabiting a couple of the units at one point, but otherwise, it looked like everyone had just left this place. It was sad, how people could leave their things here and forget about them. But then, that’s what places like this are for. You bring things here to forget about them. It was like a photograph, everything paused as if waiting for people to return. No one would. It’s a place people come to forget and die.

Michael was waiting in front of one of the units, looking scary. He was dressed in all black, the little gold cross around his neck. My self preservation instinct kicked in again, and I wanted to leave, to run and hide myself. But I’d come here to do a job, and I would do it. Abruptly, I remembered the spray paint outside. Remember your dead. A shiver slid down my spine like ice water. It was warm outside.

As soon as the thought hit me, I realized I couldn’t smell the corpse. Odd, considering that it was the middle of July. The body wasn’t that old, but it would most likely smell rancid by now. Even through the door of the storage unit. Maybe I wasn’t close enough. Maybe the building wasn’t falling apart as much as I thought it was.

We moved in a sort of synchrony, knowing without words what we were doing. Michael pulled the garage-like door up, revealing a dark pit. I moved forward, and the lights turned on of their own volition. No, that wasn’t the lights at all. It was a halogen flashlight, bright enough to drown the room in a bluish light.

When coming in close contact with corpses, they’re always an it. Calling it a he or she makes you remember that this messy thin was once human, with hopes and fears and aspirations and probably a family that would miss him. Dr. Henry Lichman might have been a quack with a $1500 a day coke habit, but he had been a person.

In the office, Michael had told me that the body had been shot execution style. There shouldn’t have been enough of his head to scrape up and fill a plastic bag.

The doctor’s head was intact. So was the rest of it, save the fact that it was blue. Blue like drowning, or hypothermia. Like he had been stored in a freezer.

Stored in a freezer. Michael had lied. It shouldn’t have surprised me.

I stood from my crouched position slowly and turned around like the stupid blonde in a horror movie. Michael had a gun out. I swallowed, my mouth suddenly dry.

“Who hired you?” I asked.

He shrugged and said, “Can’t tell you. It’s part of the contract.”

“Of course it is,” I muttered. It was worth a try. I heard him chamber a bullet. The gun was a revolver. Six shots to get out alive. It seemed like bad odds.

I jumped him. It was either very brave or very stupid, probably the latter. But I refused to be target practice. I was unarmed. I had no other options, so I jumped at him when he looked down a moment to adjust his grip. I may not be linebacker material, but I know how to tackle someone. I went for his legs, hoping to knock him off balance so I could get the gun.

Unfortunately, Michael expected that. He had definitely had some kind of martial arts training. I hadn’t, which put me at a disadvantage, but I’d grown up in a crappy neighborhood, and more recently a downright dangerous one. I fought dirty.

I hit him hard in the stomach, but instead of doubling over like I had hoped, he socked me in the jaw. I’ve never been any good at taking a hit—I stumbled backward and nearly fell. Had he been smart, he would have shot me then. Rather than shooting me though, he wrapped an arm around my neck and squeezed. I yelled as loud as I could, not because I wanted to get help—no one would stop him anyway—but so his hand would cover my mouth. It worked. I bit him hard enough to taste blood. The tiniest bit of hope flared in my chest, and I beat it down savagely. The mercenary shouted and pulled away from me.

I’m better at fighting offensively as opposed to defensively. I lurched forward, out of breath, and…originally, I‘d planned to kick him, but I was still breathless and I fell off balance and plowed into him. I got a good grip on the family jewels in the scuffle and twisted hard.

I was rewarded with a whining noise. I set my feet so I would have enough leverage, and shoved him into the wall with my shoulder, crushing his gun hand against the cinderblocks and trying to make him to let go. The gun went off, and I had a moment to hope the bullet didn’t ricochet and hit me before I ground his hand into the cement blocks. He let go, and the gun clattered down to the ground.

For a good measure, I shoved my thumb into his right eye, sinking it deep into the socket. Blood and a clear, viciously gooey substance ran onto my hand and down his face. Michael screamed like a rabbit does, high and pitiful, and his hands flew to his impaled eye. I had the gun in my hand and pointed at him before he managed to open his good eye, the uninjured one.

“I’ll ask you again,” I coughed. It sounded like I had been smoking or knocking back shots of Scotch for a long time. “Who hired you?”

Silence. I pulled the hammer back threateningly. You didn’t have to do that on this gun, but it made a nice noise. One eye closed briefly, then opened again. In that moment, he came to a decision. He shook his head.

“I’m going to kill you anyway,” I reasoned. “You might as well tell me who ordered the hit. I’ll be killing them, too.”

