The Pit; a short story

My neighbor had, caught up in his arms, the robust body of a roebuck stag. With one powerful motion he wrenched the half dead creature up and then cast it into the pit before him. In my arms I held a dog from my neighborhood. Stunned by a baseball bat and whimpering I flung it into my pit. I dared not strain to see what was at the bottom. Even though I knew I dared not look. The last gasps of the animals we throw in are only audible for a few moments, then nothing. My neighbor caught my eye in passing since I’m not really allowed to look at him, though the man’s a pit a mere twenty feet away. His leg was oozing blood and puss from the antler of the stag a branch still stuck into his upper thigh. He was on his way back into the forest to look for something else to throw in. I nabbed a fly between my fingers, plucked the wings off, and cast it in too. How did I get here?

The body of a doctor came into work last Thursday. That is not unusual when your in my line of work. I was a mortuary technician and aspiring funeral planner at the Resurrection Funeral Home in Auldgate, CA. It wasn’t a job I aspired to, it was a job I fell into. The money was good and I was detached enough from the suffering of others to make a pretty good living at it. My boss, though he was not an evil man, is probably the only person I know more impersonal than me. He encouraged me to stay on. Not because he liked me necessarily, in fact I think he thought I was rather too nonplussed about the job, makes talking to next of kin awkward. He’d call me ‘robot,’ ‘creeper,’ and ‘puppet’ when he thought he was talking to someone who would keep the slander to themselves.

“Almost done killing yourself?” he asked when he saw me smoking my third cigarette of the day on the ramp out back.

“Just about,” I answered back, knowing the nonchalant response would annoy him.

“We have a client to tend to, whenever you’re ready,” I put the smoke out and followed after I’d seen him gone.

Today’s lucky winner was Doctor Martin Mallon, formerly of Stanford University and a one time resident of Auldgate. Grew up here in fact. His sister was seeing to the arrangements of the funeral. The boss wanted to keep me away from her. He thought I lacked elegance around the bereaved. He was probably right in retrospect. It’s not like I cut into any of the clients with any respect. I spent as little time with them as possible to be frank.

“I didn’t see the cart from general today,” I said as we wheeled the man into the embalming room.

“He didn’t come from general,” said the boss, “came straight from the airport. Poor bastard died overseas last week.”

“Where?” I asked.

“South America,” he said “his sister paid a lot to get him back.” I couldn’t imagine why anyone would pay for a corpse.

“Where abouts?” I asked.

“Somewhere in Brazil,” he said “careful, you’re starting to come off sounding interested in someone else.” I grimaced.

“Am I assisting you?” I asked.

“No,” he said “I’m not feeling well, I was hoping you could handle this on your own. Cotton. Fluid. I can do the make-up tomorrow morning. Can you handle it?”

“Sure,” I said.

When I unzipped the black bag I was startled. A week without embalming, rough plane ride, and found dead for days in the Amazon rain-forest. There should have been no body at all. Instead a spindly old man lay naked, shrink-wrapped, and looking jaundiced (almost orange). The smell was off too. I’ve smelled death before. It was there then, but masked by something else. Something familiar yet not. I started the process. Set the formaldehyde pump and began stuffing the chest cavity with cotton. There was a lite residue around the bagged internal organs and along the inside of the rib cage like a melted orange crayon and the accompanying shavings. After I closed him up I washed up and stopped by the front desk to ask the receptionist, Alicia, for a cigarette. Alicia was a student at the junior college. She wanted to study mathematics and she liked this place for the hours and the moments of kindness she could show to people on the worst days of their lives. She should have worked anywhere else. She joined me on the ramp for a smoke after she locked up out front. She produced two smokes with one hand angling one in my direction.

“Did you see the death certificate for the guy I’m working on now?” I asked her.

“Yeah,” she said.

“I’m playing a little game with myself,” I explained “what was the cause of death?”

“That’s a pretty shitty game.”

“All the same. I’m not sure why he looks the way he does. No animal predation. Not even an insect took a bite. Like the rain forest knew better than to munch on it.”

“Him,” she corrected, “C.O.D. was listed as a respiratory fungal infection,” she explained.

“Should we even be treating him? I figured C.D.C. would have something to say about this.”

“I doubt he would have been cleared through customs if it were anything to worry about,” she said. She had a point. I stomped out my cigarette and went back to work.

