Chapter Two
Later That Night

"Only the Dead"
by The Conqueror Wyrms

       Russ Gundersen looked down the hallway. Everything was quiet. Quiet, quiet, quiet. Still as a morgue. Which was quite proper. Considering it was a morgue he was looking at.
       More specifically, the door that led into the morgue. Russ was night watchman for the basement floor of Arkham General, an easy job in what was generally a fairly quiet hospital. Sure, there was always some action upstairs in the ER, but, aside from the occasional delivery, the morgue was a very sleepy place at three in the morning.
       It was getting to be about time for Russ make his rounds. Not that there was ever anything much to see, but the exercise kept him from dozing off. That, and the thermos of thick, hard, black coffee that he kept under his desk.
       He finished off a cup and stood up. He decided to hit the morgue first, have a chat with Doc Finney. Finney usually worked the late shift, performing endless duties of cutting, cleaning, packing and weighing. Despite the fact that Doc was an hermitty old curmudgeon who had deliberately chosen the zombie shift because of the solitude it afforded, Russ found the Doc to be generally open to a bit of conversation, and maybe he would even share a morsel of gossip or some juicy murder details. If he didn't think too much about what the Doc was doing while Russ was talking to him, Russ found the old man's company pretty tolerable.
       Russ walked on down the hall to the morgue door, his thick heels echoing across the empty tiles. The door was locked, as it usually was at this hour, but Russ had a key, which he found after some jingling. He opened the door and stepped inside.
       The outer room was dark, but Russ saw light glowing from under the swinging silver doors that led into the refrigerated morgue area. He stepped through the doors, out of the darkness into the light.
       The quietly humming flourescents seemed dazzling, reflecting as they did off of glistening stainless steel examining tables and rows of glasss flasks. Doc, who was quietly puttering around a cadaver, glanced up at Russ as the doors swished shut behind him. "Russ," he nodded, turning back to his work.
       "Hiya, Doc", Russ answered, stepping closer to the table, though not too close. "What's cooking."
       "Not 'what', 'whom'. And not 'cooking', but 'cooling'. It's a young male, caucasian, bullet wound to the chest."
       "Ouch! Gang stuff?"
       "How should I know? I'm just the morgue doc. The homicide boys take care of that stuff. Don't you watch TV?"
       "I thought you were like, you know, Quincy. Solving crimes through rate of decay and stuff like that."
       "No, they handle that over at the Medical Examiner's office, downtown, as they say. I take back what I said, you watch too much TV."
       "Why's he here, then?"
       "Simple. He died here. We get him 'til the police decide whether they want him or not. Most likely they'll pick him up in the morning. I'm just doing some rudimentary cleanup, weights and measures, the like. Grunt work, as we used to say in the corps."
       "Come on, you must have some idea."
       "Of course. Look at his arm. Go on."
       "Scabby."
       "Needle marks. Self inflicted, you can see how they're slightly infected in places. Compare these to the marks we made here. Nice, clean, almost invisible... you're not looking."
       "No thanks. I don't like needles."
       "Eh. You asked." Doc, who had barely looked up during the whole conversation, continued to focus intently upon his work at hand. Russ began to fish for gossip.
       "Anything else interesting tonight?"
       "The usual. Old guy. Cardiac. 'Bout my age, like looking in a death mirror. Plus some forty-something suicide. Pills. They almost saved him, but..."
       Russ snuck a peek in through the glass window in the door to the storage cooler, a slightly cooler room adjacent to the examining room they were in. The room was dark, but he could make out some white shapes on gurneys. "You know, suicide's a crime. Do you get that? If you survive, they can arrest you for the attempt. That just gives you one less thing to live for."
       "It's an understandable law in a Judeo-Christian society. Only God can decide when it's time for you to die, so to take your own life is, like blasphemy or idolatry, a crime against God. And talk about your 'victims' rights'... suicide is the only sin you can't atone for, according to Catholic doctrine. A one way ticket to hell. No parole."
       Russ didn't know what to say to that, so he was quiet for several moments, until the silence grew oppressive. "Ever get spooked down here?"
       Doc thought for a moment, then looked up. "No, but I'm sure to now, since you've mentioned it."
       "Well, sorry, but it just seems to me that this would be the spookiest of jobs, late nights all alone with the silence of the dead."
       "Why? Do you believe in ghosts?"
