Shades of Night (Sparrow Falls Book 1)

by Justine Sebastian

  “I know,” Nancy muttered. “I hate when it does this though.”

  “Same here,” Nick said.

  Their journey back to the truck was a slow and arduous one, Nancy stumbling and cursing, belching threatening clouds of Christmas cheer. She didn’t vomit, though she was nearly asleep by the time they reached the pickup, Nick about one more dragging step away from saying to hell with it and just carrying her. He got Nancy situated in the truck and winced when she tipped her head back. It rapped against the back windshield, but she didn’t seem to mind, a soft grunt the only sign she felt anything.

  It was time to go home.

  “Hey, guys!” Nick called, stepping around the front of the vehicle and waving his arms. Hylas was snapping pictures of the house, Dawn Marie and Tobias were still inspecting the bloodstain. Well, Dawn Marie was; Tobias was looking back toward where they had all been standing before. He was frowning, fingers steepled beneath his chin.

  They all turned back toward Nick though and Hylas waved. “Hi, Nick!” he called back.

  From inside the truck, Nancy retched.

  Nick felt like his head was about to explode. It was the first time in a long time that he had felt overwhelmed by the outside world. He thought he had readjusted admirably well after ten years locked inside a concrete cage; the first week or so had been awful, but the uneasiness had begun to fade away. Now it came roaring back and for a few dreadful seconds, he wanted to go back to jail, back to the familiarity of schedules and the intimate knowledge of Ioan’s lithe body.

  The sky was too big in the free world, it was too loud and unpredictable out here; people made too much noise. His cousin was hanging out of the truck door vomiting in a yard that only a couple hundred feet away had been soaked with the blood of a john he’d grown attached to despite himself. There were footprints and hand prints in the mud, a path ripped through the grass like it had been tissue paper.

  “We need to go,” Nick called. His voice was bowstring taut, trembling he was so tense. It had washed over him, sank into his bones and was making his insides feel quaky and jittery.

  “Nick?” Hylas asked.

  “Now,” he called over his shoulder as he turned to go back to the truck. Nick shook his head, raking shaking fingers through his wind-tangled hair as he went. He climbed in the cab and leaned over to help Nancy sit back upright. There were some napkins in the glove compartment that he got and gave her to wipe her face with.

  “I knew that was going to happen,” she said. She groaned. “God, I have to pee. This is so unfair.”

  “We’re going,” Nick said. He honked the horn without looking around and jumped when Dawn Marie hopped over the puddle of Nancy’s vomit, pretty much vaulting herself into the truck.

  “Chill out, Nick,” she said as she squirmed around in the seat to get comfortable. “We’re right here. Damn.”

  The back of the truck dipped and rocked as Tobias and Hylas climbed aboard as well. A sharp knock on the roof let Nick know they were settled and ready to bump their way back down the road toward home.

  17

  New Year’s Eve at Sparrow Falls Memorial was a madhouse. The days immediately following Christmas had been dull and uneventful. Nick had dozed in the custodian’s office for at least half of his shifts during that time. Melinda Turner told him the night before New Year’s though that what they were seeing right then was the calm before the storm. She told Nick to make sure he had all the disinfectant and fresh mops he could count because he would probably need them. Like an idiot, he hadn’t really believed her, had thought she was only screwing with him because he was the new guy.

  He was proven wrong the second he clocked in for his shift. The janitors on the day shift had practically run out the door, the head janitor, Ed, telling him, “Good luck, kid.”

  Nick worked the night shift with a woman named Carla who he generally got along with, but he didn’t even have time to wish her a happy New Year that night. She clocked in not five minutes after he did and all he managed to do was nod at her on his way out the door. Some woman with alcohol poisoning had pissed all over the emergency room floor not ten seconds after she had staggered in with her husband.

  It was not the kind of night to attempt throwing a party, but the employees at the hospital tried anyway. In the break room against one wall was a long table covered in cupcakes and cookies, all decorated with sparkly sugar and little signs shaped like party hats or made to resemble exploding fireworks. Some of them said Happy New Year!

