Basement
The furnace in the basement of the Miller Building had a pulse. If you sat on the low wooden stool by the intake valves long enough—past midnight, when the hum of the city above thinned to a greasy wire—you could feel the rhythm of it through the soles of your shoes. Thump. Thump-shudder. Pause. It wasn't mechanical. It sounded like something large, heavy, and ancient shifting its weight beneath a frozen floorboards.
Leo didn't like the basement. Nobody liked the basement, but the night shift required a ritual sacrifice of dignity, and Leo’s portion was checking the boiler pressure at three o'clock.
He unlatched the heavy iron door of the incinerator room. The air smelled of burnt hair and wet lime. On the center slab—not even rolled into a body bag yet, just dumped under a stained canvas tarp like an old rug—lay the intake from Ward 4.
Leo didn't check the tag. He didn't want to know the name. Names made things sticky; names made you look too closely at the ears, the shape of the chin, the way a specific shadow fell across a cheekbone and reminded you of someone you used to drink with in another life, back before the town changed its shape.
He reached for the edge of the canvas.
His fingers met skin that wasn't cold. It was greasy and tepid, like lard left out in an August kitchen.
When he pulled the fabric back, the fluorescent strip overhead gave a long, wet flicker. The man on the table was middle-aged, wearing a gray Sears windbreaker soaked through with dark, oily water from the river. But it was his left forearm that caught the sickly green glare of the room. A brand-new tattoo, the edges still weeping yellow lymph and dark indigo ink into the pale hairs of the wrist.
Don't bury me. I'm not done.
A drop of sweat rolled down the bridge of Leo’s nose, catching on his lip. It tasted salt-flat and bitter.
He knew that ink. It was the same shade of blue-black they used at the tattoo parlor down by the lumber yards—the one that burned down in '74, the one that didn't have any windows.
Thump.
The boiler shuddered behind the concrete wall.
On the table, the dead man’s eyelids didn't flutter. They simply rolled back, wet and yellowed like peeled hard-boiled eggs, revealing eyes that were entirely too wide, fixed on a ceiling that hadn't been painted since the Eisenhower administration.
From deep inside the man’s chest, beneath the soaked windbreaker, came the dry, rustling sound of autumn leaves being dragged across asphalt.
"You missed a spot, Leo," the corpse said. Its jaw didn't move; the voice seemed to rise straight out of the drain in the center of the concrete floor, echoing up through the soles of his shoes. "The ink’s still wet. It doesn't take if the blood's already cold."
Leo looked down at his own hands. His palms were stained dark blue, right up to the cuffs.