“Holy shit—” was all Lydia finally managed to summon as she half-sat, half lay on the floor, looking up at an impossible monster. No blood was oozing from the holes in his chest.
The creature on the table was fixed on her with blood-red eyes. The corpse grinned an entirely unpleasant expression that promised nothing but pain. His canines were long—too long. They protruded against his lower lip as he seemed to sincerely enjoy the thought of whatever he was planning to do to her.
Oh, you must be kidding!
Lydia had seen enough horror movies to know what he was. She wasn’t even going to say the word to herself. No way in hell was she going to dignify the ridiculous situation she was in by naming the thing that was in front of her.
Luckily, the newly-awoken-monster-corpse didn’t quite have his legs under him yet. His hungry, fierce hiss in Lydia’s direction had been followed by a rather unceremonious collapse onto the concrete floor with a hard crack. Lydia did her best to finally scramble up to her feet and nearly took another table down with her in the process.
Its haze didn’t seem to deter it much. It was crawling after Lydia on the ground, snarling and growling, pale and translucent lips pulled back from the too-long white teeth. That was all it took for her to declare “nope” and decide self-defense was not an option. Lydia somehow had the presence of mind to snatch up her phone as she ran by the desk on the way to the door out of her office.
“Get back here!” an angry voice shouted. The corpse could talk. Great. It sounded raspy and dry like he had swallowed rocks.
There was a roar and a hissing sound from behind her. As she slammed the door shut, she whirled, unable to resist the temptation to look at the creature that had once been a corpse on her slab. The monster, uncaring for his nudity, was standing now and lurching toward the door, his face still twisted in rage.
The thing was going to kill her.
Adrenaline pounded through her body, and she took off running down the hallway as it slammed into the door. She didn’t look back again to see what was happening. She knew the creature was going to chase her.
“Do not run!” the monster snarled.
Like hell, buddy.
“Help!” she screamed as she tore ass down the tile-walled hallway, looking for somebody—anybody. “Somebody, help!”
Footsteps were rounding the corner as other people in the building came to find the source of the screams. A mix of employees in lab coats and office garb gathered in the intersection of the hallway, eyes wide, as they had no idea what to expect, except fear. They were all coworkers she recognized but didn’t know their names.
Lydia’s running slammed her into one of them. The guy caught her and grasped her upper arms, keeping her from crashing them both into the wall.
She was shaking. She wanted to throw up. Wanted to cry. She turned down the hallway and saw the monster standing there in all his undead glory. His white-and-blue translucent skin was blotchy under the overhead fluorescent lights. The creature seemed entirely indifferent to the dozens of circular wounds on his chest.
The impossible corpse stalked toward them down the hallway slowly. The cadaver had shut his mouth, hiding the too-long canines. He wasn’t a shark going for the kill just yet; he was sizing up his prey. And they were prey. Lydia wanted to run, but somehow standing there with a small crowd felt safer. That somehow they would, by sheer numbers alone, be able to deal with the impossible monster coming down the hallway at them.
“What…the fuck…is that?” one of her building-mates exclaimed. Lydia deeply shared the sentiment.
“Is this a prank?” another one asked.
“I wish,” Lydia said quietly. She backed away from the monster. He had yet to take his eyes off her. All she wanted to do was hide behind the other people.
The monster rolled his shoulders, and someone in the small crowd groaned as there was an audible pop and a snap. And then…the walking cadaver laughed.
It was raspy, dry, and sounded like sandpaper rubbing on a brick. Gravelly and loose. Fear and dread welled in her as she pressed herself farther back away from the crowd, wanting to get to the back of them to run away. Lydia didn’t know what she was dealing with. This wasn’t possible. Adrenaline was screaming at her to run, and she wanted to listen.
“This is stupid,” a woman in her forties, with neat and tidy hair in a neat and tidy suit coat said as she stepped forward. “All right, you’ve had your fun, you two.” The woman walked halfway between the gathered crowd and the corpse and put her hands on her hips as if she were a schoolteacher scolding a pair of students on April Fools. “The makeup is very nicely done, but the lack of pants isn’t terribly fair to the rest of us.”
The woman turned to look back at Lydia with an accusatory glare, and Lydia was caught off guard once more as she realized the woman was blaming her as the other half of the prank. “N-no,” Lydia stammered and shook her head. “This isn’t—he isn’t—”
“Then someone pulled off a great stunt on you,” the woman said with a smile in her direction. “But the joke’s over.”
“It’s not a—” Lydia tried to explain but never had the chance.
The monster seemed done with the conversation. He ran down the remainder of the hallway and closed the distance between him and the older woman in the suit coat. The corpse slammed into her, grabbing her by the arms. In that instant, he opened his mouth, revealing the sharp and deadly canine teeth in his possession.
The crowd screamed and fell back against the wall as the monster’s inertia was going to send him, and the older woman, crashing into the rest of them. They all recoiled and wound up as a tangled mess of people and limbs against the tile wall like a group throwing themselves clear of a car wreck.
But the impact never came.
The corpse was gone.
So was the woman.
The moment they had come close to the pack of people, the two of them merely…vanished. Gone.
