Page 16 of Brimstone Bound
I squinted. This wasn’t the time for semantics. ‘Why does a morgue need CCTV?’
Laura made a face. ‘We’ve had lab assistants in the past who haven’t been entirely respectful towards the bodies. And when I say they weren’t respectful, I mean we’ve had assistants who—’
I hastily interrupted her. ‘I don’t need to know.’
She glanced at me. ‘Yeah. Fair enough.’ She swivelled the screen so I could get a better look. ‘Anyway, if we rewind the footage maybe we’ll get some clues about what happened.’
I wasn’t sure I wanted to watch; unfortunately, I knew I had to. I put my hand out, steadied myself on the desk and drew in a breath. ‘Let’s do it.’
Laura clicked on the footage. ‘There,’ she said. ‘That’s you.’
2.16am. I was already in the body bag so thankfully I didn’t have to look at my corpse again. I watched as I was wheeled into a narrow room. There were several shelves and what looked like several other bodies. I shuddered. ‘Where’s that?’
‘The cold chamber. Fortunately not the negative one.’
‘Pardon?’
Laura explained. ‘We have two cold chambers for storage. One is maintained at four degrees. That temperature doesn’t halt decomposition, but it slows it down. It gives us time to conduct post-mortems, or to hold bodies until families can collect them for their own funeral arrangements. The other chamber is for when bodies remain unidentified and we need to hold them for longer. It’s essentially a freezer.’
Goosebumps rose across my skin and I rubbed my arms. I felt cold just thinking about it.
Laura ran the footage forward. ‘There,’ she said, jabbing at the screen. We watched her enter the room and slide out my body bag again. She unzipped it, allowing the camera a clear glimpse of my unnaturally still body. She paused at my face for a moment and then zipped up the bag. ‘That’s me coming to get you to prep you for the post-mortem. I didn’t need to feel your pulse to know that you were dead.’ She whistled. ‘Baby, you weregone. I was just double checking that I had the right corpse before I moved you.’
Something else I didn’t want to think about too closely. ‘Post-mortem? I thought it was pretty obvious how I’d died,’ I said, frowning.
She shrugged. ‘You were murdered. A post-mortem is protocol.’
I knew that. It didn’t prevent me from shivering.
We watched as she wheeled dead Emma from one room into another. She busied herself getting her equipment ready, then the door opened and a man popped his head round the door.
‘That’s Dean,’ Dr Hawes explained. She sounded eager now. ‘He was telling me I had a phone call.’
‘Related to me?’
‘Nah. The geriatrics ward. They wanted to confirm that the body of one of their deceased patients had been moved.’
On the screen Laura nodded and walked out of the room, leaving my bagged corpse on its own. She smiled at me with morbid excitement. ‘Five minutes later, I walked back in and you were standing up. So this is the part where things are going to get really interesting.’
My stomach was churning. ‘Is there any chance that I was still alive? That I was just in a kind of coma or stasis or something, and nobody noticed?’
‘No. There is no chance.’ She ticked off her fingers while keeping her gaze on the screen. ‘Paramedics saw your body. A doctor signed you off as dead. Last night’s morgue crew checked you over when you came in. There are the photos.’ She sucked in a breath. ‘And now there’s this.’
We both stared. There was no denying what we were seeing. The body bag –mybody bag – was on fire. The stench of rotten eggs that had been in the room had been from me. Sulphur. Or rather…
‘Brimstone,’ I whispered. ‘Fire and brimstone.’ My mouth felt dry. ‘Rewind the tape. Play it again.’
Laura swallowed. ‘On it.’
We watched again. To all intents and purposes, it looked as if my corpse simply spontaneously combusted. Flames appeared out of nowhere, licking upwards through the white plastic from my head to my toes. It was only when the fire had flickered out that I began to twitch, then move, sit up and fall gracelessly off the gurney.
‘I’ve seen a lot of shit in here,’ Laura told me. ‘But I’ve never seen anything like that before.’
Chapter Seven
‘You were brought in with nothing on you. No bag, no wallet, no phone. Whoever killed you took whatever you had, presumably along with the murder weapon because it’s not been found anywhere nearby. Your clothes are ruined as well – they’ve already been sent to the incinerator.’ Laura looked me up and down. ‘You can’t walk out of here like that.’
‘No kidding.’
