One
Even deep in the basement of Northpoint Regional Hospital, I can hear the torrential downpour pounding against the building. I shiver at the sound, thankful I made it inside before getting soaked. Wet clothes and the perpetual cold of the morgue are not a good combination for a looming ten-hour shift.
As usual, I arrive early, already dreading the paperwork. Deaths have risen throughout the city lately—so many overdoses, accidents, and broken bodies showing up every day. I wonder if it will ever slow down again.
Breathing a sigh, I back into the heavy door of the morgue and push it open, my gaze cutting to the exam tables. Three bodies draped in white sheets are waiting. None of them have been tagged, and judging by the bulky shape beneath one of the sheets, my almost-useless partner hasn’t even gotten around to undressing them yet.
I whip my head toward the offices in the back of the room and narrow my eyes at the back of Mason’s head. He’s hunched over the desk, earbuds wedged in his ears, drumming two pens over a stack of files.
Balancing a cup of coffee in one hand and my purse, lunch box, and coat on the other arm, I hurry across the exam room to the office. Even from three feet away, I can hear the music blasting from the tiny speakers in his earbuds. I reach over and flick one of them. It arcs across the desk and hits the floor the same moment Mason shrieks and whirls around in his chair, hinges screeching in protest.
He stares up at me with wide blue eyes, hand pressing to his chest. His surprise quickly gives way to fury. “For fuck’s sake, Edwards! You can’t creep up on a guy like that around here!”
I ignore him, take a step back, and point toward the three exam tables. “Are those new?”
Mason rolls his eyes and bends to retrieve his fallen earbud, offering me a strained answer while refusing to lift his ass from the chair. “Got here maybe an hour ago.” When he sits back up to blow dust and debris from his earbud, he glares at me. “An OD and a broken neck.”
“There are three of them.”
“Huh?” Mason doesn’t wait for an answer. He wedges the earbud back into his ear and turns to his desk.
I yank it out again, and as soon as he whips his head up to shout at me, I point to the exam room. “There are three in there.”
“They must’ve slipped it in when I went to the bathroom, jeez. It’s not that big of a deal.”
Yeah, I think as I toss the earbud into his hand. To you, it’s not, because you’re leaving in two hours and don’t have to deal with it.
Sure, it’s not the first time we’ve been surprised with a recently deceased—especially since the evening hospital staff has gotten lax—but the least Mason could have done is undress them.
I sigh and drop my stuff on the short filing cabinet behind my desk. A stack of unfinished death certificates sits beside my keyboard, and I groan, cursing myself for procrastinating yesterday. Diving into paperwork first is my least favorite part of the job—aside from babysitting my coworker.
I glance again at the bodies in the exam room and sip my coffee, grimacing at the bitter taste. For the next hour and a half, I fill out each death certificate as quickly yet thoroughly as I can, making sure not to leave a single piece of information out.
Mason gets up to stretch his legs and grab something from the vending machines upstairs, leaving me to myself. Judging by how long he’s taking, I figure he’s stopped by the nurse’s station to flirt shamelessly with the night shift girls.
Though being alone in the morgue creeped me out at first, I’ve become so used to it that I barely notice the lifeless bodies around me. They’re as harmless as furniture now.
It’s the living ones I don’t like.
After finishing the last death certificate, I drop the stack onto my attending doctor’s cluttered desk and stretch. The air shifts as I move into the exam room, the temperature dipping near the refrigerated chambers. The cold usually doesn’t bother me, but a shiver rolls down my spine as I pass them and I frown.
I stand before the three exam tables and lift the sheet on the first one. Thick, black boots and dark jeans ripped at the knees. I drop the sheet, vowing to blackmail Mason into undressing this one before his shift ends. I lift the next sheet and breathe a small sigh of relief.
At least this one’s undressed.
I tug on a pair of nitrile gloves, grab my recorder, and fold the sheet down to the middle-aged woman’s waist. There’s nothing unusual about her—aside from the obvious cervical fracture on the left side of her neck. Bringing the recorder up, I hold the button and begin.
“Mollie Edwards, initial examination, ten-twenty-two P.M. Middle-aged female, approximately forty years old, presenting with cervical fracture. Female is overweight with excessive adipose tissue around—”
The door to the examination room slams open with a deafening crack and I nearly jump right out of my sneakers. My pen, file folder, and recorder spill onto the floor, the latter tumbling under the chambers. Mason stands in the doorway, arms clutching his midsection as he laughs at my misfortune.
“You asshole!” I try to calm my rising blood pressure, but his giggling makes that impossible.
“Oh, god! You should’ve seen your face!” He mimics my shocked look with a dramatic gasp before falling into another fit of giggles. “That’ll teach you to sneak up on someone around here.”
I bend to scoop the metal tray from the floor and frown—my recorder is nowhere to be seen. I stand, glaring at Mason as he dances back into the office with a bag of chips. “You’re not supposed to have food in here.”
I brush my hands off on my lab coat and decide to forget the recorder. It’s more time-consuming to continue on paper, but crawling around on my hands and knees isn’t happening tonight. Being bitten by a spider would definitely make me homicidal toward a certain chubby, insufferable prick and as satisfying as that would be, I do not want to go to prison.
Grabbing a clipboard and the proper paperwork, I click my pen and continue my initial observations on the three bodies. The woman is fairly simple. The odd angle of her neck, with a few vertebrae nearly visible beneath bruised skin, makes it obvious she died from the injury. I switch to a fresh set of papers and turn the sheet down on the next one.
The first thing I notice is his hair. Thick, black strands lay across his forehead, and I stare at the silver streak starting at his temple. I’ve never seen hair so silky and shiny on a dead guy before. I blink, glancing down at his face half-covered by a black fabric mask stretching from his nose down past his chin.
This one is still fully dressed.
The one Mason won’t be leaving without taking care of first.
I cross to the last covered exam table and drape the sheet down over the other man’s chest. This one is already undressed, at least. Thankful for small miracles, I grab my clipboard and jot a basic description. He looks young—maybe early twenties. No obvious trauma I can see, so I part his dark hair to look for lacerations or blood splatters.
Maybe this one is the OD Mason mentioned. I pull the sheet back further and roll his arms over, checking for puncture marks in the bends of his elbows. As I glance to the other arm, noting the tattoo inked right over his heart, a mark across his throat catches my attention.
Frowning, I set the clipboard down across his stomach and guide his head to the side. With my free hand, I reach up to pull the light closer.
Just below his jaw on the left side, between his chin and ear, are several puncture wounds. It isn’t unheard of for drug abusers to inject directly into the neck, but these wounds are strange and positioned right over the carotid artery. The longer I study the marks, the less they look like needle marks at all.
In fact, they look more like… teeth marks.
“What the…” I trail off, standing up straight before glancing back at Mason. He wouldn’t hear me. His music still blares so loud I can hear it across the room. I raise the pen to throw it at his back, but never get the chance.
A hand snatches my elbow and grips me with vice-like strength.
I whirl around, wide-eyed, staring at the pale fingers clutching my arm. Blackened, cracked nails dig into my sleeve. My gaze follows the hand down to the arm I was just examining—all the way to a smirking face.
The dead man’s eyes snap open, pupils so large they drown the irises in black. He cuts them immediately to me, his grin widening as ice shoots through my veins..
