The Right Thing To Do

By Rick Hartford

There is a body in the street.

There is no traffic, no sounds of automobiles, other than a far away jingle of an ice cream truck.

It’s a small world after all.

The body, dressed in a dirty white suit, looks like a crumpled discarded Kleenex.

It could be a man or a woman.

Cones have been set up at each end of the intersection to prevent rubberneckers. No one will come to this fallen person’s aid.

No one will see the body, except for two sets of eyes behind blinds of the house in front of which the body lay.

“Should we go for it?” Betsy asked.

“No. Not safe,” I said, as a white van with no windows passed the body, stopped, and then slowly backed up until the van was a few yards from it.

‘See what I mean?”

Two men in what looked like white space suits emerged from the back of the van, wearing respirators and safety goggles. They lifted the body, one holding the hands and another the feet, then tossing it into the back of the van like a sack of potatoes. It made an ugly thumping noise.

“Yep. Plague’s over,” Betsy said.

She and I continued to look through the blinds.

There would be more bodies around town, more arrivals of the van and others like it until they were all riding low on their springs, packed with dead people.

The government announced the end of the plague a month ago.

Masks are no longer necessary. In fact it has been made clear that they are more than frowned upon by the newly liberated citizenry. Wearing masks has been deemed to be a threat to the school children as the masks themselves have been determined to transmit the disease.

Betsy and I saw one man in a mask running away from a group of hecklers, falling to one knee when struck by a rock thrown from the crowd behind him. He hurriedly got to his feet, blood running down his white tee shirt, and ran away.

Heckling will soon turn to lynching.

So the maskers, like us, stay indoors. .

Sometime in the beginning of the plague, we clung to the science. You wore a mask and you went about your business. But science doesn’t count anymore.The scientists have stopped talking, other than to say that the plague is over, clasping their hands in front of them as they read their lines from the prompter in front of the television camera.

Civilization will remain intact.

Government has adopted the herd immunity theory. Some must die so that others may live. It is a war against the disease. And, as in any war, truth is sacrificed for the greater good.

Sometimes at night we can see the light from fires down the street, The rumors are that they are burning people at the stake.

The Modern Dark Ages.

There were certain advantages in this new world.

One of the byproducts of the plague was the proliferation of drone deliveries.

Safe. Swift. Successful.

At first it was an exciting novelty, to see your package delivered to your door by a little helicopter.

But after a while everybody was doing it, and drones were like dragonflies, flitting up and down the streets, hovering over the door steps, crossing paths with other drones with inches to spare..

Crimes of opportunity followed, with thieves would track deliveries and then swoop down with their own drones and steal packages right from the front steps.

In response to this the police bought their own drones into play, following the criminal drones which followed the delivery drones.

The skies were getting crowded. The air began to roar like a tornado.

One day, Betsy and I saw a rather large drone flying unsteadily up the street, weaving back and forth, losing and then gaining altitude and then crash landing on the sidewalk right in front of us.

It disengaged its package and took off and went unsteadily down the street where it took a corner and disappeared.

I ran out and picked it up, and then ran back to the house. Once inside, we looked the package over. The address had been obliterated in the crash.

The box was two feet square and it was quite heavy.

“Should we open it up? Or try to return it?” I asked Betsy.

“Return it to who?” She asked.

“Well maybe we don’t have to do a thing. A lot of these packages have tracking. When the owner doesn’t get what he expected he can merely ask the shipping company to track it and they’ll follow it right to this street.

So we put it on the kitchen table.

“Aren’t you curious?” Betsy said.

“It could be medical supplies. Something for a diabetic. Somebody might have already died waiting to get this,” Betsy said.

“We’d better open it up, Just in case.”

“It could be the blob,” I said.

“What if there’s a million dollars in there? Would you keep it?” Betsy asked.

“What if it’s the blob?” I said.

“You can play Steve McQueen,” Betsy said. She walked over to the pantry and retrieved the fire extinguisher, handing it to me.

“If we open the box we are responsible for whatever happens. That’s what Pandora said. I think.”

“It’s called destiny,” Betsy said, putting a little exotic spin on it.

I got out a box cutter from the junk drawer in the kitchen, carefully slitting the two sides and then the tape down the middle. It was a little like Christmas morning.

I opened the lid.

I don’t think there is anything more unnerving about a severed head. The unseeing eyes, open, seeming to ask so many questions.

