The Book of a Thousand Sins Page 5

  The homeless rate grew astronomically as destitute dead wondered the streets in a daze. There were a few episodes of vampirism and even cannibalism. Scientists immediately rushed in to study the captured perpetrators as fear and panic began to spread only to find that the “Vampires” were just confused and psychotic reborn who assumed that they must be undead monsters or else what were they doing crawling their way out of graves?

  An ingenious mortician began marketing an escape proof coffin and became an instant millionaire until the screams of the prematurely interred became so loud that mourners complained about the monstrous din and civil rights groups launched protests over the abuse of the undead. The coffins continued to sell but now with a recommendation to bury your loved ones at ten feet rather than the standard six, so as not to disturb the sensitive. Once the graveyards quieted down the protests lost steam and died out as well. No one minded that their dearly departed would awaken in an inescapable coffin so long as they didn’t have to hear their anguished screams and no one had yet figured out what rights the dead possessed if they did indeed possess any at all.

  So, while the Supreme Court battled over the rights of the resurrected they continued to be denied jobs, housing, drivers licenses, health care, to be used in medical experiments, excommunicated from churches, immolated, and entombed alive.

  I tried to imagine what it must be like to awaken in that coffin, slowly suffocate after hours of struggling to escape, only to reawaken and repeat the process again, over and over. I turned toward Rick and shuddered as I recalled his tale of being conscious during his body’s entire process of putrefaction. If it was true than there could be no fate worse than death. No fate could be more horrible than months upon months of living decay.

  The increased population meant more competition for jobs as well. Anti-resurrection groups sprouted up everywhere lobbying for the exclusion of citizenship rights to the recently undead; most importantly the right to work. Other groups like the KKK and even a few “Right to Life” organizations were taking a firmer stance. They were kidnapping and cremating the reborn.

  Even those who had initially been happy to see their deceased loved ones again soon changed their attitudes once the reality of feeding, clothing, and housing their new expanding families set in. Some of the very people who had shown up at Grandma’s house that first Easter morning were now turning relatives out on the street and joining anti-resurrection hate groups.

  When Uncle Joe disappeared one night after a house party and little Sue, my Aunt Tracy’s resurrected still-birth, disappeared from her stroller while on a trip to the mall, fear and anger gripped the entire family. Little Sue had been one of the biggest bright spots in this whole resurrection business. As soon as Tracy had heard that the dead had started coming back to life, she’d immediately driven out to the Rosemont Cemetery and began digging for Sue’s tiny coffin. She’d only gotten three feet down before she heard the screams. Grandma had guessed where she was going and had sent Rick, Uncle Joe, and I out to help her. We’d unearthed the tiny casket and found Tracy’s beautiful baby girl crying softly inside. She was our miracle baby. And now both she and Joe were gone.

  “What the fuck is going on, man? Why are they killing everybody?” Fear had started eating away at Rick. I could see it aging him, breaking him. He had started chain smoking, drinking forties of malt liquor like it was spring water, and I suspected that he’d started smoking crack again. That’s what had gotten his ass killed in the first place. He’d been dealing for a thug named Rockmond on consignment and had smoked up his entire stash. When it had come time to re-up he didn’t have a dime of Rockmond’s money. So Rock did what any self-respecting street entrepreneur would do and peeled Rick’s cap back with about thirty hollow point rounds. Now Rick was back to his shit again.

  Rick was afraid to leave the house. Dirty Ed had turned up burned half to death. He said that a group of neighbors had come after him with a fucking flame-thrower and Moose had been burned alive by his own parents! After that Rick just sat at home playing Play Station and smoking weed all day. The fear of immolation was a great excuse not to go job hunting.