“Jane?” a man asked. That must have been her name. The woman who was far braver—or at least far more convinced this was fake—than Lydia was.
Nobody answered the call; there was nobody around. They could see down the intersection of the hallways in all three directions. They had disappeared right before their eyes in a blink. No smoke, no mirrors, no moment of flickering lights. Just…gone.
“Jane!” the man shouted. No answer. The man turned to look at her, wide-eyed, as fear started to set in. “What’s going on?” he demanded.
“I don’t know,” Lydia said breathlessly, her heart pounding in her ears. She didn’t know what a panic attack felt like, but she was wondering if she was getting close to one. “I just—he was in a bag, I unzipped him, and…” She trailed off, unable to finish. I was doing an autopsy, and like everyone’s worst nightmare, he got up and tried to kill me. That was what she wanted to say. But somehow, self-preservation kicked in. Lydia knew if she said that, they’d label her an accomplice because the other option—that it was true—wasn’t possible.
Never mind the fact they had just seen a naked dead man and a woman disappear right in front of their eyes. If she added to that ridiculousness by saying the man was not wearing makeup and that he was actually a monster, it’d all be pinned on her.
Not to mention that the dead man had a mark on his face bearing a substantial similarity to the one she mysteriously woke up with this morning.
She just shook her head uselessly and hoped the man would pin her silence on her panic. It wasn’t too far from the truth.
The man seemed to buy it, at least. “Jane!” he shouted again and put both of his hands through his hair. “Oh, god. We have to call the cops.”
The cops just made things worse.
Not because the cops weren’t trying to help, mind you. They were. Technically, they were all on the same team in some strange way, after all. The cops treated everyone—even Lydia—with the utmost respect since they were all working toward making Boston a safer place in their own way.
> It even looked like she would be let go without much fuss. That was until the cops saw the security tapes. Their system was horribly out of date and still ran on actual tapes.
Once the recording was fetched and played back on the monitor, the cops instantly brought all the witnesses and sat them down in a room. There were five of them, now that she had the presence of mind to count. Three from one of the nearby departments who had all come running when Lydia had screamed for help and a fourth person who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jane had been the senior level administrator of the office shared by the other three.
So now, they all sat around as the cop rewound the tape of the hallway and hit play. It wasn’t long before the unfortunate group understood precisely why they were watching.
A naked dead man grabbing a woman and disappearing in a single frame of a film would have been one thing. That would have been hard enough for them to explain. But it was far, far worse than that.
There was nothing on the film.
Well, no undead corpse-monster, to be exact. The rest of the group—Jane, Lydia, Jane’s three officemates, and the fifth guy who just went for a soda—were all there in the frame. Everything else played out as she remembered it.
First, Lydia came tearing down the hallway, screaming and bouncing off one of the walls as her momentum carried her around a previous corner too quickly. She didn’t even remember hitting the wall; that was how afraid she had been.
Enter the other four and Lydia colliding into the group at full tilt. They all turned to look at…nothing. Nothing was there. Jane stepped forward, scolding the invisible monster for the prank.
Here came the part that was really hard to explain. Jane was yanked off her feet and carried by some invisible force, crashing into the rest of the group. They all shrieked and fell against the wall in the same moment, and Jane disappeared.
The cop paused it, rewound it, and played it again. When none of the group could explain what was on the tape—or rather, what wasn’t on the tape—that was when the real questioning began.
They split them all off into separate rooms. Each of them was grilled by a cop, asking for a description of precisely what had happened. Lydia knew she was in for the worst of it, as she had been the lucky winner and had been the monster’s first target.
“So,” the cop started and sat down in a chair across from her in an office they had borrowed. They were questioning them all here and not back at the precinct, in the hopes that they’d be done with this before the end of the day, and Lydia and the others could all go home. “Run through it again with me.”
Lydia had told them exactly what happened twice already. And seeing as they had other security footage of her in the lab, she had to confess to the whole thing. There was no getting around it this time.
“This morning, I was assigned to a D.B. who was dead from apparent shotgun wounds. I’ve said all this already,” Lydia said tiredly. She wanted to cry. At least the nice man had brought her a coffee, and she was busy clutching it for dear life.
“Yup, we have that here,” the cop confirmed, looking down at the notes that had been fetched. “Was there anything unique about him?”
“He had strange clothes. They looked old—Victorian, maybe?”
“We have them in bags, yes. Anything else?”
Oh, thank god, at least they had that much proof that the man had been real. Then came the harder choice—the marks on his face. Since they hadn’t come in with photos of the dead body, she assumed there were no images on her work camera. Should she tell them about her matching ink? No. She didn’t want to be linked to the monster in any way, shape, or form. “No, sir.”
The cop nodded. “Then what happened?”
“I was pulling out all the buckshot when he, uh…” Lydia paused and looked down in her coffee, feeling the tightness in her throat start up again.
Fear was an incredible emotion when you thought about it. Its only purpose was to keep us alive. To tell us what was safe and what wasn’t. To give us the wherewithal to get the hell out of dire situations. But here she was, sitting across from an armed cop. Clearly, she was fine. But just the memory of that man sitting up on the table made her mouth go dry and her hands start shaking. “I didn’t have anything to do with this,” she said weakly.
