A Boy and His Corpse Read online

  Mr. Rovas put up a finger, and Herbert resisted the urge to snap it right in half. After another whole minute of just standing around, he had had enough.

  “Okay, that’s it. I’m out of here.” As Herbert turned around, he heard a giant, rasping sigh from Mr. Rovas.

  “Alright, alright,” Mr. Rovas grumbled. He dropped the phone in his pocket. “I might as well just show you since you’re here.”

  He dug his hand into his other pocket and pulled out a number of tiny, iridescent microchips.

  “What are those for?” Herbert asked.

  “You’ll see,” Mr. Rovas said, and he mumbled something Herbert couldn’t quite hear.

  “What do you mean, I’ll see?”

  “I mean, you’ll see,” Mr. Rovas repeated.

  The corpse they stood before had pale, milky eyes. His mouth hung open and his skin looked newly rotted, maybe only a few weeks dead. Mr. Rovas took out his phone and began to text again.

  “Why do you keep looking at your phone?” Herbert asked, flexing his fingers.

  Mr. Rovas’ phone buzzed, and when he looked at it, his already thin lips became a line.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said.

  “Who? Me?” Herbert asked.

  “No,” Mr. Rovas said. “Somebody else. A liar. I should have known not to trust him. Well, I might as well just show you then. You’re here, after all, and the world does need our help.”

  Mr. Rovas put the green, rectangular chips on the table beside the corpse’s elbow. He rolled up his sleeves and extracted clear gloves from his pocket. He put them on, stretching out the fingers with his teeth. He picked up the chips and moved to the heads of the corpses. With clinical detachment, he slipped the chips into their open brains, sticking in two at a time between the two hemispheres.

  “What’s that for?” Herbert asked.

  Mr. Rovas reached under a table and pulled out a hand-held device with a single joystick and a red button.

  “What are you going to do with that?” Herbert asked.

  “Just watch,” Mr. Rovas said. He pressed the red button three times and pulled back on the joystick.

  “Okay, they’re ready,” he said, staring intently at the corpses. “I want you to get one of them up now. How about this one?”

  He pointed with his chin to the one right in front of them.

  “Why? What for?” Herbert asked.

  “Because I want to try something,” Mr. Rovas said.

  “Try what?”

  “Look, we don’t pay and house you to ask questions, Herbert. You’re down here to work, and I said I wanted to try something out. So are you going to get this corpse up or what?”

  Herbert stared intently into Mr. Rovas’ eyes, and Mr. Rovas stared back at him, unflinching.

  “Well?” Mr. Rovas asked.

  “I don’t like your attitude right now,” Herbert said through gritted teeth. “Just tell me what this is all about and then I’ll raise him.”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, ‘no’?”

  “I mean no. Some things aren’t meant to be disclosed to you. You know that. In fact, the call I was waiting for was from the President.”

  “Why? What does he want?”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter now. He was supposed to come through and he didn’t. That’s why I didn’t vote for him. He never did look like the trustworthy type. All good looks and nothing between the ears. But I digress. What matters now is that I need to see if these chips work or not.”

  “What are the chips for? To control them?”

  Mr. Rovas’ expression didn’t change as he continued to stare at Herbert.

  “Wait, you can’t be serious,” Herbert said.

  Mr. Rovas expression still didn’t change.

  “How is that even possible? You don’t know anything about controlling corpses. Nothing at all.”

  “Well, we’ll just have see about that once you get this one up.”

  “And what if I decide not to?”

  “Then you’re turning your back on your country.”

  “Oh, please. What do you have to tell me about my country? You’re not even from here.”

  Mr. Rovas narrowed his eyes. “Look, Herbert, you want the truth? You’ve grown sloppy. You don’t want to admit it to yourself, but you have. Every time we go on that battlefield these days, you’re a liability.”

  “A liability how?”

  “What? Are you living in a different universe or something? A universe where Valazquez isn’t dead?”

  “Don’t you dare pin that on me, Rovas. He never should have gone back into a burning building. Who does that? That was his mistake. Not mine.”

