Morgue Rotation

THE MORGUE at Abbelyse was a busy concrete tomb buried in the basement. It contained
more dead than living who came around from time to time to take notes and shuffle the dead
from drawer to drawer. Jan was working alone tonight, except for the man behind the glass. She
was determining the cause of death of some of Abbelyse’s less fortunate citizens. Jan was a
resident pathologist and the current medical examiner on duty at Abbelyse Memorial Hospital.
Her duties included determining cause of death and performing autopsies for residents of
Abbelyse and the greater Halter County, though an autopsy wasn’t usually necessary. During her
rotation, she’d seen no shortage of agricultural accidents that left little mystery for the examiner.
Every once in a while, however, they’d receive a mystery; a guest of honor who required special
attention. Tonight’s special guest had brought along the man behind the glass.

 

Jan finished writing the necessary information onto the former Mr. Nate Woodley’s file:

 

NAME: Nathan Woodley
AGE: 37
CAUSE OF DEATH: Eviscerated by Agricultural Implement

 

She slid the gurney table carrying Nate back into his refrigerated drawer and shut the
door. She did so as quickly as possible. The drawers were her least favorite part of the job. They
brought back memories she’d rather stay dead. Soon, she’d be off morgue rotation and free from
interacting with the dead and their claustrophobic drawers.

Each drawer sealed shut with a door approximately three-by-three feet lined with inch
thick rubber. It latched with a stainless-steel handle. Each door also included a similar handle on
the inside of the door, a feature unique to AMH. The reason Jan was given for these was simply
that accidents happen. She wasn’t crazy about accidents happening in the morgue, but she liked
the handles on the insides because it meant she couldn’t get locked in.

The morgue was long rectangle lit by fluorescent bulbs hung in series along the ceiling.
They gave off a buzz you got used to and cast flickering blue-gray light onto the room. The
operating table sat in the center of the room. It was designed to allow gurneys to slide right up on
top of it, so doctors didn’t have to lift corpses. Behind the table was a sink and a laundry hamper.
The only door into the morgue was in the middle of one of the room’s long walls. It had a steel
frame with thick bullet-proof glass and electric locks controlled by a keypad. A wire rack beside
the door held clean scrubs, gowns, and surgical masks, and further along, Jan’s black wool coat
hung on a row of hooks beside a small desk shoved in the corner. On the other side of the door
was a large pane of one-way glass the hospital had installed so people could identify bodies. The
man who sat in the observation room beyond the glass was a military police officer who was
there to observe an autopsy. With the morgue lights on, and off in the observation room, the
glass reflected the morgue back on itself. Jan couldn’t see in, though the man could see out. On
the wall opposite the door a bank of corpse-filled refrigerated drawers hummed a low motor
tone. Their stainless-steel doors were almost as reflective as the one-way glass and, standing at
the operating table, Jan could look to either side and see her reflection.

Jan tossed her dirty apron in the hamper and washed her hands. She pulled her phone
from her coat pocket, but quickly put it back. She’d been expecting a call. Then she pulled the
next file from the desk and went to the bank of morgue drawers to get the next cadaver.

The latch clicked open in her hand and the door swung open. Air shifted between the
drawer and the operating room in a cold hiss, reminding Jan to hold her breath. The gurney
pulled out and collapsible legs with large casters fell down from underneath. Jan rolled it across
the room and clicked it into place on top of the heavy operating table. As she closed the door her
eyes shot to the back of the drawer, just to make sure it was empty. This was a paranoid reflex
she’d picked up from childhood. It happened whenever she closed one of the heavy, stainless
doors. Just as fast and reflexive, she looked up into the one-way glass, as if to see if anyone had
noticed her compulsion, but only she looked back.

When Jan was a young girl, she had no shortage of toys; obligatory presents from
relatives she never saw which she kept in a big wooden chest that sealed with a latch. Every day
after school her father would leave her older sister Carrie in charge and go out to get drunk. Once
he’d gone, she’d pull the toys from the chest and take them on elaborate scientific explorations
into the heart of the Amazon or the depths of the Pyramids. At some point she began bringing in
wildlife from her back yard to join the toys in their expeditions. Crickets, roly-polies,
earthworms, even moths and butterflies, and when she was equal parts patient and lucky a toad,
turtle, or salamander would join Barbie, Duke, and a team of Troll dolls in exploring Sumerian
tombs or Castilian caves.

