Phelps and Cross

Mortician Amy Phelps stared down at the body in front of her with a clinical curiosity. The method of suicide was simple enough – an injection of air behind the ear, effective without compromising the face for recognition. Phelps nodded grimly. Tucking her vermilion hair behind her ear, she busied herself filling out the standard questions on the paperwork. Katie Cross had been for a checkup just a few days before her death – the GP reported that there was nothing abnormal about her body systems at all.

Katie’s patchy blonde hair fanned out around her head like a short halo, bald patches covered by thin strands. Her eyes were closed out of respect for the dead and she looked far more peaceful than she had in life. Though she had been a lovely personality for her first twenty-four years, Katie had spent the last six months of her life terrified, stressed and paranoid.

Exactly six months and four days earlier, Katie Cross had run screaming through the main streets of town, naked and bleeding from her nose. When she was finally caught and sedated, all that the various doctors and psychologists could get from her was some vaguely coherent babble about aliens. When asked to describe them, she clamped her mouth shut, bit her lips and hook her head furiously. She would not even provide a crude drawing, leading her doctors to diagnose her with hallucinations and psychotic episodes. Under the best psychiatrist in the state, Katie had been dosed up to the eyeballs with all kinds of different coloured pills, liquids and therapies.

Phelps slid the corpse into the freezer, along with a few others that were toe-tagged and ready for release to their families. She knew that Katie Cross was destined for the incinerator – there was simply no one willing to take her. Sagging against the freezer, Phelps checked her watch and rolled her eyes. Her feet ached and her eyes stung from the stagnant morgue environment and she was still three hours out from the end of her shift. Put simply, she was exhausted, still unused to the graveyard shift she had taken over.

Moving away from the freezer, she leaned against the sink and picked up her book; a generic romance novel that really barely held her interest but there was nothing else new in her bookshelf. Fabio was in the middle of professing his love for Priscilla, a typical trope within the first hundred pages, and Phelps could tell that some ‘sexy’ action was coming up. Amy wondered if anyone actually read these books because they liked them, or if it was just some strange was of getting a cheap thrill, by reading something ‘naughty’.

The bad sex was just beginning and Amy made an incredulous face at her book; she was sure that even she, inexperienced as she was, had had better sex than this. The euphemisms for genitalia were frankly ridiculous and her eyes were glued to the page in disbelief that anything like this could ever reach the publisher, so she didn’t noticed the slight creak of the morgue freezer drawer opening just a crack, nor the slow slither of a long, thin grey tentacle slithering out, covered in blood, and rising up behind her.