2033 is the Kept Year
And a Maggot-Riddled Raccoon Warns Prophetic
Gibson didn’t like shoes on his rugs. However, he found it difficult to articulate that precisely in that moment, at the tail end of a thunderstorm that would leave the sky raw and gray for days, like flank stank pounded so brutally that it took up the gray color of the counter top. He didn’t like shoes on his rugs, but everyone’s boots were so dirty that he doubted any speck of sole was actually making contact. They were all slipping and coasting along on layers of gritty mud.
The meeting had Gibson, Neubert, Rackley, Dendils, Phillips, Krepick, and Hayes. Everyone had been called, but few had come, most citing the storm as the reason they refused to travel the paltry number of miles to Gibson’s respectable 14 Sea Breeze Drive. This was it, the moment they’d all been waiting for, given up their lives for, and still they didn’t come.
Gibson had ordered a party sub and laid out bowls of snacks with dozens of bottles of beer, like they were going to watch a game on his big screen. He’d planned for it the only way he knew how, but at least he understood how vital it was. The wives hadn’t. Every last one of them had gone, and more than a year ago too.
That was impressive in and of itself. Most cults had women in them; he’d heard it argued that the whole point of arrangements like theirs was for one man to secure sexual access to multiple women. He’d also heard that people had different brains when they were in a cult, and in different ways. A man’s cult brain convinced him to sacrifice himself, completely and quickly as possible. A woman’s cult brain convinced her to disappear into the background, become so many different forms of foundation for a new society.
That was neither here nor there, because the Brotherhood of Exhumation was not a cult. If it was Gibson had lost the love of his life and his daughter for nothing. If it was he’d donated his country acres to a bunch of nutty people who wanted to repeatedly bury and exhume the recently dead to call their spirits back from the grave.
It sounded crazy, but everything sounded crazy these days, even the crack of thunder outside. Gibson’s windows were reinforced with storm shutters, but they weren’t the bunkering-up of paranoia. They were just what you did now that the storms in the summer got so loud that they shattered windows. Climate change they said.
If you asked Gibson, it was his daughter who was really in a cult, watching all of those damned inane animal videos on the internet. Her and everyone else, all day long, even playing them on the news. She didn’t want to apply to colleges, she didn’t want to get a job, and worst of all she didn’t want to sit with them at the dinner table.
Of course Gibson didn’t want to sit there at the moment either, not when the bundle in the tarp was muscled through his entryway and lowered onto it. The wood would be stained, no question. He tried not to think about it, and he tried even harder not to say anything. Providing the house was his job; it was the others who were actually summoned to reclaim him.
Why? He wondered. Why did he not receive the call? He tried to ask when the other six men first arrived, pulling into his driveway in a pickup as rain streaked down the pavement so thickly that it formed chevrons.
They were all in gray ponchos that looked even darker under the clouds. It wasn’t midday yet, but the sun seemed to have fled from the rolling thunderheads. The thunder was constant, yet Gibson didn’t see any flashes of lightning when he held the screen door open on his front step and watched his brothers struggle with the first real prize of their… organization?
Four of them were in the vehicle’s bed, holding something down even as it prevented them from stabilizing themselves. When Rackley hopped out and opened the back water poured out like vomit, streaked with some kind of ropy grime like the drool of a drubbed freeway. Everyone moved to secure their cargo, except Krepick, who was limping because a sharp turn had tossed him out of the bed. The other brothers had almost refused to slow down enough for him to get back in.
They were all terrified that the thunder was growling, and that there was something in the sky that didn’t like what they were doing. What they did was noble, divine, revolutionary, but it had to get under a roof and out of sight as quickly as possible. That was when their boots, muddier than the current legal status of Gibson’s marriage, squeaked across his doorstep and assaulted his carpets.
“How did you know where he was?” he asked Krepick as the others fell all over themselves trying to keep the bundle off the floor until they could get it over to the dinner table. They blew right past the sandwich, chips, and booze, but the stench they brought with them didn’t. One whiff of it made everything inedible.
“I don’t know,” Krepick said, but thought of a better way of explaining it. “I wish I didn’t know. I just woke up suddenly, knowing it, and nothing else for five minutes while I figured it out. I knew it in his voice. He’s back. Brother Mazarus is back.”
