No, the book wasn’t good enough.
There were all kinds of scalpels and saws in the autopsy rooms, but he didn’t want to take a chance of coming across an intruder before he could get to a weapon. He opened the drawer to his desk. Aha! A letter opener.
Clutching it in his hand, he stood. He looked toward the door to the street and noted that it was securely locked. He started down the hallway.
A glance into the first room showed him that everything was sterile and pristine.
And smelling…sanitized.
Like a morgue.
A place of death.
Hardly a surprise, he thought with a shrug, and he moved on.
He found nothing. At last he came to the large insulated stainless steel doors that led to the morgue’s current occupants.
He opened the door to what was essentially a giant refrigerator and looked around. Nothing. No, wait.
Something.
Shit!
There was movement on one of the gurneys. Damn it, they did have rats! Big rats, if the movement he was seeing gave any clue.
Rats—or a frat brother, trying to freak him out, he thought. He shook his head and walked to the gurney.
“Asshole,” he said, pulling back the sheet.
But no frat brother was waiting to leap up and yell “Boo!”
He’d seen the corpse earlier. It was the one that had been discovered by a woman chasing after her kid, and it was months dead and decaying. The eyes were…gone. Eaten by insects or who knew what. Most of the flesh had been rotted away, and what was left clinging to the bones looked as if it had been burned. In fact, the smell of burning flesh had hovered around the body. She—because it was a she—had scarcely been recognizable as a human being.
But now…
A sound like…like insects gnawing on flesh and bone was coming from the corpse, but that wasn’t the cause
It
Her eyes—eyes that hadn’t been there at all earlier—suddenly opened, and she stared at him.
And then she smiled.
Smiled, only it wasn’t a smile, it was like a snarl, and she was baring her teeth, but they weren’t teeth at all, they were fangs. She looked like a huge asp, her horrid maw of a mouth opening, and he knew that she meant to sink those fangs into his jugular.
He screamed.
And he struck, batting at her face with his hand and trying to stab her with the letter opener. But those teeth were still coming….
Then, suddenly, he felt something heavy smash down on his head. Stars burst before his eyes, and he crashed to the floor.
He thought vaguely that he heard someone groan “Son of a bitch,” but he wasn’t sure. And then the world went quiet, as if a black curtain had fallen from the sky, and all seemed to be eternal darkness.
14
M ark was certain the morgue was empty when he arrived, but as he stood at the door of the seemingly deserted facility, it opened, and Sean Canady was standing there in the dark.
“Took you long enough,” he said, then turned and walked away, calling over his shoulder, “Come in. Quickly.”
Mark followed, his eyes adjusting quickly to the darkness. There were security lights, but they offered dim illumination at best.
“No night attendant?” Mark asked.
“He’s…here.”
“Oh?”
“I knocked him out,” Sean said impatiently. “I had to.”
“Really?”
“Come see.”
“I thought you wanted me down here because of that body the cops brought in today?” Mark asked with a frown.
“Yes.”
“I destroyed her today.”
