"Overtime"

     John was awake, but his eyes were still closed. It was not unprecedented for him to wake up with his eyes shut. But he normally had some indication of what day it was or, at the very least, where he was. This time was different. His mind was hazy and his thoughts were jumbled. He tried to open his eyes but couldn’t. He must have really tied one on, he thought. Wait a second. John was not a big drinker. He would have an occasional beer or a glass of wine with dinner, but he certainly did not abuse alcohol. In fact, he hadn’t been drunk since his fraternity days. He knew what a hangover felt like, and this wasn’t it. He was a bit stiff, but not sore.

     John searched his memory banks for a clue. What was the last thing he could remember? It started to come back to him in dim fragments. He remembered going to sleep on the sofa in his den. He was puzzled. Why would he sleep on the sofa and not in bed with his wife? As the fragments came together, he recalled brushing his teeth and settling on the brown leather sofa for the night. It was not as if he simply dozed off. He intended to spend the night in the den. His body was telling him that he was not lying on leather anymore. This only added to his confusion.

     He tried again to open his eyes, but the lids would not budge. He struggled to raise his arm. After he worked out the stiffness, he managed to bring his hand up to his face. He gently rubbed his right eye. It felt weird to him, like it was crusted shut. Was it possible for a person to produce enough eye boogers to actually seal the lid? John tried to scrape the crust off, but soon realized it wasn’t crust at all. It felt as though his eye had been sewn shut. He moved his hand over to his left eye and felt the unmistakable stitching as well. This was too extreme to be a practical joke, even for the cruelest of pranksters. This was something darker, scarier. Panic began its infiltration of John’s control center.

     As he struggled to figure out what had happened to him, John kept seeing human organs being removed from a body. It was a fuzzy recollection, and he couldn’t connect it to anything that made sense. Suddenly a new memory flashed into John’s brain. He saw the horribly gnarled face of a man hovering over him. The man had wild eyes and unruly, dark gray hair. With a gap-toothed grimace the man said, “Not yet. No. Not yet.” The man then chuckled. It was not a comforting laugh. It filled John with a sense fear.

     Then the memory was washed away. John’s body felt covered with goose bumps, but actually it was different than it should have been. In fact, everything felt different. Odd. He moved his hand around his body. As far as he could tell, it was his body. He determined that he was naked. This only deepened the mystery, as he never slept in the nude. Even after making love, he would put his briefs back on.

     John prided himself as a person who could remain calm under any circumstance. He decided to explore his unusual environment. He could tell he was lying on a hard, flat surface. Methodically moving his arm around, he felt some kind of table next to him. He delicately fingered the tabletop. There were a number of small tools or pieces of flatware on it.  One of the items was definitely a small pair of scissors. Other than an explanation, this was exactly what John needed.

     As carefully as possible, John began to snip the stitches that kept his right eye shut. He thought he slipped a couple of times but felt no pain. He sheared through the last suture and slowly opened his eye. Everything was fuzzy, almost pixilated. All he could see was a dim light.

     While his eye adjusted, John decided to sit up. As he struggled against the stiffness to bring himself upright, he could feel his joints popping. It was a chore, but he got himself to a sitting position. His feet were dangling and did not touch the floor. He assumed he was on a narrow table.

     The pixels began to form into shapes and the fuzz was starting to come into focus. As John began to free his left eye he saw a flash of green disappear through a door. Although he didn’t get a good look, he thought it was a person darting away. Maybe that was the jerk that did this to me, he thought. His other eye would have to wait. It was time for John to get some answers.

     He slid off of the table until his feet hit a tiled floor. He straightened his body, and as he did so, he heard a disturbing series of snaps and cracks. His equilibrium was off, so he took slow, careful steps toward the door. It was slightly ajar. He reached out and opened it. The door led to a small broom closet. It was filled with the normal assortment of cleaning supplies. Cowering in the corner was a man of medium build with short dark hair. He appeared to be of Latin descent. This was confirmed by the nametag on his custodian-green cover-alls that read: Fernando.