He shook his head no again. I was getting impatient, and my throat hurt. I knew what he wanted. “Look, even if I cut you a deal and let you live, what’s the use for a blind assassin? You gonna go out and find a desk job with your outstanding credentials? Think of it this way—I’ll be murdering the person that indirectly caused your death.”

He was getting desperate, and more than that, he knew I was right. Desperation will loosen anyone’s tongue. “If I tell you,” he said haltingly, voice thick with pain, “will you kill me quickly?”

“Yes,” I promised. I didn’t have the stomach for a prolonged death anyway. Let him think he was getting off easy.

“Senator Marianne Parker.”

I pulled the trigger.

When I finished throwing up in the corner, it was late and I was due in for work. I hadn’t played hooky like this since high school. I rationalized and said I deserved a day off. Before I left the storage unit with the two dead bodies in it, I ripped that little gold cross off the late Michael’s neck. It looked too sad, too tragic there, covered in the blood and thicker things that used to be his head.

I hauled the body that had been Michael into the back of my pickup truck and drove out to the woods that bordered the river. There was a shovel in the back of the truck, and I set about digging a grave. I hadn’t done this in a while—we had been cremating the bodies for a while—but it’s a little like riding a bike. Or at least, it’s something you don’t forget to do.

It was a proper grave, about six by three feet, six feet deep, relatively rectangle-shaped. A good sized pile of dirt sat next to the pit, dark brown and moist. When I was satisfied with the grave, I tossed the shovel into the back of the truck and went about dragging the body over to the freshly dug hole. I’d wrapped what was left of his head in saran wrap so it didn’t mess up the bed of the truck. With one last roll, Michael landed in his eternal resting place. I grabbed the shovel again, and started the tedious process of scraping dirt into the grave. This was why we’d moved to cremation. Burying a body was too hard and time-consuming. But I buried him, because maybe I felt like I owed it to him. Or maybe because I was running on autopilot and trying very hard not to think. It didn’t matter. Doesn’t the end justify the means? Did that apply to this situation? I had the information I needed, but I’d killed a man to get it. I’d never killed anyone before.

When the grave was filled in, I fished around in my pocket and pulled out a small gold cross. The chain had snapped when I pulled it from his neck. Now I dropped it onto the grave and scraped a handful of soil over it, stomping down dirt in an attempt to return the ground to its original state. I was stepping on someone. I didn’t like the feeling, so I gave up.

Finally, I sat down on a rock and looked out at the river, away from the dead body. It was dark, but the lights from the city gleamed on the water, making it ripple and reflect like the Van Gogh in my office. Blood dripped into my eyes from a cut I hadn’t noticed before. I dragged my hand across my forehead, and wiped it on my jeans. I couldn’t remember how I was injured. I was probably going into shock. Oh well.

“Godspeed, Michael,” I said to the river. I didn’t even know if Michael was his real name, but it didn’t matter. Names are too easily changed.

When I returned to my apartment, the disgusting hypodermic needle was still there, coated in yet another kind of junk. I kicked it off the staircase and paused a moment to listen to it fall down each step, like raindrops on a tin roof. I wondered if the junkie next door would try to find it, or if she’d finally get a new one. I was hoping for the latter.

I washed my hands in the sink with dishwashing soap and pulled two bullets from my back pocket. They were the last two in the revolver’s cylinder magazine. I’d shot Michael the assassin three times. Just to be safe. He would have only shot me twice. I hadn’t lied, though. I’d killed him quickly.

Thinking of Mother brings back voiced. You're nothing, Corbett Parker! Nothing. You're scum, useless scum, you're—nothing. I can remember her eyes, but that’s it. They were dark gray and bloodshot and I only remember them because mine looked exactly the same, minus the booze fueled rage. My rage was fueled by something completely different. She had liked to tell me that I wasn’t a person at all, just a thing.

I know she survived the takeover because she was a senator in the new government now. I’d seen her run for the spot, watched her be merciless and cruel—her favorite hobby. Mother had gotten so far politically because she had an idea the equivalent of killing purebred puppies that come out with the wrong markings. She wanted to thin out the gene pool—kill the homeless, the prostitutes, the drug dealers, street people, and everyone that lived in the lower class. It made sense that she would hire someone to kill me. If anyone found out that Senator Parker’s daughter cleaned up corpses, she’d be ruined.

It was no wonder she thrived in these conditions. It was no wonder she’d tried to drown me when I was a child. I would return the favor now. She’d tried to kill me twice. I would only have to try once. Mother would be the second person I’d ever killed. I thought I should care, but I just didn’t have it in me.

I’d be paying Mother a visit very soon.

Memento mori. Remember you will die.

--Revised version just sent off to a horror/sci-fi literary magazine, 12/22