Necropolis Now 1



  Necropolis Now 1

  by

  SaJoBa

  Published by:

  Necropolis Now

  There’s a War on for Your Brain

  Copyright © 2013 by SaJoBa

  * * * * *

  Necropolis Now One

  Raisinville, Ohio. Last Summer.

  Jim Bradford’s face wrinkled in disgust as he paused at the cemetery gates. Even in the falling dusk light, the scene was horrific.

  “Hey, Chief, this is the worst one yet,” Morris Bruiner said, sharing the view.

  Police Chief Bradford didn’t look at his only fulltime officer. “It’s only going to get worse with the college students back in class.” He put his hands on his hips and glared out over the gravestones dripping with red. “You’d think the kids around here would find something better to do, something more creative than tease a poor town’s graveyard.”

  Morris shrugged, grinning a little too much for Bradford’s liking. “They only got the bowling alley and the movie theater here in Raisinville, Chief. Aside from that, nothing left but running them out of the make-out points. It’s just some mischief.”

  “Stop your justifying, Bruiner,” Bradford snapped. “Decimating a graveyard is a serious offense. It only leads to worse crimes in a juvenile’s future. You want us to be the breeding ground to a generation of criminals?”

  “Kind of dramatic, Chief,” Morris said, but slid the grin off his face. He sighed, relenting to see things the way his boss did—as always. “No, I don’t want spawning a wave of serial killers to put us on the map.”

  Chief Bradford opened the rusty gates to the cemetery. “Come on. Let’s get a head count and make a list of possible perps.”

  Bruiner swallowed his first retort and followed the Chief into the cemetery. It was a smattering of gravestones, ranging from newly-buried Reverend Clymer to some of Raisinville’s founding fathers. They waded between the grave markers, sending a few nods to the mammoth ones standing over the 200-year-old Crupper family plots and the detailed Catholic markers draped with angels and mourning doves. These were untouched; it was the chess piece-looking stones that wore the grisly red liquid.

  The night was warm, the final humid mists of summer shrouding the yard as dusk succumbed to night. With the dark came a weird fog thick with unfallen rain, making the stone and gray grass seem strangely without color.

  Except the red. That, Chief Bradford and Morris Bruiner noted, was eerily red, even in the filmy moonlight clouded in the heavens.

  They stopped before a tall rook-looking gravestone where the red liquid drizzled down the front of the stone. It shined slick and scarlet, moving slowly downward as if feeding into Old Man Rappaport’s grave below.

  Chief Bradford took a tissue from his pocket and touched it to the red ooze. “It isn’t ketchup this time,” he said with frown, examining the shade of red on the tissue. “Consistency of something finer, more-syrupy than ketchup.”

  Bruiner squatted beside the stone, nodding as he studied the red ooze. “Real blood?”

  Chief Bradford gave him a scowl. “No. I was thinking maybe half-set gelatin.”

  Bruiner grinned and stood up. “Now that’s a bit more creative than last time.”

  “Maybe you can put that in your report while you make a list of kids known for this type of decimation,” the Chief snapped, shaking out another tissue. “Maybe you can decide if it was cherry or strawberry Jell-O, or if it was sugar-free or regular, too.”

  Bruiner wished he hadn’t made light of the issue. “Just a joke, Chief.”

  “Tell that to Rappaport who’s got goop all over him.”

  Bruiner caught the red-spotted tissue Chief Bradford tossed at him. “I’ll make a list. The usual suspects, I suppose.”

  Chief Bradford straightened and gazed around the 100-foot-square cemetery. “Get with the truant officer at the high school. See if anyone’s absent lately.”

  Bruiner was looking at the tissue, watching the red spots bleed onto the clean areas. “Why? School just started. No time for truancy yet.”

  Chief Bradford’s jaw set in his stony face. “Because it’s only Wednesday and this is the third time this graveyard’s been messed up since Sunday. Someone’s got a lot of spare time. What the hell are you doing?”

  Bruiner had the tissue to his nose, sniffing the red spots. He lowered the tissue, an uneasy look washing over his face. “This doesn’t smell fruity.”

  “What kind of fool comment—?”

  “I mean it doesn’t smell like fruit Jell-O,” Bruiner added. “I don’t think it’s gelatin or jelly. It’s not...pleasant at all.”

  A different stiffness came to Chief Bradford’s expression. He looked back to Rappaport’s marker. “Take another sample. We’ll run a lab on it.”