Okay, so I’m still a day behind. I’ll figure out a fool-proof way of catching up, I swear it. ;)

Word Count: 26,704 

I brought the plates to my secluded laboratory, but did not put them in a refrigerator. I wanted to look at them. I stared at them for a good few minutes before relinquishing them to the cold cabinets. The door shut, and they were gone. I would wait three days for the cultures to develop. Those three days could not have moved slower, but my spirits remained risen as the old mortician’s body continued to remain intact. As the days passed, nothing happened to his body. It remained perfectly as it had been when he’d perished. I wanted to question the new mortician – was he really dead, this man? – but waited those three days to find out. I would find out; I did find out. Nothing could have stopped me, but nothing could have stopped the old mortician, either.

So, as three days went by and more hospital staff fell ill, I began to realize how important my job as hospital repairman actually was. Seemingly I was the only man who was not contracting some sort of illness. There were a few others, but they were sparse. Our small numbers made us afraid that the larger majority of sick persons would seek us out. They would look to us for help, perhaps, and we would be unable to do anything. The whole hospital would fall. There would be nobody left if this incurable disease spread to everybody.

But that never happened.

What actually happened was so different from what I originally imagined (an ocean of corpses akin to the black plague, thereby rendering our hospital useless and permanently closed), and all because of those tissue samples and that mortician.

The first day came and went, but the second day did not. The day was dragged out by an increased number of patients. We were now refusing to treat our own doctors. “Go to another hospital,” they told us. “We don’t have room for you,” they told us. “We have to help the people from the area,” they told us. And then we told them, “Fine, but you won’t see my face around here anymore, since all my time will be spent in that other hospital.” And the day went like that. I saw our numbers diminish, not because people were being stricken with disease, but because they were stricken with anger. They left without getting proper treatment, out into the open world. I urged them not to go, that if they felt sick they should surely remain in an environment all together, like a giant quarantine chamber. Nobody understood me, or knew what I was talking about. If only they’d understood! Perhaps this tragedy could have been averted.

The third day came. We were half our numbers, and I had to wait until nightfall to examine the agar plates. I had still kept Victor’s and Shane’s, though Shane’s I noticed were dying and would be useless by the end of the day. I’d get rid of those, but not Victor’s. I kept Victor’s until the proper time, which came very soon from then. There was a time to realize what was being done his body, and the proper time did not come until after I had examined the old mortician’s dishes. I ate my lunch that day as I always did, under the painting. The day waited for my lunch – finally. I looked up, at the painting. “Don’t stare at me like that,” I told the man in the painting with my full mouth. “Or I’ll leave this place and eat somewhere else.”

I finished my sandwich, and took a quick drink from the water fountain. I was able to finish my lunch entirely because I’d brought almost nothing with me. I had purchased a plastic-boxed sandwich from the 7-Eleven nearby, and stored it in the refrigerator until it was time to eat. I bought no drink. Who’d have time to drink in my position? Nobody. I didn’t deserve to drink bottle liquids anyway, not until I’d discovered what was on those agar plates.

I couldn’t wait. I ran back to my secluded microscope room and looked at the refrigerator and freezer. I opened the freezer door and looked at Victor’s plates. Looked at Shane’s, which were disgusting and rotten. I threw out Shane’s plates, and saw that Victor’s plates were far less covered in white, and were almost completely peach colored. Victor’s cells had been revived. I opened one of the plates; it was a layer of skin that I felt when I ran my hand over the open plate. Frozen skin, but skin nonetheless. I was careful to wear gloves so that none of the white bacteria would get into my skin.

I closed the refrigerator door and paced the room after throwing out my gloves. The trash needed to be taken out. There were several hours to fill before these plates would become completely useful. I did as many silly tasks as I could – I disposed of the infected, dead plates that once belonged to Shane Evans, as well as organized the freezer so that Victor’s plates were arranged from back to front by which plate was most peach colored. And then I looked at the refrigerator, where the mortician’s samples were.

I had to open it. Could anybody have blamed me? I was only human; if I hadn’t opened it then there might have been a problem. But when I did open it, even though it was just a bit too soon to see the true results, I smiled.

There was white.

I wanted to jump, but before I could I reminded myself to shut the refrigerator door. Then I zipped around the hospital, tending to patients with the utmost enthusiasm. “Why are you so happy?” many patients asked me.

“Do I need a reason to be happy?”

“To be so happy as that, yes!”

“Well then, I’ll tell you later!” And I would give them their diagnoses or their test results or whatever it was that I’d done for them in the last day or so and be merrily on my way. I visited the morgue wing after about two hours and found the new mortician still struggling over bodies, as if the flow of them never ended; I did not know where all these corpses were coming from, but I did see that that day marked the beginning of the reconstruction of the broken cadaver chamber. It already felt cold being nearby it, and some bodies had been moved into the new coldness to preserve them before their autopsies. I was told that those bodies were scheduled for tomorrow, but that there was little room in the other cryogenic freezers. The backup continued, and hearing about it I forgot to give the mortician the good news.

