“There was a girl I think.”
“Don’t see her now.”
“Sure as hell she didn’t run off from this.”
Flashlights played over me. I closed my eyes to cut out the glare. The world went pink and streaked through my eyelids. I felt a rough hand grab my arm and hold it, fingers pressed on my wrist.
“This one’s dead.”
“I don’t see any blood.”
“No pulse and he’s not breathing. That’s dead in my book.”
“That’s not our call. That’s the EMTs’ problem.”
I opened my eyes a slit. Two cops were close in. A redheaded cop with a weightlifter’s build stood on the slope squinting.
“He’s by himself. Didn’t you say you saw a girl, Chad?”
“Thought I did. I’m going to look for her.” The redheaded cop. He moved out my sight.
The other two cops stepped away. One of them cursing as his foot went into the water at the bottom of the gully. I considered running, only I wasn’t sure where I was. Roxanne took off on me. Must have been less than a second after we came to a stop. Or maybe she was thrown. The cop went looking for her. She could be in the surrounding darkness watching us.
The hunger was gnawing at my insides even more fiercely than before. A weakness, a crushing fatigue, came over me. I couldn’t run. I probably couldn’t even stand up. I needed to feed.
The ambulance came and along with it two EMTs who cursed a bitter blue streak at having to bring a gurney down the slick muddy surface to the bottom of the gully then haul me up to where their rig sat. One of the cops offered to follow the ambulance to the hospital. They’d need to ID me.
“Look at this son of a bitch,” an EMT said when they had me up under the highway lights.
“Thought he was a black guy. But he’s just a black white guy. What’s with his skin?” the other said.
“That’s one sunburnt motherfucker,” a cop said. He snorted. I felt him lean close to rifle my pockets.
I listened to him go through my wallet, flicking through credit cards.
“He’s local. I guess that’s him in the license photo.” He smelled like aftershave and mustard. And blood. I could smell the sweet, sticky, caramel apple smell of his blood moving through his veins. The lure of it came off him like heat off a furnace. I fought down the urge to spring at him. In my condition I had no chance against a half dozen guys.
I’d have to ride this one out. Ride it all the way.
With a series of bumps the EMTs rolled me into the ER. I had my eyes locked open now, unmoving and staring. An ER doc gave me a once over and pronounced me to be deader than shit. A nurse snapped a bracelet with a bar code around my wrist. I was parked in a curtained alcove until someone could come to wheel me away. Sounds came through the curtains. The place was hopping. Docs and nurses jogging past. Some drunk was arguing with someone who kept telling him to calm his ass down. A baby was crying. A doctor called out for a blood panel. I wasn’t sure what that was. It sounded delicious.
A guy in stained baby blue scrubs came along and kicked the brakes from under my cart to wheel me away to the elevators. He smelled like garlic and vinegar and a faint whiff of cannabis. Earbuds dangled from his breast pocket. He pulled the sheet up over me and got me into the elevator with a series of jarring impacts. I could hear him humming to himself along to the music in his ears.
A ding, a clump, a thunk and we were rolling again into a hall. I was parked again along a long wall and the orderly walked away. I stayed that way a while until two more guys came along, read my bracelet and rolled me off onto a loading dock. They spent some time slipping a body bag over me, zipped it tight. The inside of it smelled of Clorox and corruption. I felt myself lifted and set down without much ceremony on a hard metal surface. Doors clunked shut and I was moving again. The back of some kind of vehicle.
I couldn’t see a thing, blind inside the bag. The sick feeling that sunlight brought came over me. I resisted the urge to convulse. Direct sunlight couldn’t reach me through the thick black vinyl. I wasn’t burning. But every second was torture.
The drive was over. The beep beep beep of a reverse warning as the vehicle backed to a stop. The doors clanged open and I was lifted up and roughly dumped onto a smooth surface and wheeled off once more.
The foot of the cart banged doors aside and we were in a room that smelled of disinfectant and feces. The guy rolling me said something to someone else in the room.
