Ghost Stories from the Grid

(This story is neither fiction nor non-fiction but a mixture of both. For those interested, the more gruesome details to the story are the true ones. The rest of the story is built around them and is mostly made up. The thought was that I’d heard enough stories at work over the years to work them in to some sort of serial fashion, this being the first part.)

 

It was our annual fall getaway, and the campfire was already going. It was a good turnout this year, with almost everyone present. Other than those scheduled to work the weekend, there were only a few who didn’t attend, and with the rash of new hires over the last four years, our little group had quite the eclectic mix – old and young, new and old, men and women.

Dead and not dead and almost dead. And Undead.

The getaway wasn’t anything the company sponsored. Perish the thought. In this day and age, we were lucky enough to get flashlight batteries, let alone a weekend retreat on the company dime. It was something that we, as the workers and fellow union brothers and sisters, put together. And it was always impressed upon the trainees that it’d be in their best interest to attend, not because they had to fear any sort of repercussions if they didn’t, but because they had the most to lose out on if they missed it. The electricity business is no different than any other business in the sense that, if you’ll pardon the pun, knowledge is power. To their credit, the trainees were well represented. You see, the stories told were of local legend, almost unbelievable if not for the fact that someone in our department, either current or retired, had been a part of them, an unwilling witness to some of life’s horrors.

Some time around dusk everyone began to naturally collect around the fire. Conversations between smaller groups began to either die out or blend into others, until we were all in a big circle and part of one big discussion. From that point, it was only a matter of time before someone would start in with the first story, waiting for that right moment when a natural segue to the unnatural nature of our business could be found.

Knowledge is power, and these are stories that need to be told. That we need to tell.

Part I: Sue is idle

It was Wink who spoke up after Chinner’s ignorant comment about how the Undead didn’t really exist.

“Well, I seen a lot in my day,” Wink said, “and I never believed in ‘em either, until I saw one. I been here over thirty years now, and not only do they exist, but they come in all shapes and sizes too. Arms missing, legs gone, spilling their guts out, you name it. They’re all just different varieties on the same theme. A gross misshapen deformity of what they should be. The one you always remember though is your first one. If you can deal with that, then you can deal with anything on this job. Can’t deal with it? Then you don’t belong here.”

Wink settled back in his lawn chair. He crossed his legs at the ankles, his steel toe boots resting on a rock that lined the fire. He rubbed the scruff on his face. We could all hear the sandpaper sound coming from his big-knuckled hands.

“Two weeks I’d been on the job. I was getting my training, which meant someone was driving me around to show me where the stations were. All you babies who cry about your training now, hah, you got nothin’ to complain about. In the beginning I wasn’t even allowed to set foot in a station unless I had to. How’s that for training? Whatever I learned I learned on my own, without no one teaching me. And I never let ‘em forget it neither.

“So Flask is driving me around, and we’re out in The Berry and he’s showing me this station and that, just driving by, and we had just left The Eternal Flame Station when Dispatch called over the radio.

“ ‘We got a live one!’ they says. ‘I mean, a dead one!’  ‘Hold on,’ I says. ‘What are you talking about?’ So he says, ‘Someone’s down at Eternal Flame!’ and I says, ‘What? We were just there! There’s no one over there!’ I had the call sheet with me, so I looked it over again to make sure there was no work going on over there. Nothing. ‘I don’t care what you saw or didn’t see,’ they says. That was Dewey running the show upstairs that day, eating his Tums like they were M&Ms, and as he was talking to me I could her him crunching away. ‘Some guy from the construction site next door saw a flash and heard something let go, and he said when he ran over he saw what looked like an Undead in the yard. Said he was on fucking fire!’ ‘All right Dewey,’ I says, ‘call the cops and the fire and an ambulance then. We’ll head back.’

“Flask pulled a u-ey and we sped back. He had one hand on the wheel and the other inside his jacket. I tried calling Sue on the radio but I didn’t get no response, so I gave up. We pulled off the main road and up to the gate. I didn’t know what to expect. I barely knew where the hell I was let alone how to handle this. But it was my job, and sometimes we’re better off going in to a situation ignorant, otherwise we might not ever go.”

Of the forty-plus of us around the fire, not one person made a sound. Everyone was lost in some degree of thought; you could see it on their faces. Shop Boy ran a fingertip in circles around the scarred blob of skin that consumed most of his forearm. He was well-versed in death of course. He and others stared across the fire at Rogue Squadron, a new sect that currently had two members. Sancho Asspan was a military guy before joining our little family, and it was hard to tell but he looked a touch pale. Rogue Squadron Leader sat and said nothing, as he should (or shouldn’t). The fact that the two of them had not only broken protocol at work, but also killed someone in the process had not escaped anyone’s attention.

It was one thing to be Undead, especially if it happened on the job. At the very least that was worth some amount of sympathy and remorse. It was a whole different ballgame though to be responsible for making one.

