Working Stiff (7 page)

“Check him,” Mr. Fairview said. “I don’t want an unpleasant surprise.”

Freddy opened up the walk-in refrigerator and wheeled out the other body that had been in the freezer, the one in the body bag. And Bryn, to her horror, heard that sound again.

That scratching.

Not rats. She could see the bag moving, very slowly.

“Oh, God,” she whispered. She couldn’t seem to move as Freddy unzipped the body bag.

The smell spread through the room, sickly sweet and foul, and from all appearances, what was in the body bag was at least several weeks dead and decomposing. Bryn was used to the stench, but what made her eyes widen and her throat close up was the fact that this corpse, this decomposing
thing
, was
still moving
. Not involuntary biological twitches. Real, directed movements.

The lipless mouth opened, and air scraped out—not a scream, because the vocal cords were gone, but she understood.

Deep inside, she knew it was a howl of utter horror.

“Christ,” Freddy said in disgust. “He’s hanging on better than I’d expected. I may have to disassemble him.”

“No,” Mr. Fairview said, and came to stand next to Freddy, looking down on the remains of Mr. Garcia … Bryn’s predecessor. “This is fine. We can document the progress, until he’s too far gone to be of any use to us. Five full days is the longest anyone’s lasted, right? Maybe he’ll go to six. Or Mrs. Jones will. I suppose we can give up any hope of a payday on her as well.”

“What—” She hadn’t realized that she’d spoken until the word slipped out, and then it was too late. She’d drawn their attention.

Bryn grabbed a scalpel from the tray of sterile instruments and menaced Freddy as he came her way. “Back off!” she said. “I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch.”

He laughed. “Late to the party, Double Trouble. Fairview got me first.”

She was fast, but he turned out to be faster, slapping the scalpel out of the way and slamming her face-first into the wall. Everything went vague, except for the pain, which remained cuttingly sharp, and then she was on the floor in a heap, watching her own blood crawl red over the tile.
Just like Melissa
.

The voices came at her smeared and disembodied, from what seemed like a great distance.

“Do you want to keep her?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe. It’s a bother to set up her disappearance properly. Let’s do it and get her in storage. I’ll decide later, once we dispose of Mr. Jones.”

Bryn felt herself being lifted, then settling into place on a stiff, cold surface.

A preparation table.

“No,” she whispered, and Mr. Fairview looked down on her with that distant, professional compassion she’d thought was so wonderful before. Adrenaline surged through her, and she tried to get up. He had leverage, and muscle, to keep her down.

“Sorry it didn’t work out,” he said. “You really did have a lot of promise, Bryn. I hope you don’t take this personally.”

He nodded to Freddy, and Freddy snapped on a pair of latex gloves, then lifted up a clear plastic bag.

He put it over her head.

Bryn involuntarily gasped, but the plastic filled her mouth and nose and blocked off her air. Freddy made sure of it by pressing his hand down over her face, and all her struggling didn’t make any difference at all. It seemed to take forever, and the panic was so extreme that it was painful, like needles in her skin. She was screaming, but the sound couldn’t get out. Her lungs ached, then hurt, then shrieked for air.
God
, it hurt. It hurt so badly.

Then it all started to go softly gray at the edges, and the edges pushed in, and in, until it was all a hazy mist, and she couldn’t remember why she was fighting so hard, and it was all pain, all of it. Dying was supposed to be easier.

Something crashed in the room, loud enough to penetrate even her fading senses, but she couldn’t make sense of it. Nothing made any sense. Everyone was yelling, and there was smoke, and fire, and the sharp pops of gunfire. Freddy’s chest exploded in a red mist, and he fell away. Blood splattered the bag over her eyes, and she couldn’t see anymore.

None of it mattered as she gasped, and gasped, and the taste of plastic was the last thing she knew as the shadows slipped over her and drowned her.

And it hurt, all the way to the very last scream of the last nerve.

“Crap, crap, crap,” a voice whispered, from a very long distance away. “Goddamn it.
Shit
. Come on, Bryn. Come on back.”

Someone was patting her face, which felt cold and clammy with moisture. She felt … numb. Cold to the bone. And oddly disconnected, as if she weren’t quite inside her own body.