Hours later, after I had finished dressing him up I was sitting at my desk. Alicia had gone home, I was about to but then I got up. I got up like I’m like to do at some point in the day. I rose from my work station and walked into the parlor where the body of Dr. Mallon had lain in repose a mere three hours before. I forgot what I was looking for, indeed, I forgot why or whether I had willed myself to rise in the first place. I thought I was working too much. I went home.

The funeral took place the next day. A few professors from Stanford came down. A sister and her husband as well. Everyone looked out of place. It seemed pretty obvious that Dr. Mallon had no friends, not even really a family. I asked his sister for any anecdotes we might use to build a eulogy. She was tight lipped. His colleagues as well. It was like they were actively trying to avoid talking about him. I started to feel something like bad for the man. I pictured my funeral. I assumed most of my family and acquaintances might act the same way.

I had dreams the night after the funeral. I don’t dream anymore these days. I’d seen crimson orange stalks ascending from pits in the autumnal forest, swarms of crusty ants building structures with leaves, excretion, and their own bodies they had no business building. I saw my boss in his apron leaning against a tree dead as the people we wheel in and out of the funeral home daily. I’d seen corpses without eyes before, pop in a glass eye to make the relatives happy and give the illusion of an orb beneath the lid, but I never thought I’d see my boss that way. His judgmental eyes were replaced by two empty spaces, voids where crept the strangest bees. Their eyes glistened amber as they stumbled and buzzed and danced and slurped at the sockets as though they were some sweet flower. All around the woods had changed making way for it’s new master. One of the bees came aggressively at my face. I swatted it on my arm, orange crust and red blood oozed from a gash in its exoskeleton.

That had done it. The hive in my bosses head sprang to life as each bee in turn did its best to sting me awake. The cloud left my eyes and I was swatting in the night air in the middle of the forest. I was freezing in only boxer shorts and a t-shirt, barefoot, a full half mile from my house. My chest was tight, my feet blistered and bloody. I figured it was time to see a doctor.

I left a message on the machine at work that I wouldn’t be coming in. I coughed into the receiver before I hung up. Alicia is usually there to answer the phone by 10. Must be something going around. I phoned the doctor immediately after. I told him about the cough and the fever, about the body I’d treated. He said to come in directly, his receptionist would see me to a room right away. I showered, the water as cold as I could stand, wrapped my feet in gauze, and drove from my house into downtown.

I was at an intersection near Diablo Pizza. My turn signal was on but my car didn’t turn. I didn’t turn it. The light went green and I went straight ahead. I’m being careless, I thought. Letting my mind wander and now I’m going to miss my doctor’s appointment. I pulled into a seafood bar and grill called The Dutch Heart (so called because of the fake diamond displayed in front by the register that was supposedly pirate booty) and took a seat at the bar.

I didn’t feel the need to drink. I hadn’t been there in years. I ordered a scotch from the woman tending the day shift regulars. I hate scotch. Each sip brought on an uncontrollable coughing fit. Patrons did their best to cover their drinks, more than one eye judged. I imagined them bee-stung. After my third I was feeling drunk, the heat added to the fever was unimaginable. I felt so lightheaded I knew I would pass out soon but it didn’t happen. Why am I doing this? Why don’t I stop? It was then I saw her at the other end of the bar.

Alicia was sitting at the other end of the bar drinking a vodka on the rocks. How long had she been here? Had she been here this whole time and I hadn’t noticed? I stumbled over. Her skin was covered in rashes like the ones on my chest. If she noticed I was there she didn’t indicate it. She nervously sipped and coughed, wiping crust from the side of her mouth.

“Taking the day off?” I asked. She looked awful. Her skin was dry and slightly jaundiced. Her hair was coming out in clumps.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said.

“Me either,” I sat down next to her. Why did I sit down? I shouldn’t be here. I need to be in the hospital.

“The pits,” she said. Her eyes dilated in her head.

“You’ve seen them too?” I asked. She began to shake and wimpier.

“Why can’t I moved?” she asked. A gush of urine splashed the ground and covered the bar stool.

“Jesus Alicia,” I exclaimed.

“Alright, get out!” the bartender shouted. Alicia didn’t look ashamed or embarrassed at all. She looked terrified. I calmed the bartender, tipped well, and told her I’d see Alicia to the hospital.