  Mr. Rovas shook his head and clicked his tongue. “The old Herbert never would have said that. You’ve grown callous in your old age, Herbert, but that doesn’t concern me. What bothers me is that you’ve grown careless. Now are you going to lift this corpse or what?”

  Herbert stared at Mr. Rovas through scrunched up eyes. He had hundreds of choice words on the tip of his tongue, but he swallowed them all when he thought about Sgt. Valazquez.

  “Whatever, let’s just get this over with,” Herbert said. “But I’m telling you, it won’t work. Corpses aren’t robots.”

  “Well, let’s just see what happens.”

  Herbert lifted his flaming green hand and all seven corpses sat upright.

  “Do what you have to do,” Herbert said without even looking at them.

  Mr. Rovas pressed the red button seven times, and to Herbert’s surprise, all seven corpses turned their heads in his direction.

  Herbert felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck. It was like somebody else was walking with his legs and he was just watching them. These formerly living men stared at their hands and wiggled their toes on the tables. Mr. Rovas rotated the joystick in quarter circle motions and pressed the red button repeatedly.

  “This would be so much easier with an arcade stick,” he said. “I should have thought of that earlier. I never liked the Atari controller. Are you controlling any of them?”

  “No,” Herbert said, dumbfounded. “What do those chips do anyway? Just allow you to move them?”

  “Pretty much.”

  Mr. Rovas rocked the joystick back and forth and made the corpses wobble in turn. “They’re all connected to this one controller. I can’t really do much with it now since the Atari controller isn’t very limber and this is just a prototype. But in the future, I’ll have a joystick that will control different corpses one at a time. Do you want to give it a spin?”

  Mr. Rovas held the controller over to Herbert, but he shook his head and bit his lower lip. No matter what Mr. Rovas said or how he tried to sugarcoat things, Herbert knew that sooner or later, they weren’t going to need him any longer with this new technology. He was just a battery now, not the controller.

  “When will something like this go on the battlefield?” Herbert asked with as calm a face as possible. One of the corpses, a slender Caucasian male with a huge Adam’s Apple, began running around in circles. Its head and arms twitched and jerked randomly.

  “Damn. This one’s on the fritz. Well, as you can see, it’ll still take some time to work out the kinks. But much sooner than you think. I just needed to see that it would work.”

  Mr. Rovas pushed back on the controller and made the corpses sit on their respective tables, even the glitchy one. The corpses lay back down with their eyes and mouths still open. They were apparently still in “on-mode”.

  Herbert began to walk in a quick, erratic pace before he stopped and pointed at Mr. Rovas. “You’re trying to make me obsolete.”

  Mr. Rovas shook his head violently. The exuberant, child-like excitement he had only a moment ago faded from his eyes. He wrinkled his brow and put the controller down.

  “That’s not true at all, Herbert. We’ll still have you out on the field. We’ll just…lighten your workload, is all.”

  Herbert gnashed his teeth. All of a su
dden, his face felt fuzzy, as if moss had rapidly formed on it. His hands erupted into green flames. Mr. Rovas looked from Herbert’s hands to his face.

  “I see that you’re not taking this well, as expected,” Mr. Rovas said. “But you need to just calm down, Herbert. The President authorized this.”

  “I don’t give a damn what the President authorized. This is BS, and you know it.”

  “You see?” Mr. Rovas looked left and right as if he was talking to somebody other than Herbert. “This is what I was talking about. The old Herbert never would have gotten so upset. You’re being ridiculous right now.”

  Mr. Rovas backed into the table and then slowly walked to the other side of it, putting a corpse between them. Herbert watched his shape with slit eyes through the lemony mist.

  “Alan isn’t going to have any kind of future whatsoever with something like this,” Herbert said, inching forward. He felt hot and tingly all over and slowly edged closer to him like a mummy movie from the ‘40s

  “You better stay where you are and think about this, Herbert,” Mr. Rovas said, reaching over the corpse and picking up the joystick. “I don’t want to have to hurt you. You’ve been an asset to this team and I don’t want any bad blood between us.”

