Dead Inside Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Declarations

  Quote

  Dedication

  Dead Inside

  About the Author

  Death’s Head Press

  Houston, Texas

  www.DeathsHeadPress.com

  Copyright © 2020 Chandler Morrison

  All Rights Reserved

  First Edition

  The story included in this publication is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Cover Art: Daniella Batsheva

  Book Layout: Lori Michelle

  www.TheAuthorsAlley.com

  “The death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.”

  —Edgar Allan Poe

  For Jeff Burk

  Too warm.

  Too wet.

  Too alive.

  That’s how I would describe her mouth.

  She gets up from between my legs and wipes the back of her hand across her pouty lips, looking at me with an expression I can’t decipher—I’ve never been all that great at reading people—but I know it’s indicative of something less than positive.

  “Sorry,” I say, because she looks like she wants me to say something. “It’s not happening.”

  “Clearly,” she says, raising an eyebrow, her mouth turned down. “God, what’s wrong with you?” Her lipstick is badly smeared, and I think about telling her, but the tone of her voice seems pointed, maybe even angry, so I let it go.

  “What do you mean,” I ask, my own voice sounding blander than I’d intended, but I’ve never been all that great at expressing myself, either. I don’t even know what I’m supposed to express right now. She’s buttoning her blouse, and all I can think about is how silly it was of her to unbutton it in the first place; the little “favor” she’d tried to perform didn’t require any nakedness on her part. Showing off, perhaps? Her breasts are decent, but not spectacular, and she didn’t take off her bra, so there wasn’t much to show, anyway. Even if she had, would it have made a difference? Turned me on, so to speak? I doubt it. That had been the point of this whole experiment: to see if anything had changed.

  I really don’t think anything ever changes.

  I don’t want anything to change.

  Her offer had seemed like an easy opportunity to test the waters again, but it’s always the same . . . weird, tense, and unnatural. I just want her to leave.

  “How are you not even hard?” she asks, her voice still jagged with that spiteful sourness. “I’ve been sucking on that thing for, like, fifteen fucking minutes. If that didn’t get you hard . . . I mean, Jesus.”

  I think she’s offended. I’ve called into question her abilities as a woman. Hell hath no fury. If only she knew what she’d just had her mouth on. If only she knew where it had been.

  This must be my cue to say something, because she’s looking at me silently. “Um . . . do you want . . . some water,” I ask. I have no intention of getting her any water.

  She shakes her head, biting her lip and glaring at me. “That’s all you have to say? Really?”

  I hate dealing with women. They can’t be up front about anything.

  Amend that. I hate dealing with people. They can’t be up front about anything. Please don’t confuse my misanthropy for misogyny.

  “Jesus,” she says again, grabbing her purse and glancing at her phone. “You know, I appreciate you getting me through Biochem this semester. Really, I do. But seriously, there have been guys who have done a lot more for me and gotten a lot less, so when I offer you a blowjob just because you let me copy your fucking homework—”

  It was actually a lot more than that; I’d been her lab partner, “partner” used very loosely because I did everything while she stood around doing whatever the hell it is that brainless college girls do. And I did it not out of the expectance of sexual favors, but simply because we were graded as a pair, not as individuals. I never gave a fuck about her. I just wanted the A.

  “—the least you could do is pretend to enjoy it. I give damn good head, so if you didn’t get anything out of that, you’re either gay or, or . . . I don’t know, not right.”

  Gay? No, not my speed. Not right, though? That sounds about right. By conventional definitions of the word, at least, and convention has always irked me just enough to shy away from it whenever possible. You can’t put a label on me. You wouldn’t want to.

  “You skinny little four-eyed freak,” she spits, her cheeks blooming crimson with anger. People get so upset about the strangest things. Overreaction—it’s the American way. It’s . . . conventional. “Are you high, or something? What the fuck is wrong with you? That blank look on your face hasn’t changed since I got here. I don’t think it’s changed during the whole semester, actually. You always look like such a fucking zombie.”

  “Listen,” I say, looking at my watch, a purely-for-show gesture since I already know what time it is, always know what time it is. “I have to get to work. You should probably go.”

  “It’s ten thirty at night. If you want me out, you could at least come up with a better excuse than that.”

  “Graveyard shift. Security guard at Preston Druse Charity Hospital. I’ve told you that at least half a dozen times this semester.” I’m not sure if that’s true or not, because I avoided conversation with the dumb cunt as much as possible, but it doesn’t matter, either way. I do need to get to work, and her perfume is starting to make me nauseous. I’m totally regretting this whole experiment.

  “You really are a prick,” she says, tossing her hair over her shoulder and putting her hand on her hip, probably not realizing how ridiculous it makes her look. That aside, though, I look at her and realize she is pretty, at least conventionally so, and most heterosexual males would kill to have her on her knees in their bedroom. Still, there’s just . . . too much color in her face, too much light in her eyes . . . and I can feel the warm body heat radiating off her. I imagine her colder, paler. She could be almost perfect, if she wasn’t oozing all that spritely vitality. There is no greater tragedy than beauty needlessly wasted.