“What about the rest of you?” Gibson asked, getting nods and grunts. “Why didn’t I hear him? My car would’ve been fastest.”
“We called you,” Dendils snapped at him.
“With this,” Gibson spat, holding up his smartphone. He cast it aside, to the couch. “The Brotherhood is about brothers. We’re all brothers, and we’re all in it together!”
“Exactly, we’re all here,” Dendils told him. “You want to help, help now.” He stepped back, as did the others, letting Gibson see the soaked bundle for the first time. Something was wrong. They’d all struggled with it as if it had the weight and dimensions of a man, a man that was say, five foot ten and one hundred and ninety pounds, like Brother Mazarus when he was alive.
But it was much too small, and a lot of it had to be the tarp it was tightly wrapped in. Gibson moved to the head of the table, pushing the chair aside. It groaned against the hardwood. Staring down at the tarp, he saw the surface move. Up, not down. It couldn’t just be settling. The thunder came again, shaking the house, making the lights flicker. It dropped the other men into the remaining seats around the table. The bundle quivered at the crack as well.
“This can’t be right,” the head of the house muttered. He unbuttoned his sleeves and rolled them up past his elbow as if getting ready to insert himself under a sink and fix a leaky pipe. “This isn’t Mazarus. Did you forget where we buried him? Or.. you know… where we buried him the fifth time?”
“Say that again and they’ll be calling it a doubting Gibson instead of a doubting Thomas,” Rackley warned. His hands were clasped in prayer, but still shaking, with it unclear if the cold rain or what he had recently seen was the culprit.
“But this-” He gestured at the small bundle, unable to articulate the entire timeline of things wrong with what was currently happening. It was Mazarus who started the Brotherhood of Exhumation, often claiming it was to help deal with grief over the loss of his own brother. Mazarus who formalized their rituals. Mazarus who claimed he’d witnessed mystical resurrection with his own eyes.
Mazarus who had legally changed his name from Owen Maple. Mazarus who had asked Gibson to tithe his land to the cause. Mazarus who made them all feel like they weren’t losing the things that everyone was losing.
Yet it was also Brother Mazarus who had changed suddenly, aggressively, a year and seven months ago. He quickly drove off the women despite being more interested in the lives of the sisters than the brothers previously. It came with claims that women were creators of life and they naturally absorbed all creative energies in their wombs. Nobody could be resurrected while there was a woman nearby, threatening to simply get pregnant with those energies instead.
He stopped making sense, at least to Gibson, but the deed to his lands made enough legal sense that he chose to remain in the brotherhood. There was one conversation, just between the two of them, shortly before his death by cardiac arrest while standing in front of the butcher’s counter at their nearest grocer.
That chat was probably why he didn’t get the miraculous call, Gibson assumed. There was doubt in their shared words, but it wasn’t Gibson’s fault; All of it came from Mazarus. He was talking mostly to himself, drunker than he thought on the wine used in their rituals, just after their third exhumation of Neubert’s grandfather. The man had been just as dead as ever, if not more so.
“There’s something else going on,” Mazarus had said when the others were away, washing off their hands with a hose. “This is all real.”
“We believe you brother,” Gibson had responded dutifully.
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“No, I know you do, but now I- This is all real… in a different light. From a different angle. The animal angle. We need to incorporate something that’s going to work. I got confused. I thought it was about the old becoming the new again, but it’s about them. You’ve seen them.”
“Who?”
“The animals! All over the internet and the news. Nobody will shut up about them.”
“The Brotherhood is all we have that isn’t about them,” Gibson said, clarifying his own motivations for staying loyal. “Barb and Jackie were wasting their creative energies on them, remember? They were always going on about some bunny or a cat or even that… what was it? A fucking pelican? They were calling a pelican cute, and not just cute. They were calling it cute like they were calling god good.”
“Sandal pelican,” Mazarus had said with glazed eyes, staring into the fire pit they were considering feeding with Neubert’s grandfather. “Someone got a video of a pelican picking up a bunch of sandals off the beach and running away with them.”
“Exactly… more people know about that video than know about us.”
