Zombie Pulp by Tim Curran Page B

At a prearranged moment, they rose up, set on the blacks like rabid dogs. When it was over, the National Guard had been called in and seventy inmates were dead, the infirmary packed with twice that many.
    And now the mortuary was full.
    The freezers held more cold meat than a butcher’s display case. Full drawers, gurneys and slabs packed with rigid, white-sheeted figures. You could barely walk in there now, dead heaped like firewood.
    The warden decided that someone had to keep watch over all those bodies. There being so many and all, it made the old man nervous. Word had it more than one body had turned-up missing there in the past and what with the state and their impending investigation, warden didn’t want no fuck-ups this time around.
    So Johnny, who had a good record and was a trustee, pulled the duty. Pulled it mainly because he was in good with LaReau, the sergeant hack. LaReau was a big, mean intolerant prick the cons called “Ironhead” because he enjoyed head-butting anyone that gave him shit and when he did, he piledrived convict-ass big and small right to the mat.
    But Johnny was okay with him—yes boss, no boss, how was your day, boss, and can I wash your car come Wednesday, boss? Make the peckerwood feel like he was something special and he would be easy on you.
    So the mortuary wasn’t a bad gig, all things considered.
    Johnny kept the doors locked—warden’s orders—and did a lot of reading, but mostly a lot of shivering. Because it was cold in there. Johnny had a little woodstove in the corner, but it didn’t help much. The mortuary had held so many corpses in its belly through the years that the stone had sucked in all that tomb cold, let it out at night, exhaling the breath of graves.
    The clock on the wall was ticking and Johnny kept hearing little sounds—poppings and crackings—but it was just the old building settling and he would not let himself think it was anything else.
    Lighting a cigarette, Johnny went to the window over the little sink, started a bit at his reflection in the glass, smiled, and stared out through those rusting black bars.
    A moonless, black night.
    The world was caught in-between chill autumn and the promise of bitter winter, pelted by blowing leaves and a freezing, relentless rain. It turned the roads to slop and the fields to mud, sluicing and oozing and pooling in black puddles that were frosted with a scum of ice. December or not, it was miserable by the standards of northeastern Louisiana, just a stone’s throw from the borders of Arkansas and Mississippi.
    Johnny turned away, didn’t like the night and certainly didn’t like that face and those eyes and what they were saying to him. Because, yes sir, he’d made mistakes and now it was all done and he was all used-up. No more fresh air and freedom, no more t-bones and certainly no more pussy. You could get both if you had the money, guards would bring in anything for a price. But for poor trash like Johnny Walsh his days of pussy were history, for guys like him there were only the queens and Johnny preferred to do without. In fact, he—
    Thump .
    Johnny heard it. Felt something wither and die in his guts, curl-up and tremble. That sound. Couldn’t be no sound like that here, not here. His heart pounding, that cigarette welded to his lower lip, Johnny just stood there as cold as shrimp in an ice bucket.
    Thump, thump.
    Johnny’s heart almost blew out of his chest on that one.
    He looked around, saw his reflection again. Saw the sink and the desk and the file cabinets. Saw the waste paper basket, the girly calendar on the wall showing him a fine set of Asian tits…but right then his business was shriveled-up like a breakfast link.
    Licking his lips, he made himself walk first this way, then that.
    The gray cement-block walls were sweating an icy moisture. He saw those walls and figured suddenly that this was no easy bit, it was the worst cage of all. There were two doors in that room. One led into an entry