Working Stiff

stock. You know that. And I still have Mr. Garcia to contend with, which is entirely your fault.”

Garcia. That name rang a bell, something immediate…. They’d mentioned, during her hiring process, that she was replacing a man named Cesar Garcia, who’d left town.

Maybe he hadn’t left town at all.

“He’s nearly done.” Freddy shrugged. “It’s been five days since his last shot. He won’t last the night.”

“Check him,” Mr. Fairview said. “I don’t want an unpleasant surprise.”

Freddy opened up the walk-in refrigerator and wheeled out the other body that had been in the freezer, the one in the body bag. And Bryn, to her horror, heard that sound again.

That scratching.

Not rats. She could see the bag moving, very slowly.

“Oh, God,” she whispered. She couldn’t seem to move as Freddy unzipped the body bag.

The smell spread through the room, sickly sweet and foul, and from all appearances, what was in the body bag was at least several weeks dead and decomposing. Bryn was used to the stench, but what made her eyes widen and her throat close up was the fact that this corpse, this decomposing thing, was still moving. Not involuntary biological twitches. Real, directed movements.

The lipless mouth opened, and air scraped out—not a scream, because the vocal cords were gone, but she understood.

Deep inside, she knew it was a howl of utter horror.

“Christ,” Freddy said in disgust. “He’s hanging on better than I’d expected. I may have to disassemble him.”

“No,” Mr. Fairview said, and came to stand next to Freddy, looking down on the remains of Mr. Garcia … Bryn’s predecessor. “This is fine. We can document the progress, until he’s too far gone to be of any use to us. Five full days is the longest anyone’s lasted, right? Maybe he’ll go to six. Or Mrs. Jones will. I suppose we can give up any hope of a payday on her as well.”

“What—” She hadn’t realized that she’d spoken until the word slipped out, and then it was too late. She’d drawn their attention.

Bryn grabbed a scalpel from the tray of sterile instruments and menaced Freddy as he came her way. “Back off!” she said. “I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch.”

He laughed. “Late to the party, Double Trouble. Fairview got me first.”

She was fast, but he turned out to be faster, slapping the scalpel out of the way and slamming her face-first into the wall. Everything went vague, except for the pain, which remained cuttingly sharp, and then she was on the floor in a heap, watching her own blood crawl red over the tile. Just like Melissa.

The voices came at her smeared and disembodied, from what seemed like a great distance.

“Do you want to keep her?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe. It’s a bother to set up her disappearance properly. Let’s do it and get her in storage. I’ll decide later, once we dispose of Mr. Jones.”

Bryn felt herself being lifted, then settling into place on a stiff, cold surface.

A preparation table.

“No,” she whispered, and Mr. Fairview looked down on her with that distant, professional compassion she’d thought was so wonderful before. Adrenaline surged through her, and she tried to get up. He had leverage, and muscle, to keep her down.

“Sorry it didn’t work out,” he said. “You really did have a lot of promise, Bryn. I hope you don’t take this personally.”

He nodded to Freddy, and Freddy snapped on a pair of latex gloves, then lifted up a clear plastic bag.

He put it over her head.

Bryn involuntarily gasped, but the plastic filled her mouth and nose and blocked off her air. Freddy made sure of it by pressing his hand down over her face, and all her struggling didn’t make any difference at all. It seemed to take forever, and the panic was so extreme that it was painful, like needles in her skin. She was screaming, but the sound couldn’t get out. Her lungs ached, then hurt, then shrieked for air. God, it hurt. It hurt so badly.

Then it all started to go softly gray at the edges, and the edges pushed in, and in, until it was all a hazy mist, and she couldn’t remember why she was fighting so hard, and it was all pain, all of it. Dying was supposed to be easier.

Something crashed in the room, loud enough to penetrate even her fading senses, but she couldn’t make sense of it. Nothing made any sense. Everyone was yelling, and there was smoke, and fire, and the sharp pops of gunfire. Freddy’s chest exploded in a red mist, and he fell away. Blood splattered the bag over her eyes, and she couldn’t see anymore.

None of it mattered as she gasped, and gasped, and the taste of plastic was the last thing she knew as the shadows slipped over her and drowned her.

And it hurt, all the way to the very last scream of the last nerve.

“Crap, crap, crap,” a voice whispered, from a very long distance away. “Goddamn it. Shit. Come on, Bryn. Come on back.”

Someone was patting her face, which felt cold and clammy with moisture. She felt … numb. Cold to the bone. And oddly disconnected, as if she weren’t quite inside her own body.

Then, with a harsh, electric snap, she was back, and everything woke up.

Bryn’s body arched, and a scream raked its way up from her guts, out through her throat, and burst out of her mouth with so much force that she felt something tear inside of her. It didn’t even sound human, that scream: certainly nothing she could imagine coming out of her own body.

And then the pain drowned her in a thick, stinging wave, and she knew why she was screaming.

There was a murmur of voices, and she saw a glimpse of a face in the haloes of bright lights.

Joe Fideli. He looked grim and sad, and he was holding her hand. “Relax,” he said. “I know it hurts. Just relax now. You’ll be okay.”

She reached out, but it was too hard, too far, and whatever liquid they were injecting into her arm made her fall very far, very fast, into a hot, airless darkness.

Waking up the second time was both easier and worse. Easier because she no longer felt all the pain and horror; worse because she didn’t know where she was. It was a featureless room, very clean. She was tucked in a narrow bed with rails, and there were portable medical monitors, cabinets—the usual hospital room accoutrements. Nothing else that she could see. She didn’t even have an IV in her arm, only an oxygen clamp on her fingertip. The place smelled of antiseptic.

As she sat up to get a better look around, the door at the far end opened, and Joe Fideli came in. He was followed by another man Bryn didn’t know—younger than Joe, with black hair and brown eyes and skin a few shades darker than Bryn‘s. He was wearing a tailored black suit and a sober-looking tie, and both he and Joe had ID badges clipped onto their pockets.

Joe’s face was very, very calm, blank, and bland, and from the first look at him, she knew she was in trouble.

She just had no idea why, or how.

“Hello,” Bryn said. The two men didn’t say a word. She wet her very dry lips. “Where am I? What happened?”

Joe exchanged a look with the unknown man, then said, “You’re in a safe place.”

“Safe …” That didn’t seem to make sense to her. There was no safe place. Not anymore.

The other man, the one she didn’t know, walked forward, pulled up a single aluminum chair, and sat down next to her bedside. Close up, he was handsome in a quiet kind of way, and a little older than she’d thought— probably midthirties.

“Your name is Bryn Davis,” he said. She nodded, waiting for him to offer his own. He didn’t. “What do you remember about what happened to you?”

“I—” She stopped, because there was a black curtain between her and those memories, and she didn’t want to walk through it. She knew instinctively that it was there for a reason. “I’m not really sure. I remember going to work; there was a girl who killed herself—”

“Yes,” the man agreed, without any emotional weight on the word at all. “Go on.”