King Of Flames (The Masks of Under Book 1)

by Kathryn Ann Kingsley

  No injection marks. Maybe it was somewhere really well-hidden, and Lydia was missing it. Well, she couldn’t just sit in the bathroom all day and look. Somebody was going to notice she wasn’t at her station eventually.

  Flopping down at her desk, Lydia realized there was a body on her metal table. It was still in its bag, likely having just been dropped off. Lydia blinked. There wasn’t one scheduled for today. A folder on her desk had a sticky note on it, saying in fine-point Sharpie scrawl, “You’re the lucky winner. Jim.”

  Jim was her boss. He was funny, they had a friendly and casual working relationship, and he trusted her to get her job done. Even better, he didn’t over-manage her, and in exchange, she didn’t ask him for a damn thing except for time off. Lydia was as self-reliant as employees came and managed her own time without an issue. It was a pleasant, peaceful coexistence.

  But it also meant when he needed to get something done and done fast, it was her job.

  Sighing, Lydia picked up the folder and opened it. The body would have been in the fridge, except Jim had pulled it specifically. Upcoming holiday weekend and schedule be damned.

  Death was hard to plan, after all. Especially the kinds of death they handled. The gentle term they used on the website for this kind of death was “unexpected.” Lydia, with her off-color sense of humor, had long since dubbed it “murdery.”

  There were a few different kinds of people who worked in the dead-people business. There were those who had simply turned that part of them off and handled everything they saw and did like a bank clerk. No big deal, nothing to see here, move right along. There were those who internalized it to the point they became dead inside themselves. And then there were ones like her, who handled it with humor. It was a crass and morbid way of dealing with the world, but at least it was good for a laugh.

  Better that than winding up like that guy from Phantasm. What was his name again? The Tall Man. Right. It’d been a while since she’d seen that one, and if she could recall right, he’d been some weird brain-sucking alien or something. She didn’t remember, except that he had those bizarre floating silver orbs.

  Lydia loved horror movies. She adored them. They were a pastime and a hobby. From the age of eight and on, her dad would take her to the local Blockbuster every Friday, where she could rent two VHS tapes. So she did, and every week, they were always from the horror section. Lydia had spent her childhood working alphabetically through from 13 Ghosts all the way down to Wolfman.

  None of it ever scared her. As a kid, all she’d ever wonder about the movies was whether Michael Myers ever got lonely or how Pinhead slept at night with all those things in his face. Did he have to straighten them all back out in the morning with the back of a hammer?

  It was part of her love of horror that led her to do what she did for a living. It was easier to handle, in some weird way, if you just pretended it was all movie magic. These weren’t real squishy people—they were just props.

  The folder contained the police report. The guy had been found the night prior in an alley between some buildings in Boylston. All that was scribbled down was that the man had died from an apparent shotgun wound to the chest. No other descriptions, no other boxes checked. Even the little box that indicated if a weapon was found nearby was left blank. Freaking cops. They never wrote down anything that mattered. More than once, she had wound up doing a cast of a blade only to be told another department had the knife the whole time.

  With a sigh, Lydia stood and walked up to the body. Putting on a sterile hair cap, she suited up and threw on a pair of gloves from the table next to it and unzipped the bag. She pulled it all the way down past the toes before opening it up.

  “Well, hey there, buddy,” Lydia greeted the dead body incredulously and tilted her head to the side. That was something you didn’t see every day. The man was dressed in what looked like Victorian clothes. Shirt, vest, and coat, all extremely dated and all in shades of white and cream. Even his shoes were white and polished. Was this guy on the way to a wedding? Or a costume ball, maybe?

  Blood had oozed from his forehead and ran straight down his face, revealing it had been there while the man was standing. It covered the right side of his face, obscuring what would have been otherwise reasonably handsome features. He had short black hair, the only thing about him that wasn’t white, cream, or in the case of his skin, the familiar lifeless pale blue of a corpse.

