Surprised to be Dead

Well, this certainly is a predicament.

Her eyes opened only to find darkness above and all around her. It wasn't the first time Brigid found herself waking from a dream-like coma in a coffin or a morgue. The trouble was getting out of the freezer drawer in the first place. It was a shame she never had a watch to time herself. It would make a nifty trick at Halloween parties.

Her hands reached out, white fabric rustling as the pads of her fingers found the icy walls and ceiling. Her senses returned slowly. They usually followed slowly after she woke up. The darkness grew dimmer; she became used to the shadows with the passing seconds. Blinking several times just to be sure she could still see, Brigid became aware of a few other things her dulled senses did not pick up at first. The first thing she noticed was the lack of clothes. Realizing that she wasn't really dead, goose bumps roamed all across her skin from the cold. The cold slab under her bare back was almost too much for her to handle at the moment. She wanted to wrap her arms around herself, but there was no room. The metal drawer wasn't wide enough. Her bony elbows met sharply with the walls which sealed her up in that square prison.

She was naked, alone, and locked inside a freezer, presumably owned by the local medical examiner. She knew how and why she got here. It wasn't the first time, which was why she didn't panic. After the fifth time, she simply sighed, shrugged, and laid there in silence. If anything, being stuck in places like this gave Brigid ample time to think, something that she didn't really have enough time for between injections.

She worried more or less about the title of her next book, or that publisher would come calling on her phone or bust down the door to get a hold of her. Being an anonymous writer made it that much easier for Brigid to find herself in this kind of mess. It wouldn't do to have a best-selling author on drugs, though that could be quite the boon if she sold exclusively to the alternative scene. Not to mention it would be very difficult to explain how said best-selling author comes back to life and wanders out of the local morgue, seemingly rising from the dead on a nearly regular basis. It wouldn't do at all to keep away news hounds and religious nuts. Solitude, she lived in and for solitude; yet another boon for ghost writing.

They hadn't started an autopsy, at least she hoped they hadn't. Brigid felt along the expanse of her chest as she tried to find the familiar Y-shaped scar you see in every CSI-type show on cable. Though her arm could barely reach where her hand needed to go, her fingers met with nothing but smooth skin. She sighed with relief, although little good an autopsy would do for her. The scalpel's cut would probably heal instantly anyway; she never tried to test the theory out.

Now to the task at hand, getting out of here without many witnesses.

The trick to escaping the morgue, in case you're mistaken for a corpse, is fairly easy. It sometimes depends on where you are, some morgues have freezers that are different from many others. However, from what Brigid discovered for herself, medical examiners typically picked the old hook and eye closure to seal up the drawer. In general, some banging on the opening, or the face of the drawer just above the head, usually got the job done.

What you waited for was the soft ping of the hook sliding out of place, but if some poor unfortunate soul were to stumble across the freezer, shaken by the horrible realization that some other poor unfortunate soul was trapped inside a place clearly designated for the dead, well, that is where some real creativity can come into play. Bribery sometimes worked as did simply killing them, but Brigid found that the best method was simply to scare the living daylights out of the witnesses. Nobody would believe them anyhow and Brigid would be free to exit stage left. If you can get them to faint, all the better, if not catatonia was equally effective.

The soft ping was a welcomed angel. The drawer opened with a heavy clatter. Brigid's hands padded against the low metal ceiling above her until the slab rolled out like a plank of wood on a pirate's ship. She had to be careful, though. If she pulled out too quickly, she'd wind up on the floor, and the floor certainly was a less friendly bed-mate than four metal walls.

As she sat up, intent on sitting briefly to regain her senses and scope out her new surroundings, all the exits, doors, and hiding places, the cloth hiding the feminine organs that made her a woman slipped. The cloth was nothing more than a small sheet hardly big enough to wrap even half way around her body. Brigid didn't boat of having a voluptuous, curvy body of sex goddess simply because she didn't have that kind of figure. She was a twig, a skinny twig with a B-cup, which counted as the only part of her body that was curvy. Evidently, her backside was flat as a board, or so she'd been told. She left the cloth slip away anyway. It crumbled to the laminated floor in a beige heap. Brigid sat, more naked than before, thinking. She liked to think when she was bored. She hadn't noticed til just now that she became bored very easily and more frequently as of late.

After being alone with her thoughts, Brigid swung her legs of the slab, feet deftly touching the floor. Bending over in an unladylike manner, but come to think of it, when was Brigid ever a lady to begin with?

