The Book of a Thousand Sins Page 4

  “Come on in, Bro.”

  I stared at him for a long uncomfortable moment before I remembered my grandmother, all by herself with a herd of dead people at her door.

  I picked up the phone and chills raced the length of my spine as the dial tone whined in my ear.

  “Wait here, man!” I dashed upstairs and shrugged into a t-shirt in jeans. I dialed my grandmother’s number again but there was no answer. Taking the steps two at a time I sprinted downstairs and out the front door.

  “Fuck! Oh fuck! Come with me, man!”

  “What’s up bro?”

  “I think something’s wrong with my grandmother!” I already had tears in my eyes as I imagined that kindly old lady being torn apart by an army of the undead.

  I grabbed my coat and started sprinting through the street, with Rick close behind. It looked like there was some type of party going on. There were people everywhere. At first, I assumed it was a block party, or maybe somebody had an accident and they were all waiting for the police to come. Then I started to recognize faces. Faces that all looked wrong, out of place.

  The first thing I noticed was the bizarre clash of styles. There were far too many suits with butterfly collars, bell bottom pants, and purple and pink shirts with frills and ruffles. Far too many afros and pork-chop sideburns. It was like the whole block had gone retro. It looked like a pimp convention and my neighborhood just wasn’t that hip. The other thing was that everyone seemed to be dressed up. I knew it was Easter Sunday, but I’d never seen that many people at church. Something really fucking weird was going on.

  Dirty Ed waved at me, smiling wide, with dirt between his teeth and bloody fingers from where he’d clawed his way out of the grave. He looked like shit, but then he’d always looked like shit, even before he’d gotten his ass shot breaking into Mr. Pratt’s house to steal his VCR. I waved back at him, but kept running.

  “Hey Skip! Wait up!” I heard Rick yelling at my back. “Hey, wasn’t that Dirty Ed? Didn’t he get shot a few years back? I mean, we went to his funeral together? How the fuck can he be alive?”

  I didn’t reply, because I’d gone to Rick’s funeral too. It was just a little neighborhood ceremony with some of the kids we’d grown up with, who knew that Rockmond had shot him and dumped his body somewhere, even if the cops refused to investigate. We’d poured out a 40oz, cried, told stories about the old days, and smoked a fat blunt in his honor. Then we prayed and lit a candle down by the old clubhouse where we’d all first met.

  I also didn’t answer because I was already looking at Sharon, who’d overdosed on crack last year and was now sitting on her porch cradling the premature baby who’d died a week before she did. I didn’t answer, because Big Moose was coming right at me with that look on his face like he used to get when he was about to steal my sneakers or take my bike on a joyride. Only I could tell he was confused, because I was bigger than him now and the last time he’d seen me I’d been a twelve year-old kid. That was the day before his big dumb ass got shot by the cops while trying to rob the fucking supermarket. He took thirty-six bullets, wounded two police officers, and killed another. He had a closed casket funeral. People still talk about him around the neighborhood. He was a legend, and now, apparently, a living one.

  ***

  I was completely out of breath by the time I reached Grandma’s house. Her front door was open, and I immediately thought the worst. I was not at all prepared to see her sitting there with Poppa and Nana and Uncle Joe and Cousin Charlie and Aunt Rose and Cousin Jake. They were all lounging in the living room, laughing and sipping tea and coffee and listening to gospel music on the radio, like one great big family reunion. Except all of them were supposed to be dead. I’d been to all of their funerals. Cried over all of their graves. Yet here they were.

  “Is that little Skip? Come give your Aunt Rose some sugar.”

  I remembered how much I hated that when I was a kid. Walking into a room full of old relatives and getting slobbered on and my cheeks pinched ‘til they went numb. The thought of kissing her now almost made me want to scream. I looked around the room in a mild state of shock, ignoring Aunt Rose’s outstretched arms.

  Rick caught up with me, busting into the house like he lived there just as he had when we were kids, when his family and mine were almost interchangeable; when he’d been like the brother I’d never had; when he’d still been alive.