“It makes people feel things. They laugh. When was the last time you heard somebody laugh at anything that wasn’t some innocent animal video online?”
“I don’t know,” Gibson admitted, thinking it over. It was strange, even stranger than the things they were doing. If there was a cult it was everybody else, he decided. “And they laugh so hard they cry.”
“We need to pivot Gibson. We need to pivot and I don’t know how...” Things had ended there, but Gibson had thought about it a lot. Pivot what? Their spiritual beliefs? Those weren’t supposed to pivot. If you twisted those they broke right off the foundation and took everybody down with them. No. They were the Brotherhood of Exhumation. One day their theory would be proven true. The dead could return, as long as they were never allowed to rest.
“Open it and see for yourself,” Rackley goaded him, under his own roof, under the threatening thunder, over the twitching bundle that couldn’t be Mazarus if everything was still to make sense. Now Gibson’s hands were shaking, but they came down anyway and started to unwrap the soaking thing, like peeling wet newspaper off a deflated volleyball.
The odor got stronger with each layer stripped away. It didn’t smell like death, but like clinging life, like someone attached to a dialysis machine, still breathing, but flung into a wet pit somewhere, various slimes seeping into the machine’s fluid supplies. Gibson ripped the last few away all at once and recoiled.
His back hit the wall, knocking down several family photos with a clatter. He was right; it wasn’t Mazarus. It was roadkill, and not particularly fresh at that. The thing’s head unfurled from under the tread marks, revealing its matted dark mask: a raccoon. Most of a raccoon. Part of a raccoon. A compressed, splattered, degraded, incomplete, unfit, rotten, floppy pasta shell of a raccoon.
Somehow it lifted its head and looked at Gibson. One side of its face was missing and mushy, held together with numerous maggots acting as living stitches. Some were fat and yellow, but most were of that small white variety that was barely visible, that moved like reflections on the surface of water droplets. One of its ears was torn off. Its tail was glued to its side, fed under a hole in the flank skin before coming out another opening near the spilled gut. It opened its dead mouth in a garbage-swilling gurgle. The sound made all the human skin in the house crawl faster than the maggots.
The undead beast hacked up a glob that was equal parts its last meal and road salt, enabling its next gurgle’s metamorphosis into a single word: brothers. They all bowed their heads, out of deference and to avoid looking at it, all except Gibson.
“I’ll… for...give you for… not recognizing me,” the raccoon said, its jaw flapping so loosely that some of the syllables dribbled out onto the table. “I am returned Gibson. Welcome me back.” Even funneled through the tiny obliterated throat, the voice was unmistakably that of Brother Mazarus. It echoed out of the other holes in the animal’s body, like it was a deep well with Mazarus trapped in neck-high water at the bottom.
“I don’t understand,” Gibson gibbered, looking at the others, each refusing to look back. “Your body turned into a raccoon? You never said anything about… vermin? The creative energies… They’re not this creative… right? Right?”
“All will be explained,” the Mazarus mammal assured him. “Brother Neubert, assist me. Take me to the head of the table.” The man obeyed, holding his breath as he stood and slipped his arms under the tarp, around the squishy backside of the roadkill. He lifted it up and brought it to the chair, but it wasn’t high enough.
Dendils lunged out of his seat, grabbing a small ottoman from by the television and placing it on the head chair just before Neubert lowered the bundle onto it. Together they pushed him up to the table before returning to their places. Mazarus’s stubby black paws rested on the wood. The carcass slumped forward, one milky eye moving over them.
Gibson was still glued to the wall, watching the back of the monstrosity’s head, disassembling his own babble. Mazarus’s corpse had not turned into a raccoon; there was no reason for it to have tire marks were that the case. It must have been a woman thing! A lady raccoon. Her wandering presence desecrated the grave site, and the creative energies inside her must have diverted Mazarus’s spirit into the wrong vessel. They were witnessing an abomination of both the natural world and the spiritual realm.
“Do not look so disturbed my brothers,” Mazarus began, “for I have come back to you as promised. A new world is dawning, one far stranger than the one we anticipated, but together we will ensure that the Brotherhood of Exhumation is a founding force within it. All of you, come to me, and receive my blessing.”
