by

Robert Nowall

            The morgue was an eerie place, at night, with the lights down low.  This was my last night shift, guarding the morgue.  The staff kept office hours, even into the evening, but one guard was needed at night.

            I would be done in the morning.  But I wouldn’t be leaving.  I had decided what to do and made all the preparations.

            The security cameras, here and there, were on the blink.  Nobody knew I had done it, and it didn’t matter much to anyone, if they noticed at all.  That was the first step.

            Well after midnight, I got up from my desk and went to the locker room to change.  Once there, I removed my uniform, down to the shoes, and put it all in the locker.  I had not bothered with underwear.  I used to keep spare clothes in the locker, but I had removed them some time ago.  I figured they would assume I just abandoned those clothes---they weren’t much use anywhere else.

            Even in the locker room, the smells of the morgue were present.  Heavy on disinfectants, heavy on preservatives.  They turned my stomach.  I had come to hate the smell.

            And I looked at myself in the locker room mirror.  Assessing myself as if I had just been brought in.  Female, white, five-foot-ten, maybe a hundred twenty pounds, brown hair, mid-thirties, looked to be in good shape.

            The most noticeable feature on my body was on my chest.  A perfect autopsy Y-incision, the top over my breasts, the bottom down to my pubic hair.  It looked real, down to the dried blood around it.  I had worked hard on it.

            I had worked on the rest of me.  I took off the wig I wore.  I had cut my hair short under it, and on the right side, shaved it off altogether.  There, I put a fake deep cut, stitched up like the Y-incision.

            I also added a number written on my left thigh.  “37.”  That was my case number.  I was in the files as “Jane Ecks,” age thirty-four, cause of death blunt trauma to the head, caused by a slip and fall.  Just the name was phony.

            I wrote the files myself, complete with convincing morgue pictures.  I didn’t know how convincing the photos, or the fake injuries and autopsy scars, would be.  Would it hold up on close examination?  Maybe not, but by the time anybody noticed, I would be gone.

            I didn’t care if they found me and figured it out.

            When I left the locker room and entered the autopsy room, I took some things with me.  I tossed the wig, along with my ID and a small wallet, into a bin marked “MEDICAL WASTE.”  I knew the contents of the bin would be incinerated, first thing in the morning.

            My morgue security access key and employee ID were back on my desk.  All I carried now was a manila tag, with a string attached.  Printed on the tag was all the required information concerning “Jane Ecks.”

            In my mouth, under my tongue, I carried a small capsule.  It wouldn’t dissolve or break until I bit into it.

            I shivered as I walked through the autopsy room.  Four steel tables with holes in the tabletop, sinks and faucets and attached hoses at one end.  The smell was bad here, and the dim light made it creepier than I always found it.  I had helped bring in and prepare corpses for examination and helped drag corpses off to storage afterwards.  It was also damned cold.

            I had thought of just lying down on one of the tables and letting things take their natural course from there.  But at this time of night there wouldn’t be any corpses.  They would all have been put away in storage in the room next door.  It would give my game away, much too soon.

            I went through a pair of double doors, into a room that was much colder.  Here were a couple of bodies, stretched out on carts, wrapped in green sheets, just their toe-tagged feet exposed.  These were the bodies that would be autopsied first thing in the morning.

            There were some racks, and a couple more sheet-wrapped corpses lay on the racks.

            I was not planning to stop here.  My destination was behind the big silver refrigerator door at the far end of the room.  A new corpse storage system had been installed a few years ago, just after I started working here.  Long-term storage.  Hooks dangled from the ceiling and suspended from these hooks were some post-autopsy corpses.

            A motion-sensitive overhead light came on when I pulled on the handle and pulled the door open.  I blinked as my eyes adjusted to the light.

            There was room for maybe thirty corpses, but there never had been that many while I worked here.  Right now, there were eight.  I remembered the cases, but not the names.  A middle-aged man and woman, dead in a car crash.  An old woman found drowned in a bathtub.  A teenaged boy had a heavy load fell against to break his neck.  A large and heavy-set younger woman, dead of a heart attack.  Another middle-aged man, who electrocuted himself.  Two young women, overdosed.  They hung from hooks, in their ears, feet just inches off the floor.

            The smell of preservative was stronger here.  The bodies themselves were in different states of deterioration and decay.  Bruises and wounds were visible.  So were the autopsy scars.

            The floor underneath the hanging bodies was dirty, dribble of one kind or another from the bodies that had once hung there.  It needed good cleaning.  I had mopped the floor myself, but that was another thing I would do no more.

            I did give the corpses a good look-over.  Most of the time, the corpses looked nothing more than dead, and repulsive.  Now, they didn’t look that bad.  The two young girls looked almost attractive.

            There were many more hooks on chains that were empty, even some between corpses.  The corpses in front had higher numbers than what I had put on my thigh.  I picked out empty hooks in the back, behind other hanging corpses.  It was just where I wanted it to be.

            I bent down, and, with as much care as I could manage, tied the tag I carried to my right big toe.  The floor was icy cold and I shivered again.  It was cold in this freezer, very cold.  But I wouldn’t worry about the cold in a few moments.

            Once that was done, I slipped past two female corpses and stood under the hook.  I reached up and grabbed the two hooks above me.  The hooks were almost up against the ceiling, almost higher than I could reach.  The chain rattled, and for a moment, I worried about someone hearing me.  Then I dismissed the worry.  No one was there.  No one would hear.

            I was ready.  The injury and autopsy Y-incision looked real.  My skin was pale.  I had even purged myself before coming in for work, so any output of urine or feces would be minimal.

            At least no blood would drip from me.  My skin had not been cut.  I smiled at my little joke.  I would be gone and no one would find me.  Or if they did, so what?  I wouldn’t care.

            It was time.  No clock, but it was somewhere in the middle of the night, the wee hours of the morning.  I pulled the hooks apart and brought them up to my head.  I inserted the hooks into my ear canals.  The hooks wouldn’t go all the way in, but they weren’t supposed to.

            Then the chains and hooks started to lift.  It was automatic.  For a moment, it was a sort of nngh-nngh feeling, like something I would try to stop in a few moments.  I tried my best to ignore it, long enough.

            It was time again.  That small capsule under my tongue---I rolled it out and over to my molars, and bit down.  The capsule dissolved in my mouth and I swallowed.

            I kept calm.  There was time now, a moment.  I took one deep breath, then opened my mouth and let it all out, one big exhale.  My eyes stayed pen as the hooks in my ears tightened.

            I swayed back-and-forth for a moment as I hung in the air, and then I was still.

            The lights went out.

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