       "Well, yeah, I guess. I mean, my cousin says he saw my aunt come to him in a dream the night she died... I've never seen one, though."
       "Neither have I, and logic would seem to indicate that a hospital would literally be crawling with them, particularly the morgue. But never, not a one, not a shadow or a flicker."
       "Maybe you're just not looking."
       Doc's face took on a serious set. "Son, when you get to be my age, you look all the time. See, I'm not far from ghosthood myself, and there is nothing that would set my heart at ease more than a little proof that we continue after death. Just a little proof. Nothing earthshaking. Just a tiny little bit of proof. But I've never had a hint or a glimpse."
       "Those who seek proof the most find it the least."
       "Huh?"
       "Something somebody said once somewhere... did you just hear something?"
       Doc paused a second, then smiled. "Just like I told you, you're spooking yourself."
       "No, I'm sure I heard something. From the other room."
       "So check it out. That's your job, I believe."
       "Yeah, I guess it is." Russ had indeed spooked himself, and did not feel like a credit to his uniform at that moment, but he stepped toward the stainless steel door, one hand on his nightstick. He looked through the window again, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. He turned back toward Doc. "Yeah, I guess it was nothing-"
       There was a low, clear moan from the cooler. It was short in duration, but unmistakable. They both heard it this time.
       Doc stepped over to the window. "Most likely gas being expelled from the lungs of one of the corpses. It happens."
       "I should check it out anyway."
       "Suit yourself."
       Russ pulled his flashlight from his belt and flicked it on. It cast a reflected circle of light against the stainless steel of the cooler door. He swallowed and pushed the door open with his foot. It eased forward with a well-oiled swish. He stepped deliberately into the room, his breath misting in front of his face, and cast the flashlight beam around the room, looking for a light switch. He couldn't see one. The light came to rest on the bodies on gurneys, three of them, one after the other. Pristine white sheets were drawn across them from head to toe, revealing only the contours of the reclining figures; defining each person's lost existence as a sum of forehead, nose, gut and toes.
       Russ slowly moved the light around the cooler, looking for anything out of the ordinary. It was a large room, and the walls were lined with steel shelving, which held an array of boxes. In addition to the three occupied gurneys, there were several empty ones lined against the far wall. Russ slunk to his knees, shining the light under the gurneys, in case someone or thing were hiding there, but he saw nothing.
       He then began examining the spaces under the shelving and between boxes. Whatever made the noise could well have been a rodent of some kind; not really a job for a Nightwatchman, but the exterminators would have to be notified. He saw nothing at first, but was determined to search out every nook and cranny until-
       There! Behind him! He caught a glimpse of peripheral motion. He whirled to face whatever was back there moving, but there was nothing to be seen. Had he imagined it?
       He returned his attention to the floor, looking to see if anything were scurrying away into some crevice somewhere, but there was no further moment. He straightened up...
       In time to see the movement again. Directly in front of him.
       Under the sheet.
       "Doc!" he cried, but his throat had parched up and all he was able to expel was a soft harsh dead-leaf "Dcaccckkk!" He felt panic welling up inside his spine, felt every tendon beginning to tremble. His mind said "Run!' but his feet stuck still, frozen as in amber. The sheet moved again.
       "Doc!"
       This time he was able to gasp out the cry loud enough for the sound to override the soft whir of the cooling units and reach Doc's ears in the other room. Doc heard the panic in Russ' voice and raced through the stainless steel doors to be faced with an eerie tableau. Russ stood shaking, hair hackled, face wraithed, the trembling beam of his flashlight illuminating the figure of a corpse, still covered with the sheet but now sitting up, facing them, immobile. Doc looked at the corpse, at Russ, and began to laugh.
       Russ looked over at him, bewildered. Doc strolled over and clapped him on the shoulder. "Russ, it's a muscle contraction. They do that sometimes, sit up on the gurneys. Scares the hell out of the new residents. Don't let it spook you. They do that."
       Doc looked at Russ' face not seeing the relaxation he expected. Instead he saw Russ' eyes widen feverishly. "Doc," he managed to whisper through his chattering teeth, "Do they also do that?"
       Doc turned to see what Russ was referring to, in time to see the corpse finish pulling the sheet off its face and chest. It was the suicide, the forty-something male. He looked at them, then down at his pastewhite hand, then back at them, then rolled his eyes and collapsed back on the table, groaning.
       "Oh Christ, can't I do anything right?"