  Nick picked up one such cupcake when he finally got his break and plucked the sign off immediately. He tossed it in the trash because he was having a decidedly unhappy New Year. He got it; people went out, got loaded, had accidents. Some of them did too many drugs and overdosed. One of the more amusing mishaps involved a man who had found himself with a bottle rocket burning a hole through his ass cheek mid-coitus. Apparently fucking your date on the golf green of the country club was hazardous and a good way to get your membership revoked. Mostly he seemed concerned about the secondary burns on his testicles if the wailing from behind the drawn curtain had been anything to go by. Nick had been sopping up what he estimated was his seven-hundredth puddle of puke at the time in the next curtained cubicle. It had been an illuminating moment, to say the least.

  He stirred the punch in a cheery, disposable plastic bowl covered in more party happy-slappy New Year’s themes. Baby New Year sat front and center, fat and frankly, a little terrifying with his rosy jowls and big teeth. The punch itself looked like diluted, frothy blood; the creamy, bubbly foam on top like flotsam and jizz.

  “What is this shit?” he asked Nancy who sat on the couch next to the table, slumped over in exhaustion, her formerly tidy hair in disarray. She had a spot of puke on the thigh of her scrubs.

  “What is what shit?” she asked while halfheartedly picking the sprinkles off her cupcake. She yawned and stretched then finally turned to look at Nick. He gestured at the punch bowl. “Oh, that. It’s some kind of punch Letha in pediatrics made. I think it’s cranberry juice, club soda and some kind of sherbet. Can’t remember if she said lime or orange. Maybe it’s both.”

  “This foamy crap looks like come,” Nick said. “Infected come.”

  “God,” Nancy said around a laugh. She slumped down on the couch more, tilted her head to rest on the back of the couch. It looked hellaciously uncomfortable to Nick, but she closed her eyes with a groan of relief. She was smiling. “The shit you say.”

  Nick shrugged. “I’ve seen a lot of come.”

  She cracked one eye open, a look of alarm sparking in the blue. “Infected come?”

  “Ah, no, actually,” Nick said. “But I did see this guy jizz on an Alka Seltzer once. It looked kind of like this.”

  Nancy closed her eye again and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Out of morbid curiosity, why did this fellow jizz on an antacid tablet?”

  “No idea,” Nick said. “He thought it was funny, I guess.”

  “Was this a… um… client… of yours?” Nancy asked.

  “No,” Nick said. “He was an… associate at the time.”

  “So a drug dealer friend,” Nancy said.

  “He wasn’t my friend.”

  Nick had barely known the guy and couldn’t remember his name anymore, but he did remember that because it had been so fucking weird. He’d asked if Nick would watch while he jerked off, Nick had told him that it would cost him thirty bucks and the guy had paid up then proceeded with the festivities. He’d made a big show of placing the Alka Seltzer tablet on the floor and had pointed his cock at it the entire time.

  A long, long time ago, Nick had stopped even the vaguest attempts at trying to figure out why people did what they did, especially when it came to sex and the weird shit that got them off. Back in his earlier days, he had asked a few times and usually he got nothing but a blank look and maybe a shrug. Sometimes they were ashamed and clammed up and he never saw them again. The last one had been the first to ever break hi
s jaw and it had taught Nick that asking such questions could be incredibly hazardous to his health, so he had stopped. Broken jaws hurt like hell, it was not an experience he’d wanted to repeat, though repeat it he had two more times. Three times with a broken jaw was a remarkably low count for a whore though and Nick considered himself lucky.

  It took him a moment to realize Nancy had not answered. When he glanced over at her again, he saw that she had fallen asleep and her cupcake had tumbled out of her hand and onto the floor. Nick put his snacks down, picked up the cupcake and cleaned up the frosting. When he was done, he covered Nancy with the throw on the end of the couch before getting his food again. He still had most of his break left and didn’t know what to do with it. He considered going to visit Wes, but when he’d looked in on him earlier, he had been dead to the world thanks to the drugs they had him on. Wes needed rest more than he needed Nick offering him small cakes and punch, so he scratched that off the list.