“You see it last night?” my driver said.
“My girlfriend came over. I DVRed it,” the other said.
“You got to see it, bruh.”
“Uh huh.”
A wire was twisted tight around my big toe. My tag.
A heavy latch was undone. Steel on oiled steel rolled to a clanking stop. Together they lifted me from the gurney onto a chilly metal shelf and rolled me into a dark place. The door slammed back into place and I was alone in the frigid dark wrapped like leftovers.
• 15 •
I lay in cold blackness, listening to the muffled conversation of the two orderlies. They were morons and I began to drift off. The sickness brought on by sunlight was gone and I could feel the sleep state come over me.
I’d be helpless for the next twelve hours or so. Especially in my weakened, famished state. I could try popping out of this drawer and overcoming the two stoners. But I just didn’t feel it. I tried to weigh the risk of escaping now against the chance that I might be rolled out of my vault and dissected. In the end I was swept under by the pull of sleep. The real dark melted into infinite dark, my senses fading away to nothing.
I woke in silence. Night had come at some point while I slept the long nap. I ran hands over my arms and torso as much as I could in the tight confines of the bag. My clothes were still on. My skin intact. No one had opened my drawer. I was still on the autopsy waiting list. If I still breathed I would have let out a mighty sigh of relief.
No sound reached me from outside the drawer. I listened for a long while before testing the inner surface of the door at my feet through the material of the body bag. I was expecting some kind of latch, handle or press bar. That was stupid. The people stored in these drawers were dead. I remembered a song I heard my grandmother sing a few times.
Why build a wall ’round the graveyard when nobody wants to get in?
Why build a wall ’round the graveyard when nobody can get out?
Excuse me for being pissed off but I hammered at the door with my feet as much as the bag would allow. No one came to check out the pounding noise down in the morgue. The exertion cost me. I lay back limp as a rag to suffer blazing pangs of hunger spinning like a ball of fire in my gut.
No idea how much time had passed before I heard the sound of a swinging door from outside my drawer. A scuffing of rubber soles over tiles. A radio came on. A hand turned the tuning dial from hip-hop through country and came to rest on a talk station. A guy talking about the possible presence of extraterrestrials in the President’s cabinet. I knew that was an after-midnight show. I was deep into the night with my hunger clawing holes in me.
I heard the click of a latch and the rumble of a drawer opening. I lay back, willing myself to be still, inert, and even more lifeless than I felt.
Another click and clack and the niche I was in filled with light. I was drawn out under the fluorescents. A guy in full surgical scrubs muscled me onto a rolling cart. He huffed and puffed with the effort and not gently. I was dead, right? He worked an arm under my shoulders and kind of flipped me over onto the cart. I landed face down, striking my head on the metal surface with a meaty crunch. He rolled the cart alongside a steel autopsy table. He pushed me sliding from the cart and onto the convex surface of the cutting board. He levered me onto my back and wheeled the cart back toward the wall of drawers.
To my right a middle-aged woman lay on the next table. She wore sleep pants and a loose t-shirt with a dark blotch of dried blood between her breasts. Her mouth was open in a yawn th
at would last all eternity. Her eyes stared upward, shining like buttons, into the ceiling lights.
The cart rolled back to my left. The guy grunted as he shoved a heavy set man onto the next table in the row. He moved past me to return to the woman on the slab to my right. I moved my eyes askance to watch him work.
He pulled on a face mask and strapped a clear plastic shield on his head, lowering it to cover his face. First step was cutting away the woman’s clothes with a pair of shears. The t-shirt came away with a Velcro sound, the fabric glued to the dried blood from several wounds to her chest. They looked like stab wounds. Once she was naked the guy took a vial of blood using the artery on the inside of a leg for access. The room smelled with the musk of the sweet syrup. He wrote on a pad of stickers, removed one and wrapped it about the vial. I followed his hand as he placed the full vial atop the pile of the woman’s shredded clothes. The blood was thick and gooey and left an oily film on the inside of the glass.
