Breeds 2 (11 page)

“Is it anatomically or physically?”

“I don’t know. Either one works for me.”

“Yeah, I suppose,” Al remarked, folding his hands behind his head. “Yep, that’s Deb. She doesn’t say too much to me. I think she likes me for some reason. Must be my seniority.”

“Sure as hell ain’t your ass.”

“You don’t be thinking about my ass.”

“Well,
my
ass is telling me it’s time for a deposit.”

“You best listen then, before it starts grumbling.”

“Hold the fort,” Noah said and walked off to the left of a living room-style waiting area for visitors.

In answer, Al grabbed his crotch.

Perhaps thirty meters from the front desk, Deb could still hear her coworkers’ mutterings. She stopped without a shoe squeak, in a straight hallway that was sterile in its cleanliness and robust with its beige cinder blocks. Two lanes of gurneys could chug along its wide breadth if needed.

She listened, her face a dim, green reflection in the shiny floor.

Footsteps. Back at the front desk.

In full hunting mode, she leaned to her left, to one gray door, and grasped its lever. Locked. Its twin lay only two steps down the corridor on the right. She stepped lightly toward the door and confirmed it was also locked. Behind her, her two males––as she occasionally referred to Al and Noah––had stopped yakking at each other, which suited her fine. Deb didn’t mind in the least working the graveyard shift at the center. She liked the quiet. A person could hear a fresh corpse squeeze off a butthole ringtone if the right sequence of doors was left open.

The next door led to the garage bay. She crept along, grateful for the soft rubber soles of her work shoes. They weren’t exactly ninja level, but they did grant her a phantom-like degree of silence if she kept her key ring from jingling. She stopped and gripped the door’s lever, placed her ear a hair’s breadth from the gray surface.

Nothing. Spotless green tiles gleamed underneath the light.

Seconds passed, melting the knot of anticipation in Deb’s chest. She tried the lever, confirming it was still secured, and released it. She heard something and it wasn’t old wood settling from a warm spell, pipes rattling, some dead guy farting, or any other reasonable explanation. This particular sound had potential. Real potential. To be something freaky.

And truthfully, Deb
wanted
it to be freaky. She’d practically danced around her Windmill Lane apartment when she got the call to report to work five months ago. A war child of eighties and nineties horror thrillers, Debra Cohn wanted to have a real-life, honest-to-God encounter with the dead. Or at least the spiritual residue of the dead. The security aspect of watching the building was secondary. Each and every evening when she started her shift (always the night shift), Deb hoped and prayed that she be witness to the unexplainable. A flicker of the afterlife. A gust of graveyard coldness. A goddamn giggle from down the hall, even. Or the motherlode of them all, an honest to Christ crashing from the freezer unit.
Anything
for her to record on her smartphone, which she carried gunslinger-style in her hip pocket. Folks would pay top dollar for shit like that.

But besides the monetary value of an authentic supernatural experience (and not the fucking paranormal, Lord how she despised the word), she honestly craved seeing a ghost. She wanted a full elephant-sized load of adrenaline to flood her system, and fucking straighten her curly, raven-haired locks. One would think a morgue would be the place to sneak peeks of the recently deceased. Much to her disappointment, however, Deb had not. No ghost, no specter, no haunting. Not even a fucking reanimated corpse, though she still remained optimistic on encountering one of those.

Five months in, however, and
squat
.

Except for the occasional flatulent corpse, and no one was going to pay money for a sound bite anywhere between a mouse squeak and a rock god of thunder.

Another
thump
whipped her head around, shattering her moment of disappointed musings and raising goose bumps along the length of her arms and back. She quickly zoomed in on the location and ninja-walked at double time down the hall. Hope spread across Deb’s face as she realized where she was headed. Her heart revved, aching for action.

Holy shit
.

The noise came from the cooler unit.