  Then he thought about Crash all alone down in the morgue. He was sure to be busy, but maybe he could squeeze Nick in if Nick came bearing gifts. He’d barely seen Crash since the night they talked in the parking lot and he behaved like a half-sane human being for a change. Nick did not delude himself into thinking that Crash was sane, but he had left a better impression and Nick didn’t feel like eating his cupcakes and drinking shitty, suspicious looking punch all by his lonesome.

  He snagged a couple more cupcakes and a few cookies that he wrapped in a napkin then dipped up two cups of punch. It was off to the morgue with him then and while he didn’t relish the idea of having snacks with a bunch of dead bodies hanging around, he still thought it was better than standing there eating while his exhausted cousin snored like she was trying to suck the roof down.

  Going to the morgue was like going to another reality, something caught between a time warp and someone’s idea of a time warp. The way there was through a long tunnel buzzing with fluorescent lights. There was no light at the end of that particular tunnel, the last three banks of lights had gone out sometime between Nick’s last trip down there and the present. The only light came from behind Nick and leaked from the thin cracks beneath the heavy double doors that signaled the end of the living world and the beginning of the dead land. Hylas would have said that it all felt like a butchered metaphor; to Nick it felt like nothing more than what it was: fucking creepy and oddly, delightfully fitting. Nothing about going to the morgue should feel cheerful, even good lighting felt wrong somehow.

  He stepped through the double doors and into the ugly checkered tile corridor. The lights there were hanging from the ceiling at intervals, bulbs covered with industrial grey powder-coated aluminum hoods that cast the light into cones on the floor. The closed doors along the way were hung with Christmas decorations, glittery cardboard cutouts that leered from their places of pride against the old wood. Someone had tied red bows dripping with jingle bells around each doorknob. It was all rather depressing.

  The double doors at the end of the corridor were also industrial grey, heavy with long rectangles of wired glass set into each. As though anyone would ever want to take a peek at what was going on in there. On the left door was a huge cutout of Santa Claus on his sleigh, reindeer cheerfully galloping through thin air. On the other was a huge snowman wearing a big smile filled with improbable teeth. It looked like Santa and his reindeer were only a few moments away from plowing down the snowman and he was happily awaiting his death.

  Nick was amazed at how morbid and forbidding even the simplest things could be if they were in the right location. He went through the double doors and laughed when he saw the little Christmas tree perched on the corner of the attendant’s desk.

  “Crash?” he called as he walked further into the morgue.

  There was a wall that extended partway across the floor, a sad attempt at separating the attendant’s area from the morgue proper. The bottom half was painted an unnatural shade of blue, the top half a hideous sea foam green. Nick thought, not for the first time, that whoever had decided to decorate the morgue needed to have their ass kicked for possessing such bad taste. He would never win any awards for being fashion forward or design savvy, but he did have the same basic skill most people had: he could look at two colors side-by-side and determine whether or not they worked well together. Whoever had painted this place had not been gifted with such talent, had perhaps been fully colorblind.

  On the other side of the wall came a thump and a thud. Nick wrinkled his nose as he imagined what must be going on there. Then he set the punch and food down to look around the wall anyway.

  Crash was wrestling with the corpse of an obviously obese individual in which rigor mortis had begun to set in. There was some flexibility to the limbs, but not much; they moved with all the limberness of hardening plastic inside the body bag. Nick’s stomach turned and he jumped when Crash nearly lost his grip on the body, practically dropping it back on the gurney it had arrived on. He was trying to get it into one of the upper drawers and it clearly was not an easy task.

  “Hi, Nick,” Crash said, looking over his shoulder to smile at him. “Give me a minute to get this fat fuck in his unit and then we can parley.”

  “Why are you putting him up there?” Nick asked.