  “Signs of an altercation before death,” Lydia mumbled to herself as she wrote it down on her notebook. That would be the only reason he had blood streaking down his face toward his chin. What had killed the man was pretty clear—a broad swath of small holes in his chest, each circled and ringed in dried blood. A shotgun blast to the chest, and it looked like it was done from close range and been packed with buckshot. Great. That would make for some serious fun all afternoon as she picked each individual ball out of his chest. Lydia sighed. So much for a short day.

  The man had no identification on him at the scene. In fact, his pockets had been entirely emptied. That wasn’t uncommon, even if most people didn’t generally get mugged with a shotgun on the way to a costume ball. Lydia had to admit at least that part made it interesting.

  First step, photos, then strip a layer of bizarre Victorian clothing, and more snaps with her camera. The clothes weren’t cheap and didn’t seem like they were costumes. Once the body was naked, she took more pictures, bagged and tagged the clothes, and put them in a little plastic bin on the bottom shelf for the more traditional forensic teams to examine.

  The lab would want a blood sample. They always did, no matter how obvious the cause of death might be. Lydia took a red washable pen, circled a mark on his femoral artery on this thigh, and inserted a syringe. He’d only been dead twelve to fourteen hours, as far as she could tell, so it’d be easy to get a blood test. When she pulled back the plunger, it was dry. Just air.

  What…?

  She threw the needle into the hazmat bin by her feet and picked up another one, and this time circled a different spot on the femoral artery. Lydia drew back the plunger and…nope. Nothing. No blood.

  The hell?

  Okay, the subclavian, then. No blood. All right. Screw it. Screw this guy. Going to a stack of drawers, she rummaged through a bin and found a cardiac stick. Go for the gold. She unwrapped it, went to the body, and fed it into his heart.

  Nothing.

  Okay! Okay, fine. He had no blood in his body. Completely exsanguinated. Sure, why the hell not. She took off her gloves and started to write notes on one of her forms, detailing what she’d found, or, in this case, not found.

  Lydia could start doing a cut-down and pull open the guy’s ribcage to see if he was utterly devoid of blood, but that was a hell of a lot of work to do without being explicitly told to do it. The corpse hadn’t started decomp yet, so he hadn’t been dead long enough that the blood would have pooled into the tissue. The man didn’t have bullet wounds large enough to have bled him out. Where did all the blood go?

  Whatever. Let someone further up the food chain solve the mystery.

  Lydia took a few more photos of the shotgun wounds on his chest before taking a swab and beginning to clean each one. It seemed that the only blood this guy had was the dry stuff on the outside of his body. Oh, well.

  Picking up a small pile of little red sticks, she began to feed each one into the bullet wounds. It always reminded her of playing KerPlunk. Taking a photo, she wrote that the weapon was likely operated by someone standing between three to five feet away and at chest level. Pulling all the red sticks back out and dropping them into the hazmat bin, it was time to stop avoiding the inevitable.

  Picking up a pair of thin, needle-nose tweezers, she began plucking out the little balls of lead, one by one.

  Tink.

  A little lead ball went into the tray. At least the wounds weren’t too deep. A few inches at most. Enough to kill and wind up in the lungs and the heart, but not enough that she had to really go digging.
>
  Tink.

  So much for a peaceful last day before Thanksgiving break.

  Tink.

  She was going to be at this for way too long. It had already been forty-five minutes, and Lydia was barely halfway through.

  Tink.

  Each time she pulled out a ball, she marked the wound with a tiny red dot of her washable pen. That way, she wouldn’t have to play the guessing game of which ones she had already done. That was the worst.

  Tink.

  The mindless, repetitive task let her mind wander. Of course, naturally, it strayed right back to dwelling about the mark on her arm. What the hell was it? How the hell did it get there? What kind of sick joke was this?

  Tink.

  How could she get the stupid mark off her forearm?

  Tink.

  At least she was almost done with the buckshot. Just a few more little pieces of lead to go. That last one had been deeper than the others.

  Tink.

  Lydia nearly jumped a foot in the air as her desk phone rang. With a sigh, she put down the tweezers, pulled off her goggles and gloves, and went to answer it. “Yeah?”

  “Hey, Lydia,” answered her boss, Jim. “Wondering if you could take a mugshot of our dapper John Doe. Upstairs wants to circulate a description before they leave for the day.”

