by Mia Archer
“Come on,” I said. “Don’t you want to help me?”
He licked his lips and swallowed. It looked like he was having trouble concentrating. I got the feeling he didn’t get many college girls down here giving him attention like this.
He looked up at me and shook his head. His dedication to his job was admirable but frustrating since I needed to get in there.
This sort of thing had always been so much easier for my dad, but I didn’t have the advantages he had on the job.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But that’s not possible. Nobody gets in there without authorization.”
“Nice try with the sexy,” Cara said, coming up behind me. “Now it’s time to try something else.”
“What are you…”
Only before I could say anything, Cara had pulled my gun from my purse. I rolled my eyes as she looked at me and smiled.
“You said it yourself,” she said. “This is Aliens where we’re the ones with the guns calling the shots. We have to do what needs to be done.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean taking off and nuking the morgue from orbit. We need to be on this guy’s good side!”
“Holy shit,” the guy said. “If you want in there that bad then just fucking go! They’re in the special storage unit. It’s your funeral if you want to go in there!”
His eyes had gone wide when he saw the gun. I got the feeling this wasn’t the kind of job where you had to worry about someone shoving a gun in your face, after all.
“The special storage unit?” Cara asked.
“Which door is it?” I asked.
The guy nodded over to a supply cabinet. I smiled and hit him with a wink.
“Thanks so much for that,” I said.
“You really don’t want to go in there,” the guy said.
“What is he talking about?” Cara asked.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I really am, but I do need to go in there.”
The guy held his hands up.
“Just go! I promise I won’t say anything. Please.”
I hit him with another apologetic smile. Then I turned and hit Cara with an irritated glance as I headed for the storage cabinet and pulled it open revealing the secret entrance to the special ice box.
“What’s with the dirty look?” Cara asked.
“The dirty look is because I had everything in hand there,” I said.
“You totally did,” she said. “That dork was totally going to let you in if you let him stare at your cleavage for a little longer, but we don’t have time for that shit.”
“You have a point,” I said.
“Besides,” Cara continued. “I didn’t like him staring at your tits. That’s my job.”
I should’ve been irritated that this all boiled down to jealousy, but I couldn’t help but shiver. Cara getting murderously jealous was pretty hot.
“We’re really going to have to talk about that,” I said.
“You know you like it,” she said. “I see that look.”
I rolled my eyes. I hated that she could pick up on that, but whatever.
The secret door was a hell of a lot heavier than any other door we’d seen at the hospital. Because of course it’d be heavier considering what was stored in there on the regular.
“Is that a secret door?” Cara asked. “What is this? A fucking game of Clue or something?”
“There’s not going to be any Tim Curry coming along to liven this up,” I said as I pulled down on a massive handle that would’ve been difficult for a regular human to open. It let out a loud creak, like it wasn’t used often, and then the door sprang open, revealing another equally heavy door on the other side.
“What the hell is this?” Cara asked.
“Airlock protocol for a room like this,” I said. “Every hospital has a room like it, but you’re not going to find it on any of the usual tours.”
“What are you talking about?” Cara asked.
“I’m talking about the pesky fact that the supernatural is very real, which means society has to deal with it. One of the ways society deals with it is having a special room rated to contain supernatural creatures up to a certain power level for a certain amount of time. Your basic vampires, werewolves, stuff like that.”
“Basic vampires and werewolves?” Cara asked, looking at the drawers with more trepidation. “What the hell do you do if you get something bigger than that?”
“Call the Ghostbusters, of course,” I said with a grin.
“Wait a minute,” Cara said, suddenly looking excited. “You’re telling me the Ghostbusters are fucking real?”
“Actually they’re not,” I said. “Ghosts are totally real, but usually getting rid of them is boring stuff like getting a young priest and an old priest together for some fun. That sort of thing.”
I walked to the second door and tried to open it, but it refused to budge. I frowned.
“Having trouble?” Cara asked.
“We need to get into this next room, but…”
“The second door doesn’t open unless the first one is closed,” the guy shouted from outside. “Again I’m legally obligated to reiterate that it’s your funeral if you go in there!”
I sighed and bit back a curse.
“What’s wrong?” Cara asked.
“We have to close the one door to get this one to open,” I said. “I was hoping we wouldn’t have to do that. Airlock protocol keeps the nasties inside until the authorities can come to deal with it.”
“Oh,” Cara said. “Fuck.”
“Though in this case they’re probably only leaving the werewolves on ice long enough to make sure they don’t wake up. That’s standard procedure with your zombies and werewolves and people who might rise and become vampires.”
“How do you know so much about all of this?” Cara asked.
I frowned, my mouth compressed into a thin line.
“You really don’t want to know.”
There was nothing for it, so I closed the first door and moved to open the second one. Only as I moved to open that second one I heard a clang from the other side. I bit back a couple more curses.