​

Sometimes Carrie liked to join in as well, and the two of them would take the inanimate
toys on adventures with their unwilling captives. Jan got along with her sister while they were
young, but as Carrie got older, she grew strange and cruel, and her mind began to curve in
strange ways. One day while playing, Carrie performed an experiment with a toad and her bare
foot, testing how much pressure one could tolerate from the other. As it turned out, not much.
Carrie seemed satisfied with the results, but Jan was repulsed and screamed at Carrie. The

screams must have blown a fuse in Carrie’s mind, because she reeled back and clutched at her
ears in pain. Then she lunged at Jan and grabbed her by the throat. Her face went white, and her
jaw locked. Her eyes drifted apart until it wasn’t clear what she was seeing. Then Carrie opened
the toy chest, tossed Jan inside, and swung down the hasp. Jan screamed and banged on the lid,
but Carrie ignored her and went about her experiments with the playthings on the bedroom floor.

Eventually Jan wore herself out and she fell asleep inside the chest. She didn’t wake up
until her father came home and let her out. Her father, so drunk he could barely stand, surveyed
the scene of animal carnage in her room, and assumed Jan was to blame. He began shouting at

her, screaming in her face to teach her a lesson. She tried to explain, but he tolerated no talk-
back, and screamed all the louder. Carrie stood crying behind him in the doorway. The sisters

stopped playing together after that, but Carrie made a habit of coming into Jan’s room from time
to time to lock her in her toy chest and crush her living playthings. Jan would thrash against the
lid until she got tired and fell asleep. Eventually, her father let her out and berate her until he was
red in the face. This became their pattern for a long while, until eventually reports began to filter
into school. Carrie and Jan were taken from their father and sent to live with different families
and attend different schools. Jan had lost track of Carrie over the years and hadn’t spoken to her
father since the day she left.

So, Jan had developed a distaste for small spaces, but not because she was
claustrophobic. She’d learned early on how to control her breathing and calm her mind. For Jan,
small spaces were a place of strange punishment, where cause and effect didn’t line up, and,
when she came out of them, things had a bad habit of being horribly different. When she went in,
her father was a rational man, and her playthings were alive. When she came out everything had
changed. She’d changed, she’d fallen asleep. Time passed in the chest, whisked away in big chunks

like she’d blinked out of existence. How did she know she was the same person when she
blinked back in? Perhaps she was a different person entering a different world: a world of
punishment, and a person who deserved to be there. She feared going into small spaces, but she
feared coming out even more. That’s why she hated the morgue. Even looking into one of the
refrigerated drawers put her guts in a carnival ride and sent her blood pressure rising like a
geyser. She had to double check them to make sure there wasn’t another version of herself
already trapped inside.

Satisfied that this one was empty, she sealed it shut and looked at the file for the next
patient. This was the one—today’s special guest.

NAME: Everett Zehr

AGE: 67
CAUSE OF DEATH: UNKNOWN

​

She studied the corpse and doubled checked the file. Everett Zehr was an elderly heavy-
set fellow with a bushy white beard. Despite being overweight he was muscular and had dry, tan

skin with cracks on his elbows and callouses on his hands. He was found dead in the snow
outside his home. Beside him were two bodies in four piles: military police from Ft. Gloucester.
The details of their death, and their business at Everett Zehr’s house, were as interesting as they
were classified. And while the MP’s autopsies were being handled on base, civilian Everett came
to AMH, along with the guard on the other side of the one-way glass.

Since there were no outward indications of Everett’s cause of death, Jan prepared to open
his chest. A tray table to her left held scalpels, forceps, and a variety of other surgical tools. She
pulled opened a drawer that contained an electric oscillating bone saw. With her right hand she
traced Everett’s sternum up to his collar bone, while her left hand lifted the instrument up so she
could examine the controls. In the stainless surface of the blade, Jan’s deep brown eyes looked
back at her. Right fingers found the mark, left fingers flipped the switch. The blade hummed as
she pressed it into the dead skin, and the corpse emitted a short sigh. Gas leaving a corpse was
not uncommon, but in that moment the saw stopped humming and the morgue lights clicked off.

Power outage. The words passed briefly through her mind. The only light now was
coming from the “EXIT” sign above the door. Once her eyes had adjusted to the dim red light,
Jan looked around the morgue. The room was silent without the whir and buzz of lights and
motors. With the lights out, Jan could see through the one-way glass to the observation room and
was shocked to find it empty. The guard that had been there when she came into the room was
not there now, and Jan was starting to feel worried when Everett grabbed her wrist. The shock
that ran through her now was like a cattle prod on bare bone. Jan looked down to find Everett
staring her dead in the eyes, his face washed in red light. Jan recoiled at the cellular level. Every
fiber of muscle locked unfurled, every hair came to attention, and glands with ancient protocols
began pumping out cocktails like mad. She would have flown off her feet if Everett weren’t
holding her down. He leaned up from the table, eyes still locked on hers. He turned and stood up,
still holding her wrist, pulling her close.

