Kiara held up the eye of the needle to the light, trying to rethread clear string. The metal was bent in a crescent shape, perfect for stitching together thin, delicate flesh. She finally slipped the transparent line through the hole after several failed attempts. The mortician tied a small knot in the end which prevented the thread from escaping again from the needle. Fluellen huffed quietly.

The corpse belonged to a man who had committed suicide. A vibrant red and purple collar of bruising encircled his neck; the skin was broken and the noose had left behind an angry lace of rope burn. Smothering had caused the blood vessels in his face to rupture, leaving a watercolor of purple and grey pools of blood beneath his skin. His eyes bulged slightly from their sockets--wide with fear and death. Kiara frowned and poked out her lower lip gently in a pout. “[color=#F0F8FF]This is the third suicide this week…[/color]” She spoke aloud to no one in particular. 

The mortician carefully held down the lid of his eye. She hooked the curve of the needle through the delicate skin, using an inverted stitch to hide the clear thread beneath the flesh of his eyelid. She continued working, sewing shut the other eye. “[color=#F0F8FF]There,[/color]” Kiara said, a hint of relief in her voice. Even after nearly a year of work as an undertaker, she still found the milky, vacuous gaze of the dead deeply unnerving. 

She was paid well for her work, and even more to keep quiet about it. The cadavers that came from Blackthorne Medical and Munitions were often atypical. They had evidence of strange and sadistic experimentation--bruises from restraints, cranial staples left behind from lobotomies, ports embedded in the chest for injections straight to the heart. Other experienced quarantine specialists would handle the cremation of more confidential specimens, but the hot smell filled the furnace yard, and the towers from the crematorium belched black smoke into the cloudy sky.

She frowned. Had that corpse drawer been open before? [color=#F0F8FF][i]Probably.[/i][/color] Nobody worked at a morgue who spooked too easy at things like that. The atmosphere and the work did strange things to the mind on long shifts, and you learned a simple truth - despite every horror movie and skin-crawling instinct, the bodies were just bodies. They didn’t get up again. She reached out to push the drawer shut, but it was stuck on something, and after a moment she gave up with a sigh.  [color=#F0F8FF][i]I’ll just finish up here and leave a note upstairs.[/i][/color] 

This corpse was different than Kiara Fluellen had witnessed before. Her co-workers were currently predisposed, and she had been left alone in the mortuary to handle the few bodies deemed appropriate for embalming. His time of death had been recorded as less than twenty-four hours ago, but already the body showed immense signs of decay: blackened, necrotic flesh had gnawed away across most of his torso; lesions on his back were rotten down to the bone, leaving yellow vertebrae peeking through the rancid meat of his back; sepsis had taken over most of his body, making his blood thick and black with rot. 

“[color=#F0F8FF]This is… Horrible. [i]What could have happened to him?[/i][/color]” She traced her gloved finger over the Y-shaped autopsy incision. After glancing around to make sure the mortuary was empty, she reached for a scalpel and began to re-open the corpse. “[color=#F0F8FF]I-I’m not doing anything wrong,[/color]” Kiara reassured herself, “[color=#F0F8FF]It’s important t-to preserve the organs.[/color]” Cutting into his cadaver released a horrifying smell--it was sickly and sweet, like bananas that had been fermented in a septic tank. “[color=#F0F8FF]Oh, [i]God![/i]”[/color] She exclaimed, recoiling from the stench. 

After recomposing herself, she began to remove and empty the large intestine into a bucket. The long, overlapping undulations of the colon and blackened blood had hidden strange, fleshy, anatomical abnormalities. “[color=#F0F8FF]Wh-what… What is this? These [i]can’t[/i] be human![/color]” She pulled one out to examine it, carefully bisecting the unfamiliar organ. Inside was a substance that looked similar to a sticky, toxic molasses. The material bubbled and steamed upon exposure to the air. Fluellen gasped in shock, dropping the fleshy bag back into the abdominal cavity. The brown liquid slowly spilled into the body, dissolving the endoderm of his organs away like muriatic acid.  “[color=#F0F8FF][i]Oh God…[/i][/color]”

[color=BC8F8F]”You want to be careful there. Some of these kids can be a little feisty afterhours.”[/color]

Kiara actually leaped at the voice, crashing hard against the wall of drawers behind her, as the corpse bubbled and steamed on the table. There was no one there.

But she’d heard the voice, clear and cruel, a little amused - [color=#F0F8FF][i]not human[/i][/color] - and her heart was already triphammering so loud she could barely hear what was happening to the corpse on the table, the way it was boiling and melting, an unthinkable sludge flowing over the sides of the trolley. Even in silence she wouldn’t have noticed. All her attention was on where the voice had seemed to come from. The stuck drawer.

A minute passed.