“What the hell was that?” Cara asked.
“That was the sound of the door out of here locking behind us,” I said with a frown. “That asshole must’ve had some sort of remote way to lock and unlock the door once it was closed. Or maybe it was automatic.”
“So we’re fucking locked in here?” Cara asked, her voice rising.
“Let’s just do what we came here to do,” I said, opening the second door.
25
Kirsten
“You’re very nonchalant about being trapped in here,” Cara said.
I glanced up to a camera at one end with a single red light glowing at us. No doubt we were being watched by the asshole who’d locked us in here.
“I’m not sure how else I’m supposed to act,” I replied.
“You could maybe act terrified? That guy could be calling a bunch of his werewolf friends for all you know.”
“I don’t think that guy was working with the werewolves,” I replied.
“And what gives you that learned opinion, oh great one?” Cara asked.
“Just a hunch,” I said, looking at the row of drawers. Each sported a very heavy looking padlock. Which was exactly the kind of precaution the normals would take to try and lock something in.
I shook my head. Depending on what kind of supernatural creature they were dealing with, that padlock could be everything from a great idea to a simple thing ripped aside like so much tissue paper.
“Stand by they airlock,” I said. “If anything starts to go bad go through the first door. You should be safe enough in the airlock. The guy might even take pity on you and let you out if he knows you’ve closed the door.”
“You’re not making me feel better about any of this,” Cara said.
I walked along the row of drawers. It really did look like something straight out of some cop procedural. I
saw a couple of names I recognized, and a few names I didn’t.
There were even a couple of John and Jane Does. I figured those had to belong to werewolves.
A key hung on a small metal circle like something straight out of an ancient jail. I undid the lock on one of the Jane Doe drawers and pulled it open, then frowned at what I saw. I waved a hand as mist rose out of the thing as the cold air from the inside made contact with the slightly warmer air on the outside.
“What do you see?” Cara asked.
“Nothing you want to see,” I said, looking down at the chunks of what had been a werewolf, but everything had transformed back into human bits by the time they got around to picking up the pieces.
I wondered how they got the right pieces with the right person. If that explosion had been as big as Cara described then it’d be pretty difficult to put Humpty Wolfie back together again. Especially when there’d been half a pack in there before the place went sky high.
I grinned. An explosion was just as good as silver for sufficiently large explosions, after all.
“Are you seriously smiling at a time like this?” Cara asked.
“I was thinking of something funny,” I said.
“You have a really weird sense of humor,” Cara said, glancing nervously at the drawers.
I pushed the door closed and put the lock back in place. I didn’t think it was necessary to have a lock on a drawer holding bits and pieces of what had once been a werewolf, but I figured I’d be nice to the people working at the morgue. Even if that asshole hadn’t exactly been nice to me.
I was going to have words for him once I convinced him to open that fucking door again. Though I did have a nervous itch between my shoulder blades. I didn’t like being locked in here, for all that I was trying to act like it didn’t bother me to keep Cara from freaking out.
I moved down the line until I saw a name I recognized. I frowned. It was none other than Brad.
The guy might’ve been an asshole, but that didn’t mean that he’d bought the big one.
I thought back to his corpse on the ground in the basement. They must’ve been able to recover something, though he hadn’t been a werewolf. There was no need to open up his drawer and have a look at whatever the fuck was left of him.
I continued down the line, getting down on my haunches as I looked at the next one. I shook my head as I saw the name. Wade Arnold. Otherwise known as the star player of our school’s basketball team.
Which is to say he probably wouldn’t be much at a Division I school, but he was definitely the big man on campus at our school. He was the one who was responsible for our team having a record that was only slightly more losses than wins, and around here that was considered a good thing.
Somebody was going to be pissed that this guy had bit the big one. He’d always been a self-absorbed prick who didn’t deserve that attitude, but that didn’t mean he deserved death.
Nobody at that party had deserved death, even Brad who’d spent most of his time at practice harassing me.
I put the key in the padlock and turned it. Pulled it open revealing the charred remains of what had been a person. And they were so charred that I knew there wasn’t a chance this guy was going to be coming back from the grave.
“That’s disgusting,” Cara said, looking at the charred body from across the room.
“Sorry,” I said. “But I have to be sure.”
“Are you going to check all of these?” she asked.
“Probably,” I said. “I have to establish a baseline, after all, and go from there.”
“A baseline for what?” Cara asked.
“This guy here has been charred to a crisp,” I said.
“Obviously,” Cara said.
I hit her with a look that I hoped communicated how annoying it was that she was taking that tone with me. She hit me with a sweet smile that said she knew she was being annoying, but she didn’t care. I rolled my eyes and continued.
“Charred to a crisp means he doesn’t have the whole werewolf Wolverine healing factor thing going for him,” I said. “Which means it’s safe to assume we don’t have to run a silver stake through his heart or anything.”
