Working Stiff

“I worked late. I met Mr. Fideli….” Bryn looked past her inquisitor to Joe, who was leaning against the wall by the door, still looking neutral and distant. He nodded at her. “And then I tried to leave, but Mr. Fairview took me back inside….”

Her voice faded. Whatever had happened to her after that, before Joe Fideli had slapped her face to wake her up, she didn’t remember, or want to remember. It made her stomach churn with anxiety to think about it.

“Something bad happened,” she whispered. “Something …”

The man didn’t blink. “Yes,” he agreed again, exactly the way he’d agreed to her earlier statement. “Bryn, I need to know what you know about the business Mr. Fairview and Mr. Watson were running from the basement.”

“The embalming?”

“Not the embalming.”

“I don’t understand.” She really didn’t, and her head hurt. Her mouth felt dry and tasted of metal, and she desperately craved a drink. “Could I have some water, please?”

“Not yet. I need you to tell me what you saw, Bryn.”

“I can’t.” She meant it. She was shaking all over, ice-cold at the thought of even trying to pull up those memories.

He studied her for a moment, then pushed back the chair, stood up, and walked over to murmur with Joe Fideli in the corner. It was a quiet, fierce argument, and finally Joe turned and left the room. He didn’t look happy.

The man in the suit looked at Bryn, and she felt vulnerable, fragile, and cold.

“I’m afraid I have to give you some very bad news,” the man said. “Please, I want you to stay calm.”

Bryn’s hands clenched into fists around the sheet that was draped over her body. “I’m calm.”

“You’ve suffered an attack,” he said. “Unfortunately, you didn’t survive.”

She blinked. What the hell had he just said? “Excuse me?”

“You’re dead, Bryn. You were suffocated with a plastic bag over your head.”

“I’m not dead.” But what he was saying made the darkness in her head ripple and threaten to tear and let those awful memories come out. “Obviously, I’m not dead; I’m talking to you. It’s not true.”

“I’m sorry, but I have no choice but to explain this to you. You’ve been treated with a proprietary drug, a drug that can bring a subject back from death for a limited period of time.”

“Limited,” she echoed faintly. “What do you mean, limited?”

“Without another injection, the nanites in your bloodstream will shut down in twenty-four hours. They’re all that’s keeping your body running, Bryn. They can repair damage and maintain your body at a certain level, but they don’t restore life permanently. It’s a facsimile of life, not sustainable on its own.” He clasped his hands behind his back and met her eyes steadily. “You’re a problem, Bryn. My problem. I made the call to bring you back, in the hope that you could give us some information about what was going on at the Fairview Mortuary, where they were obtaining the drugs stolen from our company.”

She didn’t understand. She didn’t want to understand. Her heart was pounding—if she were dead, her heart shouldn’t be beating, right? But she could feel it. She could feel everything. She was thirsty, for God’s sake.

She was alive.

“You brought me back,” she said. “From the dead.”

He said nothing.

“To ask me questions.”

“Questions you haven’t yet been able to answer,” he said. “Which is a problem for us both, you see. I made a substantial investment that isn’t paying off. As things go, I really don’t have any justification to give you a second shot. Unfortunately, that means you face a very difficult five or six days while the nanites completely shut down, and you … continue on the natural path of decay. We don’t really know if consciousness survives during that process, but I’m afraid it might, for a time. We’ll do everything we can to make you comfortable.”

It burst in on her with a blinding light: Mr. and Mrs. Jones. The drug. Mr. Fairview demanding all that money.

Mr. Garcia’s rotting corpse, moving weakly in its bag.

That’s going to be me.

“No!” she burst out. “No, you can’t do this to me! You son of a bitch, you can’t just let me rot!”

“Then tell me something that I can use to keep you alive,” he said, and for a second, his hard shell of reserve cracked. “Please Miss Davis. Tell me something I can use. Anything.”

She swallowed hard, squeezed her eyes shut, and then opened them. “Mr. Fairview was charging ten thousand dollars, and five hundred per shot. I saw him with someone named Mr. Jones. His wife needed the shot. And … he’d lost his job. He tried to grab the drugs, but Mr. Fairview shot him.” The world went too bright, and wobbly around the edges for a moment. She grabbed a deep breath to steady herself. “They put Mrs. Jones in a body bag. She was still alive. Still moving, anyway.”

There was a flash of horror across the man’s expression that made him seem, at least in that moment, human. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but that doesn’t help us. Did you hear Mr. Fairview say anything about where he was obtaining the drugs …?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t know anything about that.” And she realized, with a sinking sensation, that she’d just doomed herself. She had nothing left to tell him. Nothing he didn’t already know.

He seemed to know it, too. He looked at her for a long, silent moment, and then he turned and headed for the door.

“Wait,” she said. “At least tell me your name.”

She didn’t think he would. It was probably easier for him if he didn‘t. But he surprised her. “My name is Patrick McCallister,” he said. “I’m the chief of security for Pharmadene.”

“What’s Pharmadene?”

“The company that created Returné,” he said. “The drug that we gave you to bring you back.”

“You mean the drug that’s going to take five days to kill me again,” she said.

He unclipped his badge and swiped it through a strip reader next to the door. The door clicked open. “Unless I find a good reason to give you the next shot,” he said. “Yes.”

She watched the door slowly close, and then lowered her head to the clean, soft pillow.

I’m alive, she thought. Damn it, I’m alive.

For five more days, anyway.

Chapter 3

There was no way to tell time in the sterile little room Bryn was trapped inside. She wasn’t restrained, at least; that was something. There was a small, bland little toilet area off the main room, and she visited it regularly. Being almost alive came with toilet duties, apparently. She kept wondering whether they’d lied to her, if maybe there was nothing at all wrong with her; she didn’t feel different. She felt fine.

She was alive; screw what McCallister had said. This was all bullshit, and they were just trying to scare her. She’d blacked out when Freddy had been suffocating her with the bag; that was all— someone had gotten it off of her in time, and she’d been unconscious for a while, but she was okay now. Nothing weird about any of it.

In fact, she was no longer sure she’d even seen what she thought she had. Mrs. Jones had probably just been a junkie, sick with need. And the body in the bag … No, that had just been a decomposing murder victim, nothing special about it. It hadn’t moved. It hadn‘t.

It couldn‘t.

Bryn flexed her hand, staring down at it. Same smooth skin. Same fingernails, topped with the same chipped pearl-pink polish. Same flexors and extensors and muscles and bones. Same scar, there on the wrist, where she’d