by Jolly, Kirk
“Not yet. His spot was empty when I rolled in.”
“I tried to ask what they were looking for but they wouldn’t say. They just said to report to them if we see him. I heard a rumor from an ER nurse that a bunch of equipment has been taken lately.”
“What, stolen?”
“Yeah. You don’t think Simmons would…?”
“A couple months ago I’d have said no, but lately…,” he shrugged his shoulders.
“Yeah, I know what you mean. Still though, he’s an actual doctor and we’re running low on those these days. I’d better not hold you up any longer. Alice is manning the station alone right now. If you see Simmons though, you better report him. You don’t want to get on Admin’s bad side.”
“I suppose not.”
“Good luck today.”
“Thanks.”
Wilson and his lackeys walked away. Allen suddenly felt depressed, knowing that he couldn’t count on Simmons today. He should be able to handle it with Alice but if things got too busy, he hoped the ER would be able to spare somebody. He walked the rest of the length of the corridor and scanned his badge at the entrance to the morgue. As soon as it swung open, he could smell the familiar hint of charred flesh. No matter how much disinfectant the cleaners used, there was always that smell underneath.
Alice looked up from the body she was standing over as he walked in.
“Morning, Dr. Weathers,” she said smiling.
“Good morning Alice, and please just call me Allen, or Weathers if you prefer. There’s no need to be so formal.”
She blushed slightly but nodded her head. Even fresh out of medical school, while all of his colleagues were getting off on being call Dr. This or Dr. That, Allen had never felt comfortable with the term. He’d grown up calling his father Dr. Weathers, and hearing the term applied to him just never felt right. Even less so after he’d given up on being a surgeon during his first year as an intern and switched to pathology.
“So they left us a live one?” he said trying not to dwell on the past.
“Yeah, they said security was down here questioning them when this one came in and they got distracted.”
The man’s body was strapped to the gurney face down, as was the new custom. He didn’t see any bite marks or other signs of trauma. Probably another suicide. There were a lot of those these days.
“What’s the clock?” he asked. He remembered in the days before the dead began to rise, his first question would have been cause of death, but not anymore. These days, his job was all about time. Alice reached down and grabbed the man’s wrist and looked at the watch strapped there matching the one she wore. Admin wouldn’t allow anyone into the cities without the implant and watch. It was just too dangerous to let people die quietly. If you ever took it off, or worse, tried to remove the implant, you were turned out of the city to fend for yourself amongst the Risen that roamed the countryside.
“Two hours and twelve minutes since death. We’ve got time,” she announced.
“Well, let’s get to work. Plenty of time or not, you never know what will be coming down the hall and with Simmons gone, we can’t afford to get backed up.” She nodded in agreement already putting her gloves and other gear on.
“So tell me about our first customer.”
Chapter 5: Burn the Brain, Kill the Zombie
Allen prepared his tools while Alice relayed what Wilson had told her. The Runners had brought him in about an hour ago: male, mid-40s, widower. He’d been found with a bunch of empty syringes next to him and track marks on his arm. Probably heroin or meth overdose. He nodded and examined the arm, noting that there weren’t any old injection sites. He saw only three fresh ones. That would do it.
“Family?” he asked.
“Records show they all died shortly after The Event,” she replied.
The Event was what the media had taken to calling it, but it had many other names; The Rising, Z-Day, even The Rapture by the zealots.
“Alone, huh. A lot of people like that these days. Even still, let’s make sure this guy can have a real funeral.” With that, they set to work.
Allen grabbed his bone saw and began to cut away the back of the skull. June 15, 2013, the day of The Event had been almost two and a half years ago, and Allen had repeated this process countless times since.
He remembered the day well. He’d been unlucky enough to be at work in the old morgue in the basement.
He’d just finished performing an autopsy on a murder victim for the cops and the news was droning on about some emergency in the background when Allen heard a knocking.
He’d frozen in the middle of bagging the murder victim and waited. He’d been a Pathologist for seven years at that point and was used to working with the dead, but still sometimes, his imagination got the best of him. Just when he convinced himself he had imagined it, it came again. He swallowed hard, suddenly realizing that he was the only one working in the basement today. He walked slowly over to the cold storage lockers and listened. Besides the body on the table, there was only one other in the lockers: a young woman who’d died earlier that day.
With his ear pressed close, he could definitely hear the muffled sounds of struggling inside. His first thought, the only logical thought at that point, was that somebody had made a mistake and this poor lady was still alive.
Allen thumbed the electric saw off. He had a few bloody bits on his face guard that Alice wiped away with a towel. She then handed him his long thin forceps. He began to peel back the circular piece of skull he’d cut away from the back of the head. Alice used her scalpel to cut away the veins that connected the brain to the skull. The mental image of opening a can of Spaghetti-Os always flashed into his mind at this point.
With a suddenly sweaty hand, he opened the locker. The black body bag thrashed around inside, the head raising and smacking the top of the small, rectangular opening. The whole scene was surreal. In all his years, he’d never had somebody wake up in his morgue. He’d heard about it happening many times but this was a first for him. Thinking back on that day, he knew now that it was odd that the poor girl hadn’t been screaming her head off but at the moment it didn’t occur to him.