  “Hey Grandma!” he said leaning over to give my Grandmother a kiss on the cheek. And of course he did not see anything wrong with all of them being there. How could he? He was wrong too; something else that shouldn’t have been.

  I looked around at the assemblage of ancestors and could see nothing unusual, nothing sinister or evil, no indication that they had any intention of drinking our blood or eating our brains. If it hadn’t been for the stench of grave dirt, the tattered clothing and shredded nails, you would have thought that they’d just been out of town on a vacation or something and not on the wrong side of eternity.

  “Uh, Hi Aunt Rose. Hi Cousin Charlie, Cousin Jake, Uncle Joe, Uncle Paulie, Poppa, Nana.”

  My eyes started to tear up. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed them all. I ran to my Great Grandfather and Grandmother and cried in their arms. For a moment they looked confused as if they couldn’t figure out who I was; couldn’t rectify the boy they’d known with the grown man weeping in their lap. Then they softened, reacting to my pain, and they began to weep as well, showering me with hugs and kisses. I didn’t care how they’d come back to us. I was just glad they were there.

  ***

  It felt like Thanksgiving. We all sat around my Grandma’s house cooking, eating, drinking, and reminiscing. More friends and relatives, long dead or long thought to be dead dropped through. Neighbors came by to introduce us to their dead parents, grandparents, or in some cases their children. We sat comforting Mr. Hightower who had shot his father dead again when he’d seen him banging on his screen door.

  Mrs. Lucy was in a very difficult position. Uncle Joe had to sit in between her resurrected husband and the man she’d married after his death to keep them from killing each other. They glared across the room at one another, gesturing threateningly. Apparently they’d been best friends before the funeral.

  It was funny how difficult it became to keep track of who was dead and who was really alive. I mean, they all were alive, but some of them shouldn’t have been. What was even weirder, was that after sitting there laughing with a guy who still stank of formaldehyde, listening to him tell jokes about how he’d seen you running down the street without a diaper when you were two-years old, it was hard to remember that none of this should have been happening. Somehow it didn’t feel so weird. The more dead people came crowding into my grandmother’s house the less surprising it became. Pretty soon we just welcomed them with a big hug and introduced them around to the other guests as if they had just been out of the scene for a while and only needed reintroduction.

  Someone turned on the television and everyone went silent. Apparently what was happening in our little neighborhood wasn’t an isolated incident. Somehow I didn’t think it was.

  “All over the country the deceased are returning to life. In the most unusual occurrence in recorded history hundreds of thousands of the recently departed returned to their loved ones this Easter Morning. Scientists and physicians alike are baffled by the apparent mass resurrection. One noted physician who had the opportunity to examine some of the miraculously reborn had this to say . . .”

  A very shocked and confused looking young doctor stumbled in front of the camera stammering nervously. There was a haunted and incredulous look on his face that told anyone observant enough that he had no answers even before he opened his mouth.

  “Well, I have actually examined over a dozen of the . . . uh . . . resurrected, and I can find nothing at all unusual about them. They all appear to be in perfect health. They don’t even show any evidence of the injuries or afflictions that lead to their deaths.” />
  “Do these . . . uh . . . um . . . reawakened individuals pose any kind of threat to the living? I mean is there any evidence at all that they might not be completely . . . safe?”

  “Not at all! You mean will they suddenly start decaying or drinking blood or something? As near as I can tell they are perfectly normal. If it weren’t for the fact that some of them have been dead as long as twenty-five years I would see no reason to hospitalize them at all. As it stands we are keeping them in the hospital for observation for a few more days while we wait on the result of a few toxicology tests.”

  All the laughter stopped. Everyone stood shocked in Grandma’s living room. Many of them hadn’t really believed that they had indeed been dead. Now, after hearing it on television, they were having a difficult time denying it, but an even harder time accepting it.

