I closed my eyes and focused. My limbs grew heavy and ungainly as I pulled away. The jasmine scent of spring retreated, replaced by hollow nothingness.
Somewhere behind me, a body convulsed, thrashing about on the grass as a thousand synapses misfired. Then the world lurched, and it was gone.
The first thing I noticed was the smell — a harsh ammonia reek that burned my sinuses and caught in the back of my throat, making me gag. My stomach clenched and I doubled over, or tried to. My head clanged against something just a couple feet above, a muffled thud. I pressed against the liquid darkness. Cold vinyl pressed back, slick and unpleasant. Clumsy fingers fumbled in the darkness as I followed the line of the zipper. It ended just overhead. I forced a finger through, metal teeth digging flesh, and then pushed the zipper open.
I kicked free of the body bag. The chill of the morgue drawer stung my naked skin. My heart raced — the useless panic response of a fledgling meat-suit. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, and the flutter slowed.
Hands against the back wall, I pushed, and the morgue drawer slid open. The room beyond was dimly lit, but after the absolute black of the drawer, I squinted still. I stumbled to a large utility sink, clumsy as a newborn foal. Bile rose in my throat, and I retched. It happens every time. A reflex, I suppose — just the body's way of trying to get rid of me. I try not to take it personally.
The water ran cool from the tap. I drank from cupped hands. Whiskey and pills and sick swirled toward the drain. The water calmed my stomach, and the act of drinking was an anchor, fixing me in place. The body no longer fought my movements, no longer coursed with fear. I stretched my limbs, testing each in turn. Not a bad fit, really. Possession can be a tricky thing, particularly with the dead. You've got to find one in decent working order, for one — if you don't get to them quick enough, they tend to run a little rough. And they've all got their quirks. The guy I left in Oxford, for example: bum hip, lousy stomach, and apparently scared shitless of bugs. You get something that ingrained, there's no stopping it, and considering he'd been on his floor a couple days before I found him, I was lucky he didn't have a fucking heart attack. I had to shower for an hour before his skin stopped crawling. Still, it beats taking the living — no thoughts, no memories, no baggage. Their constant yammering is enough to make you want to take a header off a bridge and bail on the way down.
I glanced at my wrist, a useless gesture. The watch I was looking for was a continent away, adorning the arm of a corpse. I looked around. The clock on the wall read 5am. If I were a betting man, I'd have said this place'd be deserted for least another hour. Of course, I'm not a betting man — in my line of work, I've seen my share of wagers, and believe me, the house always wins. Still, it couldn't hurt to poke around a bit.
I peered through the gloom at the bank of morgue drawers behind me. They gleamed faintly in the pale glow of the exit signs. Numbers, no names. I padded naked toward the door at the far end of the room. Beside the door hung a clipboard — a list of names, arranged by drawer. Three of them MacNeil.
I crossed the room and slid one out. As I unzipped the bag, the copper tang of blood prickled in my sinuses, and I went a little woozy. Great — New Guy had a thing about blood. That was gonna be a treat.
He was a boy of maybe twelve, with straw-colored hair and a smattering of freckles across his face. His feet were bare, his pajamas in tatters, and there was so much fucking blood, it was impossible to tell what color they were. His hands were nicked and scraped, his face mostly spared — it was clear he'd tried to protest, to protect himself. His chest was a tattered mess — bone protruding, soft tissue visible beneath. I zipped him up and slid him back.
The father was a mess as well. Well over six feet and not a slight man at that, he looked as though he'd been tossed about like a rag doll. He had at least a dozen fractures that I could see, arms kinked at improbable angles, legs a twisted wreck. His chest, too, was riddled with holes — knife wounds, like the boy — some flecked with chips of bone from the force of entry.
The mother, though — she was something else entirely. With her chestnut hair and her elegant features, she was beautiful once, no doubt, but now her body was a maze of tiny cuts — thousands of them, each no longer than an inch, marking her skin like some unholy etching. And there was something else, too. A familiar scent, mingled with the metallic bite of blood.
Alcohol.
Jesus — these cuts, they weren't intended to kill. They were meant to hurt like hell. To make this woman scream. I wondered how long it took before the neighbors took notice and called the cops. From the look of Kate's mom here, it could have been hours. And Kate just kept on cutting, waiting patiently for her audience to arrive before she slit her mother's throat.
I was suddenly glad Kate MacNeil would be cuffed and unconscious when I came to collect her. She wasn't to be trifled with, it seemed, and borrowed body or not, the pain's the same.
I slid the drawer closed, eyeing the gooseflesh on my arms as I did. It was cold in here, I realized, noting the tension in my muscles, the ache in my joints. I left the autopsy suite, snatching a lab coat from a line of hooks in the anteroom beyond. Pressing through a set of swinging double doors, I found myself in a hallway ablaze in fluorescent light. The hall was empty, its walls scarred with the scuff-marks of countless carelessly piloted stretchers, and I crept quietly down it, mindful of the doors on either side.
At the end of the hall was a locker room. A set of utility shelves stood along one wall, stacked high with clean scrubs, all neatly folded and arranged according to size. I took a set and slid them on, admiring myself in the mirror. I was a little pale, a little thin, but already my face showed signs of color, and for a dead guy, I cut a dashing figure in the powder blue scrubs. You could hardly even call it theft — in a couple hours I'd leave this body behind, and both it and the clothes I'd pilfered would wind up right back here.
I put the lab coat back on and headed for the door. An elderly woman pushed a mop bucket past me in the hall, but she paid me no mind. Between the lab coat and the few days' stubble that graced my cheeks, I looked like I'd just pulled a double shift.
I pushed through a set of glass doors and stepped out into the pre-dawn half-light. It was cold — bitterly so — as though the first kiss of spring I'd felt in Oxford was still some weeks away from warming the dead gray of New York's steel and concrete. From where I stood, First Avenue was pretty quiet — just the odd commuter among a dozen or so delivery trucks rumbling northward from the East Village. Bellevue lay a few blocks to the south. I pulled my lab coat tight around me and set off walking, my bare feet aching as the chill of the sidewalk leeched upward through my soles.
3
It'd been sixty-five years since I last laid eyes on Bellevue. Sixty-five years, four months, and seventeen days. Since then, it had changed plenty, with its modern glass atrium jutting skyward and glinting in the morning sun, I almost didn't recognize it. But the cold, impassive stone face I remembered all too well stared outward from behind the glass, and my own new face twisted into a smile of grim remembrance. Try though we might, we never can quite deny who we once were.
The hospital itself was a massive structure, occupying twenty-five floors and two city blocks. In the nearly three centuries of its existence, its halls had spread and shifted and wound among themselves like vines on a trellis. The result was a tangled labyrinth of wrong turns and dead-end corridors, peppered with the occasional brightly colored map in what I can only assume was a fit of architectural sarcasm.