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” Crash said. He paused, holding the fat man up by his shoulders. “We’re all full up here. If this keeps up then I’m going to have start piling them in two to a drawer. This night is proving to be rather fatal all around. Jeb here, he died of a blood clot to the old ticker, but the lady below him died of a spouse-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. New Year’s Eve is apparently better than a full moon when it comes to loads of dead bodies.”

  Crash went back to trying to maneuver the dead man, Jeb, up again. He wasn’t all that winded and Nick found that admirable, even more so that he could hold the body like that and still run his mouth like it was no big deal. The problem, it seemed, wasn’t the man’s weight, but the cumbersome task of getting his unwieldy, slowly stiffening bulk into a drawer so high up. It occurred to Nick that the upper drawers were probably usually reserved for lighter bodies; like those of children.

  “I thought full moons were only for crazy shit like murders and such,” Nick said.

  “Ah, well, I figure it can be a catch-all,” Crash said. “Or since this isn’t a full moon and is instead a pointless holiday then maybe there is an exception made. It’s like a pizza with the works. A death pizza.”

  “Death pizza.”

  “You are correct, sir,” Crash said. He stopped again and cursed under his breath. “So. Nick. How’s about you come help me get lard ass here up on his slab so we can get to the parley I mentioned?”

  “I… don’t know,” Nick said.

  “I implore you, Nick,” Crash said. “I am in dire need of assistance. I fear if I don’t get it then I might have to leave old Jeb here on his gurney and no one wants that. Particularly me, honestly, because I don’t want to get yelled at for negligence and whatnot.”

  Nick still hesitated, wetting his dry lips with his dry tongue. He rubbed his hands on his pants legs and took a halting step forward before stopping again.

  It wasn’t dead bodies themselves that freaked him out; it was that they were so goddamn cold. Even in the heat of summer, a dead body could be colder than ice. He remembered how cold his father had been when he’d hugged his still body goodbye before the sheet was pulled over his face.

  It had been June and the air conditioner was busted in the hospital, windows were flung open, bringing in the sounds of traffic and health and life from outside, but not a single lick of a breeze to dry the sweat. Nick had been sitting in a soup of it, the ass of his jeans shorts and back of his shirt actually wet like he’d taken a blast from a hose to his back, when his father finally let go and flew away from him. He used to imagine that his dad’s soul had flown right out the window when it left his body, that it had become part of the sticky summer air and the birdsong drifting through on th
e little wisp of wind that had finally deigned to tickle the back of Nick’s sweaty neck.

  “Mayhap I am going about this all wrong,” Crash said. He let Jeb go, laying him down on the gurney with surprising gentleness. He patted his chest through the black body bag holding him and tapped his bottom lip. “I should swap an occupant from the lower rack out and put Jeb in their place. That should be much, much easier and far less damaging to my back and patience.”

  “Good idea,” Nick said.

  “Mhmm,” Crash said. “I do have moments of unparalleled genius, albeit rather belated in this instance. And hey, you’re off the hook. I can pull the old switcheroo all on my own.”

  “That is a relief,” Nick said.

  “I don’t understand what your hang up is,” Crash said as he began opening drawers and inspecting their contents for an ideal swap-out. “They’re not zombies, they won’t bite, you know.”

  “I’d still rather not if I can help it,” Nick said.

  “A phobia?”

  “A strong preference for not touching dead bodies,” Nick said.

  “I suppose that’s good, in its own roundabout way. It means you are, in no way, shape or form, a body banger,” Crash said as he peeked into a drawer. “Ah, here we go.”

  “A what?”

  “A necrophile,” Crash said. “Necrophiliac. A member of the ‘dead girls don’t say no’ club. Or guys, for that matter.”

  “That’s disgusting,” Nick said.

  “It is, isn’t it?” Crash sounded delighted as he pulled out the drawer holding a much thinner corpse. He looked over at Nick and tipped his head for him to come closer. “Would you like to see something though?”

  “No, I would not,” Nick said.

  “I bet you would,” Crash said. “This one actually came in this morning after I went home for the day. It’s a real doozy.”