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since he’d been out of the Army, he was on a schedule.
    But his mind fell into memory as it often did and he was in a warehouse in Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm, a Graves Registration Specialist with the 24 th Infantry Division. The fighting was hot and heavy and the bodies kept coming in—Americans, Kuwaitis, coalition troops—so many that they could not be properly processed and they were heaped like cordwood and he was alone with them in the dead of night: chalky faces spattered with blood, tangled limbs, cleaved torsos, a jigsaw of human anatomy that had to be sorted and identified even though the latter was pretty much impossible and many of the remains shipped stateside were of doubtful identification.
    “ Just give ‘em something,” Major Colbert had said. “Give ‘em something to bury. Anything.”
    They just kept coming in and the process of sorting them went on day after day after day until the system was so overwhelmed it began to collapse under its own weight. Understaffed, undersupplied, there was little to do but pile the dead soldiers in heaps and work through them a little bit at a time.
    Henry worked the night shift, sifting and sorting, bagging and identifying… and then one night as he stared at the jumble of corpses he felt the old unnatural urges take hold of him until he was sweating and shivering, aroused to the point of pain. Nobody would know. Nobody would see him. He was all alone.
    So he crawled into the sea of the dead, sliding like a worm through the charnel depths, sinking himself in the litter of war and he was content. He was happy. That constant gnawing in his belly was satisfied. He was among the dead he so loved, secreted there amongst the cold meat. It was all so calming that he must have fallen asleep because that’s where they found him the next morning—
    Henry licked his lips and set the girl down.
    (what kind of animal are you, son? what the hell made you desecrate the dead?)
    He jumped into the grave.
    Spade in hand, he began to dig, to unearth the coffin he had stolen and secretly buried here by moonlight under a thin layer of soil in the open grave.
    Stolen?
    Hardly. It was not exactly theft when something was already in the possession of the family. After all, it had been his grandmother’s coffin, hadn’t it? Gramma Reese, the supreme shrew who had bitched no less than three husbands into the grave. After thirty years in the family vault the old whore had scarce need of a coffin.
    Henry grinned as he remembered that night.
    Exhuming the old witch beneath the wan light of a thin-edged moon. Scattering her bones like jackstraw in the night. Relieving himself on her, anointing the sacred cow in piss. Later, he had come back and gathered her bones up and dumped them back in the vault so a scavenging dog didn’t make off with one of Granny’s femurs. Something like that could cause trouble… raise questions.
    And Henry had always been so devilishly careful.
    Gramma Reese surely had not been the first he’d exhumed. Nor the last. There’d been plenty back in the good old days when it was all just good, clean fun. Not like now. Not serious business.
    Behind him, Worm was worrying at the girl.
    (she’ll need discipline again, a firm hand)
    “ Leave her alone,” Henry snapped at her.
    Worm knew how to obey. He didn’t like to be stern with her, but sometimes he had to be. Left unsupervised, Worm could get out of hand. She would bite the girl and Henry didn’t want that.
    “ Here’s what we’ve been waiting for, Lisa,” he said in a lewd whisper, throwing open the unearthed coffin. “A nice quiet place for you to rest.”
     
    9
    Sometime later: a sound of tapping, thudding.
    Lisa Coombes opened her eyes, closed them. Opened them again, saw only darkness. There was an aching throb in her head and a sticky, warm wetness at the back of her neck. Thoughts raced through her mind. Gray thoughts, shapeless thoughts lacking both form and content.
    Thud.
    The