Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks

Author:Micah Dean Hicks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

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When she got to the plant, Jane went to the payroll office to pick up her check. It wasn’t much, about the same as she had made at the grocery store, but better than not having a job at all. Looking over her pay stub, Jane saw that her job title was listed as “Pig.” Hogboss had said they weren’t hiring any new human workers. He must have lied on her paperwork so that Corporate would okay the job.

There were a dozen working screens in the security room now. Jane turned the lights off and swiveled back and forth in her chair, submerged in the glow of monitors. She’d found an old boom box and set it up under the desk, filling the room with crackling, tinny sound. Her ghost couldn’t read people as clearly through the video feeds, but it could pick up a few things, worries and fears that were written right on their faces. It sent Jane an unending stream of heartache and bitterness, soaking up their secret thoughts.

There was a crew of boys who worked packing the cut meat with gloved hands and hairnets, shifting from leg to leg in the chill of the cooler. They were the ones who’d tried to hurt Henry and Dennis. Their faces were bruised and swollen, all of them marked from the fight. They were angry, wanted to get even with Bethany. As they grabbed bloody chunks of meat and slapped them down on Styrofoam trays, violent fantasies curled through them like thorns. They imagined Bethany on her knees, begging. When one of the pig workers walked through the room with a clipboard, they imagined throwing him down on the floor and hacking him to pieces. One of the boys thought of Jane’s brother standing with Dennis at school. She changed the monitor to a different feed.

After flipping through cameras for a while, Jane rewound footage until she saw Trigger and his father, insulated in their heavy suits, spraying the empty workrooms of the plant down with corrosive foam. His father was hollowed out, struck with the new loss of his son, while Trigger was ashamed that he was so happy to have his ghost gone. Their minds blew about, as light and skeletal as dead leaves.

On another monitor, she saw night footage of a crowd of ghosts surrounding an antique grinder. A ghostly man had gotten caught in the machine up to his shoulder. The others stood around him, shouting and shoving, cigarettes falling from their mouths. She knew that they would argue and wail until the man’s blood muddied their shoes, until he finally passed out. Then the ghosts would take their knives and cut him out of the machine. They would lay him down on the floor, and then the whole scene would dissolve into cigarette smoke and fog, waiting to repeat itself tomorrow.

Someone knocked on the door and wheeled in a stack of new monitors and cables. Jane spent a few hours hooking it all up, letting her ghost feel out whether there were spirits trapped in any piece of the equipment.

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