Maybe this was the night. Maybe the stars had aligned and she was about to catch a glimpse of the macabre. Her hand went to her right hip and gripped the stainless steel Smith and Wesson holstered there. The sound led her into the autopsy suite, where she flicked the nearest light switch. Chemical cleaners and a trace of formaldehyde lingered upon the air, noticeable but far from overpowering. The three workstations were empty; the sterile arrangement of dissection tables, weighing scales, steel scrub sinks, and cabinets were all undisturbed. At any point, three bodies could be worked on at once, though the center maintained only two full-time medical examiners. Plastic refuse boxes and red containers stood out amongst the colorless metal. Not a bone saw was in sight, although a tray set near one of the sinks did hold an assortment of forceps, knives, and chisels. A wall clock displayed the time at just after two in the morning.

The cooler unit’s gray door remained closed. A bare skeleton hung from a stainless steel framework to the right, standing on guard.

“You hear anything?” Al whispered just behind, startling Deb with a sharp intake of air. She took a moment to compose herself and glared at her coworker.

“You mean I got you?” Al asked.

“You just let me know next time,” Deb warned, her hand on her weapon. “I was ready to draw.”

“I saw that.”

“What’re you doing here?”

“Heard something, so I came.”

“Where’s Noah?”

“In the can. Doing what he does. The man’s regular, I’ll give him that. Told him I was going to check on you.”

Deb nodded at the cooler door. “It came from over there.”

Al moved ahead of her and pulled out an electronic swipe card. He pressed the plastic against the nearby pad, generating a sharp click. Deb cringed at the noise, knowing that anything inside the cooler no doubt knew they were outside.

“You ready?” Al said, his hands on the door’s lever.

Deb slipped her S&W out of its holster and nodded grimly. Al pushed the door open and an overhead fluorescent light flickered to life, illuminating the cold steel cave where up to forty guests could be stored if needed. The cooler hummed as ceiling vents blew a cold, underlying wave of formaldehyde, lemon juice, and an underlying smell of decomposing flesh into their faces. A wall consisting of coffin-sized freezer units was to their immediate left, while just past that was a parking area for a pair of automated cadaver lifts.

The smell of chilled flesh caused Deb to pucker her lips as she took the lead and slipped into the room, ignoring the sharp drop in temperature. She immediately checked behind the door before proceeding deeper into the cooler. Al lowered a rubber doorstop, secured the opening, and followed her inside. Deb straightened and signaled that the main floor was clear. Stout refrigeration doors remained secured, the individual units stacked three rows high and ten long. The exact location of the noise had stumped her. She shot a questioning look in Al’s direction and got a shrug in return.

Thanks.
Male
.

No sooner did she project that last thought when the faintest scratching perked her ears and straightened her backbone. An unrelenting, inquisitive digging, as if the source of the noise was somehow puzzled at its predicament. Al stood with mouth open and eyes lit, clearly disbelieving what was happening, and ready to sprint for the parking lot.

One look from Deb quashed that notion. Al would not run on her watch. She’d shoot him in the back if he did.

She chopped a hand at a second tier unit on the right.

Deb held her weapon low as the scratching grew in intensity, growing frantic as the two guards neared the chrome-faced tomb.

“Someone’s alive in there,” Al insisted, astonished.

“No one’s alive in there,” Deb answered, still in control and eyeing the cabinet’s number. “This is the fresh one brought in Friday evening. Damn thing didn’t have a head.”

The scratching stopped.

Both Al and Debra exchanged pensive looks. The noise had ceased when she’d spoken. Deb slowly became aware of a presence listening for more, and that notion prickled the flesh of both security guards.

Sweet Jesus
, a voice whispered in Deb’s mind with icy stark realization. She was about to encounter her first weird happening at the morgue and she had her gun out instead of her camera. Not that she was about to swap the weapon for the device. Fuck that noise.

Lower teeth grazing her upper lip, she nodded for Al to open the unit’s door.

“I’m not going to open that,” he whispered, moisture beading on his face despite the chill.

“You open that now.”

“I am
not
opening that thing.”

“What could be in there?”

“I don’t mind telling you, Deb, I’m a little freaked out here.”

A blunt smack of flesh on metal caused them both to flinch, the sound brought on by their voices. A wide-eyed Al jerked back a step. He flicked a wrist and extended a steel combat baton that professional security forces used for riot suppression. He glanced fearfully at Deb.

“I’m going to call Noah,” he mumbled.

