Diggers

Thomas La Barbe took another drink from the bottle.
“You know,” he said, in a voice that echoed no matter where he was, “most of this homeopathic stuff is absolute rot. Wouldn't use it to grease my machinery. But this Hostetter really is a genius.”
The two men to his right nodded. They were well aware of their boss' bizarre loyalty to Hostetter's Medicinal Stomach Bitters.
“I used to get colic nearly twice a month. Like trying to piss out nails, it got so bad. Now I don't get it at all.” He took in another mouthful, swished it around, then swallowed. “Whoof, that's the stuff. This man should run for mayor. I'd vote for him. Couldn't be worse than the moron we've got now.”
The two men nodded. Then one of them spoke.
“Uh, sir?” he asked. “Can we turn the light on, please?”
La Barbe sighed, tucking the bottle into his jacket. “Oh, go ahead. We'll keep this short. Electricity doesn't just fall out of the sky, you know.”
The man who spoke inched his way over to where he thought the light switch was, but all he found was a short stool. And he didn't exactly find it; his shin banged into it while he groped around for the switch.
“Son of a bitch!” he yelled, gingerly rubbing his shin.
“Keep going, Murphy," La Barbe said, with a trace of amusement, “you're almost there.”
Murphy inched forward, arms out, the floor creaking in protest under his feet. He eventually came to a big switch jutting out from the wall and pushed it up. The lights flickered on, with a loud pop and a brief flurry of sparks from the ceiling, and spilled onto four rows of what were modeled after tables, but whose middle portions were fine wire mesh screens within steel frames. These, Murphy hazarded a guess, were the SifTrons that removed impurities from the synthetic tobacco before it was transported to the rolling and packaging machines upstairs.
La Barbe fixed his good eye on the two men, who now stood diagonally from each other. “Happy now, Murphy?”
Murphy nodded. He walked back to his partner's side, giving the stool a good kick en route.
“Good,” La Barbe said. “To business, then. I have another job for you.”
“Wait,” Murphy said, then remembered his place and added “...sir.” He hesitated. “I thought we said the last job was the last job.”
“I don't recall saying that,” La Barbe said, even though he did. “And since when did we rely much on your thinking, given how infrequently you engage in it?”
Murphy nodded, frowning a little. He'd told La Barbe that he “didn't think much” at the beginning of their association because he thought it made him sound more industrious. It didn't. Besides which, it had been, much as it was now, an utter lie. Murphy thought all the time. At that moment, he was trying to remember when he'd seen the boss in something other than a matching blue suit, and concluded that he hadn't. No matter where they'd met, or when, he always wore that same blue suit with the gold watch chain hanging down from the vest pocket. He was wearing it now, in fact.
“Yes, sir,” Murphy said, nodding. He nodded a lot around the boss.
“Right,” La Barbe said. “This time, one of the research laboratories has need of a young lady, not fat or syphilitic. And by a marvelous stroke of fortune, one has just been interred in Keller Cemetery. Pays double, for obvious reasons.” He tilted his head down to cough, giving Murphy and his partner a good look at his bad eye. It lacked pigment, and sat in its socket as though it slept in a hammock. “Get it tomorrow night and bring it here the next morning in ice. I'll see it gets delivered in the cigarette truck.”
“A lady?” Murphy asked. He gulped as the gravity of the situation fell on him. “Sir, we can't dig up no women. That's, that's just—“
“Profitable?” La Barbe finished Murphy's sentence. “Why yes, it is.”
“Well yes, it...yes, it is. But it's also wrong.”
“So is digging up men, and I don't recall similar protests on their behalf.”
“Well it's not illegal, I mean, yes it's illegal, but it's...” Murphy tried to conjure a proper word, but failed. “...wrong.”
“You have a peculiar definition of chivalry,” Thomas La Barbe said, then immediately rethought it. “Actually, I doubt you have any definition of chivalry, but I do, and yours is peculiar.” He turned to Murphy's partner, who stood flat-footed with his hands thrust into his sack coat's pockets. “Do you have anything to add, Gil?”
Gil thought for a second, which was a genuinely rare experience for him. “You said it pays double?”

Murphy was furious. And scared. Scared happened to outweigh furious at the moment, as he walked into the Keller Public Cemetery, without a flashlight, leading the Judas who volunteered them. And being a Judas didn't seem to bother Gil at all. There was a spring in his step and his face bore the expression of a man whose destination was pleasant. Murphy had never once seen or heard of a pleasant cemetery.
Nor had he ever been totally comfortable with Gil. La Barbe had paired them together for the first job, getting three Asian men for the Lindemann University Medical Center, and they'd sort of fallen into a partnership, but it was one about which Murphy had grave misgivings. True, Gil hadn't given him up to the militia or stolen money from him, but he was just unpleasant company.
