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Atta

September 1993

Moving a corpse in the rain is such fussy, slippery business.

Fat drops slipped into Atta’s eyes as she hauled along the cadaver by moonlight, rigour mortis making her efforts all the more difficult. She couldn’t see the mud sloshing up her tweed trousers and camel trench any more than she could make out the face of the dead man twice her size.

“These were new boots, you bastard,” she gritted out as she pushed him up against the back of her car and smashed her hip into his weight to hold him there.

She knew it wasn’t his fault. The dead don’t control the weather.

Attempting to keep him in place, she wrangled the keys from her pocket and jammed the correct one into the lock by feeling alone. Her fingers had gone quite numb, but she managed to get the boot of the old ‘77 Granada to spring open.

This was not her first experience with a corpse. No, that had occurred twenty-five years prior, at the tender age of three. Nor was this her first time slinking away with a corpse into the night. Though she usually had a gurney with which to move them. Tonight had been less than ideal. Nothing had gone to plan.

Though Atta was nothing if not clever.

The edges of her vision darkened, a familiar fog rolling in. She winced and the cadaver fell forward against her, his chest colliding with her shoulder and knocking her back a step. Grunting, Atta willed the sharp pain in her head to go away, its ghastly hallucinations with it.

For once, it blessedly did.

But the body slipped from her grip, thunking to the asphalt as Atta hissed a curse. Grateful as she was for the broken streetlights and ominous clouds obscuring the car park and, therefore, her dark deeds, she wouldn’t make it to Achilles House before dawn if things continued progressing at the rate they were. She should have waited for a clear night—or early morning, as it were—but this John Doe had been too good to pass up.

Atta bent over double, sloppily wrapping her arms around the fallen corpse’s middle, and heaved his torso up. Grunting and cursing in a way that would make her mam toss holy water at her, she dragged the dead man up against her chest, muscles screaming.

Maybe she should join a gym.

She almost dropped him again when she snorted at the absurdity of such a thought.

Alas, Atta managed to drag him along.

“Almost there,” she encouraged herself through the strain.

Something about the way his heels scraped against the asphalt as she tugged at him was making her nauseous. Viscera and bone beneath a scalpel or bone saw never made her bat an eye, but this was different. She shouldn’t have been able to hear the disturbingshushof it over the rain, but the deluge was finally slowing and the sound of skin on road felt too human.

No matter that there was nothing human about this man. Not anymore. His soul had gone off to wherever souls go, to haunt or to hallow.

Atta managed to get his shoulders into the boot of the car before he slipped again, and she bit back a cry of frustration. The rain slowed to hardly a drizzle and the full moon broke through the clouds with enough silken light for her to make out the crumpled, nude body, his chest hastily sewn shut.

AnotherUnidentified Deceased. One more for the pile of bodies in the overrun morgue.

Atta’d been the one to accept him, tag him, and run the preliminary procedures according to protocol. She’d planned to put him with the rest, to be picked up by the gravediggers coming in the morning to take them to the incinerator—as was expected of her. But, come closing time, everyone else had left, and Attaneededto know more about the inner workings of the John Doe. Her fingers haditchedwith the desperation to investigate.

Thus, she’d snuck him down to her hidden, makeshift laboratory beneath Gallaghers’ Morgue which she’d outfitted with discarded tools received from Achilles House as payment, and began her research with exhilaration in her veins.

With his chest cavity open, all had appeared as expected at first glance. Blood blackened by the Plague, organs failed from the infection.

That was when Atta saw it.

The blossom sprouting from his lungs.

Not a phantom or a trick of the lamplight. Not even a seedling-looking thing one could pass off as an abnormal growth of some sort. No, it was a macabre bloom of foreign flora that had taken root in the man’s lung, and flowered.

Rain sluiced down Atta’s face, dripping off her lashes. She tore her eyes from the sodden, sewn chest and told herself not to pull that flora from her pocket. Not right now. It was surely already soaked, and she never should have removed it from the body in the first place. Yet, it didn’t look anything like the thousands of botanicals she’d studied in her coursebooks or those in her grandfather’s journals that she grew up with her nose shoved in.

But what was done was done.

Refusing to look at him any longer, Atta heaved and pulled and pushed until she got the corpse shoved into the boot and shut the lid, hopping to press down on it with all her weight like an overfilled suitcase before it finally clicked closed. Huffing, she slid into the front seat, wondering just how sore she was going to be later.