I never wanted anything more in my life. I fought down the urge to jump up and help myself. My eyes flicked back to the guy at work. He caught the motion and looked my way, studying me for a long ten seconds before returning to the job at hand.
On the radio the golden-throated host was giving crap to some caller about whether the Secretary of Education was a gray or a green alien.
The guy used a syringe to take fluid samples from one of the woman’s eyes. With a longer needle he drew a tube of urine from the bladder. Each of these got a sticker. He set them by the blood vial.
The vials of blood, eye fluid and piss went into a refrigerator at the back of the room. I caught a glimpse of a plastic rack loaded with rows of vials. A fresh gout of flame rose up my throat making it an effort to remain in place.
He sat at a stool by a counter and made notes on a form. Then he folded that form up over the top of the pad before turning to me.
My unfocused and unmoving eyes studied him as he leaned over the table to study me. He had some mileage on him. In his forties maybe, but looked ten years older. Sallow skin and dark circles under his eyes. He sweated a beer smell. More than a day’s stubble on his falling jowls. This guy had fallen a long way from med school to wind up a flunky in a public morgue.
He looked at my bracelet and compared it to his clipboard. Then he started at the neck of my t-shirt with the shears. He caught a movement of my eyes and stopped, head canted, to look into my eyes.
I blinked.
“Hey,” I said.
• 16 •
His face showed no reaction. It just froze like it was with a comical look of puzzlement that crinkled his brows together. He slipped from view to crash to the floor.
I pushed up off the steel table with some effort. The world seemed very far away. I stepped over the guy’s body to stumble to the refrigerator. My hands looked miles away at the end of my arms as I pulled the door open. Inside were the rows of vials, each nestled in the pocket of a plastic tray. Dozens of them.
I pulled a tray out and dropped to the floor in front of the open fridge. The vials were like those little bottles of booze they have on airplanes. I popped one after the other and downed them like tequila shots.
More like Jell-O shots. Chilled and viscous. The gooey mess slid down my throat to douse the burning. I felt the furnace turn to a warm embrace and the delicious heat spread to my arms and legs. My head felt like I was rising from the depths of an icy pool. I broke the surface with a delicious thrill as my senses all rushed back into focus at once.
I had the strength now to clamber up off the tiles and turn out the room lights. The lamp inside the fridge provided more than enough light. I bent over the body of the morgue flunky and placed my ear to his chest. No heartbeat. No breathing. The blood was unmoving in his veins. The guy’s heart went when I spoke to him. It was probably due to pop anyway. Tonight turned out to be his night.
The goop in the vials had revived me but it wasn’t the same. Roxanne was right about the canned stuff. I needed living blood.
I found a scalpel among a mess of tools that had dropped from a tray when he fell. I made a long slice along his neck and took my fill while the whisky-voiced guy on the radio told me I should consider gold as part of my retirement portfolio.
The feeding left me logy. Like after my first beer back when I was a kid. I’d have liked nothing better than to lie back on the dead guy and take in the glow. Only I knew I had to move. I was already on the ragged edge of any luck that I had. I sat up and unwound the tag off my toe. My shoes and socks were long gone. The dead guy wore knockoff sneakers inside paper booties. I pulled them off. My feet swam in them. I stuffed the booties into the toes and laced them up. Before leaving the room I snatched the trays of blood vials from the fridge and dumped them into a trash bag I took from a waste can I found under the counter.
With my prizes clinking in my arms I slipped out of the morgue and followed a long basement corridor to an exit. There was a bright yellow plaque with dire black letters on it bolted to the door. I ignored it. A fire alarm went off when I pushed the crash bar on the door. A deafening pulsing bleat. The fire door brought me to an outside stairwell. I raced up the concrete steps and through a hedge to run across a lot with a few cars parked well apart from one another.