Everett looked at Jan and Jan looked helplessly back. His grip seemed to run a current
through her that paralyzed her and took her voice. Then, Everett pushed his shoulders back and
raised his arms. The skin on his sides beneath his ribs began to bubble like something inside was
pushing out. Then the skin split, and two blue-green snaking tendrils emerged from Everett’s
sides and began slowly exploring the area near Jan’s neck. Everett’s electric grip still
immobilized her, but Jan finally found her voice. Her throat ripped open pronouncing the first
part of the word “help”, though it became more of a frenzied gurgling when the tendrils dove
swiftly into her neck.

Everett held Jan in place and the tendrils established a closed circuit between doctor and
patient. Fluid began pumping in one direction and out the other, From Everett, through the
tendrils, into and out of Jan, and back to Everett. His eyes rolled back and something inside him
opened its own: three pulsing blue lights above the collar and beneath the skin that blinked one,
two, three, like a loading bar while Jan tried to breath. Several minutes passed while the fluid
transfer took place, and then Everett released his grip and Jan fell backward, screaming. The
tendrils broke free from Everett’s sides, but remained attached to Jan. They wriggled up like cut
earthworms and disappeared into her neck. The skin on her neck sealed up behind them leaving
two raised nodes of tender skin. She scratched at them furiously while she prepared to defend
herself.

​

But Everett staggard backward and stood between Jan and the door. His arms flailed out
and he began to tremble. Then, from the incision in his chest, his skin began to peel. Inch long
strips of skin tore out and slowly turned over, prompting skin in wider circles to do the same.
Soon, a chain reaction was traveling out from his chest until his entire form was in flux and
Everett was a ball of revolving flesh. As the skin turned it revealed new flesh beneath it, and Jan
watched as Everett changed piece by piece into a woman who was identical to herself. Everett,
the clone, whatever it was, finished transforming and began to walk around the morgue,
breathing heavily and examining its new form. Though it was a near perfect recreation of Jan,
whatever was inside was still getting comfortable. The new skin sagged on its frame like a coat
on a hanger and it walked like a broom swept. It’s three bright blue eyes blinked and swiveled
with a mind of their own beneath the skin above the collar. It shuffled to the shelf beside the door
and clothed itself in a pair of scrubs and put on Jan’s long black coat. Jan caught her breath on
the floor by the coolers. Under her skin, the tendrils were finding their new positions. One had
crawled down her spine and the other was maneuvering beneath the skin on her skull.

The clone moved before the one-way glass and stared into the empty observing room.
With whatever power it had used to turn off the morgue lights it flicked them back on so that the
glass turned back into a mirror, displaying the clone’s reflection. The blue lights in its neck went
out and Jan’s eyes rolled down in the clone’s head. It looked in the mirror and stood up straight.
It turned from side to side, inspecting and adjusting itself. Once it seemed satisfied, it turned to
Jan who was huddled on the floor near the wall of cooler drawers. It began to walk towards her,
and the blue lights returned as its eyes rolled back. As it passed the operating table, it picked up
the oscillating saw. The morgue lights switched back off and the saw began to hum. The clone
moved towards Jan lit only by the red light of the “EXIT” sign and the pulsing three blue lights
from its neck. Jan stood up and bolted for the door. She crossed to the other side of the operating
table, and the clone made no sudden moves to stop her. When Jan made it to the door, her heart
was racing, and her legs could barely hold her up. She pulled at the handle, but the door was
locked. The clone was walking towards the door watching Jan struggle to unlock it. Jan opened
and closed the dead bolt and tugged on the door, but it was no use. The heavy door’s electric
locks were engaged and, with the power in the room out, the keypad to open it was useless. Jan
was trapped and she banged on the door for help. Suddenly the clone lunged at her and grabbed
her by the throat. It picked her up off her feet and slammed her down onto the operating table
with all the emotion of a hydraulic press. Its right hand held her paralyzed, while her left pressed
the humming blade into Jan’s chest. Jan was locked up again by the clone’s electric grip, but she
thrashed around inside her own body trying to move or cry out. She clenched her eyes and gritted
her teeth while the blood from her chest splattered against her face. Every ounce of her strength
was spent trying to move until eventually she began to feel weak, and the red light started to fade
and, all of a sudden, her call came through.