“Get the car,” I said.

. What are we going to do?” Betsy said.

“Make it somebody else’s problem.”

I hurriedly taped the box back up and went out the back door into the garage where Betsy was sitting behind the wheel of our Impala.

“Head down to the industrial park,” I said.

The park was about three miles away. It was a Sunday so the place was deserted. I pointed to a Dumpster in back of Modern Printers. Betsy pulled over. I got out and opened the trunk, carefully lifting the box and walking over to the Dumpster. I put the box down and pushed opened the heavy steel lid. Then I lifted up the box from the ground, held it over the edge and let go, hearing the heavy box sink into the paper and cardboard scraps from the printing company.

I jogged around the car and got into the passenger seat. Neither of us talked. Betsy put the car into gear and we drove slowly out of the park.

We went straight home and pulled into the garage.

“I need a drink,” Betsy said, opening the door from the garage to the kitchen.

She walked over to the fridge and had her hand on the handle when she noticed the two men sitting at the kitchen table just as I walked in.

Betsy regretted that she hadn’t yelled to me to run. But her throat was so thick from fear she couldn’t say anything.

The two men sitting at the kitchen table looked as if they were twin morticians. Black suits. White shirts. Black ties. Funeral parlor bookends, holding their black fedoras in one hand as they sat at the kitchen table..

One of them spoke.

“You have something that belongs to our employer, Mr. Conklin.”

“I put it in a Dumpster down at the Industrial Park,” I blurted out, giving them directions and hoping they would go away, knowing that It wasn’t going to be that way.

One of the twin morticians said he was going to stay behind with Betsy as the other mortician and I were to retrieve the box.

We drove over to the industrial park in silence, with Mortician 1, or was he 2, smoking a cigarette with his left hand and pointing a gun pointed at my chest with the right.

“Those things will kill you,” I said.

“You first,” he replied.

When we got to the industrial park I pointed out the Dumpster and we parked in front of it. “Time for some Dumpster diving,” the man said, as he gestured toward the huge steel container.

I climbed up, pushed the heavy steel lid open again and hoisted myself up, looking inside the dark cavity. Then I climbed over the lid and lowered myself and then dropped the last two feet to the bottom.

Swishing the paper and cardboard aside I worked the entire length of the unit until my right foot hit something.

After what I had seen in the box there was only way this was going to go. They were never going to give us a free ride after getting Mr.Conklin’s head back.

I called up to the man, my voice making a shaky echo inside the steel enclosure.

“Give me a hand,” I said. I’m going to lift the box up to you.”

The mortician put his gun in his pants pocket and then pulled himself up to the opening and hung over the side, his legs dangling on the outside.

“I’m ready, give it to me,” he said.

I reached up and grabbed the man’s outstretched hands.

The last thing he said was: “Don’t!”

When it was over I sank to my knees beside the man’s body after hitting him in the side of his head with the hammer I had managed to grab and stuff into my pants when we went into the garage.

There was one other thing which had to be done. I looked at the box cutter in my hand.

Back at the house, I parked the car in the garage and went around to the passenger side, collecting the box.

I opened the kitchen door slowly.

Betsy and the other mortician were standing in the middle of the kitchen, a gun pointed at her head.

'Where is my brother?”

I placed the box on the kitchen table.

“He lost his head,” I said.

“You’ve done something to him.”

I shrugged.

“Open it, he said, taking a step toward the kitchen counter, pointing his gun right at me.

I obliged.

He looked inside the box. He looked at me.

He let out a dry chuckle.

“Lost his head, Indeed.”

“What are you going to do with us?” Betsy said.

I had a firm grip on the hammer in my lap, ready to leap across the counter.

“Where’s Mr. Conklin?” He asked.

“In the trunk.” I said.

“Time’s a wasting,” he said. “I need to get him connected to the rest of his body before the wake this evening.”

“So why did you cut his head off?” Betsy said.

“I didn’t. His wife did it. They had an argument when he found out she was having an affair with my brother, who you just killed. Now she feels bad about it and wants to get Mr. Conklin’s head reconnected with his body before the funeral. She said it was the right thing to do, seeing as he left her a very large inheritance. And you just solved the other problem she had. What to do with my brother.”

The mortician rose.

‘Give me the keys to the car.”

Which I did.

It was the right thing to do.

“