The Forlorn Corpse of Gaffen McGinty

Gaffen McGinty is searching the beach for his small intestine.

What’s left of it anyway. At least I think so. It’s hard to say for sure. 

Everything he (it?) says is relayed to me through Yarbol, the sniveling necrofiend interpreter appointed to me by the Crystal City Justicars. Last month, Yarbol was caught thieving a mass grave in the viscid zone of the Slime Pots, a relatively minor offense to be sure—but one punishable by 250 hours of community service nonetheless.

The slate board hanging around his neck says he’s on hour 16.

I tug at Yarbol’s rune writ chain as the shambling corpse that is McGinty lets loose a gut rending belch. The smell of brine and old socks washes over me. Yarbol bares an incisor and hisses, but goes to work with the requisite gusto.

“Nrrr, this is just great,” Yarbol translates for McGinty. “How am I going to pay the Meat Man now?”

McGinty is a member of the undead horde—1,763 strong by the last Royal Census—amassed outside the city walls. Cordoned off from polite society, treated like third-class citizens at best and brain dead monsters at worst, McGinty and his fellow shamblers are forced to eke out a meager existence by feeding on rodents, crustacea, the occasional tourist, and premium cuts of fresh flesh wheeled in daily by the Meat Man. 

But as the saying goes among McGinty’s kind, Ragharblaragh!: “Meat for meat.”

When I ask Yarbol to clarify, McGinty halts his staggering progression across the bone littered sand and crams a willowy forearm through the ragged hole in his abdomen. The doubled over ghoul stares up at me fiercely, his eyes like the rotten yolks of hard-boiled eggs. When he yanks out his arm, a syrupy slop of ichor, dead sardines, and shredded gobbets of blackened flesh spill over his ankles into the gently rocking surf. The stench is unbearable.

McGinty grunts. “Does the idiot understand?”

You see, to continue their purgatorial perambulations through the material plane, the undead really only need two things: a throat for the tasty brains to slide down and a stomach to keep them in. The majority of undead flesh moulders at normal rates, complete dissolution kept at bay with the regular harvest of new marrow and musculature. 

The digestive organs however are a different story.

For some reason that remains a mystery to zombie science, once a person becomes a ghoul, their entire gastrointestinal tract ceases to break down and becomes as indestructible as a heap of rubber tires.

This is what makes shambler entrails so incredibly valuable on the black market, where they are bought and sold wholesale to delicatessens, armories, sex shops, bootleg distilleries, eccentric artists, and apothecarists looking for the cure to rotgut. 

Which brings us to why we’re searching the beach for McGinty’s small intestine.

Yesterday it was tucked snug as a bug in his abdomen, but when he woke up this morning, it was gone. Whatever the cause, fresh flesh has been in short supply of late, and McGinty has already sold off most of his innards. So without a piece of himself to trade for a garland of pig feet off the elusive Meat Man’s meat wagon, he will likely starve in a few days. 

“Some damn teenagers probably took it,” the corpse mutters wearily as we wander over to a cluster of howling ghouls scraping at the curtain wall with their fingernails. Yarbol tells me that a kind-hearted city guard dumped a box full of puppies off the parapet yesterday. McGinty squints into the sun and issues a sarcastic moan.

“A bugbear never sticks its dick in the same tree twice,” he says, turning away. “Mammy used to say that to us kids.”

Beneath the sea salt encrusted thatch of strawberry hair clinging to his birchbark pate, McGinty’s once manic eyes begin to look sad, resigned. Who was he before? Impossible to say. Irrelevant now. 

Starvation for a ghoul doesn’t mean second death but it does mean perpetual immobility. Once the engine runs dry the pistons freeze and the frame falls forever still—consigned to the sands until nothing remains but a chattering mouth and a resolute coil of viscera.

I try to distract McGinty with a joke. He doesn’t laugh. We pass a mermaid sunning herself on a sandbar. She tells us she saw a lone coyote run by a few minutes ago with what looked like a rope of sausages trailing from its mouth. McGinty’s small intestine? We ask her which direction it went, thank her, and move on.

After another fruitless hour of searching, a few seagulls wheeling in the azure sky swoop low. One of them tears off McGinty’s left ear in its beak and flaps away. McGinty snarls and rakes a moldy claw through the air. Something snaps in his shoulder and his arm thumps to the sand, where a songcrab immediately sets to work probing the fatty part of his palm with its rainbow pincers. 

McGinty sighs.

“I never liked that arm anyway.”

We continue down the beach.