There are the dead, and then there are the deadish, and then there are the very dead. You are exhausted because you’ve been awake for too long and you’re sitting in a moulded plastic chair in the corner of a room full of bodies, and you are wondering which kind of dead they are. You wonder what you did so wrong in your past life that this is your job now.
You didn’t choose. You didn’t agree to this when you arrived in this city, fresh from a pogrom only sixteen miles away, and carrying nothing but a bag of dirty laundry because that’s what you had in your hands when the soldiers came. Tear-stained, and blood-stained, and scared, clutching your bag, you arrived in the city that takes anyone. You passed through the gates and took the work assigned to you. Everyone who enters the city is assigned a job, unless you’re from the city, of course. There are rumours that some jobs are good ones. You wouldn’t know.
You sit with the corpus of the dead and you breathe in their smells, and you wait to see if some of them will need managing. You hold a long stick, try to balance it on your finger, pointy side down. It leaves an indentation in your skin, but you stop before it punctures you. You’ve made that mistake before and had to react quickly when the dead suddenly awoke at the smell.
No one knows why some of the dead awake. They didn’t in your village, not so far away from the city. You knew nothing about it until after the soldiers attacked, clearing out the people and claiming the resources in the name of a state that isn’t this city, but isn’t not this city. All the villages are being emptied out, their residents fleeing to the city. All the resources are now owned by the state, which feeds the city. You don’t understand how this helps anyone.
On your first day, the foreman told you to drive the stake through the dead if they sit up on their cold tabletops, said a stake through the heart would finish off the deadish. You muttered that a stake through the heart would finish off anyone, including the alive. She raised an eyebrow and asked if you were always this funny.
These dead, who might be deadish, or might already be very dead, came from an accident down by the docks, a collapsed wall in a building heaving with too many people. It’s not your building, but it sounds like it’s the same type, too much brick, not enough mortar. Not enough to hold it together when every room is filled with people, people. You’re glad it’s not your building because it means your laundry, now mostly clean, most of the time, is still safe and not covered in blood, dust, wails, and moans.
Near you, someone lies in a foetal position, a hand drooping off the edge of the table. You touch it briefly, wonder if it wouldn’t be better if all the deadish could just rise to join the ranks of the rest of the city. Who would know, after all. What difference would it make to let in a few more. You wait to see if the hand twitches.
It doesn’t move. No one in the room moves.
You lift the hand and lay it against your heart. Then you tuck it safely against its owner’s breast before rigour mortis sets in. You wipe the grit off on your trousers, move to the next person. It’s not your job to look at them, and mostly you try not to. But they aren’t anyone special. They’re just people who have gone from alive to dead, to most likely very dead. It makes you feel heavy, and you move from person to person, touching each of them.
There is a baby, because of course there is, and you take it off a lonely table and tuck it against someone else. It won’t matter now, and it’s probably not the baby’s parent, but who cares when you’re very dead anyway. It’s just to make you feel better. You wait to see if the baby will move. You’ve been there before, and it makes you sick, but you tell yourself that no one wants to be stuck as a baby for all eternity, so maybe you’re doing them a mercy.
Later, seated in the staff room, you stick to the edges while a few people talk. It’s been a long night. Half a dozen rooms are full of the dead, but none of them have awoken. That’s good, you think. There are rumours that it’s the refugees bringing this illness, this oddness, into the city. It’s bad that it’s good when a lot of people die, prove the haters wrong.
People in the staff room are talking, complaining about the late night and how the extra shift pay still sucks and whether it’s even worth going home. They might just catch a couple of hours under the table and do the next shift. Someone says they don’t think they can sleep with the strip lighting in here. Someone else says they can’t cope with the noise out there. Someone says they could sleep like the dead. You hold back a snipe, that the dead don’t sleep, not even the very dead.
You caress the stake tucked in your belt. You could pretend to sleep, but since you’re permanently awake and no longer a fan of the outdoors, you grab a cup of water and head back to your mortuary. You sit with the dead, even though they’re all validated as really and truly dead, and you whisper to them about how it was when the soldiers came, then how quiet it was after they’d left, and how you’d awoken to the mess and the stink, and you’d grabbed your bag of laundry, covered in your own blood, and started to walk to the city sixteen miles away.
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Ⓒ Emma Burnett