Gil was one of those people who was always moist; his palms were damp and clammy, and beads of sweat perpetually gathered under his nose and at his temples. And he had a bowl haircut, which never sat right with Murphy. Grown men should never have those. He rarely spoke, unless he was getting paid or asked very specific questions, which left Murphy to handle all the negotiations. Until last night, of course.
“Are we in the Unclaimed section yet?” Murphy asked over his shoulder.
“Just passed the sign for it,” Gil said. “Bitch we're diggin' up should be a few rows down.”
Murphy winced. “Would you mind not saying that out loud? Jesus, you'd think we were amateurs.” He untucked his black shirt and let it spill over the waist of his black pants. It seemed too fancy for what they were about to do.
When they reached the girl's grave, Gil tapped Murphy on the shoulder and pointed to the marker. It was digital, but not holographic. Those were reserved for regular burials. The marker simply read Kelly Meyers. Unclaimed. RIP.
Murphy looked up at the sky, running his hands back through his sandy hair and letting out an exasperated sigh. He wanted to be anywhere else but here. Even a night with La Barbe and his bottles of smelly hippie medicine would be better than this. There weren't even any stars out to greet his gaze, Funny, he had the only view of the sky unhindered by pipes, buildings, or adboards, and there wasn't anything there except formless black nothing.
Gil coughed, and Murphy stifled his thoughts. He looked back down, and saw Gil digging away with his spring loaded shovel. He'd already broken through the foot of dirt over the coffin, and when his shovel blade hit the top, he looked up and smiled triumphantly. Murphy nodded and walked over to the other side of the grave. Gil reached into his sack coat and pulled out a short pipe that ended in two parallel handles. He touched it to the coffin and slid it around until the magnet in the top of the coffin secured itself to the magnet in the pipe. Then he grabbed one handle, Murphy grabbed the other, and they pushed up together until the earth under them gave way as the coffin slid vertically from the grave. When neither of them could reach any higher, they each bearhugged the coffin and pulled it up, setting it down on the ground once they'd extracted it.
“Man,” said Gil, panting, “this shit was easier when they buried people flatways.”
Murphy knew 'flatways' wasn't a word, but he agreed with Gil. About a month ago, the city had decided to switch the cemetery over to a vertical burial grid system, meaning that coffins were laid on their ends in shallower graves. Mayor Rollins had said it was a time, space, and money saver, but Murphy hadn't really been paying attention. He'd thought his grave robbing days were behind him when the change was announced. Oh well. At least Gil had come prepared.
Now for the locks. Murphy knelt down beside the coffin, preparing to freeze its electronic locks with Nitrospray and break them, but the damn thing wasn't locked to begin with. What began as a simple test of the locks' strength became Murphy throwing the lid open and staring into the dead face of a young, blond girl. Not a spot of decay on her. She had a delicate, almond-shaped face and brittle arms that were folded over her chest. She didn't deserve this.
“Damn,” Gil said. “She was hot. Looks like I may bring a date home to Momma after all.” He grinned, and Murphy shot him a menacing look.
“Just help me get her out,” he said.
They lifted her out of the coffin and set her down on the ground. Gil started pulling up her burial gown and Murphy almost smacked him, but remembered that they had to freeze her. He handed Gil the can of Nitrospray.
“Would you mind freezing her?” Murphy asked. “I'm gonna check and see if any guards are wandering around.”
Before Gil could answer, Murphy walked off and examined his options. He could just run. But if Gil didn't catch him, he'd tell La Barbe, who would. He could waste Gil, certainly a tempting thought. But that still left La Barbe to worry about, and he wouldn't let Murphy leave the city. Not alive, anyway. And Murphy wasn't sly enough to waste La Barbe, that was certain.
He looked out at the rows of identical markers blinking into the distance. It didn't seem quite fair to endure all that life spits in your face, only to be unceremoniously dumped into a cubby hole and left for, well, people like himself and Gil. He looked down at the marker near his foot; Xiaodan Li.
It reminded him of the Asian job. He was young, unemployed, with creditors nipping at his heels and throwing bricks tied to Late Notices through his windows. If he could only turn back the clock and tell scared, young Murphy to get temp jobs until his loans were repaid. That no amount of untraceable money was worth a job you weren't allowed to quit. If he could only tell scared, old Murphy that.
Dammit. Why did things always have to be so hard? Why wasn't there a viable solution at hand? And where the hell was that singing coming from?
Wait.
Where was that singing coming from?