The cell phone in the clone’s coat pocket beeped and lit up, and it must have startled the
clone, because it jumped back from the table and began whining. It clutched its hands to its ears,
reeded back, then doubled over. It was as though the phone’s sound or signal had blown a fuse in
the clone’s mind. Jan, free from the paralysis but bleeding from her chest, got up off the
operating table. She picked up a scalpel from the tray table and looked to the door, where the
clone was tearing at the pockets of her coat trying to find her phone. Jan backed up until she felt
the handle of one of the morgue drawers behind her. Finally, the call ended, and the beeping
stopped. The clone composed itself and looked to Jan who flung open the cooler door without
thinking and dove inside the drawer. She pulled the door shut and sealed it with the inside latch.
Then she held on to the handle with all her remaining strength expecting to feel the clone tugging
from the other side any second, but the door stayed closed. Jan waited, listened, held her breath.
She thought she heard the door to the morgue open and close but couldn’t bear to open the door
to find out, so she laid on her back, clung to the handle, and tried to catch her breath.

But inside the drawer, the walls were closing in. She clutched at her chest and grew tense.
She tried to control her breathing, but the cut in her chest was pushing her heart rate. She
stretched her eyes, but she was in total darkness. She tried to reposition herself but didn’t have
the space. She felt feverish, and cold sweat started pouring out of her. She began yawning,
gagging, and chills and fever washed over her in quick alternation. Her stomach started wringing
itself out and she began vomiting metallic bile across the sores in her throat. She gurgled and
choked up cries of pain. The nodes on her neck scratched and burned. She felt the tendrils
moving under her skin, twisting and spinning in place. She convulsed and spun in the drawer
until she was on her hands and knee, her arched back pressing against the ceiling and blood,
sweat, and bile all poured out of her onto the bottom of the drawer. She tried to open the door
now, but she was too weak to pull the latch.

Something was happening. In Jan’s pulsing vision, memories were coming back. She
remembered her sister, her father, her room, her skin was on fire. She shut her eyes but couldn’t
stop remembering. She remembered the toad; she remembered smashing the toad and her sister
screaming. She remembered her sister, grabbing her by the throat and locking her in the toy
chest. Whose chest? She remembered her father screaming at her for torturing her sister. He
wouldn’t listen. Her sister brought the bugs inside, her sister was the one screaming, she needed
to be put in the chest. She remembered the bugs crawling across the floor, crawling under her
skin, she could feel them now. They were on another expedition, exploring the remains of her
nervous system, spinning around her spine like a maypole and boring in through the back of her
skull. She tried to crush them, tried to scratch them out of her skin. She began scratching to get
them out, and her skin began to peel off. She felt like she was going to burst and then she
blacked out.

Jan woke up with a start and hit her head on the top of the drawer, looking frantically for
the clone through the darkness. She held her breath and listened. She collected her thoughts.
Somehow, she was still alive. The coolers had started working again, so she knew the electricity
was back on. She was freezing, but she felt better. She pushed open the door and stepped out of
the drawer into the brightly lit morgue. The room was empty and there was no sign of her clone.
She stretched and felt her chest. Somehow, the wound had closed without a trace, and the nodes
on her neck had disappeared as well. She masticated her cotton mouth. The taste of blood and
bile was still on her teeth. She stood there, perplexed, trying to remember what had happened.
The events of the night were all so fantastic that she began to wonder if she’d dreamt the whole
thing.

The one-way glass was once again happily reflected the morgue back onto itself. Jan
moved in front of it to inspect where her wound had been, but instead saw Everett Zehr. Jan
screamed and recoiled at the sight of her memory, and Everett did the same. Jan was surprised
that Everett did not lurch at her, tendrils flaring and wielding a saw, but instead cowered by the
coolers in the reflection. Slowly, she stood up and Everett did the same. She clasped her hand
against her mouth to keep the truth inside from escaping. Everett did the same in the mirror.
Wheels spun and cables snapped in her brain. She looked down at herself to discover that she
now had the body of a 67-year-old dead man, and her mind began to tear itself apart as a
mechanism of self-defense. She lunged at her reflection and smashed her fists against the glass.

Behind the glass the lights flicked on, allowing Jan to see to the other side. The
observation room was filled with doctors scribbling on charts, armed guards standing at
attention, people in dark suits with dark glasses shouting into phones, and a well decorated
military official looking gravely through the glass at Everett Zehr, a man that had recently been
found dead. Jan’s face went white, and her jaw locked. Her eyes drifted apart until it wasn’t clear
what she was seeing. Then the doctors lowered their notes and the men in suits hung up their
phones. The decorated official said something to the rest and the armed guards came into the
morgue. Jan tried to say something, but Everett’s voice came out; a thoughtless, broken question.
The guards moved in. The left guard grabbed the right arm, and the right guard grabbed the left
arm and together they carried Everett screaming from the morgue.