  “Stop looking at me like that. You’re creeping me out.”

  Annoyed, I bite the inside of my cheek and take off my glasses, polishing the lenses with the cuff of my sleeve. “I think you should go,” I say again.

  She stands there a moment longer, then mutters something under her breath, turns on her heel, and marches out. I watch her legs as she goes, thighs muscular and pliable, moving lithely under her short skirt. I picture them atrophied and slightly wrinkled, spiderwebbed with purple veins against a backdrop of icy flesh, white and smooth as marble.

  As I dress myself for work, I’m daydreaming of chilly kisses punctuated with black tongues and chipped, gray teeth.

  ***

  The hospital is quiet at night. Television gives the impression that large medical facilities are always bustling with frantic activity. That’s either a blatant untruth, concocted for the sake of dramatic set pieces, or Preston Druse Charity Hospital is an anomaly to which that particular rule does not apply. I don’t know. I don’t care. All I care about is the fact that this hospital, come nightfall, lowers its voice to a hushed murmur, permeated by the barely noticeabl
e chirps of uncaring vitality monitors, the sparse staff’s whispered conversations, and the occasional steady sighs of a breathing machine. The halls are all but empty, excepting a few nurses’ stations and, sometimes, a skulking doctor frowning down at a clipboard.

  People rarely attempt to engage me. Maybe it’s because everyone is busy, but it’s probably because of my general demeanor, which in the past and present has been described as “unapproachable” and “creepy”. Even the janitor, a pleasant and friendly old war veteran who seems to be well-liked by all, usually avoids me as one would avoid a nest of wasps. One that appears to be vacant but could possibly erupt into a violent swarm of insects at any moment.

  It is no matter. I prefer the level of invisibility I am afforded here. In the three years of my employment at this establishment, never have my services actually been required—no escaped mental patients, no intruders, no suspicious activity—so I sit in the tiny security room reading Poe and Bukowski, glancing every now and again at the camera monitors and making periodic, uneventful rounds through the building. I am a mere formality, a small blip on the payroll, and a largely unnoticed presence about the premises.

  This is exactly the way I like it. I am a harmless phantom, floating below the radar of perception, granting me a ghostly existence that permits me to freely engage in my unusual extracurriculars.

  People don’t see me, and I don’t really see them.

  It’s better for everyone that way.

  ***

  The nearly dead have a certain scent about them. In a weak attempt at socialization, I once made the mistake of divulging this lovely tidbit of information to a college classmate after I’d been working at the hospital for a year or so.

  The conversation had taken place in a poetry workshop, if my memory serves true, and my colleague was already visibly unnerved by my slightly satanic sonnet. When I made the offhand comment about the smell of the dying, he shifted uncomfortably in his seat and picked at his thumbnail. “Yeah?” he said. “Um, what do they . . . smell like?”

  I could tell he really didn’t want to know the answer to that question; he was clearly trying to be polite in case I was some murderous Columbine wannabe who kept track of anyone exhibiting the faintest amounts of disrespect, but it was too late for me to back out of the conversation. Making a mental note to, in the future, avoid such topics with ordinary citizens, I said, “They smell like . . . like a kind of slipping away, I guess. Like something that’s there but is noticeably fading. Like the last whiffs of a dream. It’s . . . a stale smell.” I paused, but I could tell the poor bloke was becoming more and more freaked out, so I figured I might as well deliver a finishing blow. “I love it,” I’d said, staring coldly at him. “I love it almost as much as I love the smell of the recently dead.”

  “Listen, I need to get going,” he’d said, gathering his things in sloppy haste. “Uh, great poem, nice talking to you, see you next week.” He’d almost tripped over his own feet on the way out the door. The professor had watched him go and then turned her gaze to me, raising an eyebrow. I’d just shrugged.

  Yes, the smell.

  The slipping away.

  I can smell it tonight.

  It hits me while I’m making my rounds through the recovery ward, strolling down the wide hallway with my hands in my pockets, whistling a low tune, something I think the Reaper would whistle if he were the one walking down the hall. Maybe it is.

  The smell wafts thickly, in a cloud almost visible, out from a room across from a storage closet, a mop bucket sitting in forgotten solitude near the doorway. This leads me to assume that everyone’s favorite janitor is keeping the occupant company—something he’s known to do—performing magic tricks or telling lewd jokes. A candy striper and a toilet scrubber, all in one. Only the finest get to work at the thirty-sixth-best hospital in Ohio. It’s a treasure trove of talent.

  See, even creeps like me can have a sense of humor.

  That was humor, right? Like, sarcasm? I don’t know, you get what I’m saying.

