Dead Man's Flowers

This is was my entry for Stupefying Stories's Friday Challenge for 11/03/17

Dead Man's Flowers
By Snowdog

Oscar loved to float freely above the city at night.  It was warm in the late evening hours over Manhattan. A thick curtain of humidity hung in the air like an invisible wave from the Atlantic.
It had been exactly one hundred and twenty-seven years since he had been buried in the dark cemetery below. Oscar had visited his grave on every one of those anniversaries. He had always been given to sentiment. It was one of the things that women had found endearing about him and one of the many things that his father had frowned upon.
Tonight, he had planned to enjoy the solitude that only a New York Summer's evening could bestow.
He lit at the foot of his own grave and sat there a while to take in the stillness. There were crickets chirping out the temperature for those with the mathematical skills to interpret. Cars droned their way up and down the west side highway. A garbage truck emptied a dumpster behind a popular restaurant somewhere in the bustling metropolis. To Oscar, it was peace.
And then there was the crackling of feet on fallen twigs.
The gangly oaf that came stumbling from the darkness shattered his solitude as surely as an air raid siren. The young man stopped for a moment and glanced around.
“These’ll do, I guess,” he muttered with obvious discontent.
Unceremoniously, he reached down and snatched up the potted petunia that decorated Oscar’s gravesite! He held it up to his face for a moment and frowned. Then he ripped the flowers from the pot, which he dropped. Without another word, he walked across Oscar’s grave and headed for the exit.
“I’ll be damned,” Oscar growled, ignoring the irony. He took to the sky to follow.
He had to laugh at himself. Even after more than a hundred years as a citizen of the afterworld, he found himself staying back to avoid detection. The living could only perceive the dead in the subtlest of ways. An odd decision, a face in that moment just before drifting off to sleep, a sudden, brief change in temperature, these were the sorts of ways the five human senses could detect his presence.
Still, Oscar stayed a safe distance above his quarry as he walked unsteadily through the streets below and finally, to the door of a small apartment building.

The room fell silent as the teenage boy pondered his next move. His opponent on the other side of the chessboard was good, probably a bit better, but he had an ace up his sleeve that no one, no one at all, knew about.
William knelt beside his chair and whispered a suggestion. The timer ticked. The boy didn’t show any sign of having heard.. Another whisper. He seemed to freeze for a moment, then he shook his head and hastily made his move, as if to force himself to commit before he changed his mind.
“Checkmate” the boy across exclaimed gleefully.
William hung his head and sighed. “This one never listens.”
“You expect that to change?” Oscar asked, stepping through the wall and into the room.
William wasn’t startled. He had sensed his old friend nearby several minutes earlier. He stood to greet Oscar.
“It works… sometimes”
“Coincidence.”
William sighed. “I swear I can beat the statistics once in a while.”
"If it were anyone else, I'd say they were full of it." Oscar’s blue, translucent body flickered for a moment as he remembered why he had come.
“Oh. I need your help. Some bastard stole the flowers my granddaughter left on my grave.”
William frowned. “And you intend to…?”
Oscar only smiled.
"No. That's just wrong!"
"He gave them to his date, Will! He's using my flowers to try to get some--"
"OK!" William interrupted. "Fine. But how do you plan to pull this off?
"We're going to have to go corporeal."
William crossed his arms and stared for a moment. "So… your plan is to reanimate our corpses? In case you've forgotten, they're both buried in wooden boxes on the outskirts of town. If it weren't for that, the city would be crawling with dead people."
"Yes," Oscar's smile turned into an evil grin. "But I know someone on whom your little skill here might work just a bit more readily."

"Hey, one of ya'll hold my beer while I dig!" Billy shouted.
Big Jolly grabbed the can and took a deep sigh. "Billy, why? Why are we diggin' up a grave in the middle of the freakin' night?"
Billy paused for a moment to mull it over. "Ya know, I asked myself that very question." He shook his head and picked up the shovel. "But sometimes you just gotta go with your gut."
Jolly sighed again and shrugged. "I'm gonna have to put down your beer if you want me to help."