“Who’s got a toothpick?” Wink said. “Anyone?” The Don fished out a plastic tube and tossed it to him. “Thanks,” Wink said, and as he fished one out of the tube he started up again.

“This was back in ’85, just shy of my fortieth birthday. You’d think at forty you’d have a good handle on life. Not that I was old, but I was starting a new job, and that age I felt like I’d seen enough and experienced enough not to be surprised by anything. Which of course I was wrong about. After this happened, I learned best way to deal with life is one day, one situation at a time.

“So we pull back up, and still I ain’t heard nothin’ on the radio from Sue. But it’s not like we can wait for him to go in. Flask went first, but not by choice. I’d never set foot inside the yard and had no idea where anything was, or what I should be looking for. If I’d had another two months, or even a month under my belt I’d have gone first, I know that now. But he led the way, and I followed.

“Right inside the gate was the A transformer. That’s right, the same one that fifteen years later would blow up and burn for a week. You’ve all seen those pictures. There was just too much heat to ever be able to put the fire all the way out. They had no choice but to let it burn itself out, and instead keep everything else around it soaked as best they could so that didn’t burn up. Anyway, back then it was in good shape, and I followed Flask as he walked all the way around it. As far as I could tell there was nothing wrong with it. But we could both smell something, like a pig roast gone bad is what Flask said later, and that’s close enough. So we followed the scent across the yard to the B transformer. As we got closer we could hear the chain link fence rattling, and the sound was coming from the same area as the smell. We turned a corner around the transformer and that was where we found the guy.

“Like I says, Undead come in all shapes and sizes. I didn’t see him at first, turned out it was a he, though we didn’t find out ‘til later when someone heard it from the hospital. No way you could tell if it was a man or woman just by looking at him. He was black, pitch black, head to toe. His back was to us as we neared, and he was holding on to the chain link fence. His hands were shaking the fence, but he couldn’t or didn’t want to let go. Then as we got closer I seen that his skin wasn’t all black. Most of it was, but there were large patches all over him where it was burnt off altogether, leaving red raw blobs, and the edges were rimmed with crispy skin. There was no way to tell if he still had any clothes on.

“ ‘Hey!’ I says. “You all right?’

“So the guy turns around then, and I seen his eyes. No white in ‘em, just pupil and all the rest red. Then he starts talking to me. Never mind how he was still alive, or still standing, but he could hear me, and now we were having a fucking conversation.

“ ‘Hazzle grump fortula?’ he says.

“We couldn’t make out a thing he was saying. He was talking gibberish, and no matter how hard he tried we couldn’t make nothin’ out.

“Meanwhile Flask runs back to the truck for some rubber gloves and a switch coat to cover this guy up with. I wasn’t going to touch him anyway. Burn victims, right, first priority is to cover ‘em up, keep their skin from bein’ exposed too long so’s they don’t get an infection. This was long before we had gel blankets, but we had to do something. The coats back then were long like a trench coat. Once we got the gloves on we got his hands off around the fence and wrapped him in the coat on the ground. I sat with the guy while Flask went back to let the ambulance in once they got there, and he talked his nonsense the whole time. Just before the ambulance got there his eyes rolled up, and there was nothin’ to see but all red in the sockets.

“The worst of it was the smell.”

Wink pitched his toothpick into the fire. He waited another minute before he continued.

“Come to find out this guys homeless. He was out scrounging around, saw the overhead wires, and decided to kill himself. He climbed up over the fence, they found pieces of his clothing in the barbed wire later, up onto the transformer, and got whacked right in the head and chest with 115,000 volts. That fence, as you know, was forty feet away from the transformer, so he got knocked at least forty feet sideways and the transformer’s what, twenty feet high? One of the doctors said it went right down his spine and out his left leg. He lived long enough to tell what little information we know before he died.

“Sue retired not long after. He couldn’t deal with the fact that he’d been asleep when everything happened.”

If you didn’t work for the company and happened to stumble across our little gathering around the fire at that moment, and someone asked you to pick out which guys were new on the job and which weren’t, you’d have no problem doing so. The older, more senior guys looked more relaxed. They had the familiarity of having dealt with this type of situation before, and knew there was no real way to prepare yourself for what it was like. As Wink had said, you dealt with it one day, one hour, one moment at a time. They were comfortable with this knowledge, and it showed in their body language. The trainees, however, were the exact opposite. They sat or stood looking almost frozen, their eyes a little wider. If you were close enough to one of them you could smell a tinge of fear, that sour, stale smell. They were afraid, all right, and in our business a little bit of fear is a good thing. You need that fear to have respect for what you’re doing, to keep you focused on the job at hand, because even under ideal conditions shit happens. The thing is, they weren’t afraid enough yet, because the fear of the unknown, that vague sort of fear that can paralyze you when you’re faced with it, isn’t nearly as bad as the fear of what you did know. Knowing what you’re up against, despite being afraid, helps you stay prepared.

In our business, knowledge and information is the real power. And like I said, there are stories that need to be told.