Authors: Nic Widhalm
Looking down at Mrs. Munse, Hunter sighed and gently pried open her jaw. He tried not to think about the throbbing worm wrapped around his head. He tried not to notice the flickers of darkness playing at the edge of his vision.
Not darkness. You’re just tired.
Hunter blinked, shook his head violently, and squinted at the wire he was threading through Mrs. Munse’s jaw.
Easy with the gums, they’re starting to recede
. His hand spasmed as he pushed the thin wire across the bridge of the corpse’s mouth, shaking so violently that Hunter was forced to give up. Examining his botched work, he saw a small trickle of blood creep down Mrs. Munse’s teeth.
She’s been dead for over a day.
“No,” Hunter muttered, stepping back.
Not again.
Lately, at night when he closed his eyes, Hunter had been seeing things. Things that he couldn’t talk about, even to himself. Things that bled. Things that rang and clashed like steel on steel, things that roared with the voices of a thousand men. Things that flickered at the edge of Hunter’s memory when he awoke, only to fade in the daylight like morning mist. Things he was only supposed to see at night when he dreamed, not now, awake, staring at the corpse of Mrs. Munse.
Get through it
, he thought.
You’ve dealt with worse.
Unbidden, he remembered the dreams of burn victims with flesh like melted wax, bodies crushed til the bones were powder.
Hunter closed his eyes, and when he opened them the blood was gone. Taking a long, deep breath, Hunter went back to stretching Mrs. Munse’s smile. The trick was to avoid breaking the jaw. If the jaw broke Hunter would have to double the wire, and he would never hear the end from Makovich. Letting his eyes close—
just a second, just a second of space—
he could hear him now:
“Dammit Friskin, how many fucking times do I need to say this? Keep the inventory
tight!
”
Hunter would apologize and go on as usual. He needed the job.
“You lazy bastard, get back to work.” Makovich would say. “You think I’m paying you to day-dream? You think I give a shit if your head is splitting and you’re seeing blood coming out of corpses?”
No
, Hunter thought.
That’s not right.
“I swear on the cross, I will throw your lazy ass out if I hear one more sob story about your
dreams
.”
Stop
.
“I’m not doing shit. I’m the boss here. You stupid, slack-eyed, piece of—”
Hunter opened his eyes. Mrs. Munse’s artificial smile had widened; a sickly grin covering half her face.
There was no wire.
“What the fuck you looking at, pal?”
Hunter pushed his chair back, knocking over partially filled bottles of embalming fluid and filling the air with the medicinal stench of the preserved. He stared in shock at the corpse of Mrs. Munse as she sat up and threw aside her sheet. Her smile had grown, the teeth protruding in a sticky, red grin as blood leaked down both sides of her lips and spilled to the ground.
“I said ‘What the fuck you looking at’? Jesus, get back to work, Friskin. You lazy son of a whore. Get back to
work
!”
Hunter blinked. She walked closer. He thought,
there’s no place like home
. It didn’t help. Pinching his arm, telling himself it was only a nightmare, none of it changed the fact that Hunter’s dreams had leapt from the night into the day.
Then, before she could get any closer, Hunter reached over and grabbed the nearest thing he could find. Without looking he threw it at the corpse…and watched in surprise as a bright slash of red lipstick appeared on Mrs. Munse’s naked torso.
She looked down. “Seriously Friskin. This is hooker lipstick.”
Hunter jumped forward and grabbed Munse around the neck. He could feel his feet slipping in the embalming fluid, but only tightened his grip as he tried to drag the corpse to the floor. As his fingers clenched around the clammy throat Hunter could swear her grin grew wider.
Her grin.
She’s talking, but her mouth’s still
.
Hunter let go in surprise, and stopped to listen.
“Friskin, goddammit, do you think this is going to help you get…” The words faded away. Munse stepped back and took a surgical knife off the tray next to the steel table. Turning back, her grin flashing like crimson lightning, the corpse advanced toward Hunter.