Her back ached where she’d hit the drawers. There would be bruising.

[color=#F0F8FF][i]You’re losing it,[/i][/color] Heart still pounding, her breath an undignified series of gasps, she pulled herself to her feet - the drawer she was using for balance jumped open with a clatter - she screamed, propelling herself into the middle of the room, every muscle and nerve screaming with her.

An empty drawer, which is why it had been unlocked to slip in the first place. She shook her head violently, almost reaching up to rearrange her hair before remembering at the last second the state of her hands. She spent another minute doing deep breaths, watching the empty drawer, letting herself calm. There were jokes about this, the late night crack. She hadn’t ever thought she’d be one of [i]those,[/i] but...the weird bodies, the awful secrets she carried around...well, maybe it was no surprise.
Kiara turned back just in time to see eight impossibly long things slip out of the stuck drawer to grip their surroundings. Fingers. Spider legs. The scream was back, strangled in her throat

[i]the image of her fear like a noose around her neck, like the dead man, she would be dead soon[/i]

and this time her twitching muscles gave up rather than catapult her into a worse situation. Kiara slid slowly to the floor as the finger-things flexed and pushed and the drawer slid slowly open. What crawled out was...her eyes wouldn’t see. Everything swam and she had only impressions of impossible size and dexterity, something that could never have fit in the same space as a human body. Something that bent in ways and with [i]noises[/i] it scraped away at her sanity to hear, until it had pulled itself all the way free and loomed over her, hunched over despite the high ceiling. Smiling.

That smile was like a crack into Hell. Something seemed to move in it - or was that her blurring vision, growing dark around the edges? The monster was holding something as it moved towards her. Stepped, shuffled, skittered. There was a high-pitched gibbering noise in her ears that she realized suddenly was coming from her throat.

[color=BC8F8F]”Oh, don’t you worry, kid. [i]I[/i] don’t rile. Not here. Not for you. But, you know, I am here. And I am here for you.”[/color]

Something was wrong with the corpses in the background, the one that was half a flow of sludge and the mangled red thing - [i]don’t look can’t look[/i] - that had been sharing its space with Smile. There was motion. Kiara would have thrown up, but she could barely keep her throat open enough to breathe. Smile was bending down further, its expression ruining her thoughts like a boisterous child running through spiderwebs. The fingers of one hand splayed hideously across the floor, then began to creep towards her. The other hand and its dripping burden levitated slowly towards her.

[color=BC8F8F]”It’s okay, kid. You’re not gonna die. Or, well...mm, you’re the professional. I’ll let you be the judge.”[/color] It giggled and the strength went out of her, muscles trying to gather themselves to flee, to do [i]anything[/i], simply collapsing at the sound. [color=BC8F8F]”Normally I’d tell you a little about how special you are and leave you alone, but - things are changing, kid. Exciting times. So you’re even more special, because you’re going to help me with something. Or save yourself, if you prefer.”[/color]

Its fingers kept creeping. Its hand floated forward. The dark at the edges of her vision was spreading, swarming. The corpses were…

[color=BC8F8F]”[i]New Steel Memorial Hospital[/i]. There’s a patient there, but not for long. They’re gonna find her, kid, and then they’re gonna find [i]you[/i] and when that happens...well, you might not want to let it. I think you know how that ends.”[/color]

The red thing in the drawer. The bodies from Blackthorne. Smile grinned.

[color=BC8F8F]“You’ll have just enough time, after the adjustment. I’m making sure of that, kid. Don’t say I never did nothing for ya. You’ll still have to do a little legwork, of course, but you’re up to it, or you [i]will[/i] be.”[/color]

Her eyes shifted slowly, unwilling, across the mind-murdering expanse of the thing’s body, towards the hand that was too, too close. Towards what it carried.

She couldn’t tell if the face had been male or female. It was coated in blood and worse, denying her even ethnicity. It was dripping and hanging loose from Smile’s fingers.

[color=BC8F8F]”You knew it’d come to this sooner or later, didn’t you? It’s time, kid. It’s time to [i]face[/i] your fears."[/color]

The hanging tatters twisted in Smile’s grip, and stretched for her, and its hand rushed forward and slammed the gruesome mask over her own face - it was [i]digging[/i] - she was screaming and she heard a door upstairs, her colleagues finally come to investigate. Smile rose to its full height. The corpses behind it - what was left of the one - were flopping onto the floor, towards the exit.

[color=BC8F8F]”We’ll clear the way for you, kid. You just make sure to clean up down here, okay? It’s what you’re good at.”[/color]

Its voice was impossibly far away. Everything was far away, she was hanging to the world by a thread - and then she slipped free, and the darkness took her at last. Recognizing her now, perhaps, as one of its own.

[i]In collaboration with [@Viatos][/i]