  My Great Grandmother burst out in tears and Poppa took her in his arms and held her tenderly. He looked frightened and lost. I looked from one pair of eyes to the next and in each there was that hollow-eyed fear and confusion. Everyone had been trying to ignore the question of his or her miraculous revival. But there it was laid back on the table. The room no longer looked like a celebration. Now it looked like a funeral. Mrs. Lucy’s ex-husband Tony was the first one to speak.

  “But how? How is this possible?” He looked at Mrs. Lucy and then at her new husband who lost all his hostility and looked back at Tony helplessly.

  “How did I die, bro? How long have I been dead?”

  “You fell asleep behind the wheel of your car like three years ago. Went right through a metal barricade and into Wissahickon creek. I did the eulogy at your funeral, man.”

  The questions started to fly and soon the party began to dissipate as the neighbors left to answer their questions in private. I was sad to see them all go. That meant we had to resolve our own issues now. Rick shuffled uncomfortably from foot to foot staring down at his ruined Stacy Adams and no doubt wondering how he was going to get a new pair of Air Jordans. The tension rolled in like a wave and stayed there like tepid water filling the air with a dank morbid humidity.

  Uncle Joe walked into the kitchen and came back with a bottle of Tangueray.

  “So, we’re all dead huh?” He said with his voice full of false bravado as he took a long swig from the shapely green bottle. “I guess the question now is does anyone have a joint? Cause this is some heavy shit and I should at least get high before I have to deal with all this.”

  His bottom lip trembled and tears welled up in his eyes as he spoke. I’d have cried too if I was wearing a blue tuxedo with bell bottoms and a butterfly collar. Joe died back in ’76.

  We sat for hours talking to our dead loved ones. Soon the conversation turned to practical concerns. Where would they stay? How would they support themselves? Once those essential questions were answered we dove eagerly back into the more obtuse speculations. How had this happened? What was it like being dead? That question seemed to bring the entire conversation to a screeching halt.

  “I don’t know. It’s like one minute I was in my bed. I felt a pain in my chest. The next minute I was clawing my way out of a grave. Who picked out that cheap ass pine coffin anyway? I guess I should be thanking you. If you had gotten me oak like I wanted I might still be down there.” Uncle Joe said, still trying to make light of the whole thing.

  Aunt Susie started going on about a flock of angels lifting her aloft and everyone rolled their eyes and groaned. It was fairly obvious that she was full of shit.

  They were all lying. Every one of them. Something in the haunted look that crossed their eyes at the question of the after-life, told me that they knew more than they were telling.

  We left there with everyone taking home a dead person for the night. I took Rick, mostly because he was the only one that I wasn’t one hundred percent positive had recently been lying in a grave. Also because I had no idea where his parents had moved to and he had nowhere else to go. Living corpse or not. He was still my best friend.

  Rick and I sat up on the couch most of the night watching old sitcoms and laughing about old times. A rerun of Mash started and the solemn theme music caused us both to slip into a deep retrospective silence. Rick was the first one to break it.

  “You know I was lying right?”

  “Lying about what?” I asked.

  “You know what. You always know when I’m lying. I could never keep anything from you.”

  I didn’t want to hear what he was about to tell me, didn’t want to think about it, but curiosity got the better of me.

  “What you sayin’, man?”

  “I’m sayin’ I remember. I didn’t at first. But when you started telling me about how you guys had all assumed that I’d gotten my ass murdered, and how you threw a little funeral for me, it all started coming back to me. I remember lying in that shallow grave out in the woods, insects and animals tearing me apart, my muscles and fat liquefying under my skin. I remember all that shit.”

  “You mean you were still conscious? While your body was rotting away?”

  “I was trapped in there, man. My mind was stuck in that prison of decaying meat. I don’t think I lost consciousness until my brain had completely turned to liquid and leaked out through my ears and nose.”

  “That’s horrible, Bro!”

