Deadshifted (16 page)

Rory came over to take the ice from me that I was doing such a shitty job of distributing. He looked down, shaking his head. “I don’t want to move another corpse.”

Calling this man’s friend a corpse in front of him seemed harsh. But then I hadn’t been through what Rory’d been through.

“I can’t go back there again,” Rory went on. It took me a second to realize where he meant—the morgue. Or wherever they were keeping all the bodies. And I realized what I had to do, just in case. If Asher wasn’t here, there was still one place worse he could be. I frowned and looked up. Nathaniel was still watching.

“I’ll go,” I volunteered.

Rory nodded with increasing speed, picked up the bags of ice, and took them away.

“Help me then?” The man unfurled the sheet his friend had been tied with, preparing to use it as a shroud.

“Sure.” I knelt and grabbed the corpse’s feet, and together we rolled the man over and onto the sheet, which made a hammock-like gurney for transport.

The man hefted his half up easily. Mine came up with a grunt. “Let’s go.”

*   *   *

We walked down the same hall Rory and I had with the body dangling between us, but past the kitchen doors. I was glad that he was the one walking backward down the hall into the unknown instead of me. The hall bent, and then we took a freight elevator down to the first floor.

I had no idea what I’d do if I found Asher’s body up ahead. None at all. There was a growing knot of fear inside my stomach even contemplating it. It seemed unlikely, but unlikely wasn’t the same as a zero percent chance. I heard a small puppy-sound and realized the man holding up the other end of the sheet was crying. I’d been too self-absorbed to notice. I bit my lip. What to say?

“I’m so sorry for your loss.” As generic as a sympathy card. Dammit.

He nodded and whimpered again. It was the part of the time with families when I’d normally hug whoever was crying—but I couldn’t here, I’d drop half of his friend. The elevator opened and he walked backward out of it, walking and crying, until he reached a lull in his tears.

“The worst part is that our act was finally doing so well. We were finally going places together, just like we’d always dreamed.”

Talking was better than crying. “What was it?” I asked him.

“We were the Two Chers on South Deck,” he said with a long sniffle. “Just another Steve and Eve show—you know, two drag queens, high heels and higher wigs, trying to make our way in the world.” He said it all very tongue-in-cheek before sighing. “We were the late-night entertainment two nights a week. Raunchy comedy and karaoke favorites. Stefano did a mean Cher. I did a nice one.” Interpreting my silence for the confusion that it was, he continued. “You know—he was very ‘Dark Lady,’ I was more ‘Believe in Life After Love.’ Except that he’s dead now, and after the shit I have seen today I don’t believe in fuck-all anymore.”

“I’m so sorry,” I repeated.

“Thanks. I’m Jorge.” He lifted and wagged the body we held. “This is Stefano. Was Stefano.”

“I’m Edie.” The stupid part of my brain latched on to the only Cher song I knew. “If I could turn back time—”

Jorge shot me a dark look. “Don’t even.”

I bit my tongue too late. “Sorry. Very, very sorry.”

He snorted, defused. “Stefano always liked bad puns.”

The farther down the hall we went, the more it smelled like flowers. Then we started passing them in the halls, piles upon piles of flowers, like a parade float had beached here to die, and I realized they must have repurposed the floral freezer for the morgue.

Jorge said. “You planned it like this, didn’t you?” It took me a second to realize he was talking to Stefano. “You knew I’d be too cheap to buy you all these flowers otherwise.”

Treading upon bruised petals, we walked through the freezer door.

It was less horrific than the restaurant in here by a factor of ten, but twenty times more sad. When I saw the bodies spread evenly on the floor, I felt a huge temptation to just drop his friend and run away. I’d been around carnage before, but I’d never seen so many bodies all at once—and I still had to see if any of them were Asher.

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?

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

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.

Undeterred, Raluca continued. “I’ve put out rations for anyone who wants them. You have to take care of yourself, so you can take care of your loved ones. Remember to wash your hands. That is all.”

She clicked off the megaphone and stepped down.

The volunteers who were mobile staggered up and queued to go outside, and I followed them. I needed to break free from here and look for Asher—or find Nathaniel and get him to tell me more. I scanned the room for him and didn’t see his sneer.

Outside, we walked past the food table en masse. Grilled cheeses all around. My stomach turned green. Without thinking, I sagged forward, bile rising, and Jorge caught me.

“Hey—hey.” He set me upright as I looked for something nearby that I could puke into. “You’re sure you’re not sick?”

I waved away his concern. “Not like that, no. The ocean. It gets me.”

“Raluca’s giving out Dramamine like candy. You should take some,” he advised.

“Thanks, but—” I began.

It was too late; he’d already started to wave for her. “Raluca, she needs Dramamine—”

There was nowhere to hide. What was the worst that could happen—she’d take me into the next room over and tie me to a table?

Raluca came over to give me the nursing once-over—I recognized it, nurse-to-nurse, in her eye. I tried to pretend that everything was okay, for the currently low values of okay we all shared, as she touched my forehead with the back of her hand. I thought I still felt like an icicle from my time in the morgue, and I could tell from her face relaxing that she did too.

“Where did these come from?” I gestured to the table.

“There’s still healthy people crewing the last kitchen, as best they can. We can’t let everyone starve.”

Which begged the most obvious question I hadn’t asked yet. “How many people are left on board?”

She inhaled to answer me, then paused, and I saw my opportunity.

“You don’t know, do you?” I asked. It was hard not to sound excited.

Raluca shook her head. “We haven’t gone room to room yet—”

“So there could be sick people up there.” I pointed above us, to indicate the rest of the rooms. “Too sick to call.”

“We’re overwhelmed as it is—”

“But what if the medical ships come, and they don’t take everyone? There could be hundreds of people, feverish in their beds, trapped.”

Her eyes narrowed, and she gave me another look, nurse-to-nurse. “Just how big do you think the medical ship will be?”