Necromance in the Air - Chapter III - (Fiction)

Cable-tied

Welcome back! Felix is on his own at work, meanwhile Lucy is dealing with shoe polish smears as she sneaks around. In Chapter 3 we return to the beleaguered Felix as he contends with another quiet night in the office…if only things were simple.

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Photo by Nathan Cima on Unsplash

Moving Geoff’s head to repair his jaw was a delicate operation. People underestimate the number of tubes involved in necromancy. Felix had lost count of the times his suspension of disbelief had been shattered watching zombie films where they just didn’t rot, or somehow kept the bite strength of a rottweiler without flesh, tendons, or muscles. Felix knew there were ways, but there was still that pesky entropy to contend with. Keeping things alive, or undead, requires energy. No amount of pretending there’s a magic un-deadening virus is going to change the fact that they need fuel, and ‘braaaains’ aren’t going to cut it.

He swivelled Geoff’s head away from the screen and crouched so they were face to face. “Ugh, come on, Geoff, you don’t have to huff in my face. I know it’s not your fault, but you’re dead, and you stink. You know the living say it smells like something died in here? Well, you did.”

“Ur.”

“Fair point. Hard to keep your gob shut when your jaw has fallen off. Let’s see if we can fix that.”

He found the other half of Geoff’s jaw on the floor beneath a desk. It was hiding behind various tubes, some transported ominous fluids, and others powered outdated computers the resurrected were working on. “Just once, it would be nice to see a bloody cable tie. I’m not asking for perfection, just the occasional half-arsed attempt to neaten this shit show up.”

As he pulled the tube, it snagged on something. He tugged a harder, which is when something came unplugged. “Shit.” Felix looked up from beneath the desk and stared at the workstation monitor. He looked up from beneath the desk and stared at the workstation. The screen blinked off, and a jaw hit the floor—Geoff’s. Though, Felix’s own jaw could’ve followed swiftly.

“Argh, couldn’t it have been something I have a vague understanding of? No offence, Geoff, I understand how to plug a tube of nutritious undead cursed ooze in, but I can’t tell the difference between an ethernet cable and HDMI, or USB-C and whatever else there is. Why can’t we everything be wireless? It’s like the bloody dark ages.”

“Really? We weren’t this advanced when I died.”

Felix glared at the head of a woman who was trying, and failing, to turn in his direction. He scowled at the woman. “Shouldn’t you be on a call?”

“I’m on a break.”

“Oh. Well, enjoy that.”

“Be easier to enjoy if we had more than solitaire on these computers.”

“You’ve got minesweeper too. Not sure you can control that one with the tab key, though.”

“Ooh, I’ll give it a go. Anything to break the monotony of being trapped for all eternity doing scams for you evil bastards.”

“I’m just as trapped as you.”

“Really?”

“Well…no, I suppose you have it worse. I go home after my shift and I’m only trapped because I’m in loads of debt and the drudgery forced upon my by our capitalist culture means—”

“Not quite the same as being brought back from the dead and enslaved by dark overlords.”

“Well…we work for the same people.”

“I work for you. You’re one of the dark overlords.”

“I don’t think I’m an overlord. That’s a little above my paygrade.”

“Oh, an over-peasant, is that better?”

“Right…Oh, would you look at the time? Break’s over.”

“I’ve got another—”

He reached across and, gripping the top of her head with one hand, turned the woman away. “Sorry, but Geoff here is in a compromising situation and HR wouldn’t be happy about me chatting when I should be helping him.”

“Human Resources don’t care about us—”

“HR as in Head Repairs. If I can’t fix him, well, he’ll need special treatment,” Felix said.

The woman fell silent. Being raised from the dead and placed in an endless cycle of repetitive calls, knowing that you’re scamming people the whole time, might be a fate worse than death, but there are even worse things. Few of them ever came back from Head Repairs. Those that did were never the same. The returned whispered and muttered between calls. Their eyes always flickered from side to side as if they could see things that nobody else could. Then there was the name that passed from head to head through furtive conversations between calls, a name that haunted dial tones and those brief respites of potential peace. “Marvin.”

Felix found Geoff’s jaw once more and, placing it in front of Geoff on the tiny amount of space in front of Geoff’s monitor, he set about opening the flesh repair goop.

First, he snapped on the pair of latex gloves. Typically, they were awkward to get on, and despite the light dusting of mysterious white powder on their insides, his sweaty palms still made the task far harder than it should’ve been. When he finished, he attempted a flourish, pulling down on the left glove to make a snap, but it broke, and now the wrist of it hung from his arm.

A gurgling came from the podium to his side, the sound of jawless laughter.

“Laugh it up, Geoff. If I decide to give up, you’ll be sitting here for the rest of my shift without a jaw.”

A sad gurgling moan come from Geoff. Felix couldn’t be sure if it was an insult or whine of contrition.