  “An asset to the team? I AM the team,” Herbert said, and without even raising his hand, three of the corpses sat up again. He controlled them by simply raising his eyebrows. Their hands, like his own, were fists.

  “Herbert, I swear to God, I’m warning you,” Mr. Rovas said, pulling down on the joystick to no avail. “I’m just doing what’s best for the team. What’s best for you!”

  The three corpses, one thick and tall, one skinny, and one plum-shaped, got off the table and started slowly advancing toward Mr. Rovas, who continued to back up.

  “Don’t make me do it, Herbert. So help me God, don’t make me do it.”

  Somewhere in that fuzzy head of his, Herbert wondered, Do what? But all he saw was green. His world was lost in hatred.

  “That’s it, you leave me no choice!” Mr. Rovas shouted. He shoved his hand in his coat pocket, shook it about, and suddenly, gray handles sprung up on his shoulders. In five separate snapping pieces, a backpack formed on his back and a long, gray hose formed in his hands with a red canister beneath it. A mask composed itself over his face with protective eye gear and a patch for his mouth. He now cradled a flamethrower.

  The hose coughed twice, letting out little bursts of flame, before shooting out a fireball in the third puff. The plum-shaped corpse went up in flames instantly, waving his arms up and down as a silent scream left his mouth. Herbert felt the impact like a punch in the heart. Hell burned its way up his legs to his face.

  The corpse threw its arms about spastically until it fell to the ground, its body in cinders.

  The two corpses fell to ground and Herbert went to his knees. “Please, don’t hurt me,” he said.

  Herbert watched the man’s heavy black boots cross the floor. He felt a stream of heat erupt over his head. The mask came off and Mr. Rovas’ voice was thick with hatred.

  “I told you not to mess with me, and now look what you made me do! You’re not in control, Herbert! I AM. Just as I’ve always been! Do you hear me, Herbert? Do you hear me?!”

  Herbert watched the flames in Mr. Rovas’ eyes. The sadistic man chuckled in amusement.

  Alan

  “Holy crap, let me see that,” James said as he touched the dark red mark on Alan’s cheek. “Who did this to you? I’ll mess them up.”

  Alan swatted the hand away.

  “Quit it out, man” Alan said. He slammed his locker shut. “I got it because of you.”

  “Me?” James exclaimed. The roar of the high school hallway was too loud to merely talk. They had to yell. “What do you mean you got it because of me?”

  “Because of what you did to—” Alan stopped and looked both ways. “You-know-who.”

  James squinted. “Okay, you lost me now.”

  “Starts with an M, ends with and Ort” Alan said, and he tapped the back of his head, indicating the spot where James dropped his pet corpse.

  “Oh, Mort? You mean your dad did this to—”

  Alan put his finger up to his lips. “Just keep quiet about it, okay?”

  “Why did he hit you, though? Has he hit you before?”

  “I already told you, man. He did it because of what you did to,” again the shifty eyes, “you-know-who.”

  James shook his head. “You’re always blaming me for something.”

  It was five minutes before first period in Dover High. The clangor of laughter and gossip made it hard to hear over all the noise. Sophomores and freshmen of all shapes and sizes roamed the hallways in a hodgepodge of different races and faces. Alan didn’t know a single one of them. He didn’t care to, either. All the same, he didn’t like people checking out his bruise as they walked by, especially not the pretty toothpick-legged girls in tight jeans. In passing, Alan even heard one of them saying, “God, I didn’t think he could get any uglier.”

  Hiding the bruise was impossible as it took up half his face. He wished he brought sunglasses to school today, but that would have just raised even more suspicion.

  And I would still be just as ugly anyway.

  “Uht, here comes trouble,” James said. A pale, white kid with pimples so red they made his face shine sauntered over to them. Behind him was a short, light-skinned Columbian kid, who also had a face plagued with pimples. Logan Tremmel and Steve Vazquez, respectively.

  “Whoa!” Logan said as soon as he saw Alan. He reached to poke the bruise.