  ***

  The ghettoes exploded. Once the population reached its breaking point the reaction was as dramatic as it was predictable. The commodities of existence were much sparser in the overcrowded slums then in upper-class neighborhoods. They, least of all, could not afford the strain of the increased competition for survival. Rick and I sat on the couch watching CNN as the reborn were dragged out of their homes and set ablaze in the middle of the street. There were disturbing images of lynchings. Whole streets lined with bodies that hung from the streetlights and slowly burned to cinders. The rumors were that the Ku Klux Klan was responsible. But everyone knew that many of the victims had been murdered by their own family and friends. There was a horrifying video being shown over and over on the network news stations of a mother and child being burnt alive in the middle of the street in North Philadelphia. The camera would zoom in on their screaming faces as the flesh melted from their skulls and then slowly pan out to include the faces of the woman’s husband and oldest son as they doused the corpses with more gasoline, their eyes ablaze with fury.

  “That’s some fucked up shit, man.” Rick exclaimed, staring at the screen in wide-eyed terror.

  I didn’t say anything. I just kept watching.

  There were scenes of the reborn being herded into houses at gunpoint and then the entire house set ablaze in one great funeral pyre. Every night Rick and I watched it on television. It was getting to be an addiction. I could see the worry creeping into his eyes.

  “You’d never do me like that, right? You’re my dog, right? These people is crazy. I know you got my back though.”

  I’d give him a pound and sometimes a hug. But I never responded. There was too much on my mind. Sometimes after watching the news we would go to the window to watch similar scenes unfolding outside our own door. That’s when Rick’s agitation would reach a fever pitch.

  “Man. We’ve got to get out of here! We need to go somewhere where nobody knows me. These motherfuckers are crazy out there! You think they’d come for me? You don’t think they’d fuck with me do you? I mean I grew up in this neighborhood. I went to school with all of these niggas, played basketball with them, kicked ass and chased pussy with them. They wouldn’t come fuckin’ with me would they?”

  As I stared down at the streets and took in the shootings, the rapes, the dismemberings, all culminating in the inevitable cremation, I was reminded of the overcrowded rat experiment. The one conducted by sociologists back in the fifties to study the results of overcrowding on the human psyche. The experiment began with a few rats in a pen wide enough so that each rat had just enough space and just enough food to support itself. Then they watched as the rats began to multiply within that space and the space that had been adequate for one was soon filled by two, three, ten, twenty. The rats went insane. They began killing each other, eating their young, and stealing the young of other rats, even gnawing at their own flesh. They repeated the experiment with monkeys and the results were even more extreme; rape, incest, infanticide, patricide, cannibalism, necrophilia, and worse took place once the monkey cage began to swell. All the things I was seeing outside my window. I turned back to the news. It was less depressing.

  The newscaster was hyperventilating. Rick was sweating and fidgeting and human nature was showing its worst.

  Everyone was surprised when the suburbs started going ballistic. The middle-class bourgeoisie had been killing their reborn all along, quietly burning bodies in their basements or in abandoned lots and cemeteries. Once the news broke about the hundreds of corpses found torched in one neighbor’s house the whole thing came above ground and righteous moral patriots began walking door to door dragging the resurrected out of their homes and burning them alive along with any loved ones that resisted.

  I could hear them outside my own door now. I could smell the acrid stench of burning corp
ses. The sky was black with smoke from all the fires.

  “Bring out your dead!”

  Rick cringed as he heard the cry. He began to cry and beg me to hide him as the mob pounded at the front door.

  “Tell them I wasn’t dead! Tell them I was in jail or something!”

  I looked out my window and saw my Grandmother and my Uncles among the posse. My Great Grandfather and Great Grandmother were already outside tied to stakes burning slowly. Aunt Rose, Aunt Susie, Uncle Paul, and Cousin Charlie hung from streetlights with a dozen other neighbors lit up like roman candles. I looked through the peephole and watched as their eyes sizzled in their sockets and then exploded with audible pops and drizzled down their charred and disintegrating faces. I looked at Rick and slowly opened the door to let the posse in.

  “No! Don’t! Don’t let them take me! Help! Help me, man!”

