Digger

By Rain Sullivan

Published in Elegant Literature Magazine, June 2023

When they slap your window at two AM, flexing their badge and thumbing their Glock, you get up, nod, show ‘em your keys, and move out. They don’t want you clogging up the street; you don’t want them flashin’ red and blue. Shit’s annoying. Plus, they flash and every mother fucker around knows your make and model like that. I may live in a beat-up Civic from the dark ages but it’s a shit-ton better than pitching poles in the Jungle—Seattle’s Skid Row. Believe me.

But it isn’t the cops this time. And when I open my eyes, expecting to get laser beamed in the retina by a baton disguised as a standard issue flashlight, I see nothing but a backlit blood-five on my windshield. The flickering streetlight overhead brightens like a fuse, turning the mark candy-apple red, then snaps to black, removing it and everything else from existence. Nightmare, yup, just another nightmmmm—

The light crackles back to life. Fuck. Not a nightmare. Someone’s nasty-ass blood and all five fingerprints are on my windshield. Probably some shit-for-brains tweaker probed too deep. Half the junkies out here don’t know the first thing about shooting up, every one of ‘em’s got a patchwork of burst blood vessels and puncture wounds from wrist to elbow.

I reach for my phone, immediately dousing the bright screen against my chest. Bringing it low, beneath the height of the back seat where I sleep, I change my alarm from five to four. Gettin’ up in an hour and fifty-seven minutes is gonna suck some serious ballsack but I can’t let my boss know.

Right now, I gotta J-O-B: front desk at a gym. Perfect gig for a house-less piece of shit, by the way. No one knows I sleep in the car I pull up in. No one knows my logo-stamped polo and kakis are one of two complete outfits I own. And no one knows that that shower, and that laundry machine, and that microwave that smells like hoisin and fish sauce are the only amenities I got besides this car. But they will know if I show up with a bloody handprint on my windshield…

Tap-tap-tap. My phone flies out of my hand and hits the roof so hard it comes down twice as fast. Someone’s staring down at me through the backseat window, their knocking knuckle still poised against the glass. I half-expect it to be the cops, I half-expect it to be some methhead, but this guy's face is stone-cold, and his all-black get-up and throat tats—a choker made of daggers—make me think ‘law-breaker’ not ‘law enforcer.’

His index finger uncoils, then beckons twice. I reach for my phone. Tap-tap. This time it isn’t a knuckle against my window, it’s a barrel. Fucker. The man doesn’t have to say shit, I read  his point-blank stare loud and clear. Leave the phone, come with me, or get a bullet to the brain.

I shimmy out of my sleeping bag, sort of. It sticks to my sweaty hands and snags my jeans. Even once I’m out of my polyester tube I’m fighting it as I tug on my boots.

My heart flogs my guts as I reach for the lock, a crystal clear warning not to remove the last barrier between before—house-less, broke, safe in my shitty car—and what’s to come. I step out of the vehicle biting my inner cheek so hard a welt forms between my teeth. 

“I didn’t see any—”

“Shut the fuck up,” he hisses. The barrel lands between my brows and the cool metal ring of the shaft seems to cut right through my skin to my skull. Tension ripples from the crown of my head down to where my teeth root into my jaw. “Walk.” He juts his chin, pointing where to go. I turn and walk, more aware of the gun’s new postion against the nape of my neck than anything else in this world.

My mental map of the city dissolves. We take lefts and rights, we go down a flight of stone steps I don’t recognize, and enter an underground tunnel fit with a single yellow bulb. Rats scurry by and I’m jealous of their insignificance. We resurface and evergreens stand like stone walls all around us. I’ve always been inner-city trash who gets a semi-hard-on for nature and shit like that, but not tonight. Their tops bow inward, forming a cage, and their wind-swept needles scratch the black night like fingernails. 

My stomach tightens as recognition plunks down one poisonous drop at a time. The hill we stand on is no mere mound, and there’s a reason a spot as prime as this hasn’t yet been infested by the likes of me. Not even low lifes and drug addicts wanna sleep atop dead bodies. 

Headstones jut up like middle fingers, mocking me for my slow uptake. Something happened, I don’t know what, but it doesn’t fucking matter, I saw it, a red handprint, and now this dude with the throat tats needs to clean up.

Kill me in my car and I’m a breadcrumb: a body linked to a time, a place, a set of plates. But out here, in the dead of night, me and my recollection, slight as it may be, vanish. 

The man hands me a shovel, turns off the safety I wasn’t aware had been on this whole goddam time, and says, “Dig.”

Shaking hard, I grip the handle and drive the blade down. It sinks too easily into the earth and again the headstones mock me. This soil is not hard-packed for a reason. I check the date on the stone I stand two feet from and, sure enough, Simeon Chun DDS died four days ago. 

Theories spring up before I can stop them. Is this a grave-digging operation? Was Simeon Chun loaded? DDS… so… maybe? What about the handprint? I sneak a glance at the man with the gun, he now sits behind me, ass propped on a headstone like it's a stool. I pivot incrementally to get a better look. A mask of shadows conceals his face but his gun-wielding hand is pale and unstained in the meager moonlight. 