     When John tried to speak he discovered his lips also had been sewn shut. The sound that came out, a ghastly moan, sent Fernando into babbling panic. John didn’t understand much Spanish, but he managed to pick out the words “muerto” and “brujeria,” which he knew meant “dead” and “witchcraft.” Before John had a chance to think of his next move, Fernando’s eyes rolled up into his head. He gave a horrific gasp and went limp on the floor. John knelt down beside the janitor and tried to take his pulse. He felt nothing. That’s when John had an epiphany.

     He slowly brought his fingers up to his own jugular vein. There was nothing. Am I dead, he wondered? He felt for a pulse at his wrist. Still there was nothing. There should have been a sinking feeling in his heart, but it was not beating. He should have been short of breath, but he was not breathing. Maybe he was dead. No, he thought, that’s impossible. Dead people don’t get up and walk around, do they?

     John stood up, an inner numbness slowing his movement. He spotted a sink in the corner with a crooked mirror hanging over it. John approached the mirror. The sight of his own face shocked him. At least he thought it was his face. It looked swollen, and his eyes were deeper in their sockets than he remembered.  He touched his face and found some kind of putty filling a dent in his forehead. Moving his fingers to his hairline, he felt stitching that ran the circumference of the top of his skull.

       I must have been in some kind of accident, he thought, and his vital signs were so weak that the doctors pronounced him dead. Then, somehow his system must have been shocked back to life.   He then noticed something else--a large “Y” shaped incision spanning his torso. He looked down at himself and saw that the incision had been stitched up. He knew exactly what a Y incision meant. He had been autopsied!

     This was too much for him to handle.  If an autopsy had been performed on him, how could he be moving around? John made his way out of the broom closet, shutting the door behind him. He took a closer look around the room in which he had awoken. It didn’t look so much as a morgue as it did a prep-room in a funeral parlor. There was a stainless steel table that he had been on, and next to it a tray of surgical implements. He also noticed several new coffins and a hazardous materials waste bin.

     John’s mind was racing for answers when he heard approaching footsteps. He fought the stiffness of his body and made his way back to the table. He lie down and closed his good eye. He had already scared one person to death.  He needed time to sort things out.

     A moment later, he heard someone enter the room. Light rustling sounds made it clear that the person was moving around the room. John desperately needed to figure out why he was dead but alive. He thought hard, but the only thing he could remember was going to sleep on the sofa. Why? It was really bugging him. Then, the reason hit him like a cement truck: He had gone to sleep in the den because he found out his wife had been having an affair. Could that fact have anything to do with what had happened to him? John didn’t want to believe it.

     Suddenly, John felt hands on his body. The person in the room was dressing him. John assumed a suit was being put on him for the funeral. This unnerved him, but not as much as his wife’s infidelity. He couldn’t remember the specifics. He began to postulate that he caught his wife being unfaithful and possibly threatened her with divorce. Then, maybe as he slept she killed him. He didn’t want believe that she could have killed him, but she certainly had cheated on him, and to John that betrayal of trust was not far away from murder.

     Perhaps it was the stress of being a living corpse that caused John to think the worst of his wife. A more comforting scenario occurred to him. He was an investigative reporter, and he often worked undercover. It was possible, he thought, that he had pissed off the wrong person in the course of his investigations and ended up on this slab as a result. This was a model for John to work with. It didn’t make him any less dead, but it did put his mind at ease a bit. Now, if only he could remember what he was working on, he might be able to figure out who bashed his skull in.

     John felt the mortician put the finishing touches on his attire. He could tell he had been dressed in a suit that was open in the back. It was not a functional suit. It was just for show. The mortician grunted as he rolled John over onto his stomach. John assumed he was flipped over so the back of his clothes could be secured. He couldn’t have been more wrong. What John felt next was even more disturbing to him than finding out he was a creature from beyond the grave. The mortician climbed on top of John and was trying to penetrate his buttocks with a blunt object.