  When I peek in the small room, which reeks deliciously of impending death, the comedic custodian is nowhere to be seen. With a quick glance over my shoulder to make sure no one is coming, I slip inside and stare down at the person lying on the narrow bed, tucked neatly into starched white sheets, so still and peaceful. It’s a female, though this is discernible only from the slight frame and the moderately large breasts hidden beneath the pale blue hospital gown; her entire head, save for the bruised and blackened left eye, is shrouded in gauze polka-dotted with blooms of deep crimson. Her right arm is encased in a cast, and the left one has been amputated at the elbow. I look at her chart, attached to a clipboard dangling from the side of the bed on a length of string. Abigail M. Turpentine, age twenty-eight. Boating accident. Severe internal bleeding, cerebral hemorrhaging, more than thirty bone fractures, and a handful of severed arteries. Surgery had taken place less than three hours ago, and if the death smell is any indication, it hadn’t been entirely successful.

  Keeping an eye on the vital signs, which for the time being are steady, I say to her in a hushed tone, “A boating accident. You don’t hear about those too often. Beats a boring old car crash or heart attack, I suppose.” She doesn’t stir, and her one visible eye remains firmly shut. “I bet you look pretty awful under all those bandages,” I whisper, trying to picture it. “Like somebody took a weed-whacker to your face. Or a . . . cheese grater.” I touch my fingers to her neck, feeling the faint pulse. Her flesh is still too warm. “The coldness is coming. And even with your fucked-up face—especially with your fucked-up face—you’ll still be beautiful to me.”

  I’m feeling good as I take the elevator back down to the lobby. Usually I just go down to the morgue and see what I can find, relying on the luck of the draw, but every once in a while, I’ll be confronted with that smell, and I’ll know what’s in store for me. Abigail M. Turpentine will flatline soon, almost certainly before my next shift. Sure, it’ll be a great and terrible tragedy for the friends and family and whatever—sound Taps and usher in the Greek chorus—but hey, I have needs, too.

  Now, make no mistake, I have no delusions of sanity; I consider myself to be vastly intelligent and egregiously well-read, and anyone with half of a functioning intellect would know that a person with my proclivities is a few shades of fucked up. Self-awareness really doesn’t mean shit, though. It is, in fact, little more than psychological masturbation, and has about the same net worth as a wad of semen in a handful of crumpled tissues. No cockroach ever desired not to be a cockroach, just because it knew it was a cockroach.

  Besides, there are far worse things I could be doing; I’d be willing to stake a reasonable amount of money on the hypothesis that my former lab partner probably does more of those things on a Thursday night than I’ll ever do in the entirety of my life. Guilt really doesn’t factor into this particular equation.

  Before returning to the quiet solitude of my post in the security room, I step outside under the awning of the main entrance and fire up a Lucky Strike. I breathe in the sweet summer air with the deliciously toxic cloud of carcinogenic pollutants, gazing out at the mostly empty parking lot and thinking about Abigail M. Turpentine, age twenty-eight, boating accident. Head wrapped up like a Christmas present that might as well be addressed to yours truly. I’m smiling as I let the smoke out of my lungs and into the warm July night.

  In my mind, I’m already unwrapping the bandages.

  Christmas in July, indeed.

  ***

  I’m still thinking about it as I make my rounds the following night. I feel giddy, with the anticipation a normal male would have had for a girl as traditionally attractive as my lab partner, if she had made it clear how she intended to express her gratitude. Ms. Turpentine was not in her room when I checked earlier this evening—an elderly dog-attack victim had taken her place—and since I very much doubt she’s been discharged with a prescription for mild narcotics and orders to “get plenty of rest and dri
nk lots of fluids”, I think it’s safe to assume she’s taken up residence in the basement morgue.

  The last stop on my patrol, before I head down to the land of recently dead, is the maternity ward, an irony that does not escape me.

  It stands to be said that I hate babies, therefore I hate the maternity ward. There’s something about the creation of life that really pisses me off, not to mention the fact that they’re gross and needy and all they do is eat and shit and cry and sleep. I’m really not a violent creature by nature, but there’s nothing like a wailing infant to drive me to the brink of contemplating homicide. I once expressed my hatred of babies to one of the many psychiatrists my mother made me see, and he’d nodded and written something down and said, “Yes, yes, well then. Have you considered that babies are still people, just smaller and less developed? Tell me, at what age do people stop being so bothersome to you?”

  “They don’t,” I’d said. Which is true; all people are bothersome to me, I can relate to none of them, but at least adults don’t (for the most part, at least) shit their pants and scream bloody murder when they don’t get what they want. I’ve never been any kind of athlete or anything, but am I seriously the only person who realizes that infants are the perfect punting shape? If we replaced footballs with babies, I would have been far more successful in high school gym class.

  ***

  My hands are trembling at my sides as I stand looking down at the sheet-covered corpse on the silver metal slab. The pale, name-tagged feet stick out at the end, toenails sexily yellowed by the throes of putrid rot. I run the tips of my quivering fingers up and down the soles of her feet, the flesh rough and hard, like calluses.

  Not taking my eyes off the obscured figure before me, I step around the side of the slab to stand by her head, eager to throw back the sheet but forcing myself to have restraint, willing patience into muscles twitching with anticipation. I want to savor this. The painfully boring blowjob has stirred up a thrumming lust in my loins, and it’s been weeks since I’ve taken a dead lover.