Restored to full strength by the recent feast, I felt like my feet were flying. I raced into the dark beyond the wavering glare of the parking lot’s sodium vapor lamps. A residential neighborhood of older houses, what we called starter homes, lay beyond. I ran between two of them, leaping a privacy fence between two garages, and found a service alley that ran behind the back yards to the ends of the block in either direction. A dog barked somewhere close. A big one. Claws scrabbled at a vinyl fence across the alley. I let out an explosive animal hiss. The scrabbling stopped. The dog’s barking dropped to a yelp then silence.
I moved away at a walk then through the humble two-bed/one-baths with my bag of goodies swinging at my leg. The night was alive for me. The stars above shone like beads of glass. I walked the silent blocks between dark houses without a thought for what might come next. I had all eternity to decide that.
But first I needed to find Roxanne.
• 17 •
I guess my stuff, wallet, keys and the rest, were in an evidence bag somewhere in a police station. Or maybe Roxanne was right. I read too many detective stories. My stuff could be in a trash bin. In any case, I was broke and homeless.
No watch so I didn’t know what time it was. Something was telling me morning was coming. An inner clock. I needed to find someplace dark where I’d be left alone to wait out the daylight.
Breaking into an empty house was out of the question. I wasn’t in the part of town where my listings were located. Very working class this side of the interstate. And so many places were wired these days. I wasn’t forgetting Roxanne’s warning about entering places uninvited either. She never did tell me what would happen if I tried that.
I passed a fenced lot where school buses were starting their engines. Clouds of exhaust spreading in the cold air. A few were pulling onto the street in all directions to pick sleepy kids off curbs all over the district. That wasn’t good. I looked to the sky. Cloudless except for a few vapor trails. It looked a little on the pink side off to what I thought might be the east. I realized if I’d been a more diligent Boy Scout, or a Boy Scout at all, I’d be better at this. Never made it past Webelos.
Panic was setting in. I started to run with no idea where I was running to. There was a kind of park and municipal buildings of some kind. A row of dumpsters along a fence line. I rejected that idea. With my luck today was a pick-up day. And I thought I’d rather die than take a nap in a dumpster. The irony was lost on me. A few blocks later I was thinking my pride could stand spending a day sleeping in garbage. The sky was growing lighter along the horizon. There was no time to run back to the dumpsters. They were blocks behind me. I had the crazy idea that I could just keep moving west. Stay ahead of the sun. If I had a jet maybe.
I was in a parking lot, moving along the rear of a strip mall. There were trucks pulled up at a loading dock behind a store, engines running. Voices came from under the awning that arched over the backs of the semis. I climbed up on the dock. Vendors were rolling carts stacked with boxes through hanging plastic straps and into golden light coming from inside the store. I stood up straight and parted the strips to walk in with as much confidence as I could muster. I tried to look like I belonged.
No one paid the slightest attention to me. A man at a standing steel desk was ticking off items on a manifest while a vendor sipped from a take-out cup. Others were moving around, stacking cartons onto hand trucks. Most had earbuds in place, bobbing heads to music only they could hear.
I snagged a clipboard from a hook and moved deeper into the rows of high metal racks piled with merchandise. No one questions anyone in a hurry with a clipboard in his hand. Not even a scabby, sickly pale, guy in a wrinkled t-shirt and jeans. At least I hoped not.
Pure survival instinct led me to the darkest area of the stock room. I climbed up on a forklift and then up a stack of crated air conditioners to a higher shelf piled with dusty boxes marked “pool toys.” They wouldn’t be stocking these for sale for months. I crawled in, shoving the bag of clacking vials ahead of me. I lowered myself down on top of the boxes. They sagged a bit under my weight and smelled of mold, dust and plastic. Inches above my face was the wire mesh floor of the next shelf above me.
I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds from below. Voices, the squeak of carts and the banging of swing doors. A whiff of coffee. The world of daylight was starting up as my night was ending. The blinking glare of the overheads didn’t reach me in the shadows where I lay.
The deep drug of sleep came crashing down on me. Before I was swept away and under I wondered to myself what the hell I was going to do that night.