It had been quite a show. Oscar had watched while William darted back and forth between the two salt-of-the-Earth rural folk. Whispering hadn't worked. He'd had to get extremely close to each man and shout directly into his ear. But dig, they did, for several hours. During the extraction, Oscar had flown back downtown several times to gauge the progress of the boy's --Oscar had taken to calling him George-- date.
It had turned out that George was quite the romantic with other people's flowers. There was a movie, coffee afterward, and currently a walk in the park in the center of the city. Soon they would be headed back to her place, where, with any luck, George would be invited in for a nightcap.
Presently, Oscar and William stood looking down at the dried out, decades-old remains of their bodies as they lay in the coffins.
Oscar twisted his face a bit. "Not too bad."
William turned and glared at him for several uncomfortable seconds.
Oscar cleared his throat and continued. "We need to get moving."
A person's body is the only thing they truly own in perpetuity, and it's the one thing a ghost can manipulate. Most spirits give up trying to claw their way out of their wooden boxes once they realize they can go literally anywhere in their new form, even past the edge of what mankind refers to as the observable universe. There's an infinity to explore. A few, however, choose to linger on Earth, usually near a fond childhood memory of what they thought of as home.

William was the first to lie down on the dry husk and feel it welcome his essence back. After a long moment of strange vertigo, he set about trying to move his hand. Post-mortem locomotion involves sheer force of will rather than muscles and tendons. For several minutes, William just lay sprawled on the damp ground, but after some taunting from Oscar, he was suddenly able to sit up. Then, with help, he stood uneasily on his desiccated feet.
Billy and Big Jolly screamed and ran for the gate.

Walking was a challenge on long-neglected on bones and joints. The best they could manage at the moment was slow shuffle. Oscar had last spotted the loving couple somewhere near 44th and Vine, strolling northward.
It took some time for their dried-out ears to become aware of the screams and shouts warning of "Walkers!", but once they did, it became quite annoying. It didn't help that decayed vocal chords made it impossible to communicate with anything other than grunts and groans.
There! Oscar spotted the two, less than a block ahead. The girl --Oscar had taken to calling her Georgette--still carried the flowers! He motioned to William and growled. His friend still showed some hesitation, but nodded.
People screamed and cleared a path for them as they picked up speed in pursuit. Well, not really. They were already shuffling along as fast they possibly could. Fortunately, the couple were moving slowly, as if they didn't want the night to end.
A few minutes later, Oscar tapped George on the shoulder. Georgette dropped the flowers and screamed, moving away from them, which allowed William to step to George's other shoulder. The two walking corpses stood on either side of their prey.
Oscar poked him in the eye with a brittle finger and tried to say, "That'll teach you to steal a man's flowers!" But it came out something like, "Thur dulh tsch u to sthhh a mnnns fllrrr!"
George gave a shriek, then doubled over to nurse his eye. William kicked him in the shin and the young man was down for a moment.
"Styyy drrrnnn!!!" William shouted into the man's ear, then kicked him in the side. Then he was on top, landing blow after blow on the terrified young Romeo.
Oscar trusted William to mete out the damage. He took advantage of the moment, and bent to pick up the flowers lying between two parallel-parked cars. Georgette had found a piece of plastic pipe and was wielding it like a bat as he approached.
"Theeeth rrr frrrrr uuuuu!" he said, slowly, hoping she would understand. Instead, she took a swing at his head. The plastic bounced harmlessly off his skull.

After what felt like a thirty minute ground-and-pound from a zombie, "George" began to realize that none of the kicks and punches were doing any real damage. In fact, as the terror receded, he noticed that the…thing… didn't possess much strength at all, or much weight for that matter. When the next blow came along, he grabbed its wrist.

"Nooo… frr uuuu!!" Oscar shouted at the retreating woman. She struck again with the pipe. He felt his head lurch a bit that time. He couldn't understand why she wouldn't just take damned flowers so he could leave.
From behind, he heard a crash. He whirled in time to see George smash a heavy trashcan into William's prone body a second time. With the third strike, his friend began to come apart on the sidewalk.
The angry growl was intentional this time.
Then he felt his head lurch to the right again, much harder this time. Georgette was hitting him from behind. Again. And again. Something gave, and the last thing he saw was concrete rushing up to hit him in the face.

Oscar awoke to find the flickering azure image to William standing over him.
"Told you it was a bad idea," he said.
Oscar floated upward a bit and looked down. The entire street was engulfed in chaos. The police had decided to put in an appearance and were taking statements from the loving couple. There were a lot of doubtful expressions floating around. He heard something about it being much more likely that her date had dug up the bodies.
"Oh, I don't know," Oscar said. "Perhaps not exactly as I hoped it would go, but…"
William gave the ghostly approximation of a sigh. "Well, that's it for our bodies, I think. Unless you want to try pulling them back together."
Oscar shook his head. "I don't much see the point. And besides…" he trailed off for a moment and looked at the handful of visible stars in the night sky.
"Besides," he said again, "I think it's time to grow up. There's an infinity to explore."