  His screams were terrible as they captured him and tied him up with extension chords. They tossed his body onto a stack of chairs and newspapers and doused him with kerosene. He kept looking at me with his eyes filled with questions as they lit the pyre and he began to burn. Even as he screamed in mortal anguish his eyes stayed fixed on me. He wanted to know why I had betrayed him. Why I hadn’t fought for him? But the truth was that it had never sat right with me that he could fuck up his life so bad; sell drugs, become a drug addict himself, get murdered by rival drug dealers, and then come back and sit on my couch eating Doritos, playing video games, and just kicking back like everything was cool, while I worked hard every day. It didn’t bother me so much that there wasn’t a heaven, but there had to be a hell. There had to be something to make people want to live a good life.

  “Sorry, Bro. But it’s better this way.”

  Life had to have consequences . . . and so did the afterlife.

  The Myth of Sisyphus

  There were dreams and bleak crushing absences of dreams in which pain was the only confirmation of Todd’s continuing existence. Each claustrophobic inhalation affirmed his survival. He was alive. Tendrils of crushing agony crawled up from between his shoulder blades, along his spine, and fanned out across his trapezius and deltoid muscles, up his neck to his skull. Every muscle throbbed and ached. Even his lungs burned as they struggled to breathe the dense humid air.

  Todd slipped in and out of consciousness, from the darkness of sleep to the Stygian blackness of his reality. He shivered, immobilized in the crushing pressure. Flashbulbs went off in his head as shock, hypothermia, and oxygen deprivation fought each other for the right to claim his life.

  He dreamt of stupid things. Weddings, birthdays, funerals, holidays. He dreamt of food, sex, dancing, and beverages. Fruit juice, soda, wine, and coffee. Todd was dehydrating and starving even as he fought to keep from drowning. He was freezing in the muddy effluence that rushed over his face and past his nostrils, fantasizing about warm baths and dry clothes. When he awoke, he almost screamed. He wanted to cry out in terror, to yell for help. His horror intensified however, when he realized that he could not scream. His mouth was underwater.

  The ridiculousness of his predicament did little to take away from the horror of it. Todd was wedged face first in a thirty-inch metal drain-pipe that ran horizontally along the bottom of a storm water wash basin before continuing under the city for miles. He was a City Building Inspector who’d been out inspecting the retaining walls along the top of the basin when the torrential down pour had begun.

  It was as if a damn had burst somewhere in the heavens. Six or seven inches had fallen in less than an hour. Tiny projectiles of chilling H20 pounded the earth like a meteor shower. Four or five inches in the first fifteen minutes alone. They would later call it the one-hundred year flood, because it was the most rain to fall at one time in Las Vegas in over a hundred years. But Todd didn’t know that. All he knew was that he had only three more walls to inspect before he could go home for the day. So, he made one wrong decision. He decided to stay ten minutes too long.

  The thunder had sounded like cannon-fire as lightning churned the earth yards from where he’d stood leaving the scent of sulfur in the electrified air. Then the rain had come, bulleting to earth so hard it began to sting his skin, like a swarm of angry bees attacking his flesh. His feet sank deep into the drenched earth as he walked the perimeter of the wall, slowing his progress. The mud sucked his shoes down so deep that pulling his feet out to take each step began to hurt his knees. He had decided to turn around and go home when the wash overflowed.

  Todd hadn’t even noticed how fast the water-level had risen. The wash basin had never been intended to handle that much water in such a short amount of time and it couldn’t drain the water fast enough. The entire basin filled and overflowed. The ground on which Todd stood was suddenly submerged and he was swept off his feet and down into the wash.

  “Help! Help me! I can’t swim!”

  But there was no one to hear him. He had gone out there alone. All of the construction workers had already gone home, fleeing the storm. Only he had been foolish enough to brave the rains.