“Settle down, Miss,” he said trying to soothe her. “I’ll get you out of there.”
With the scalp peeled back and the skull opened from the base to the back of the crown, it was now simply a matter of severing the brain at the spinal cord and pulling it out. The trick was to get all of the tissue in one pull, because if you missed any, the body would still rise. Easier said than done, because the brain was not by nature a strictly solid mass, but with practice, it became routine.
Even after pulling the shelf out from the locker, the body inside the bag continued to struggle. Allen grabbed the zipper and pulled it down. Expecting to hear a cry of relief, he was instead greeted by a guttural growl as the girl lunged forward and bit his forearm.
“What the hell, lady?” he yelped withdrawing his wounded limb.
As he studied his arm, cursing more under his breath, the young woman continued to struggle to get out of the bag. The wound wasn’t deep, but she had drawn blood and Allen was a little shaken, causing him to miss his opportunity to slide the woman back into the locker and close the door.
With a thud the body fell to the floor, still unable to get its feet completely free from the body bag.
“Jesus Christ,” he again cursed. “If you’d just wait a minute, I’ll help you.”
He was greeted only by a growl. The woman was on her hands and knees and was crawling toward Allen. She raised her head and that was when he finally realized there was something very wrong. The eyes that looked back at him were fully dilated, the face was pale but the back and sides of the neck had the familiar purple stain of livor mortis, the settling of blood to the lowest points of a dead body.
The brain came free from the skull with an unpleasant slurping. Even with practice, Allen had never gotten used to that sound. Alice got her hands underneath f
or support while he took a better hold on the slippery blob of tissue. She then walked over and opened the door to the firing chamber to hold it for him. He hurried to it and unceremoniously plopped his grisly burden on the metal grate inside. Alice shut the door, locked it, and flipped the switch.
Flames leapt up from underneath the brain and it began to sizzle and smoke. She cranked the knob on the side to full and the entire chamber filled with flame. Even wet, the tissue would be consumed in a matter of minutes. The inside of the special firing chamber reached nearly 900 Celsius and vaporized anything inside, leaving only a fine ash behind.
With that done, the two set about repairing the scalp and skull as best they could. Once it was all stitched, the body would appear almost normal, and most importantly would not try to rise at 6 hours, 6 minutes, and 6 seconds.
“At least he’ll have a normal funeral now,” Alice offered.
“Yes, I suppose,” Allen replied, wondering with his family dead who would even be there. He thought back to the day of The Rising and the young woman. After the shock of realizing what was going on, he’d managed to force her into a storage closet and lock her in even while she struggled to bite him again. After a quick bandage on his wound, he’d gone upstairs to find help.
The next six months had been bad. Even with the delay in time it took for the dead to rise, it was still hard for society to retain control. Experts estimated that nearly half the world’s population perished in the first outbreak.
At first, the only way to stop the dead was to cut off the head, although this only incapacitated them. The head and body would still move independently of each other, but with what little motor control they possessed gone, most would simply flop around on the ground. Then it was discovered that if they burnt the head the body would rest.
Allen remembered the fires with a shudder. A permanent cloud of smoke from burning hair and flesh had hung over the cities in those days, a smell he thought they would never be rid of. The next discovery was that, bitten or not, every single body rose after dying. There didn’t seem to be any infection transmitted by the dead that would suggest a natural cause.
A panel of scientists, who still debated endlessly about when “death” actually occurred, concluded that at 6 hours the body would begin to stir. They had tried to leave out that it was really closer to 6 hours, 6 minutes and 6 seconds due to the religious implications, but it didn’t take long for the zealous of the world to pick up on it. Once they did, it fueled their mania. They cried that God was punishing the world for its wickedness and that repentance was the only answer. One prominent preacher had even puzzled out that the date June 15th, 2013 could be converted to 666. June the sixth month, then the day 15 = 1+5 and the year = 2+0+1+3 all added up to the magic number.
Allen personally felt that was a stretch at best, and didn’t know if he thought God had anything to do with this, but he did agree that it felt like a punishment. Still, medicine and science had been unable to explain how a person dead more than six hours could suddenly get up and walk away or even stranger, how a body could still move after its brain had been cut away, resting only once it had been completely destroyed, usually by fire, although acid worked as well. Eventually, they stopped trying to explain it at all.
The government, seeking to reassert control over the situation and to help contain the outbreaks, had come up with a solution. Each person was equipped with a heart rate monitor equipped with a GPS, that would emit a beacon if the heart stopped.
This worked well enough and greatly reduced the outbreaks. For a while, things had seemed somewhat normal again, but then something strange began to happen. People, as a rule, never really appreciate anything until it is taken away from them. Groups began to pop up demanding that they be able to die in their own way without somebody monitoring them. They felt it an invasion of their most basic rights so they began ditching their monitors and running away. Some even went to remote locations to perform mass suicides.