  “Leave it,” Alan said, turning his face. “I don’t know where your hands have been.”

  “Ask your mom,” Logan sniggered.

  “Did you get into a fight?” Steve asked.

  “Yeah, with his dad,” James said.

  “Yo, chill with that,” Alan said.

  “Your dad hit you like this?” Steve asked. He reached out to touch the bruise and Alan swatted it away.

  “What’s with you guys wanting to touch my face?”

  The warning bell to first period rang and Alan gave an internal sigh of relief. He didn’t have first period with Steve or Logan (Thank, God), and he didn’t want to talk about the bruise anymore, because, quite frankly, he hadn’t made up a story for it yet. It all stemmed back to undead wrestling. And while James knew pretty much everything about his abilities, Steve and Logan were in the dark about that. Alan didn’t trust them. He didn’t completely trust James, either, but it was lonely being different. Anyone would agree.

  “We’ll talk about it at lunch,” Logan said.

  Steve and Logan turned around and headed to their class.

  “I hate those guys,” Alan said.

  “I don’t know why. They’re nice g—”

  The second bell rang and students ran to first period.

  “You’d think these teachers actually gave a crap about us being late,” James said. Alan rubbed his cheek.

  The two of them ambled into Mrs. Hill’s Algebra class a whole minute late. They slumped into desks near the back of the room.

  Mrs. Hill, who had red hair and bosoms that went down to her stomach, called them out without even turning around.

  “Late again,” she said scribbling a lengthy equation with numbers and letters on the whiteboard for the class to solve.

  “Sorry, Mrs. Hill,” James lied.

  “Hey, it’s your grade,” she said, finishing up the equation and turning around to the class. “Okay, get to it,” she said.

  Alan rolled his eyes. Math shouldn’t have letters, he thought.

  He bent down to get his composition notebook from his book bag when a wave of pain washed over him. His eyes bulged and he grabbed his heart. It took all of his strength to keep from falling over. He sat back up rigidly in his seat and began to huff and puff quietly.

  James slipped a paper onto his desk.

  You okay? It read.

  Alan lo
oked over at his friend and shook his head with gritted teeth.

  “My heart,” he mouthed to him. “It—”

  “Mr. Chandler?” Mrs. Hill said. She stood up and was hunched forward over her desk, as if her boobs were too heavy to support a straight back. She held herself up by her knuckles. “Is everything alright back there?”

  Alan forced a smile, but saw flames behind his eyes. He even started to smell fire. Something was very wrong.

  “I’m fine, Mrs. Hi—”, he began, but his tongue suddenly felt like wood in his mouth. His line of vision turned green.

  “Run,” James said out the corner of his mouth as everybody turned to look at him. “You’re starting to glow.”

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” Alan said, heeding his friend’s advice. He rushed out of his desk and darted out the room.

  With the speed of a Ferrari, he sprinted down the hallway. Along the way, he collided with Mr. Steele, the history teacher.

  “Hey!” Mr. Steele shouted, but Alan kept running until he reached the bathroom. He shoved the door open with his shoulder.

  Once inside, Alan looked at himself in the mirror and gasped. His afro, which had always been wild and untamed, now stood straight up as if he had been electrified. His eyes also had no pupils at all. They were completely green and empty.

  Did anybody else see me like this? He worried.

  Worst of all though was the green aura that encircled his body. His skin was on fire and he scratched at it. He smelled ash everywhere and his ears rung with cries of “Please stop!” Was that his father’s voice?

  Calm down, Alan. Calm down.

  But it was hard to calm down with the sound of footsteps coming down the hallway toward you. Alan dashed into the nearest stall and closed the door behind him. He layered the seat with toilet paper and pulled down his pants before he sat down. He counted backward and took sharp (but quiet) breaths.

  Ten Mississippi, nine Mississippi, eight Mississippi…

  The bathroom door slowly opened, and Alan saw brown dress shoes underneath the stall.

  “I know you’re in here,” Mr. Steele said. Alan didn’t really know Mr. Steele since he taught the juniors.