“Hey, hey…” The cop reached across the table and put his hand on hers. He was a young guy, like most of them were, and he was doing his best to calm her down. Something about a guy in the uniform always made her smile, like most women, she figured. The presence of his hand on hers was helping, so she let him leave it there. “We aren’t saying you did. You aren’t a suspect. We just don’t have any answers, and we’re trying to figure this out and find your coworker.”
Lydia nodded, leaned back in her chair, and forced her heart to calm back down. The cop—Officer Malley was his name—removed his hand and let her gather herself up to keep talking.
“He sat up. The corpse just got up. I screamed, I fell over…I grabbed my phone and ran the hell out of there as fast as I could. He told me to ‘get back here’ and ‘do not run.’ I think he was trying to kill me.”
“So, from the tapes, you’re just standing there, working on…nothing at all,” Malley said with a sigh. “But what’s weird is we can hear him. We have his voice on the tape. We can see things fall over on their own. Whatever it is, it knocked over a table.”
“That’s what’s weird about all this?” Lydia asked sarcastically.
“Well, hey, I mean,” the cop stammered then shrugged. “It’s all weird.”
“Yeah…” Tell me about it.
The door to the room swung open, and an older cop walked in. This one wasn’t in full street garb. Probably a detective. “Everyone’s stories all match up. We’ve swept the building, no sign of Mrs. Tiel.” Jane’s last name, Lydia figured. “We can’t hold anyone without a warrant, and I need to wait for digital forensics to answer their damn messages,” he grumbled down at his own cell phone. “Look, I know tomorrow’s a holiday,” the detective said, looking up from the screen to Lydia, “but I really need you to stay in town.”
Lydia nodded. She was raised never to argue with cops. Their gig was hard enough. And besides, it wasn’t like she ever went anywhere for Thanksgiving, anyway. Her family all lived in Seattle now, so traditionally, she just took an extended Christmas break to go hang out with them. Nick and Lydia were going to have a Friendsgiving or whatever people called it. It was their own personal tradition for the past few years. “I’ll be here,” she said.
“Good. Thank you. You’re free to go,” the detective said and stood by the open door, clearly asking her to leave the room so he could talk to Officer Malley. So she picked up her bag and her phone and thanked the two men and bid them goodnight.
Free to go.
Why did that feel like a lie?
***
When she found Nick on the sidewalk outside the building, she didn’t say anything. If she opened her mouth, she’d lose her tenuous grasp on the tears she’d been fighting all afternoon. So instead, she just hugged him. God damn it, she needed a hug right now. He responded in kind and clutched her tightly as she rested her head on his shoulder.
They stood like that for a while before she finally pushed away and nodded weakly in thanks. She really did seriously need that after the corpse, after the cops, after everything. Nick hadn’t been questioned, but he worked in security. He knew all about what had happened. He’d probably been part of the search team for Jane, trying to find the woman who the undead freak had, well, taken. There was no other word for it.
As she pulled away, she felt something on his side under the zip-up hoodie he was wearing. Something hard was strapped to his side. “Nick? Are you wearing a gun?” she asked warily, shooting him an incredulous glance.
Nick had a license to carry a concealed weapon. He was a security guard and in a dangerous area of town. There were handguns for the security guards in the office that they signed for
when they clocked in and out of work. None went off the property. Ever. And yet here one was.
“No one’ll notice until Monday. It’s a holiday, and in all the fuss, I can say I forgot it because of what happened.” Nick shrugged. “Walter’ll write me up and forget anything happened.” Walter, Nick’s boss, was notoriously lax.
“You stole it.”
“I’m borrowing it. You got attacked, Lyd!” he insisted. He was honestly surprised that she was shocked by this. “And I’m trained. I know what I’m doing.”
“Great. Just don’t shoot me.” She shook her head. Although, honestly, the idea of having something should that corpse show up again was a relief, so she stopped giving him grief over it.
Nick was a lot of things, but he was responsible when it came to weapons. And all those years of video games made him a decent shot. Lydia pinched the bridge of her nose and tried to fight off a headache she felt edging in at the back of her skull.
“You all right?” he asked, probably knowing it was a stupid question but having to ask it anyway.
“No. I need a cocktail. Beer isn’t going to do it this time,” she muttered, and they began to walk down the street. The fact that they needed to gather up after everything was over and talk it through was just understood between them. Besides, she was starving. Her hands were shaking. Partially from the day’s events, but also because she hadn’t had anything but a cup of coffee and a package of crackers the police had provided to her a few hours ago, and it was now well past seven in the evening.
“I saw the tapes,” Nick said quietly. “They said a corpse attacked you…?”
“Yeah.” Lydia shoved her hands into her coat pockets. She wanted to hide the rest of her in there if only she could. “It got up. Chased me. Grabbed that woman and just…poof.”
“You sure he was dead?” When she glared at him hard enough to put a hole in his head, he raised his hands defensively. “Hey. Hey. I had to ask.”
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