Bending over, she took hold of the cloth and stood straight. She glanced around the room, looking for her clothes. There were a lot of things she could pull off. Walking out of this place without nothing but that piece of cloth, and even that didn't leave much to the imagination, wasn't one of them. There was one other thing she could do, but she would rather not leave her clothes behind. The less evidence she left behind, the better, otherwise she would get an earful from Big Brother, and that she could live without.

A crash behind her made Brigid spin on her heels, the cloth held up only by her hands around the top of her chest, spun with her. A pair of frightened green eyes met with her own. The assistant, no older than his late twenties or early thirties, shook from his head to his toes. Surgical tools lay scattered at his feet. His chest was heaving. She could smell the panic pouring off him like the stench coming off a garbage truck in the middle of a hot summer day. She smiled, K-9's peeking from between her lips greedy and hungry as if her teeth had twisted grins of their own.

Her eyes grazed over him.

The man went by Thomas McIntosh, if the plastic name tag meant anything. He wore sea foam-colored scrubs and a matching cap. The color and texture of his hair, even the length, was covered by the cap, but she did note how pretty his eyes were. She kind of like how his tannish skin, probably got that from being outside a lot, paled as she made her way towards him. The closer she got, the younger his features became until she came to the conclusion that Thomas was no more than twenty-eight or twenty-seven. Rather than looking like the stereotypical M.E assistant that basically the same on most crime-solving T.V. shows, Thomas was neither tall and lanky nor short and slightly round in the middle. He was of medium height, standing about five feet and seven inches tall. The scrubs couldn't hide the fine-tuned muscles in his arms. Brigid thought for a split second of running over there, tear of his clothes, and do him then and there. She bit her lower lip and tried to resist the idea.

She placed one of her hands on his chest, which she found to be delightfully firm. Why did she resist the temptation to sleep with him again? Playing with his name tag as she snuggled into his chest, Brigid ignored the pungent smell of nervous sweat from his armpits.

“Do you know where my clothes are?”

“Y-your clothes?”

Brigid took his chin in her hand and batted her eyelashes.

“Yes, sweetie, my clothes. I remember wearing some before I blacked out. Where are they?” Her voice was so sickly sweet she almost made herself gag, but it was worth seeing the confused, terrified, and reluctantly aroused look on the poor man's face.

“I d-don't have them.”

Brigid saw how his eyes daringly glanced down at her chest. She accidentally let some of the fabric fall away, revealing more of her breasts.

“I know you don't have them,” Brigid purred. “That's why you should go and get them for me.”

Good boy." She pecked him on the cheek.

Thomas scuttled away and out through one of the doors, a closet apparently. He returned quickly with vacuumed sealed plastic bags containing all of her clothes and shoes. He flung them on the nearest table, and with shaking hands, unzipped them.

Brigid took out the contents, dropping the fabric completely. She let him watch, unabashed by her nakedness. It was nothing more than a reverse strip tease. Her clothes smelled like someone died in them, oh wait. The inside joke made her laugh out loud, which only made Thomas all the more nervous.

“If anyone asks, Thomas,” Brigid said as she straightened the red plaid polo shirt, unbuttoned, over her dark gray tank, “I was identified by my Jewish mother. Your superiors won't think twice.”

He could only nod at this point, so drained on a mental capacity. She turned and smiled, her shoelaces wrapped around her fingers so that her beat-up red Chuck Taylor's dangled in the air next to her knees.

“That's a good boy.” She leaned against the wall as she shoved her feet into the shoes and tied the laces, not bothering to look at what she was doing. Not once did she tear her eyes away from his. It was like she wanted not so much as take a mental picture of him, but paint a morale of him against the wall in her skull. Safe to say, fear turned her on.

“Who would believe me?” Thomas seemed to find his voice as well as his courage again, however there wasn't enough courage in him to keep his body from trembling like a leaf in the wind.

Brigid laughed at him.

“Too true! Who would believe you?” She chuckled as she strutted back towards him, making sure he noticed her legs in her skin-tight jeans. She pressed herself against him, her mouth a nano-inch from his throat.

She could hear how fast the blood was pounding underneath his unprotected flesh. Humans had the naive notion that nothing could kill them, always so arrogant. But there were a lot of things that could kill them. A pen, a knife, a bullet, or better still, fangs.

The blood pounded against the veins it ran through. Brigid kissed him at the base of his throat, her palm against his flat stomach.

Then let him go.

Thomas slid down the face of the wall, staring up at her, green eyes a pair of storms of confusion.

“Don't get me wrong, sweetie. I'd either screw you or eat you in a heartbeat, but I have places to be."

Leaving the traumatized man in a catatonic state, Brigid went off to find her exit.