Nervously they stood and approached, bending down on one knee before him, pushing away thoughts of rabies and tetanus shots. Perhaps their leader intended to deliver a delicate kiss to their foreheads, but when forced through the decayed muscle memory of the raccoon’s body it was expressed as a lick.
A few of them dry heaved, but they managed to keep it off Gibson’s carpets, and it soon came to be the homeowner’s turn. The raccoon was too unstable to twist all the way around, so Mazarus couldn’t see the man still stood against the wall behind him, but he could speak to him.
“Brother, why do you hide from me?”
“Why the fuck do you think?”
“This is why I did not call out to you Gibson. You have always been full of fear, and that fear would’ve had you leaving me on the side of the road even as I reached out for your aid. I’m giving you a chance to prove yourself despite this. Come be by my side. We all have much work to do. You are needed like never before.”
“Why are you in a goddamn exploded raccoon!?”
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” the roadkill said, pausing as if in regret of using such a common phrase when it was time to mint new scripture. “The path back was fraught with dangers, and had a great deal more twists than I expected, up until shortly before my demise, but I assure you, this vessel is an absolute treasure, the only island in a vast ocean that now surrounds us.”
“You can’t do anything but talk, and hearing you talk makes me sick,” Gibson spat.
“Brother!” Rackley shouted, but Mazarus raised his paw to cool their heads.
“Now now, we must forgive him his doubts. We all have them. What you must understand is that I could only return in the form of an animal. All the energies that have been stirred up are flowing in a great torrent, and only in the animal direction. Nothing at all could be done without them.
Getting a human soul into an animal body was, I believe, the most taxing thing a soul can undergo. It has humbled me, but not extinguished all my ambitions. Perhaps the husk of a bug could’ve been gotten with less effort, but I don’t think I could’ve used it to communicate with all of you before it was destroyed by something as rudimentary as a gust or a raindrop.
And among the larger creatures even this lowly mistreated mass was heavily guarded against intrusion.” He paused, breath whistling through exposed ribs. Mazarus sounded tired, drained, the tone entirely separate from the stress of wearing a dead animal. “But with the power of this form we will not be disregarded so easily. I am one of them now, and they cannot deny me my rightf-”
Cut off and muffled by the tarp, the heads of the other brothers all whipped toward Gibson and saw him holding their leader in the bundle, top twisted shut in his white knuckle grip. Without a word he hoisted the bag over his shoulder and stormed past the table, toward the patio door that looked out upon his ample and well-manicured backyard.
The others followed him, shouting for him to stop, but made no effort to actually step outside, merely clustering in the threshold like ears of corn jammed in a silo chute. Gibson kept stomping, out into the pouring rain and drowning grass. There was one tree he hadn’t cut down when arranging the play space originally intended for his young daughter. It was for shade, or for a tree house one day. At least that was what he thought until that moment.
Actually it was for swinging against. Mazarus made rabid desperate pleas to be released, but they could only be heard as animal struggling through the tarp. His most financially loyal servant gave no pause at the sound, rearing back like a pinch hitter and bringing everything he had into the swing. The sack smacked wetly against the thick tree.
The abomination still thrashed, so Gibson swung again. Snarls. Again. Whimpers. Again. Lamentation and prayer. Again. He swung until the tarp contained little more than a maggot slurry and a pile of shattered bones. Each time the thunder clapped at the exact moment of impact, with none of the accompanying rumbling before or after. The Earth applauded his decision, and the sounds killed any intervention instincts that might have arisen in his brothers.
Gibson cast the sack aside like waste and screamed at the sky. He rolled down his sleeves and buttoned the cuffs once more before turning to head inside.
“What have you done!?” Hayes yelled. Gibson stopped just under the awning, water dripping over his eyes from limp spikes of dark hair. “You just undid a resurrection! You just undid the second coming! Why!?”
“I’m not having that nasty animal in my house,” he said as if that explained everything. “He came back once, so he can do it again. And he can get it right this time, come back as something proper. Fucking animals. You’re all fucking animals, tracking mud everywhere.”
He pushed through them and went to the kitchen. He was going to have a sandwich and a beer, even if no one else would.
“Should we bury him again?” Phillips asked the others, but nobody stepped out under the judgmental sky.