He retreated, felt his feet slip in the embalming fluid again, and this time he crashed to the floor. The words streaming from the corpse were whispers in his ears now. They seemed to be coming and
not
coming from Munse at the same time. Not English. Something different.
Even as the corpse neared him, knife in hand, Hunter strained to make sense of the whispered words. German? Not guttural enough. French? Too crisp.
Probably Latin
.
Just my luck, it would be a dead language
.
Munse leaned down, bringing the scalpel to his thigh, and before Hunter lost consciousness he finally deciphered one of the words. The language was nonsense, some hodgepodge collection of foreign linguistics and nonsense syllables—it sounded familiar, but Hunter still couldn’t place it.
“Legion,” Mrs. Munse said, and Hunter fell into the void.
CHAPTER TWO
The first thing Hunter noticed when he awoke was the wrist restraint. The second, a pungent scent of ammonia and bleach, and a low hum that had to be machinery. Taking a deep breath and bracing himself for what he might see when he opened his eyes, Hunter raised his lids.
On his left, just barely in his peripheral vision, was a collection of wire and plastic, and a small screen. Dim LED lights displayed a blood pressure of one-forty over ninety. He didn’t know if that was good or a bad.
Below, he made out a white, vinyl floor, scuffed and worn with years of passage. In the corners of the room were small mountains of dust. His gaze swept up, finding a small window with streaked panes, an ancient TV showing “Gunsmoke,” in faded colors, and a torn green curtain sectioning off the room.
A hospital. And right after Makovich canceled my insurance.
Moving back down, Hunter saw a traditional hospital bed, and a not-so-traditional pair of heavy-duty Velcro straps locking his arms to the surrounding rails. He pulled half-heartedly at the cuffs, not surprised when they wouldn’t budge. Lying next to him, barely out of reach, was a pad with a worn, blue button marked, “Nurse.”
As his vision cleared, a few things came into focus. Like the long gash winding down his leg, and another criss-crossing his wrist. Trying to remember the events that put him here, Hunter came up blank. There had been a client…some detail he was obsessing over…a vision, and...
Nothing
.
That was as telling as anything else. Some kind of trauma, or—
God help me—
brain damage. Hell, maybe something worse. Those visions…
“Mr. Friskin. You’ve finally decided to join us.” The curtain swept aside and a small man with thinning gray hair stepped into the room. Hunter had enough time to see the other bed was unoccupied before the man closed the curtain.
“I’m Dr. Maison.” The man extended a hand in greeting, then awkwardly withdrew it when he realized Hunter couldn’t return the gesture.
“Sorry about the…um…” Maison gestured to the cuffs. “Standard procedure in these cases.”
“’These cases?’” Hunter croaked, his voice raw.
Dr. Maison ignored the question. “Well, overall the signs look good. Your lacerations are clean and free from infection, and healing remarkably fast; I imagine we have the cold air to thank for keeping them sanitary for so long. You’re on a low-grade antibiotic to clear out any unwanted visitors, though. Better safe than sorry. As for the loss of consciousness, we have you scheduled for a CAT scan at ten tomorrow morning. If there are underlying physical causes that prompted the…um…episode, we’ll find them.”
“These cases?” Hunter repeated.
“These cases…” Maison looked down at his chart, ignoring Hunter’s stare as he thumbed through the pages. He was saved by a nasally voice.
“Hunteeer.” The curtain pulled back and a tall, plump woman entered. “
Finally
. We’ve been waiting all afternoon for you to wake up.”
Hunter closed his eyes, then reopened them. “Doctor, this is my wife,” He tried to gesture at the tornado of sound sweeping through the room, but was restrained by his cuffs. He shrugged helplessly and motioned with his head, “Adrianna.”
“I’ll come back in a little while, after you’ve had time to rest,” Dr. Maison smiled politely and exited the room. Adrianna hurried over and started plumping Hunter’s pillow.