The container was plastic with a large round screw off lid. It was so big that Felix struggled to get a grip on it with one hand and placed it between his knees while trying to get a grip on it in his gloves. “Righty-tighty, lefty-loose…wait, is that from above or below? Does it…ah, I see,” he muttered when he finally spotted the near illegible writing on the lid. Of course, it was childproof. “For Christ’s sake, who’s giving magic goop to kids? It’s not the kind of stuff you leave out on the kitchen table, is it?”

He pushed down, twisted, slipped, and hit himself in the face with the jar. 

“That’s going to leave a mark,” said the woman he’d just turned back around.

“How did you turn? You know what? Forget it. Your break’s over.”

“It is in, three, two…Hello there, this is Daphne, I’m calling from Blockbuster video… No, the business doesn’t really exist anymore, except for the department I work in. According to our records, you borrowed Back to the Future on VHS in 1994 and never returned it. Maybe we would still be in business if people returned things or paid their fines. You owe us nine-hundred and seventy-four pounds and sixty-three pence…Actually, that’s not including interest, and depends on your ability to return the video in question…It probably is worth something now. It’s basically an antique…”

Felix’s scowl seemed to please the woman as she began a classic scam. He elected to ignore her, and returned to a task that he was worried might defeat him, the opening of a child-proof lid. “Come on Felix, you’re not a child, it’s not Felix proof.” There was a small part of him, somewhere sandwiched between his self-esteem and ambition, both of which had shrivelled and were slowly atrophying to nothingness, that whispered, ‘Man-proof? Could we say man proof? Or is that too much?’ He ignored it, because he didn’t want to be sexist in his own headspace.

With a grunt and a whimper as he felt his palm within the glove somehow being skinned by the twisting motion, the lid opened. “Finally,” he muttered as he placed it on the floor and reached for Geoff’s jaw.

He dipped either side, or hinge, of the jaw into the pot of glittering semi-translucent gunk, and held it over the jar to let any excess drip back into it. Then he struggled, holding the jaw away from himself, to stand up. On his feet, he bent over and held the jaw up to Geoff’s face. The undead call centre agent’s eyes darted around, wide open with panic, as he gurgled. “Geoff, mate, calm down. I’m putting your jaw back on.”

“Urrglle.”

“Yeah, I understand it hurts, but the alternative is never having a jaw for the rest of all eternity.”

“Urg?”

Felix let out a sigh. “Look. I don’t have the authority to release any of you. I’d just put you in the back room with the others. We’d pretend you weren’t there until someone finally turned up to take you down to Head Repairs, and, well, you’ll go there.”

“Urg.”

“Yeah, glad we agree,” Felix said, then he shoved the jaw into place with no small amount of force. There was a crunching squelching sound as joints re-knit, and flesh leapt, grasping at its counterpoints to reform connections of dead skin, muscle and tendon. 

“Thanks,” Geoff said.

The jaw moving caused Felix to flinch, and he took a quick step backwards. The heel of his right foot hit the jar of magic goop and it toppled over, rolling to one side. He turned to watch it roll under Geoff’s desk into the tangled mass of wires and tubes.

The row of monitors in front of him flickered, then all blinked off at once. Overhead, the lights flashed and died. Darkness fell.

His breath came in shallow gasps, the beat of his heart pounding like a war drum in his chest. The rush of blood throbbed in his ears. Silence fell across the now cavernous room and his mind raced towards the potential threats. Around him were a hundred undead heads. Heads who may no longer be under the control of the occult bindings that forced them into the bidding of the company. At his feet was a web of wires and trailing tubes across threatening to trip him should he attempt to run. At best, he’d fall and hurt himself. Worse still, a head might topple from its podium and attempt to chew through his flesh, or a tube might burst, showering him with whatever dark ichor was used to sustain the living dead.

A nearby voice broke the silence. “Get in. Looks like we’re all on a break!”

The sound of mildly perturbed, celebratory voices bubbled up, nervous laughter and whispered muttering.

Felix took a breath. Pushing his panic to one side, he reminded himself he was in charge. “Okay, everyone, nothing to panic about. Just a minor glitch. We’ll be up and running as soon as I fix the problem. Take five and I’ll start working on it,” he said.

Except Felix did not know how to fix the problem, or how serious the problem was. He was, however, sure that it would take longer than five minutes. He shivered, goosebumps forming on his skin. “Oh, uh, hey guys, I think given how hard we’ve all been working that we all deserve pizza, right? Pizza party as soon as this gets fixed.”

There was a momentary lull. He waited for the cheer, for the celebration. His reward was a voice in the distance. “How are we meant to hold a piece of pizza?” 

He lowered himself to his hands and knees and, resisting the urge to fold himself into a foetal position, reached out in the dark, trying to feel his way towards the open jar of goop. He followed the direction of the cabling and his fingers met the loose wire, which was wet.

”Great looks like everything’s covered in the stuff—” Then he realised he could tell it was wet, in the dark…which meant his glove was no longer protecting his hand.

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Thanks for reading. A special thank you to all those who have liked, commented, or reached out to say they enjoyed the first few chapters — I can’t speak for all writers, but my main reason for writing is quite simple, I hope someone else gets enjoyment out of it, so it does matter when folks tell me they do!

There’s more to come…