“Isn’t running stake through the heart more of a vampire thing?” Cara asked.
“It totally is,” I said. “But it turns out that sort of thing works really well for werewolves who haven’t quite gone through the whole transformation yet.”
“Nice tip,” Cara said.
On to the next one. This one was a John Doe. I opened the drawer and found myself staring at yet another charred body. I shook my head and cursed a couple of times.
“Why are you getting upset that there’s a dead body in there?” Cara asked. “I thought we were making sure everybody was dead?”
“I want almost everybody in here to be dead,” I said. “But it would be nice if one of the werewolves survived.”
“Why the hell would that be nice?” Cara asked.
“Because then I can ask them questions about what the hell they’re doing here,” I said.
“Great,” Cara said. “You know that by horror movie logic the person to catch the big scary monsters never meets a pleasant end, right?”
“I’m well aware,” I said. “Doesn’t change the fact that it’d be nice to talk to one of them and figure out what the hell their plans are. You usually don’t see a pack revealing themselves like this. The fact that they’re coming after us like this is disturbing.”
“I’d say the very existence of werewolves in the first place is disturbing enough,” Cara said.
I closed the drawer. It’s not like I was going to find anything useful in there.
I just hoped I hadn’t been to thorough in taking those werewolves out last night. They were survivors, but it’d be just my luck that the one time I wanted one of them to survive would be the one time I’d managed to take all of them out.
Even if taking all of them out had been pretty badass.
I moved to the next one. This one wasn’t a John or a Jane Doe, but it also wasn’t a name I recognized. I unlocked the drawer and pulled it open, and I was met with a girl who looked like she could’ve been sleeping.
“That girl looks a lot better than the others,” Cara said.
“And that’s not good,” I said. “Could you please hand me my sword?”
Cara rummaged in my purse. She pulled out my sword hilt and held it towards me.
“Careful with that,” I said. “You don’t want to accidentally activate it and stab yourself.”
“Is that something that could happen?” Cara asked.
“If you’re not careful,” I said, hitting the hidden button on the side and letting the sword materialize.
“I’ll never get tired of watching that,” Cara said. “Talk about impressive!”
I held my sword up and looked down at the girl. I thought I saw her chest imperceptibly rise and fall. Which meant she’d had plenty of time to recover and the transformation was taking hold. She hadn’t started sprouting hair yet, but it wouldn’t be long.
“Of course the first good one I find is identified,” I growled.
“What does that mean?” Cara asked.
“It means she’s not going to know anything about the pack’s plans because she was never part of it,” I said.
So I brought my sword down on their neck, cleanly severing the head from the rest of her body.
“Holy shit,” Cara said. “I thought you said you were going to run your sword through their hearts?”
“Separating the head from the neck also works,” I said with a shrug. “And it’s a hell of a lot easier with a sword then stabbing them at this awkward angle when they’re in one of the freezers.”
“Got it,” Cara said, though she looked a little green in the gills. Like she was desperately trying not to lose her lunch.
I looked down at my handiwork. The separation was clean. It’d been done with silver, so it’s not like they were going to grow back
or anything. Under ideal circumstances I would’ve burned either the head or the body after they’d been separated, but I didn’t have that kind of time right now.
So I moved to the next one. I had to squat down to the ground to read the name and…
My breath caught. It was Sadie. I couldn’t believe it.
She’d always had such a happy and bubbly personality. She was the last person in the world who deserved to get offed by a bunch of asshole werewolves.
Not to mention I couldn’t shake the thought that it was my fault she was in there. After all, if it wasn’t for me then those werewolves might’ve never attacked the house.
“Are you okay?” Cara said, surprising me by coming up behind me and putting a hand on my back.
I jumped. Hey, what can I say? I was so used to things coming up and attacking me lately that I was operating on a hair trigger. She almost got knocked on her ass. It would’ve been easy, too, considering she’d squatted down next to me.
I turned and smiled. She looked so concerned. It was kind of sweet that she was so worried.
“Sorry,” I said. “Sadie was a good friend, and I hate to see her in here.”
“It’s going to be okay,” Cara said.
“Thanks,” I said, though I wasn’t sure I believed that. Seeing one of my friends, someone I cared about, was bringing all of this home.
“Are you sure you’re going to be okay?” Cara asked.
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “I just…”
I was rudely interrupted by something slamming against the drawer. I jumped, falling back on my ass. Cara scrambled back towards the other side of the room, letting out a scream.
“What the hell?” Cara shrieked.
I looked up at the camera watching the room impassively. It didn’t give a shit that we were trapped in here with a potentially transforming werewolf.
That bang came from Sadie’s drawer. Which meant that not only had she been bitten by a wolf the night before, but she was transforming.
And from the sounds of things in there, she was good and pissed off.