He turned around, fully ready to chastise Gil for drawing attention to them, but the words caught in his throat.
Headlights. Plasma, they looked like. He saw their unmistakable, wavering gaze lumbering his way, and ran out of it. He stopped behind Kelly’s grave marker and knelt down beside Gil, who surprised him by already being there. Gil’s jaw was set and his thumb grazed his shovel’s release button, neither of which implied anything positive to Murphy.
“Fuckin’ Luddites,” Gil muttered, his upper lip curling.
Murphy said nothing. He didn’t particularly care for Luddites either; they protested anything even remotely technological, often without much reason beyond that, and offered no alternatives to whatever met their shrill denunciations. But he’d handled them more or less how he handled everything else he didn’t like or understand–by leaving it alone–and hoped Gil would do likewise.
He peered down at the approaching headlights and saw that they weren’t headlights at all, but torches held close together, proving that their wavering gaze was indeed mistakable. Marching behind the torchbearers were six people, each shouldering a duffel bag. They kept a slow, deliberate pace, and sang as they trudged through the cemetery. Murphy couldn’t tell what song it was. Sounded like a hymn.
“What are they singing?” he asked Gil.
“Who cares,” Gil said, “some kinda anti-technology wankjob song. Lucky us. Why’d they pick tonight for this, I wonder?”
“What makes you so sure they’re Luddites?” Murphy asked. After all, the True Order of Ludd wasn't Desespere's only collection of shrieking nutjobs who thought technology had gone too far.
“They got all pissed off and held one of these marches in Little Dublin when the mayor changed the cemetery around,” Gil said. “Saw it on TV. Plus, they're singing.”
Murphy nodded. Luddites did sing a lot. They were also getting closer, so he crept away to watch things more closely. The procession continued, and the torchlight eventually revealed them to be modestly dressed, very white people, mostly men.. A tallish, thickset woman in a black muumuu walked behind the pallbearers, shouldering a duffel bag and carrying a tall, wooden cross in both hands. They walked past Gil and Murphy, still singing, and stopped a few yards north of Kelly’s grave.
The woman with the cross walked to the front of the group and raised the cross. The singing stopped. She shrugged off the duffel bag, then set the cross down and picked up a prybar, then jammed the prying end of it under a grave marker. One of the men with her came to her aid, prybarring the other side, and together they pulled the marker up. It strained, but finally popped out of the ground amid the pops and snaps of wiring coming undone. The woman wiped her brow and pulled a plain wooden cross from her duffel bag. She smiled as she pushed it down into the ground near where the marker had been. It sank in effortlessly.
“See?” she asked the group in a low, distinctly mannish voice. “It's easy. And if we don’t burn out by sunrise, we should be able to fix most of these. Work in pairs and keep your eyes open for security. Unclaimed is usually light patrol, but we don’t want to take any chances.” She gestured out in Gil and Murphy’s general direction, and paused. She walked over to Kelly’s grave marker as Gil, who saw her coming, dropped down on his belly.
Murphy followed suit. “Where’s Kelly?” he mouthed silently at Gil.
Gil jerked his head towards the open grave. Unbelievable. He’d thrown her in. Murphy had to hand it to him though–he’d thought this already bad situation had hit rock bottom when the Luddites showed up.
“This one’s already open,” the lady said, her voice a troubling mixture of confusion and concern.
Murphy’s toes curled in his boots. They were going to find the body, freak out, then find—and beat the hell out of—himself and Gil. And if they managed to escape or survive that beating, it would pale in comparison to what La Barbe had in store if they messed this up, which by this point they almost assuredly had. So his choice was between defending something he didn’t want to do from people who would hate him for it anyway, or making a break for it before anyone could stop him. He found the latter option more appealing, and was about to act on it when he heard a shout from one of the Luddites.
Murphy turned, horrified, to find Gil facing off with a Luddite, his shovel extended and touching the ground. Before the man could say anything beyond “hey,” Gil swung right at his head. Murphy closed his eyes, waiting for the dull thunk that would even further complicate his evening. When he heard it, he took off running.

Murphy awoke in a small, steel room, facing a steel wall behind a laser grid. His head rang, and his normally thin, bony face felt swollen. He sat up, and the bench he'd been lying under met his head with a firm, thin whunk. Pain rippled through his head, clashing with the pain that remained from the night before.
Speaking of the night before, Murphy couldn't remember terribly much of it once they'd been spotted by the Luddites. He'd run away, that was certain, but they must have caught him because he vaguely recalled being on the wrong end of an angry gauntlet of fists and feet. The next thing he remembered was a pair of flashing lights, which meant the police had arrived, or he'd suffered a concussion. Probably both. His head was killing him, and his current location was looking more and more like jail.
