In-Vocation
It had fast become apparent that I'd chosen the wrong profession---Caretaker of the Allegheny County Cemetery. Earn a respectable living my ass.
My mother pressured me, "It's the family business. It means so much to the community. And besides, there's never a dull day." I was too busy reading X-Files fanfiction to really do too well in high school. So college was out. Any other decade and I'd be in the mills, but the city has turned from steel to rust and I'm too afraid of crossing the midwest to move. Family business it is.
The day she retired, I picked up my mother's weeding tools, shovel and khaki jacket intent on proving her wrong. Maybe if I fucked it up enough she'd get off my ass and let me apply to Mellon bank, do call center shit like everybody else.
I parked my car on Butler street and made a mental note that at least Lawerenceville was a prime spot for happy hour after work. Keys in the metal chain on the gate, a little moping hobble down the path and I'm knee deep in 200 plus years of skeletons. It would be creepy if I hadn't spent so much time here for "Take your spawn to work".
So I'm digging on the hillside, pulling dandelion out of soil that probably used to be Harold Knipple's dick. Wait, his name was actually--?
And at that point a loud crash, like the Port Authority collided with the T, but coming straight from the sky and shit, was it always this dark? A big heavy wind curls up my arms and burrows right where my brain keeps fight and flight. Creaking, snapping---and I shit you not a skeletal hand, wedding right attached shoot up an inch from my face, writhing in bottled up anguish. I do a little sigh that at least maybe Harry knew true love when it hits me that HOLY FUCKING SHIT and I grab my hand me down shovel and am booking it. I'm running like a college student who woke up drunk in the Hill District, hands, feet, severed skulls in all levels of decomposition are bursting from the graves all around me. I level my shovel like Roberto Clemente and knock the cranium of one Baxter Patterson the entire way to PNC Park.
They're coming up nearly whole now and there's no way I can take them all. Some have risen completely and are taking lurching, staggering steps at me. I haven't felt this hunted since the last time I went to Mario's in a skirt. My boots are flying down blacktop now and I'm nearly there back to Butler street. A hand with some of the meat still attached has wormed it way in to my sock. Another grasps at my sleeve and rips apart a huge chunk of the fabric. Closer, closer, closer---and those fuckers can send my 3 hours pay in the mail because shit I'm in Lawrenceville and if there was a place where the zombie Apocalypse wouldn't cause the batting of an eye it's here.
"GUYS, GUYS, help! Also, run! But also help! Holy shit. Holy fucking shit." I don't have time to close the gate but I'm barreling down towards bars with twinkle lights and artisan ice cream. I can hear the slapping of funeral loafers behind me and I know there's at least one corpse on my trail.
"Hey bro" says some dude in flannel, swaggering on over to me "No means no motherfucker, not cool." And before I have a second to process that this is fucking happening, the zombie takes his first bite of hipster's tattooed forearm.
The next time I get wifi I'm submitting my resume to Mellon Bank.