Then, with a harsh, electric snap, she was back, and everything woke up.

Bryn’s body arched, and a scream raked its way up from her guts, out through her throat, and burst out of her mouth with so much force that she felt something tear inside of her. It didn’t even sound human, that scream: certainly nothing she could imagine coming out of her own body.

And then the pain drowned her in a thick, stinging wave, and she knew why she was screaming.

There was a murmur of voices, and she saw a glimpse of a face in the haloes of bright lights.

Joe Fideli. He looked grim and sad, and he was holding her hand. “Relax,” he said. “I know it hurts. Just relax now. You’ll be okay.”

She reached out, but it was too hard, too far, and whatever liquid they were injecting into her arm made her fall very far, very fast, into a hot, airless darkness.

Waking up the second time was both easier and worse. Easier because she no longer felt all the pain and horror; worse because she didn’t know where she was. It was a featureless room, very clean. She was tucked in a narrow bed with rails, and there were portable medical monitors, cabinets—the usual hospital room accoutrements. Nothing else that she could see. She didn’t even have an IV in her arm, only an oxygen clamp on her fingertip. The place smelled of antiseptic.

As she sat up to get a better look around, the door at the far end opened, and Joe Fideli came in. He was followed by another man Bryn didn’t know—younger than Joe, with black hair and brown eyes and skin a few shades darker than Bryn‘s. He was wearing a tailored black suit and a sober-looking tie, and both he and Joe had ID badges clipped onto their pockets.

Joe’s face was very, very calm, blank, and bland, and from the first look at him, she knew she was in trouble.

She just had no idea why, or how.

“Hello,” Bryn said. The two men didn’t say a word. She wet her very dry lips. “Where am I? What happened?”

Joe exchanged a look with the unknown man, then said, “You’re in a safe place.”

“Safe …” That didn’t seem to make sense to her. There was no safe place. Not anymore.

The other man, the one she didn’t know, walked forward, pulled up a single aluminum chair, and sat down next to her bedside. Close up, he was handsome in a quiet kind of way, and a little older than she’d thought—probably midthirties.

“Your name is Bryn Davis,” he said. She nodded, waiting for him to offer his own. He didn’t. “What do you remember about what happened to you?”

“I—” She stopped, because there was a black curtain between her and those memories, and she didn’t want to walk through it. She knew instinctively that it was there for a reason. “I’m not really sure. I remember going to work; there was a girl who killed herself—”

“Yes,” the man agreed, without any emotional weight on the word at all. “Go on.”

“I worked late. I met Mr. Fideli….” Bryn looked past her inquisitor to Joe, who was leaning against the wall by the door, still looking neutral and distant. He nodded at her. “And then I tried to leave, but Mr. Fairview took me back inside….”

Her voice faded. Whatever had happened to her after that, before Joe Fideli had slapped her face to wake her up, she didn’t remember, or want to remember. It made her stomach churn with anxiety to think about it.

“Something bad happened,” she whispered. “Something …”

The man didn’t blink. “Yes,” he agreed again, exactly the way he’d agreed to her earlier statement. “Bryn, I need to know what you know about the business Mr. Fairview and Mr. Watson were running from the basement.”

“The embalming?”

“Not the embalming.”

“I don’t understand.” She really didn’t, and her head hurt. Her mouth felt dry and tasted of metal, and she desperately craved a drink. “Could I have some water, please?”

“Not yet. I need you to tell me what you saw, Bryn.”

“I can’t.” She meant it. She was shaking all over, ice-cold at the thought of even trying to pull up those memories.

He studied her for a moment, then pushed back the chair, stood up, and walked over to murmur with Joe Fideli in the corner. It was a quiet, fierce argument, and finally Joe turned and left the room. He didn’t look happy.

The man in the suit looked at Bryn, and she felt vulnerable, fragile, and cold.

“I’m afraid I have to give you some very bad news,” the man said. “Please, I want you to stay calm.”

Bryn’s hands clenched into fists around the sheet that was draped over her body. “I’m calm.”

“You’ve suffered an attack,” he said. “Unfortunately, you didn’t survive.”

She blinked. What the hell had he just said? “Excuse me?”