He rolled out from under the bench and stood up, slowly. He heard snoring, and turned to find Gil slumped against the opposite wall, asleep. Aside from a bruise on his left cheekbone, he didn't look too bad.
Murphy sat down on the bench and waited for an unwelcome rush of lightheadedness to pass. It'd be prison for him and Gil, he figured. If courtroom telefeeds were accurate, they'd be held here until their trial, where an inevitable 'guilty' verdict would send them packing to King Penitentiary for who knows how long. He hadn't heard any specifics about King, but generally convicts and alien abductees faced similar trauma.
“You awake, Gil?” he asked, to no response from his partner. His voice sounded like he was talking underwater. He sure had a concussion, all right.
Murphy leaned back against the cold wall and stretched his legs out along the bench. He looked over at Gil and wondered how someone mere days away from serious prison time could sleep so soundly. Had he been to prison before? Murphy didn't know. There was a lot he didn't know about Gil. Like his last name, or what part of the city he lived in, or his favorite color. He certainly hadn't predicted Gil's recent aggressive streak or its disastrous consequences.
A loud clang derailed Murphy's train of thought, and he saw that the cell door, nearly impossible to distinguish from the wall, had dropped down into the floor. A tall, uniformed guard stood in the doorway, and Murphy watched with grim resignation as he deactivated the laser grid. The guard walked in and knocked his baton against the wall, right above Gil's head. Gil awoke with a start.
“Get up, ladies,” said the guard. “You made bail. Your barcodes will be removed at the front desk.
Murphy couldn't believe his ears; partly because he had a concussion, and partly because he hadn't entered bail into his situation. They'd probably taken the money directly from his bank account. And Gil's, if he had one.
The guard led them down the hall, which was lined with cells, and into a lobby, where another guard ran a digital scanner over them. Murphy was beaming the whole time, and Gil's indifference to the whole thing didn't bring him down at all. If he'd been wrong about this, then maybe he still had a shot at evading lock-up. He could do community service. Physical labor, even unpaid, beat assembling uplink consoles surrounded by men who wanted to rape you.
“You guys are lucky,” the second guard said, unaware that he was about to ruin Murphy's newfound optimism. “I wish my boss pulled these kinda strings for me.”
At the word boss, Murphy's smile sank into a panicked frown, and his stomach sank into the vicinity of his feet. The first guard led him and Gil outside, where Murphy's nose caught something bitter in the air and pulled Murphy's face around until it met with La Barbe's. He was smiling and pulling a bottle of stomach bitters away from his lips, the froth still crackling in his mustache.
“Afternoon, boys,” he said. “I didn't expect to find you here today.”
Murphy hung his head, suddenly longing for the security of prison. “Thanks for bailing us out, sir,” he said, softly.
He winced as La Barbe's icy palm ruffled his hair.
“You know I couldn't let this mess go to trial,” La Barbe said, his voice sharpening. “Not considering all the shit you two pulled...” He grabbed Murphy's chin and pulled his head up until he was looking right into his boss' dead eye. Soon enough, Murphy figured, he and it would have a lot in common.
La Barbe's smile widened. “...now could I?”
“No sir,” Murphy said. He hesitated. He didn't like to think of himself as a rat, but none of this had been his doing. “Gil's the one who charged the Luddites first, not me. It's his fault.”
“Hey, I did what I had to,” Gil said, breaking his silence. Anger clouded his broad face. “You turned and fuckin' left me there, you little—”
He was interrupted by a fierce backhand from La Barbe that nearly knocked him backwards.
“Not so loud,” La Barbe said, “and shut up, anyway. Which one of you fucked up worse is immaterial, the fact is that the Luddites are suing the city, and you two have made every morning newsfeed and palmcorder welcome screen in Desespere.” He pulled out his pocket watch and pressed a button on its side. About five seconds later, his long black car came around the corner and stopped next to them.
“Get in,” La Barbe said.
Murphy slunk into the backseat. Gil stayed put and puffed out his chest.
“This is bullshit, old man,” he said.
La Barbe opened his jacket. “Get in,” he repeated. Gil did as told, slamming the door and glaring at Murphy.
Not that Murphy cared. This matter would be settled one way or another, and not in a way that would preserve Gil's acrimony. La Barbe sat in the front seat and took a pistol from his jacket. He held it up so Murphy and Gil could see it, although Gil already had, and told his driver to return to the factory.
As Murphy watched the city pass by, perhaps for the last time, in a stream of awnings and holographic signs, he amended an earlier observation of never seeing his boss in anything but a blue suit. La Barbe was wearing brown today.