  “Yeah, but that’s not the worst of it though. The worst was when I finally left my body. There wasn’t no heaven, no hell, no reincarnation. I just disappeared man. I felt myself leaking into the earth and my thoughts dissolving and scattering everywhere. Then there was nothing, Bro. Nothing. Until I woke up yesterday and dug myself out of that little hole that Rockmond and his crew tossed me into after they put like thirty or forty hollow points in my ass. Yeah, nigga, I remember that too. I remember the way every bullet felt as it tore through my flesh and pulverized my muscles and organs, shattered my bones. Are those niggas still around? ‘Cause I owe them some pain!”

  “Fuck those fools man! Do you realize what you just said to me, nigga? You just described your own death, Bro! I mean your sitting here on my motherfucking couch tellin’ me about how you got shot tha fuck up and tossed in a hole in the woods to rot!”

  I got up from the couch and began pacing back and forth staring at Rick like I had no idea who the fuck he was. It was the look that white folks gave us just before they clutched their purses tighter or locked their car doors when we passed by. I felt guilty, but I couldn’t help it. I was scared to death.

  “Hey, I thought I could tell you anything?”

  “Yeah, man but damn! I mean, that shit is deep! How the fuck am I supposed to sleep now with a fucking corpse sitting up in my crib? Damn!”

  “I ain’t no fucking corpse, Bro! None of us are. Look at me man! I’ve been fucking resurrected! Whole and unscathed. Fool, I’m probably in better shape then your ass!”

  “Yeah but you’re still a fucking corpse and I’m sleeping with my fucking gat by my side. You try to eat my brains or suck my blood or some shit and I swear I’ll cap your ass with the quickness!”

  Rick laughed as I walked out of the room eyeing him suspiciously. I wasn’t kidding either. I loaded an eight shot clip filled with hollow points into my little Beretta and tucked it under my pillow. It wasn’t exactly a nine-millimeter but it would do in a pinch. I hoped.

  ***

  More people knocked on my grandmother’s door in the following weeks. Family members so old that only Great Grandpa and Nana recognized them. By the end of two weeks, my Great Grandfather’s Great Grandfather had come back. Grandma didn’t complain but her house was getting over crowded and I was waaaaay too freaked out by it all to invite any of the dead people to come live with me. Our family took care of their own though, and we found homes for them with other relatives.

  I watched the news every night. The world was going nuts. It had only been two weeks since Easter and all over the world, nearly half the people who’d ever died had come back to life. The murder and suicide rates were astronomical, but
so were the number of resurrections. Then someone figured out how to keep the dead from coming back.

  It took many attempts before the answer was uncovered. Someone would murder a spouse or a recently resurrected parent only to find that person back on their porch in the morning. Finally someone realized that cremated bodies didn’t seem to revive. People took to cremation like whores to cock. Immolated corpses were literally littering the streets. Apparently some people didn’t want to see their dead parents again. Some widows weren’t exactly happy to see their late wives and husbands again. Many suicides weren’t too pleased to be back either. Murder victims were almost a safe bet to be killed again. After all, if someone had hated them enough to murder them the first time, they would most likely not be too happy to see them walking around again, especially once the Supreme Court declared that the resurrected could testify in their own murder trials.

  Predictably, the normal religious groups started their usual racket about the “End of Times,” “Judgement Day,” and “Armageddon.” They got lots of mileage out of it with living corpses sitting beside their loved ones in the pews; the ones that hadn’t already banned the undead from church. Even the smallest storefront churches were bringing in millions of dollars in donations. There was probably not an empty pew in the entire country, perhaps not in the entire world.

  Scientists, industrialists, nuclear physicists, even cult leaders began to come under fire from those who accused them of causing the resurrections. The phenomenon was blamed on government experiments, industrial accidents, sunspots, homosexuals, Catholics, and nuclear wastes. But the truth was that no one knew. Somehow death had been defeated. And it wasn’t just humans. Nothing died anymore. The insect and pest population grew to unbearable proportions. The prevailing opinion was that heaven and hell was filled and was literally bursting open; regurgitating its contents back onto the earth. Of all the theories that was perhaps the scariest one.