“You’re dead, Bryn. You were suffocated with a plastic bag over your head.”

“I’m not
dead
.” But what he was saying made the darkness in her head ripple and threaten to tear and let those awful memories come out. “Obviously, I’m not dead; I’m talking to you. It’s not true.”

“I’m sorry, but I have no choice but to explain this to you. You’ve been treated with a proprietary drug, a drug that can bring a subject back from death for a limited period of time.”

“Limited,” she echoed faintly. “What do you mean, limited?”

“Without another injection, the nanites in your bloodstream will shut down in twenty-four hours. They’re all that’s keeping your body running, Bryn. They can repair damage and maintain your body at a certain level, but they don’t restore life permanently. It’s a facsimile of life, not sustainable on its own.” He clasped his hands behind his back and met her eyes steadily. “You’re a problem, Bryn.
My
problem. I made the call to bring you back, in the hope that you could give us some information about what was going on at the Fairview Mortuary, where they were obtaining the drugs stolen from our company.”

She didn’t understand. She didn’t
want
to understand. Her heart was pounding—if she were dead, her heart shouldn’t be beating, right? But she could
feel
it. She could feel everything. She was thirsty, for God’s sake.

She was
alive
.

“You brought me back,” she said. “From the dead.”

He said nothing.

“To ask me questions.”

“Questions you haven’t yet been able to answer,” he said. “Which is a problem for us both, you see. I made a substantial investment that isn’t paying off. As things go, I really don’t have any justification to give you a second shot. Unfortunately, that means you face a very difficult five or six days while the nanites completely shut down, and you … continue on the natural path of decay. We don’t really know if consciousness survives during that process, but I’m afraid it might, for a time. We’ll do everything we can to make you comfortable.”

It burst in on her with a blinding light: Mr. and Mrs. Jones. The drug. Mr. Fairview demanding all that money.

Mr. Garcia’s rotting corpse, moving weakly in its bag.

“No!” she burst out. “No, you can’t do this to me! You son of a bitch, you can’t just let me
rot
!”

“Then tell me something that I can use to keep you alive,” he said, and for a second, his hard shell of reserve cracked. “Please Miss Davis. Tell me
something
I can use. Anything.”

She swallowed hard, squeezed her eyes shut, and then opened them. “Mr. Fairview was charging ten thousand dollars, and five hundred per shot. I saw him with someone named Mr. Jones. His wife needed the shot. And … he’d lost his job. He tried to grab the drugs, but Mr. Fairview shot him.” The world went too bright, and wobbly around the edges for a moment. She grabbed a deep breath to steady herself. “They put Mrs. Jones in a body bag. She was still alive. Still moving, anyway.”

There was a flash of horror across the man’s expression that made him seem, at least in that moment, human. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but that doesn’t help us. Did you hear Mr. Fairview say anything about where he was obtaining the drugs …?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t know anything about that.” And she realized, with a sinking sensation, that she’d just doomed herself. She had nothing left to tell him. Nothing he didn’t already know.

He seemed to know it, too. He looked at her for a long, silent moment, and then he turned and headed for the door.

“Wait,” she said. “At least tell me your name.”

She didn’t think he would. It was probably easier for him if he didn‘t. But he surprised her. “My name is Patrick McCallister,” he said. “I’m the chief of security for Pharmadene.”

“What’s Pharmadene?”

“The company that created Returné,” he said. “The drug that we gave you to bring you back.”

“You mean the drug that’s going to take five days to kill me again,” she said.

He unclipped his badge and swiped it through a strip reader next to the door. The door clicked open. “Unless I find a good reason to give you the next shot,” he said. “Yes.”

She watched the door slowly close, and then lowered her head to the clean, soft pillow.

I’m alive
, she thought.
Damn it, I’m alive
.

For five more days, anyway.

There was no way to tell time in the sterile little room Bryn was trapped inside. She wasn’t restrained, at least; that was something. There was a small, bland little toilet area off the main room, and she visited it regularly. Being almost alive came with toilet duties, apparently. She kept wondering whether they’d lied to her, if maybe there was nothing at all wrong with her; she didn’t
feel
different. She felt fine.