Fight, Flight, or Freeze: The Healer's Story
Chapter 66: Dead Bodies Don’t Just Walk Away

Chapter 66: Dead Bodies Don’t Just Walk Away

My alarm woke me up before I was ready, but who was ever really ready to wake up in the first place?

I refused to hit the snooze button. Instead, I rolled off the couch and headed to the kitchen to make myself a chai tea latte.

Coffee was okay, tea was better, chai tea lattes were the best, and energy drinks were crack.

I would be drinking at least two of them on my double today. Tonight... whatever time it was.

Satisfied that my pick-me-up was brewing in the single-serve coffee maker, I went into the bathroom and washed my face.

There was no point in taking a shower before work. Even if I was worried that someone would be able to smell me, I had the hazmat suit to cover up any body odor and greasy hair. I guess the best part of the last three months and having to wear that suit was that I had yet to have anyone see me having a bad hair day.

I quickly got undressed and threw on a pair of black leggings and a comfortable sweater. The weather was getting cooler, and I wanted to go with comfort over style. Once again, I didn’t have to worry about anyone seeing what I was wearing.

My latte ready, I took my mug and my purse and walked out the front door.

I turned around to make sure that I wasn’t forgetting anything, but I really couldn’t think of anything. "Phone, wallet, keys, and pass," I hummed to myself, my personal variation on Adam Sandler’s song ’Phone, Wallet, Keys’.

What can I say? It helped me remember what I needed whenever I left the house.

Now that I had that song in my head, I left the house and locked the door behind me.

----

"But doctor," said the orderly as she frantically looked around the morgue. I was at the end of my first shift today, so it was maybe 10 a.m., November 1st, and I was too tired to deal with this shit.

The morgue was not my domain. Hell, it was at the other end of the hospital from my domain. There was no reason for this orderly to drag me here... unless they were trying to prank me.

For fuck’s sake. I was too damn tired for this bullshit. If the older doctors were that threatened by my very presence, then they should up their game and prove themselves better than me. Not have me tramping around the morgue.

"Are you trying to prank me?" I asked, raising my eyebrow. My signature smile was nowhere to be seen as I glared at the woman in front of me.

"No!" she assured me. "I swear. It was one of the people who was injected with the vaccine. They died after two days of fever, and the doctor on call sent them down here to be autopsied. I had seen something on him and wanted to ask you about it... but now, the corpse isn’t here!"

She sounded frustrated... and scared.

"The body was starting to turn a light purple color. I wanted to know what might have caused it, but nothing in any of the textbooks mentioned it."

I was still trying to figure out who this was supposed to be related to me. No one knew I was looking into the vaccine on my own, and I definitely didn’t have anything to do with the dead.

"Possibly post-mortem bruising," I said, brushing it off as I turned around and walked out of the cold room.

"It wasn’t," assured the orderly, still looking around for the body. "The entire body was discolored, not just small parts. And I could have sworn that the head was inflating. But that only happens when the body is immersed in water... which it wasn’t. And now I can’t find the body anywhere."

I turned around so I could roll my eyes where she couldn’t see me. "It’s not like the body got off of the table on its own and simply walked out of here. Maybe someone came and claimed it. Dead bodies don’t just move around on their own."

I refused to think of the zombie series Bai Long Qiang was insistent on me watching. If he thought that helped my need to squirrel away supplies, he was dead wrong. If anything, it only made my paranoia worse.

I could handle gunshot wounds, stabbings, broken bones, crushed skulls, and foreign objects protruding from people. I couldn’t handle horror movies or shows.

I strolled toward the elevator and pushed the button. Leaving the orderly to her own devices, I got into the elevator and went up a floor.

It was a long walk back to the ER; I might as well grab an energy drink for the road.

I tried to play it cool; I refused to let the doctors in the ER win. They wouldn’t be able to terrify me just because yesterday was Halloween. Even if they didn’t believe in it, that didn’t mean that they wouldn’t try to scare me with a disappearing dead body.

Zombies, like ghosts, demons, and gods, did not exist.

Period.

End of story.

And maybe, if I told myself that enough times, I would start to believe it.

I walked over to the staff cafeteria on the main floor and grabbed a yellow energy drink, my favorite. Quickly paying for it, I continued my walk through the hospital and back to my department.

I would not psych myself out. I was in complete control. I was not going insane.

I prided myself on being a woman of science. I knew there was a logical explanation for everything, but I couldn’t convince my brain that that was the case.

Maybe it was because of the body I found myself in. Maybe my transmigration opened my eyes to the fact that there were mysterious forces moving people around like chess pieces on a board.

Closing my eyes, I quickly took out my phone and unlocked the screen. Taking a deep sigh, I opened my eyes and opened the app with the tracking devices on it.

There was Bai Long Qiang’s. He was northwest of City A, in an area that I knew had a massive forest. Huh, maybe he really was just doing a simple training exercise. I couldn’t always be sure. He considered missions to be training exercises, too.

Reassured that he was fine, I put my phone back in my pocket and chugged the rest of my drink. Something told me I was going to need a lot of energy for what was coming next.