“Be sure they get a look at you too son,” the bartender said, “you look awful.”

I shouldn’t be driving. Why am I driving? Alicia sat next to me in the passenger seat, shivering and mumbling. I told her it was going to be alright, that I was taking us to the hospital. Despite being day drunk my driving wasn’t impaired. In fact I was driving like someone who’s better at it than me. When I missed the turn to the hospital Alicia started hyperventilating, my heart sank and I felt tingles in my blistered feet. I wasn’t driving. I was a passenger too. As the setting became familiar we started to freak out within ourselves. I was taking us to the Resurrection Funeral Home.

“I didn’t mean to…” I trailed off. Alicia broke into hysterical bouts of laughing and crying all mixed up together.

“I know, ha ha, I know!” her eyes were red.

We were compelled to enter. The boss wasn’t there, no one was. The red light on the phone blinked on and off. Seventeen missed calls lay waiting to be heard. The widow Miller’s service should have happened three hours ago. What was going on here? We passed the messages and walked into the mortuary. Alicia tried to scream but couldn’t, something was holding her back.

Upon pushing the door open we discovered a whole new ecosystem, a sadistic forest in miniature. The bio-hazard bag I hadn’t taken out was in bloom. Mrs. Miller’s smartly dressed body was covered with stalks and a sunrise path led from the bag to her corpse. Her mouth, which I had to seal shut with glue was forced open by a hideous blood-orange bulb. A dank smell overpowered the chemicals of death and the echo of a forest yet to be was asserting itself in our place of work.

Alicia dropped to her knees and began to harvest the mushrooms from and around the garbage can. She was crying. I wanted to run but it became apparent in that moment that it was not up to me. I wanted to run away screaming, warning the world, to stay away from this place. I wanted to douse the forest in embalming incendiaries and set the whole abomination aflame. I didn’t. I reached for the scalpel and cut into the widow Miller’s abdominal cavity. A whole world was at work inside her, growing, linking the cavity in a web of orange with mushrooms growing from their networked intersections. Without gloves I picked each mushroom one by one and placed them in plastic bags. Alicia did the same. Though the clock told me it was only an hour we were there, the duress of our own importance made it an eternity.

When we had picked the corpse and the floor clean Alicia and I left the funeral home and got back into my car. The orange spores were caked under our fingernails and lightly powdered our faces. We must be taking the mushrooms to destroy them right? Or give them to our doctors so they might help us? Maybe we could show them to some G-man or give them to the CDC. I told myself this as we were driven from that place and into downtown Auldgate in the early evening. We got out of the car. We started distributing the mushrooms. Each time a bio-hazard bag was emptied into a flower bed, or sold to a vagrant with the promise of a good time I felt trapped in plain sight. Could they not see we didn’t want to be here? That we were being coerced? Downtown homeless and teens overpaying for a cheap high that would never come. Despite cheapness it was a high. Once I let go after the third hour there was something intoxicating about being out of control, about passing the wheel to someone else who seemed to know what they were doing. Does being a passenger in vehicular manslaughter make it better or worse than if one were the driver. I’d seen the victims of vehicular manslaughter up close, painted them up, sewed them back together and displayed them in a pleasing way. I saw that in Lydia Martinez’s body. I saw what a broken windshield could do the the human chest. I saw her best friend Jean at the funeral who was in the passenger seat. A part of me thought she was lucky. I don’t think that now.

Alicia took her mushrooms, chopped on my dashboard with a scalpel, and went to local restaurants. A little on a pizza. A bit in your salad. No plan was formulated between us. We spoke only when and what we were allowed by the infection within. At some point we both shrunk behind the curtain. Nervous actors who couldn’t take the stage. Understudies to a pandemic. It wasn’t until I woke up the next day that I realized I could move.