  The violent currents dragged his body under, slamming him hard against the walls of the basin, nearly drowning him as it filled his mouth, eyes, and nostrils with mud and sewage. He was flipped and rolled by the roiling storm waters as they rushed towards the drain pipe, carrying him along at a relentless velocity. Despite the beating his body was taking, Todd had enough clarity of mind to take a deep breath before he was pulled beneath the waters and down into the drain pipe at the bottom of the wash.

  The mouth of the pipe yawned wide like the voracious maw of some serpentine predator preparing to swallow him whole. But, Todd was too big to swallow. He slid in on his back and lay face up with his body lodged halfway into the pipe. His shoulders were too wide to allow him to go any further so he was wedged in tight, submerged beneath hundreds of gallons of rainwater and mud.

  The water continued rushing past him into the sewer and Todd held desperately to the little oxygen remaining in his cramped lungs. He knew he had only a few minutes before he’d have to take another breath and would gulp water and sludge down into his lungs and drown. The knowledge of his impending end quickened his pulse and stole more of his breath as claustrophobia set in.

  Todd struggled uselessly to extricate himself from his narrow prison. His lungs burned like he’d swallowed smoke and ash. They were being crushed by the press of the metal pipe against his arms and torso, the pressure of the water above him, and the struggle to retain the little oxygen he’d managed to gulp down before going under.

  Water rushed by him with such force and momentum that he could feel it pushing him deeper into the pipe, wedging him in tighter. Again, he wanted to scream.

  That’s when the flash bulbs had started going off in his head as oxygen deprivation murdered his brain cells. He was losing consciousness, suffocating. Then, suddenly, the water drained away and he could breathe, just barely. A pocket of air formed at the tip of his nose and he inhaled dank steaming air. Todd’s mouth and the rest of his face were still submerged, so he kept his lips and eyes shut. Only his nose protruded just above the waterline.

  The air was foul and thick. Still, even this small amount of rancid oxygen was a blessing. Until then he’d almost resolved himself to the idea of death.

  It had been the end of the day on Friday when he’d fallen down into the culvert and slipped face first into the drain-pipe. That meant that no one would be out here again until Monday. He had to survive the entire weekend in the pipe, unable to scream.

  At night he froze, the frigid rainwater leeching away his body heat as the temperature dropped below sixty outside and what felt like thirty down in the pipe, drenched in tepid water. During the day, when the sun rose and the temperature crept up to eighty or ninety degrees, it felt as if he were boiling alive. He was thankful that it was September and not June or July when the Nevada heat would climb towards one hundred and twenty degrees. If it had been the summer he knew he’d be dead already. But, then again, it
didn’t rain like this in July.

  The humidity made the dry desert heat feel like a tropical heat wave. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was not being able to move, feeling like he was being squeezed through the polluted intestines of some impossibly large beast. He was trapped and he was going to die.

  Todd wasn’t sure if anything was broken, but everything hurt. The trip down into the drainpipe had bruised and battered him. But pain was something he was used to. Life was pain and as long as he suffered he could at least be assured that he remained among the living.

  Todd could remember few days that did not end in some catastrophe. From the day both his parents died in the fire that claimed their house, to the day he was raped by a few of the larger boys at the orphanage, to the day his scholarship was revoked for poor grades and he was kicked out of college, to the day his wife left him for a younger man after emptying his bank account, he had known nothing but misery and disappointment with only brief moments of happiness sprinkled in.

  Each individual mishap was an exceptional occurrence to be sure, but misfortune in general was the rule for him. That’s what had led him to become what he was. His anger at the constant pain of his life is what led him to his first murder. He just couldn’t stand to see another person smile at him. The naïve happiness of those who’d never suffered a day in their lives was an affront to him, so he’d decided to introduce pain into their lives.

  If he made it out of this drainpipe he knew exactly what he’d do to his next victim. A slow torture buried alive or stuck in a barrel as it slowly filled with water. He couldn’t imagine that anything he’d done to any of his victims was worse than being stuck in a drainpipe for days. Life always had a way of outdoing man’s own capacity for violence and cruelty. God is the supreme sadist.