  “It’s not even two in the afternoon.”

  “Holiday.”

  Lydia shook her head. Must be nice. “Yeah, sure, I’m on it.”

  “You’re the best. Oh, and don’t forget a dental impression for I.D.,” Jim replied, and she heard the click as he hung up. Lydia hung up the phone and put on yet another pair of clean gloves. “All right, Dapper John,” Lydia said, having to give Jim some credit for the fitting nickname. “Time to smile for the camera.”

  Taking a few more shots of his face with the blood smear, she then set to work cleaning the dry, congealed substance from his features to get a clean shot for the folks who had offices upstairs. It was when she went to get some of the blood off his temple that she paused. It looked like something else was there, under the blood.

  What the hell was this? This guy was just full of surprises.

  Tossing the bloody swab into the hazmat, she picked up another to scrub at that spot further. It looked like there was…white ink on his skin. Two marks looked as though they were tattooed on him. White tattoos were rare, especially on the face. A gang member, maybe? Once she had cleaned the rest of the blood off, she turned his head to the side, stiff but still flexible, to get a better look at the marks.

  Lydia pulled back, her eyes wide.

  It matched the symbol on her arm. Her “surprise tattoo.” His marks weren’t exactly the same—no backward N with a spiral—but the style was unmistakable. Like different characters from the same alphabet. Esoteric and strange, looking like a something out of Hellraiser or some other occult movie.

  Wide-eyed and dumbfounded, Lydia froze. How was this possible? How was any of this possible? Lydia’s heart was pounding in her ears as she tried to make sense of what she was seeing. All at once she was thinking too quickly and not fast enough, her thoughts a jumbled mess as they tried to vie for supremacy.

  Nothing had a chance to win the fight and rise to the surface.

  A hand snapped around her wrist. Cold, deathly, and wrong. The face of the corpse turned to look at her of its own accord. Eyes, dilated and ringed in red, met hers.

  Lydia screamed.

  Chapter Two

  Bodies could sometimes move hours after death. They might twitch, but they didn’t turn their heads. They certainly didn’t open their eyes. They absolutely didn’t grab your wrist.

  Yet there it was.

  So Lydia did the only logical thing she could think of.

  She screamed and yanked her wrist out of the thing’s clammy grasp, the force of it sending her reeling backward. Lydia promptly tripped over a rolling table containing trays of tools and took it to the floor with a loud crash, sending scalpels and scissors, saws and her enterotome skittering across the concrete floor.

  Tattoos didn’t just appear overnight.

  A dead body didn’t just sit up.

  Being a proud connoisseur of all things horror, Lydia had believed that should a scenario like the ones on the screen ever come true, she would simply scoop up the nearest weapon and dispatch the monster without much fuss. How many times had she ridiculed the busty actress for doing something stupid? For crying and panicking and fleeing upstairs when, really, they should simply accept the monster’s existence and do what needed to be done to survive?

  Well, here she was. This was her moment. This was the bit she had daydreamed about since she was a kid. It turned out it was a lot easier to scoff when you weren’t the one sitting on the VCT, looking up at a toothy and angry monster trying to kill you. When you’re sitting on your sofa, it’s easy to judge.

  So, what would she do, when faced with a monster? This daydream-gone-nightmare, turned to life, sitting on the table with hungry red eyes boring into her as a crocodile looks at his lunch?

  Surely, she’d defend herself. Grab the mallet labeled “for hard cases only” from the bin and crack its skull open. Or grab a scalpel. Or anything. It always looked so simple in the movies.

  Turns out—nope. Not so easy. Lydia just sat there agog, her brain skipping like a needle on a record. This couldn’t be real. This couldn’t be happening. Somewhere in the back of her mind, behind all the fear and the instant rush of adrenaline, she apologized to the fictional characters for having thought she was somehow superior.

  The man was just as pale as he had been moments before. The same lifeless, cold, white and veiny blue-ish tone that dead bodies took on some half dozen hours after their deaths. But instead of the passive, stoic face of a corpse, its features were twisted in rage. In hunger.

  “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.