I walked with purpose through familiar streets, heading South in Manhattan. It was evening time. The happy hour celebrated in many local bars spilled out onto the streets, with ambient music and drunkenness issuing from several places along my route. I had no time for such frivolity. My task tonight was gruesome but necessary. I wasn’t quite sure why I had to do it, but I didn’t have anyone to whom I could pose that question.

I glanced into one of the bars as I passed. A smiling face met my gaze for a second and raised her drink, almost as if saluting me. It was as if I was a soldier, dressed in fatigues and heading off to war. This stranger couldn’t know what lie in store for me, but she took a moment from her merry-making to wish me well at it.

Only moments ago, a man in some position of authority explained that our situation was dire. An outbreak of some kind was imminent and our only hope was for me to find its source. By trade, I have very little to do with any kind of science. Yet tonight, I had a decidedly scientific goal to achieve, with very little time to spare.

I arrived at the morgue located in the basement of a lower East side building. The surroundings are familiar because my father’s wake happened at the mortuary on this block over fifteen years ago. It was a defining event in my life but I couldn’t dwell on it at the moment, especially in a morgue. This wasn’t the most inviting of places either. Unlike what one might normally see on a crime-scene investigation drama, the work area was cramped. There wasn’t a lot of room to move around. As an outsider, I was perplexed a bit by how they handled bodies here. A corpse, stiff with rigor-mortis could not be turned around a hundred and eighty degrees in this place while lying down.

The thought of standing up a body to properly position it for a post-mortem operation, gave me chills as I walked past a freezer door. Aside from the recently deceased, I was supposed to be here alone. Not sure where to begin, I was steeling myself for the task at hand when the freezer door opened. A female voice pierced the silence with such clarity that it seemed amplified. “Welcome, Mister Verbanko.” It said playfully.

As she lazily stepped out from behind the freezer door, the woman’s nakedness was almost a bigger shock than her ability to move. The person who greeted me had clearly been dead for a while. There were dark bruises all over her pale skin. She let one hand linger on the freezer door as it closed. During her life, it may have been a seductive gesture but not now. The stiffness of her body made it look clumsy.  She turned herself in my direction and began to lumber forward. The terror and disgust built up within me, forming a knot in my throat. I was somehow in a zombie movie that felt all too real.

Glancing around in a fight-or-flight panic, I didn’t have many options. I found myself towards the end of a narrow hallway. It was no wider than the center isle of a train car. Behind me, a dead end (no pun intended) and a re-animated corpse was coming at me from the front. There was a door in this hallway, almost directly to my right. I pushed it, to discover that it was unlocked.

Entering the room quickly, I spun to lock the door behind me. Unconsciously, I pushed my hands against the locked door, bracing it against intrusion, while trying to regain my composure. I was nearly hyperventilating. My breath felt labored, like I was in a steam room. No matter how hard my lungs worked to suck in enough air, they couldn’t. My frantic heart beat against my ribs like it wanted out. Outside the door, the body of a dead stranger also pounded, with a much slower -yet just as persistent- rhythm.

It was then, that I heard the sobbing behind me. I turned quickly, pressing my back against my only means of egress, to see where it was coming from. The room I had entered was small. It reminded me of a rehearsal studio waiting room in which my high school band mates and I spent a lot of time once. An old brown couch rested at the far end of the room. Between it and me another freezer door opened, its metallic creaking momentarily overpowering the crying noises before they became much louder.

Out stepped Jennifer. She was an ex-girlfriend from many years ago with whom I had left unresolved issues. Jennifer looked down at the floor, hugging herself as she stepped away from the freezer. She was completely naked and in the throes of hysterics. Her crying, tearless white eyes looked up at me. “I’m so sorry!” She cried as she let her arms fall to her sides. They revealed a large open wound around the area of her liver.

“I’m so, so sorry.”

My mind went into emotional overload as it assembled the pieces. Here was a woman with whom I was once very intimate. She was naked and in a morgue, stepping out of the freezer. The gaping hole below her small breasts had been a fatal wound. It was a very obvious final straw in determining that she was recently killed. I wasn’t sure if she was apologizing for being dead, naked, or something else. I didn’t know how to feel. Every fiber of my being wanted to run screaming from that room, but I knew I couldn’t. I had to stand here and face this. Should I be scared of Jennifer? Should I be sad that she’s dead? Should I be happy to see her again, regardless of the circumstances? Should I be mad that I found out she died this way? Or should I fear for my life?

I was completely at a loss, so I did what any sane human being would do in this situation: I woke up. Blinking the sleep away, I tasted the reality of my bedroom like the first breath after surfacing from a deep-sea dive. It was all a morbid dream. Although, I had a second of doubt when I realized my head was resting on a cold, lifeless arm. Thankfully, it was my own. I had cut off its circulation by sleeping on it. As my arm and I fully awoke, I cursed my mind for subjecting me to such disturbing thoughts. How is one supposed to rest when his own body is injecting stress-filled scenarios like these into his dreams?

In case you’re wondering. None of this is fiction. I wrote it less than an hour from the time when I awoke. I’m not sure what it all means, but I thought this was an interesting bit of myself to share. I’m hoping you the reader will return this favor and share your thoughts by leaving a comment.

-King 0f New York