MaryJanice Davidson- Undead 10, Undead and Undermined
Prologue
When the awful racket started up, when the coroner got ready to open my skull with what I later found out was a Stryker autopsy saw, I was fine with it.
No, more than that . . . it seemed like a really, really good idea. Not just a good idea for me. It would be great for everyone involved. And if you took the long view, it would be good for humanity. Because I’d had enough. Case closed, everybody out of the pool, time to shut off the lights and lock up, hit the trail, shake a leg, beat feet, get gone, get out.
I was out.
How sucky was it that I knew, knew the one thing worse than waking up on an embalming table was waking up inside a body bag? I did not ever want to know that. No one should know that.
Oh, and while we’re compiling a list of things no one should know? No one should know that they grow up—grow old, anyway—to torture their friends. That they either brought about (or didn’t bother to prevent) a scary-ass nuclear winter apocalyptic event resulting in the very real possibility of freezing to death on the Fourth of July.
No one should know that, on the off chance they turn into an ancient evil vampire crone, they forget all sense of fun and, worse, fashion. Gray dresses! What the fuck?
So even though the buzzing whine of the saw felt like the coroner was already slicing me open, I laid still and did my impersonation of a corpse.
Hey, everybody’s good at something.
Graham Benton lit a cigarette with trembling fingers. He did not smoke but had been able to score a butt and a lighter from a member of the I’m-Cutting-Back-I-Swear tribe. Graham did not smoke, had never smoked, but was determined to start immediately.
The door to the doctor’s lounge wheezed open and Graham observed his attending, the extraordinarily hairy Dr. Carter (and didn’t the two of them get shit, Dr. Benson and Dr. Carter? Like he needed another reason to hate NBC), practically tiptoe into the close, windowless, burnt-coffee-and-disinfectant-smelling room.
Carter’s beard had recently been trimmed, so the ends merely brushed his throat instead of his nipples. His dark, curly chest hair was trying to burst through his scrubs shirt. He had begged permission to jettison the de rigueur lab coat and, after he’d proven to the other chief residents that his mat of body hair kept him adequately warm, they relented. Hairy Carter was perturbing enough; Sweaty Red-faced Hairy Carter was an abomination unto the Lord.
“Sooooo.” Carter coughed. It sounded like a truck laboring uphill in the wrong gear. “Bad night, Dr. Benson?”
“It’s the wee hours of the morning, Carey.” This was a breach of etiquette; interns and residents did not call department heads by their first names without invitation. And Graham would never, ever ask. Nor would he ever think twice about breaking any etiquette guideline. His intelligence, drive, and skill were why he got away with it.
“ ‘Bad night’ isn’t just dumb, Carey. And it isn’t just inaccurate. It’s dumb. And, yeah. I said that already.” He sucked on the sullenly smoldering cigarette and thought, Millions of people smoke these things? Several times a day? For years? Voluntarily? I was right all along: 99.5% of the human race is comprised by idiots, and the other 0.5% by morons.
“Listen, we’re all with you. Except for your new weird habit. I’m worried about you.” Benson shook his head at the almost-extinguished cigarette. “And there’s not a person in this department who doesn’t sympathize.”
He fingered his collar. The scrubs were soft from many washings. “Lie.”
“There’s at least one person in this department who sympathizes, probably.”
“Gee whiz. I feel so much better. The steaming, fretful masses view me with pity. Or at least one does. Probably.”
“You have to admit, it’s not every day a patient wakes up in the middle of an—”
Graham felt his teeth meet, and most of the cigarette fell out of his mouth, decapitated by his involuntarily chomp. “She didn’t wake up, she was dead. She wasn’t in a coma. She didn’t have hypothermia. She was dead. There was nothing to wake up from.”
“Okay, Graham, but semantics won’t—”
“Flatline! Brain dead! Pupils fixed and dilated! Body temp falling . . . body temp almost room temp, do you get that? Guess what? People don’t wake up from that! You want to guess why? Because when you’re at room temp, you! Are! Dead!” He grabbed at his