My body had accomplished its work for the day. Was I tired? Was this me slipping the bonds once a night to cower at the base of an orange dusted tree trunk? Maybe I don’t run because I’m too tired. Maybe it wants me too tired. Or does that shit in the pit, that crusty orange accumulation actually know my body needs rest if I am to continue this task? Does the fungus care for me? My neighbor had stopped moving. Standing perfectly still, petrified amidst trees that once were brown and green. How long has he been standing there? He could have stopped moving anytime in the day. I hadn’t seen him cross my sight since he went back into the forest. The amber crust on his thigh sprouted a crop of mushrooms reaching towards where the sun would be in a few hours. Trying to infect that too. Beige roots broke the leather of his worn shoes and anchored themselves into the moist soil continually replenished with the custard viscera matter and organic fluids of the inhabitants of both town and wood. The roots were thick, looked anchored deep, one foot set in front of the other mid stride. Had he willed himself to stop moving? Probably not. His arms were frozen in light fists and also looked to have stop swinging. A photograph of a walker. His head was turned skyward, mouth open. Ascending towards the full moon a blood orange stalk rose three feet into the air. If I could touch it I imagine it would be rough. It was darker, more rocky, and rigid than the other monstrosities the fungus willed itself to shape. In the moonlight I could see he was breathing. Lungs aspirating, pushing air out around the stalk. Puffs of spores danced in the warm night air. My neighbor’s right eye turned to meet my gaze. I didn’t scream.

I was shocked to be able to move my hand and feel as though it were mine. It couldn’t have been a dream. My cough had gotten worse as had my fever. I seized the moment. I got in my car and went straight to the hospital, no detours, no stops. The town didn’t look quite the same. There were less people out than there usually were. Lightly trafficked sidewalks went untreated allowing dandelions and groundswell to find purchase in the cracks and drink water from the gutters. I stopped for gas. The store was closed but the credit card readers still worked so I self served. The sky seemed wrong somehow. Cloudy. My God what have I done?

A vagrant came from behind startling me out of my head and back to the bare town. He began rooting through the garbage with a bloody fist. I didn’t offer him help, nor a ride to the hospital, nor money, nor did I speak a word. He saw me see him. He also said nothing. I wondered if he knew about the orange, or if it had affected him too. I screwed the gas cap back on and sped to the hospital.

The emergency room was filled with fevers and coughs. It seemed like Auldgate was coming down with something. Sitting in a hard plastic chair, eyes vacantly glued to a television over head playing something to quiet to hear but I wasn’t watching anyway. Who can watch TV in an emergency room? A woman sitting next to me let out a grunt at the end of each labored breath. There was a cacophony of noise. Children crying, adults arguing, the elderly waiting…everyone waiting. I was called back. How long was I here?

They ushered me into a room with something between a chair and a bed, but less comfortable than the worst of either. A peppy man came by after the nurse took my temperature and blood pressure. He was blonde and his eyes were as vacant as mine. I should have gone to med school instead of dolling up the dead. Maybe I could have been on the other side of the CDC containment line. The side with answers and solutions. The side with sickeningly healthy heroes fighting the clock to destroy the orange menace. But I was not. I was on this side with no answers except maybe what the blonde could give me.

“So, what brings you here today,” he asked holding a stethoscope to my back asking me to breath in and out. I let go. I told him everything. I told him who I was and what I had done. I told him about Dr. Mallon and his new friend. I told him about the dream and the cold. I told him about Alicia and the abomination we saw growing out of the bio-hazard bag. I told him I thought we were fucked. I told him about the fungus.

“Can you describe the fungus?” he asked, forefingers steepled in front of his mouth.

“It was orange and…” I began again, even though I had already described it in some detail he cut me off.

“Why don’t you tell me what you really want?” he demanded. The blonde’s expression took on the air of offense.

“I don’t understand…” I began until I was cut off again.

“What?! You want some Oxy? How about some good ol’ fashioned Vicodin?” he had raised his voice. Though door was open and he had gotten very loud it was still not loud enough to call any attention from the din of the rest of the emergency room

“I don’t want — drugs, I want — to get rid of this infection and point someone in the direction of a hazard,” I pronounced cut off occasionally by my own coughing. The fungus in me literally tried to choke my throat shut to stop me from talking but I persisted. I wasn’t exhibiting any drug seeking behavior. I just wanted to stop being sick. To keep others from getting sick. It was the most I’d wanted for anyone else.

“I want you to go back into the forest,” he said “and do your damn job.”

A crust in his ear. A rust dusting off an old bicycle. The fine amber flecks on the inside of Dr. Mallon’s abdominal wall. The blonde was infected. The horrific noise outside had died. I rose from the table in a paper gown. Adults, children, the elderly, nurses, all looked at me. I began running but they didn’t give chase. Leaving my clothes I ran bare-assed out through the waiting room. The coughing and grunting had ceased. My keys were in my pants so I ran. I ran and coughed until I realized no one was chasing me. They let me go. I puked blood and orange puss on the side of the road. My chest burned. My head pounded. I am dying.