“Ade, stop it. I’m fine.”
“Oh.” Adrianna stopped fussing and came to stand in front of him, fidgeting restlessly.
She towered over the bed, looking down on her husband from a height of almost seven feet. Her self-consciousness made her slouch dramatically, but even so, when Hunter stood next to her she loomed over him. Coupled with an overbite and squashed nose, hers was a face only a mother could love.
Just not Hunter’s mother.
“She’s never going to be good enough for you,” his mom had said. “A woman like that is in it for one thing, and I won’t say it. But if you don’t know, blame your father.” Hunter
did
know—even if Mrs. Friskin couldn’t bring herself to vocalize “screwing”—but despite what his mother thought, that wasn’t why Adrianna had married him.
Hunter might have been attractive, but despite his looks he’d never been in a relationship. Every woman he met wanted a first date, maybe a quick romp, but that was it. Adrianna was the one exception. She’d stayed, despite Hunter’s natural effect on people, and seemed to genuinely enjoy showing him off to her friends.
Not that Adrianna had many friends—especially friends who could stand Hunter—but she still took enjoyment in dressing him up and taking him out. And for Hunter’s part he didn’t mind her broad nose or flat forehead, and her height hadn’t been a problem since it was close enough to Hunter’s own. All he really cared was that she stuck around. That she made him feel like a member of the human species for a few minutes each week when they talked about work and pretended they were a normal couple.
And if they hadn’t slept together in over a year, and if every now and then Adrianna needed the comfort of a man who didn’t make her feel like bugs were crawling under her skin, well, Hunter couldn’t fault her. It might not be love, but he’d take it.
“Good,” Adrianna said after a minute of awkward silence. “I’m glad you’re feeling better, because I’m going to
freaking kill you
!” She reached over and aimed a smack at his head. Hunter, unable to stop her, had to settle for pulling aside and suffering a glancing blow.
“Jesus, Ade—”
“Don’t ‘Jesus’ me, you son-of-a-bitch! Do you have any idea what I’ve been through? What in God’s name did you think you were doing down there?”
“Ade,” Hunter snapped. “Just tell me what the hell you’re talking about. I woke up five minutes ago, I’m cuffed to the bed, and my leg looks like it’s been carved for Thanksgiving dinner. What happened?”
Adrianna ran a hand through her limp hair. “Why don’t you tell me, psycho? I tried calling you this morning to see if you’d left the chicken out to thaw, and you never answered your phone. I got worried, cause you know I don’t like going to the grocery store after work, so I called Mr. Makovich.”
Hunter groaned. “You didn’t.”
“Why shouldn’t I? Nice man like Mr. Makovich, you never talk to him. Why shouldn’t I call him and find out where you are? Probably down at the strip club with some tramp.”
“Ade, please get to the point.”
“So I call him, and he says you’re downstairs working on some stiff, and your deadline’s probably shot.” Adrianna looked at Hunter like she might smack him again, then sniffed and walked over to a chair in the corner. Pulling it close, she plopped down next to the bed and started picking at her nails.
“So I ask him about the chicken. You know, in case you said something.”
Oh my god. You think I talk to my boss about thawing chicken
? Hunter’s pulse quickened. He looked at the monitor next to his bed and wasn’t surprised to see it soar.
“Ade,” he said quietly. “Please. Get. To. The. Damn. Point.”
Adrianna stopped fiddling with her nails and glared at him. “You should be thanking your lucky stars you have a boss like Mr. Makovich. Do you know, he hadn’t heard from you for hours? He started getting worried after I called, so he went down to the basement and found you passed out in your own blood!”
That asshole was just worried about postponing the Munse funeral,
Hunter thought. But aloud he said, “Really?”
“Really. Your leg was all cut up and there was blood everywhere.” She wrinkled her nose. “Disgusting.”
Hunter looked at the clock hanging opposite his bed. It was six in the evening. His last memory was talking to Makovich about his insurance—twelve hours ago.