     Necrophilia. Love of the dead. More accurately: love with the dead. Most places don’t even have a law against it because it’s never been a common enough problem that needed to be dealt with. This act so foul that was about to be perpetrated upon John sent a wave of rage coursing through his dead tissue. For the first time since he had awakened from his not-so-permanent slumber, he actually felt something. John channeled the rage and mustered all of his strength. Before he could be violated, he arched his midsection and launched the mortician off of him. He then quickly spun around and got to his feet.

     When he opened his free eye, he saw the terrified mortician standing a few feet away. The mortician’s pants were down and his manhood was in the upright position. Blood drained from the necrophile’s face, and every other part of his body, too. His erection became a mushroom cap in an instant. The look of pure shock on the mortician’s face fueled John’s anger. With both hands, John grabbed the mortician’s neck and began to squeeze. There was no resistance. The mortician’s eyes bulged out and his tongue protruded from his mouth. John really felt alive again as he drained the life from his attacker.

     As the mortician’s body slumped to the floor, John heard the sounds of what he thought were more people approaching. He dragged the mortician to the closet and dropped him next to the janitor. He tried to get back to the metal table, but the people were coming too quickly. He jumped in a white coffin that was near the door and played dead.

     “Where the hell is Blaine?” asked the first man.

     “It’s after nine, he’s probably getting drunk,” replied his companion.

     Both men shared a chuckle. John could hear the men walking around the room.

     The first man asked, “So which one is it?”

     “The one with the stiff, you dumb ass,” the second man shot back.

     John felt the coffin lid close. He could hear the two men speaking, but their muffled voices made their conversation difficult to understand. Moments later he felt the coffin being lifted and carried. After a brief journey it was set down again. The lid was reopened.

     John waited until he thought the men had left and then took a peek with his unstitched eye. He was in some sort of chapel. He began to get up, but then he had a most devious idea. He could go undercover at his own funeral. As a reporter, this would be the ultimate assignment. What a great opportunity to find how his friends really felt about him.

     As he lay motionless, his visions of human organs being removed came back. He saw a kidney being taken from a body and placed in a bag with fluid. It seemed important, but John couldn’t put it together. Maybe he was just remembering his own autopsy. He didn’t have time to run with the thought, as there was activity growing around his coffin.

     It didn’t take long for the chapel to start filling up. John was excited to find out who came to pay their respects. He knew that plenty of people show up at a party, especially if there’s an open bar, but it takes a person who really cares to come to a funeral. He didn’t have any family; both his parents were killed when he was young. He did, however, have a nice circle of friends and was popular among his coworkers. It was time to find out who really cared.

     A procession of mourners began to pay their respects at the open coffin. John heard some sobbing and lots of “so young, so tragic” types of comments. He thought he recognized several voices and was actually quite touched. Then came the voice John had been waiting for. It was his wife Mary. She was crying. It sounded genuine.

     “I’m so sorry John. This is not the way I wanted it to be. I blame myself.” Mary paused. She sniffed, and then continued. “I know it doesn’t matter now, but I did love you.”

     John felt a tear hit his cheek. Mary walked away from the coffin, still crying. Her comments reinforced John’s belief that she was having an affair. Obviously, she or her lover had killed him to get him out of the way. When the funeral was over, he was going to get some answers.

     After a few more well–wishers came and went, John heard the obnoxious sound of gum chewing. He knew Craig Danton was standing over him. Craig was the only guy at the Dispatch that John truly hated. He was the laziest reporter, and he had a positively toxic personality. John felt Craig close to his ear.

     “You’re dead, you stupid son-of-a-bitch. You stuck your nose in where it doesn’t belong and got your skull caved in,” whispered Craig. He gave a short laugh. “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.” Craig took out his gum and shoved it up John’s nostril. “I’ll try to console the widow. I know what she likes.” He laughed again and walked away.

     John was furious. He wanted to jump out of the coffin and rip Craig limb from limb. He didn’t want to believe Mary would have an affair with such a reprehensible jerk. What did he say about sticking his nose in where it didn’t belong? Maybe John’s theory about turning over the wrong rock in one of his investigations was true. Craig was obviously involved, but maybe Mary wasn’t.