“You are not leaving me alone here.”

“I’m going to call Noah.”

“You do and I’ll fucking go goddamn dayshift.”

Another meaty blow from the cabinet’s interior and Deb thought for an instant the door panel actually quivered, like a vibration in calm water.

“There’s nothing in there,” she said from behind her aimed pistol.

Thump.

“Noah!” Al shouted. He pressed his back against the other side of the unit’s door. He faced Deb, chanced a frightened look over her shoulder and into the hall, and regarded the troubled cabinet. “Noah!”

Thump.

“Christ,” Deb muttered, and reached out for the lever. One twist was all it took. There was a muffled clatter from within the cabinet, a rattling of thick drumsticks as if the entombed mass was repositioning itself, but nothing near as intense as the focused strikes on the metal door.

“
Noah
!”

The scratching resumed. Feverish. Seemingly excited by the voices, as if a big dog was attempting to dig its way through the steel and chrome. The sound strengthened, like a supercharged engine surging in neutral, waiting to be thrown into gear. A meaty
thump
punctuated the stream of near-constant static, the metal bulging from the impact.

“I’m gonna open it,” Deb declared over the unnerving racket.

“
Noah, get down here for Christ’s sake
!” Al cut loose, eyes brighter than headlights. He had one hand on the unit’s door frame as if testing it for heat, his very posture resembling a man on the window ledge of a skyscraper.

Deb clasped the lever. Al actually moaned before clamping his mouth shut.

THUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMP
. The metal shivered with each successive blow, but the hinges remained resolute. The unexpected burst surprised Deb and she drew back, gun aimed at the lid.

But there was nothing in there
, Deb’s mind rallied her nerves.
The guy had no
fucking
head
.

Al squirmed in place, his frame pressed against the calmer refrigeration units. He knew if he bolted for the door, something exceptionally frightening would escape its tomb and grab him by the ankles.

“
NOOOOOOAAAAAAAH
!”

Noah materialized in the open doorway with gun in hand, just as Deb cranked the lever down. The loud release brought everything to a halt. The artillery shell pounding within the unit stopped as if momentarily stunned. Deb whipped the door open and flung it wide, the metal rebounding off the far side and missing a retreating Al by a hand. Deb slammed herself flat against her side of the chamber, her S&W held two-handed and angled at the black hole. Al readied his baton and swallowed.

Faint ribbons of steam emerged from the darkness within. Nothing moved.

“The hell’s all that racket?” Noah gasped, winded from his dash from the washroom.

“Fuck if I know,” Al blurted, eyes on the opened cabinet.

And for long seconds, the silence held.

Her heart exploding in her chest, Deb flashed a cautionary look at her coworkers before edging toward the freezer unit’s gaping hole. She was on the verge of something special. She could feel it. Teetering on the very cusp of something exceptionally supernatural.

The black opening beckoned, all steam evaporated, and the strong smell of musk and blood and other unidentifiable fluids permeated the room, gushing from the cavity as if under some malefic pressure.

Deb inched forward as a white hand slunk into existence, emerging from the unit’s depths like a five-legged spider. The fingers dropped over the cabinet’s edge and hung there for a moment, seemingly exhausted, before pressing their tips into the bordering chrome. Blood beaded and pattered to the floor.

A trembling Deb leveled her S&W at the appendage and swallowed several times, trying to jumpstart her voice. But that well had gone dry.

The hand before her relaxed, suddenly lifeless.

“Holy shit,” Al muttered from the other side. Noah stepped closer, widening his arc of vision, seeing the hand, then the wrist, then the wiry forearm beyond.

“That’s a…” Noah whispered, seeing what filled the individual unit. He tightened his two-handed grip on his weapon. “That’s a muh––a
man
in there.”

Shock bleaching her face, Deb considered the opened container and eventually leaned forward in spastic movements, as if her brain wanted to see but her heart refused to go any further. But then she saw what Noah saw, what Al was being drawn into seeing.

There, lying on its body tray, was a man.
Black hair
. Only the top of his head was visible, but Deb instinctively knew it was a man. He lay motionless on his right side, with forehead sunk against the nearby wall, as if his effort to escape had left him spent.