Cassie Alexander - Deadshifted

I concentrated on helping Jorge at the moment; I didn’t want to drop my end of Stefano. Jorge looked over his shoulder and shuffled backward to Tetris in Stefano’s body at the end of the fourth row. When he was done, he folded the end of the sheet over Stefano’s feet.

I did some quick math. There were ten rows of ten bodies here, minus an incomplete row here or there, but at least ninety corpses. Some were clearly women and children, but others were men in suits. I shivered and tried to tell myself I was just cold.

Jorge straightened out Stefano’s limbs and stood quietly, looking down at his friend. Maybe lover. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know. “Did you want to say something?” I asked him. “Or I could, if you wanted.” It wouldn’t be the first time a family member had pressed me into oration.

Jorge shook his head. “This might be the first time I’ve ever been speechless. Stefano would like that. He always said I talked too much.” He knelt down and touched his friend’s forehead. I waited quietly for my turn. I didn’t want Jorge to see me rifling through the other bodies. After a moment more, he stood, resolved, and covered Stefano’s head with the other end of the sheet. Then he headed for the door and held it open for me.

I gave him a sad smile. “Sorry. I’m still looking for my friend.”

“Oh.” He gave me a compassionate look. “If you don’t mind, I’ll wait outside.”

“Sure.” Then the door swung shut, and ninety or so bodies and I were alone.

The freezers overhead were running at full blast, dialed down from chilling orchids to frozen dinners. Standing and looking at the contents of the room, I realized Raluca would have to use another freezer soon, or we’d have to start stacking bodies two-deep.

I didn’t know what person had started covering the corpses with the corners of their sheets; I’m sure they thought at the time it was kind, so that people coming in with new ones wouldn’t have to stare at so many dead sets of eyes. But now it meant I had to go around to every man wearing a blue suit, just in case.

I made my way to the first one in the farthest back corner, determined to make a scientific effort of it and go row by row. I had to pick out visible floor to step on in between the bodies, bouncing from patch of cement to patch of cement like a CrossFitter doing a monster-truck-tire-run. Eventually I found myself at the first contender and stood awkwardly on either side of his head. The older bodies had a layer of frost on them, like frozen dinners left in the freezer too long, and the sheet was stuck to the corpse’s face. Holding my breath, I yanked on it until I pried enough off to know that it wasn’t Asher. Just some other poor person. For all I knew, it was Rory’s dad.

The corpse’s chin waggled. “How’s it going, Edie?”

I gasped and fell backward onto my ass on the corpse’s cold chest, my hand unfortunately planting into the man’s crotch.

“Down here. And get your hand off my cock.”

“What the fuck—” I teetered to standing, wiping frozen-body-Popsicle off my hand.

I only knew of one entity that would think of joking at me from inside a corpse. I punched the body in the chest. “That’s not funny, Shadows.”

The voices coming from the mouth of the dead man laughed.

The Shadows were awful creatures located underneath my old hospital back home, where they lived off the pain and sorrow dripping down from above. I hadn’t seen them since July, when Asher’d been saved. After that, they’d offered me my old job back, and I’d refused them.

“What the fuck is going on here? Where’s Asher?”

“Shhhhh,” they warned me, from the darkness inside a dead man’s mouth. “Keep your voice down.”

I don’t know why I listened to them, but I did. “Where. Is. Asher?” I asked, my voice low.

“We don’t know. He’s not hiding in here with us.”

In with the dead bodies, in the dark. Where there’d be a continual stream of sad people to feed on. Of course.

“Then what good are you—” I said, standing.

“Don’t you want to know why you’re on board?”

I slowly sank back down, still straddling the corpse.

“That’s more like it. Listen close—we don’t have much power here, unless you’d like to cry for us.”

“I’m listening.”

“We sent you here.”

“What?” I’d never been so tempted to strangle a dead man.

“We’d heard rumors, so we decided to send you in. You’ve got a nose for trouble and a knack for staying alive—not to mention a shapeshifter bodyguard.”

“But Asher picked out this cruise—”

“Oh, it was nothing to convince him,” they said, interrupting my protest. “So easy for us to plant a few ideas inside his overstuffed head. Plus, this mess is partially his fault—it was the least he could do to help us clean it up. He owed us, and the Consortium.”

“So why aren’t you out there fixing things?”

“We’re not omnipotent, and we have to stay in the dark. Plus”—the voice receded, as if it was speaking from deeper inside the dead man’s throat—“we’re in hiding.”

“From?”

“You’ll see.”

I pounded another fist against the man’s frozen chest, and hoped to hell no one else would come in the morgue just then to see me. “Is there anything useful you can tell me?”

“Yes. Try to stay alive. You’ll see. Oh, Edie, you’ll wish you’d come back to us by the end of this. Working for us will seem like a distant dream—” they said, and then their voices abruptly stopped.

“Dammit, Shadows!” I yelled. All I got in return was silence.

“You’re all insane.” I stood and nudged the corpse with my foot. It felt just like kicking a cement block would.

There was a knock at the freezer door, and this time I managed to whirl around without falling. Jorge was at the door, a bouquet of flowers from outside in his hands. “Everything okay?” he asked. I nodded, and he came in to set the flowers down on Stefano. “Don’t get me wrong, but you sounded a little crazy there. Talking to yourself in other voices. It’s not like I haven’t done the same thing, but usually when I do I’m getting paid.”

“I’m fine.” I hugged myself and realized how cold I was getting. All this excitement probably wasn’t good for the baby, either.

“Was he here?” Jorge asked.

I looked down. I hadn’t made it past this first man in a suit, because of the Shadows. I surveyed the rest of the room. I wanted to believe what they’d told me—not that things would end badly, but that Asher wasn’t here. If Asher was in here dead, wouldn’t they show me his body so I would grieve and they could feed? I had to believe they would have.

“No. He’s not,” I answered Jorge with a head shake.

But if Asher wasn’t in the restaurant-sickroom or in the floral-storage-morgue, where else could he be?

What had Nathaniel done to him?

And—as I knelt to replace the sheet over the man the Shadows had violated—what was there in the world that the Shadows could possibly be scared of?

My head was swimming with too many questions and not enough answers as we walked back to the restaurant. I asked the simplest one of Jorge. “How did you know it was a he?”

Jorge shrugged. “Trouble is almost always a man.”

We entered the sick floor just as Raluca was mounting a chair with a megaphone for an announcement.

“Remaining volunteers—I have good news. The doctor has just informed me that the medical ship is on its way.”

Maybe twelve hours ago that would have been good news. But right now all the enthusiasm those standing could muster was a sarcastic “Hooray” from Jorge. I heard Rory’s matching snort from across the room.