This prompted the government to institute mandatory monitors injected into the arm, next to the ulnar artery, to detect pulse. This made it much harder to simply ditch the devices because by the time they cut them out, and patched themselves up, the authorities would find them. If they refused the injections, they were turned away from the protection of the city to fend for themselves, a choice that many made.
Allen rubbed his wrist, thinking about the painful injection, and wondered why anyone would mess with it. It wasn’t a perfect system but it did afford the population the luxury of living mostly normal lives and with the work of people like Allen and Alice, they’d regained some dignity for the dead and closure for those left behind.
Chapter 6: What Are You?
Allen and Alice busied themselves with cleaning the morgue. The suicide sat in cold storage waiting for the funeral home to pick up. The scanner tracking the crews of EMTs had some mild chatter but it didn’t sound like they had anything incoming. No codes were being announced over the hospital intercom, so they found themselves sharing a rare quiet moment.
Alice kept looking at Allen and opening her mouth as if to say something then stopped.
She was a good trainee, and not unattractive, something he tried his best to ignore. She was in her late twenties or early thirties by his guess, athletic build, tall but not towering and dark brown hair always pulled tightly back in a ponytail. He’d never married, and didn’t intend to while the world was in chaos. Even though they’d worked together for a few months now, he realized that he knew very little about her. He didn’t even know how she had come to be a trainee.
Perhaps sensing his line of thought, she cleared her throat and asked, “So what are you, Allen?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well you won’t let me call you Dr. Weathers but you obviously have a medical background. Lots of people work in our field who aren’t actual doctors. It’s not exactly feasible to go through med school these days.”
She was right. Since everything went to hell, they basically let anybody with any medical training work in the hospital. Really, they let anybody who was willing and able. Wilson, for example, was an army medic. Many former nurses were working upstairs as full-fledged doctors. In fact if Allen thought about it, there were really only four licensed doctors in the whole hospital: himself; Adams was a pediatrician and now ran the ER; Lewis, an OB-GYN, also worked the ER, and Simmons of course. Simmons had been a big-shot plastic surgeon in LA when The Event happened. Allen didn’t know how he’d ended up with them. He realized Alice was staring at him still waiting for him to answer.
“I am a doctor actually,” he replied.
“Well, what are you?” she pushed.
“A pathologist, if you can believe that. This is, or rather was, my morgue. I’ve worked here since I finished school.”
“Oh, wow. I never knew. Why the big secret?”
“It’s not a secret. Anybody that has worked in this hospital for more than a year and a half knows. We just don’t talk about the past. Nobody does, really. Too painful I guess.”
“How did you survive the initial outbreak? Were you working when it started to happen?”
Allen nodded his head.
“I bet a lot of pathologists and morticians died when it hit,” she said a faraway look in her eyes.
“I suppose so,” he replied. “I guess I was just lucky.” He rubbed the scar on his forearm absently.
“What about you? What are you?” he asked turning the conversation away from himself.
“I am a school teacher actually. High school biology if you can picture that.”
Allen laughed. “Actually I can’t. All of the high school science teachers I remember were creepy old men.”
She laughed in return. “Yes, but those creepy old men are my colleagues now, or were anyway…,” she trailed off. “But now all they teach the kids in the schools, the few who actually make the effort to go, is survival skills. It’s a shame really, but what are you going to do? I guess tha
t’s the world we live in now.”
“Yes,” he said then after a pause, “It will get better though. They’ll figure this thing out eventually.” The words felt wooden in his mouth. He’d never been one to offer pep talks and he knew it probably sounded halfhearted at best.
“I hope so,” she said.
After a moment of silence he said, “So what made you want to do this?” He watched as her face went dark. “I mean, if you don’t mind me asking, that is…,” he said trying to backpedal.
“No, you’re fine. I just think this is important work, helping the dead move on in peace and giving their loved ones a proper body to grieve over. It helps the healing process.”
He shook his head in agreement, and turned to busy himself with something else so as to not pry, but she continued.
“I lost my family in the initial outbreak. Both my parents and my little sister. We were separated by almost ten years so she was just a teenager when it all went to hell. We were trapped inside my parent’s house. They lived right downtown and the place was crawling with them. I remember hearing windows breaking in the front of the house. My dad tried to hold them back while my mom pushed me and my sister out the back. I was supposed to go out the window first to help my sister down, but when I hit the ground, one of them came out of the bushes and attacked me. My sister froze and by the time I got free, the ones in the house were attacking my mom and sister. I tried to climb back into the house, but I could barely reach the window, and there were more coming so I just ran and hid.”
“I’m sorry.”
She nodded her head wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand.
“When the army got things under control, I searched for them. They weren’t at the house, but I doubted they would be so I asked all the neighbors who were left if they’d seen or heard anything. Eventually I ended up at the fires. I never actually found my parents but after running back and forth among the piles, I saw my sister’s head as a soldier tossed it into the flames. Her face was badly mangled with bite marks, but I was sure it was her.”