I staggered up the road on bloody feet passing empty houses and closed business. I sat on the sidewalk somewhere on the main drag and started picking glass shards out of my soles. The homeless man with the bloody fist was lying in an atrium across the street. He was slumped over, not breathing. I looked at the ghost town and knew we were fucked, until a car started coming down the street heading towards the courthouse. It was a sheriff’s cruiser. He slowed and pulled alongside me.

“Are you alright sir?” he asked without getting out of the car. Could it be? Could someone have evaded the fungus? He was a county sheriff. If he was obliged to patrol the county outside of town and away from the court house it’s very possible he’s in control of himself. I stood in his presence and wiped the street dirt from my ass.

“No I’m not, but I’m sure glad to see you sir. There’s something going on here,” I said “the town is getting sick. We need help.” The sheriff got out of his car, gave me a field sobriety test, and asked me from which hospital I had escaped. Big as hell with giant dark eyes. He looked good in khaki.

“Alright. Let’s get you back to the hospital,” he said.

“No!” I cried “it’s not safe. Besides she’s in trouble!” ‘she?’…who was I talking about? Why was I lying to this man? I had no idea where he could find anyone.

“Who?” he asked.

“I don’t know her name officer. She’s in the woods. She was sick like me. Her leg is broken,” it lied through me “I can take you to her.” I knew where the infection started but I wasn’t taking him there. I was taking him to the woods where I had woken up. I wasn’t free. I was on the short leash and the thoughtful fungus just pulled the string.

We walked alone on the end of our journey towards the end of our lives. The path had been lost long ago. I didn’t know where I was taking us but the damned orange did. Trees seemed to sway wrong. Leaves fell even though it was summer and the animals were being unusually quiet. Sticks and rocks broke underfoot. The sheriff called for the woman I had made up in the forest. Imagine my surprise when someone answered back. We followed the noise and found Alicia looking ragged. I wanted to ask her how she was, if she was OK, I wanted to tell her it was going to be alright. My throat got tighter. She was covered in dirt and muck, shovel in hand, and standing before a gigantic pit. She must have been digging it since we left each other. It was massive, when I peered down into it I saw nothing but the dark. I felt like some demon or horror stood on the bottom of the pit, meeting my gaze.

Alicia fell to her knees calling my attention and the attention of the sheriff away from the pit and back to her. When he turned to face Alicia I reached for the pistol holstered in his side. In one fluid motion I unsnapped it and pulled it out of its holster. As he turned our eyes met. He was astonished and I was surprised even though my face was incapable of showing it. I put two in his neck. I had become a character in a song lyric. The wanderer who shot a cop. He gurgled and spat blood and tumbled backwards into the pit.

Alicia continued to convulse in front of the massive hole she’d put in the forest. ‘Kill me’ she whispered. I did, not because she asked me to, no mercy. It was the plan the orange filth inside wanted. In an accelerated growth pattern her hives broke open, spilling seed into the air and anchoring themselves into the girls body. I kicked her into the pit with the sheriff. Strange seed in her and the fertilizer of a lawman would begin to grow into something ominous. Something horrible. I picked up her shovel and went deeper into the forest to start digging a new pit. There were others like me, digging, luring, not choosing. There must be some way I can break out of this.

The sun began to rise as I got up and approached the pit. I stopped trying to figure out what this was. The slime was seeping out of my nose with cerebral spinal fluid. A hand wiped it off and flicked it on what must have been the last clean spot in the forest. It gaped before me. A snow of spores danced on the stench wafting up from the bottom. I surveyed the land about me. Leaves on trees were replaced by alien bulbs transparent and orange like amber jellyfish. Red fluids pulsed inside them. Three large stalks rose above the canopy deep in the forest tall as cellphone towers. The push hadn’t come from within yet but I could feel it was immanent. I hocked an orange chunk of snot at a nearby squirrel. I thought about Alicia, I thought about the sheriff, and the doctor. Some gardeners we turned out to be. We made the outside of this world match our corrupted insides. A laugh emerged, a contaminated tear, and a tumble into the soft below.