“I wouldn't slow down if I were you, you might diminish your worth.” 

My worth? 

The evergreens do more than rustle. Cracks and snaps draw my attention to the far edge of the cemetery. Three men come barreling through the dark. They match the guy who sits behind me: black garb, stoic stares, neck tats. The same daggers, all in an unbreakable chain. 

There’s whimpering, moaning. The man in the back of the group buckles slightly as something tugs his arm. He’s dragging something.

“Don’t stop digging,” the guy behind me urges. Fear and anxiety and fucking nerves quicken my pace more than anything I’m bringing to the table. 

It’s a canvas bag, a massive sack of potatoes—

Nope. My gut erupts with repulsion. I cover my mouth.

“Ah-ah-ah,” the man behind me comes to a stand, aims his gun at me, and grins. Silver teeth reflect in the steely light of the cloud-trapped moon. “Don’t. Stop. Digging.”

I reclaim the shovel but my arms are over-cooked spaghetti. The men approaching say nothing by way of introduction, they simply nod and eye the canvas sack. Bloody Rorschach images stain the fabric and sounds, human sounds, thread through the burlap and needle into my skin.

“I”—nausea threatens to knock me on my ass—“can’t—” I exhale nothing but air after that. Not a fucking word. Numbly, I scrape at the ground. I can’t see past the bloody shapes in my mind: a body, limbs, chopped, hacked. For some reason, I keep seeing eyeballs, Halloween-esque eyeballs, all gooey and unblinking. I peek at the bag again. Someone’s in there, someone’s dying but not yet dead, and I might spew chunks all over them in their last shitty seconds of life.

“Dig, Dipshit.” My guy, the likely leader of the Dagger-Tat Dudes, breaks from a whispered conversation with his accomplices.

The bag jolts; the blood stains gather clumps of soil from the ground as whoever’s inside rocks and bucks. 

“I can’t kill—” The words are so pathetically breathy as they leave me that I’m unsure if I made my message heard. “I can’t kill—”

“Ass-hat,” Leader says, “I’m not fucking asking you to kill, I’m telling you to dig.” He turns his gun from me to the bagged body and fires. The shot is quieter than expected, than should be legal. The body in the bag stops bucking, stops moaning. The bag begins to leak tenfold. 

Salt stings my eyes and my muscles recoil so fiercely it's like I’m the one who’s been shot, every bit of me hiding in plain fucking sight. 

Leader jerks his head and his collared dogs run off, blending into the dark.

“I know your type,” Leader says, “bum kid, tweaker mom, clawing your way out one shitty paycheck at a time.” I dig, driving the black blade into the even blacker soil. “You ain’t never gettin’ out, kid. This is America and you ain’t never gettin’ out.” My core tightens; my grip tightens. My chest bears down on the rise and fall of my lungs, refusing me my right to air and space. “What they pay you?”

I don’t answer, not out of fear or reluctance, but… shame. I’m embarrassed to admit that after two years of working the same fucking job, under the same dick-head manager, I still make minimum wage, I still live in my car. I’m embarrassed to tell a goddam murderer with a neck tat that I’m a worthless piece of shit.

“That’s what I thought,” he says. He grins again, grabs a shovel, and we dig until my blade nicks the casket. Two feet deep, not six. Everybody’s cutting corners these days. Leader hands me a crowbar and I pry the casket open.

Simeon Chun DDS is quite possibly the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen, smelled, felt… My stomach’s had enough and everything I’ve spent good money on today, yesterday, comes up in shades of brown.

“No matter, dude’s dead.” Leader double-claps my shoulder, then offers me a hand as we climb out of Chun’s grave. The body in the bag lands beside the dentist, right in my upchuck with a soul-sucking thunk.

Leader snaps the lid shut and looks me square in the face. His eyes have lost their shine. “Could you have buried him on your own?”

“What?” I breathe.

“Gun to your head,” he chuckles, the irony, “could you have dug down, popped the lid, and gotten What’s-His-Face all cozy on your own?”

My eyes dart, I can feel them, actually feel them, failing to see and soak in information. “I guess,” I say. “Yeah.” One perk of working at a gym is unlimited access to heavy shit. But the digging and the corpse tossing weren’t the hard parts…

“Could you cover it now?” Leader looks down at the exposed casket. “Pack the dirt like it was before?”

I nod. Seems my vocal cords, like my eyes, have checked the fuck out. 

“Good.” Leader slams a fat stack into my hand. I look down to find a wad of hundos. “Half now, half when it’s done.” I’ve never seen so much money in my life. When I finally lift my gaze to meet his, he’s gone. I stash the cash, finish the job, and sprint like a goddam athlete to my car.

The blood-stain is gone and bleach saturates the soggy city air. A note on my dash reads: 

Tomorrow. 11:45 pm. Pioneer Square.

Welcome to the team, Digger. 

Thank you for reading. <3 Rain