I snapped myself back to Earth and began. “Hey, turn around for a minute,” I told him, beckoning him to listen. “I checked out our friend’s tissue sample cultures about two hours ago, and you’ll never guess what I found.”

“I’m happy to hear it.”

“I haven’t said anything yet! But I know you know what I’m about to say. Yes, he is infected with the same disease as Shane Evans and poor Victor in the cadaver chambers. Please keep his body around for a while longer while I examine the bacteria on the plate. I’ll be doing that tonight, so don’t you dare touch that body! It’s valuable to me now, more than you know.”

It was more than I knew, too, but I didn’t say that. I didn’t even know it.

Night finally came, and it was the proper time for me to examine the plates and their contents. I opened the refrigerator. It was as though snow had fallen over every plate, a clean, glimmering coat of snow. I wanted to pick it all up and roll the contents into a snowball that I could, in turn, put under the microscope, but I found more enjoyment examining the individual snowflakes. I still felt like Sherlock Holmes with a microscope instead of a magnifying glass, even more now that I was examining a third person’s cultured and hoping to find new results. What I really needed was a fresh batch of bacteria every day that I could study, but they only appeared around living animal cells. More importantly, they only appeared around dying living animal cells, and their purpose seemed to be to keep them alive.

This was reflected in the old mortician’s plates. Many of the white cells had multiplied using the agar, and were giving their life to the dying skin cells. I knew it well enough now to seek out a white cell in the process, and found one cuddled up next to a skin cell that seemed to be punctured and leaking out its contents. After observing for a few minutes, I realized that I was mistaken and that the cell was not punctured. The white cell had punctured it, and then punctured itself. It bled its own cytoplasm into the living cell, and reduced spillage with its wing-like flagellums. Those same flagellums then acted as arms to seal up the cell, the bacteria’s last motion before passing away, empty and lifeless. It had saved the skin cell, but for how long?

My research was cut short, however, by steady breathing behind me. It was on top of the bed in the corner of the room. There were beds in this room; it was still a hospital room, and a former patient’s room at that. So when I heard breathing, I thought that it was just a patient who had lost his or her way. But I could not have been more wrong. It was my nightmare come true – lying on that bed was the old mortician, his chest steadily rising and falling. He was breathing, but did not appear to be conscious. I would have known if he were conscious had I not once again become unconscious myself.

This time, however, I was not moved. I awoke on the floor; it was still night, and the old mortician was still unconsciously breathing on the bed nearby. I opened the door to exit the room after slowly picking myself up, but it was dark and nobody was in the hospital at this late of an hour except the sleeping patients. There were not even on call doctors. I looked at the clock, which told me that it was two in the morning. I locked the room after exiting to make sure that the newly awakened mortician would stay in the room. When I returned later that day, after dawn, he was still unconscious; however, he looked like he would wake up soon. I brought the new mortician over to see, who was absolutely stunned when he noticed the corpse missing from the drawer.

“Did he get up on his own and walk here?” the man asked. But I didn’t know the answer. All I knew was that he was there, on that bed, sleeping as though he’d never been dead. I was reminded of the man in the warehouse, who without warning simply stood up from death as though it were a chair that one could stand up from. I pictured a chair called Death, and these people sitting on it, getting up off it at will, as opposed to the vast majority of humans. For the rest of them, Death is a chair with glue placed on the seat. Once you have fallen or sat down on Death, you cannot get up. These bacteria were removing the holy glue of Death’s chair and allowing people to escape its grip.

But that wasn’t what was really happening.

I had a theory that would explain what was really going on, but I wanted to observe the mortician longer. He hadn’t been cut up, as Shane had. If we had been more fortunate, we would have gotten a closer look at Shane’s insides. We would have seen the spider web-like network of white bacteria that wrapped around his vital organs. But we did not, so such a discovery had to wait for the next man, or perhaps woman, to fall ill. “I hate to say it…”

“I know you told me this could happen.”

“But I didn’t actually think it would.” And I didn’t. “I thought that Shane was just a very strange, very special little fluke. I was, in truth, hoping for it. I hoped that we’d simply screwed up, and that he’d never been dead in the first place. We’re sure this guy was dead, right?” I looked at the old, sleeping mortician, puzzled. He had been dead, but as a formality I wanted the new mortician to confirm it to me.

“Yes, sir. He’d been dead for about a week, as you know. I checked and rechecked his body for vital signs. No pulse ever cropped up. He was dead, no doubt about it.” But there was doubt. There was doubt because he had kept the man in the drawer for that week. And why had he kept him there? Because despite a dead man being in a room temperature drawer for a week, the body never even began to rot. That said something: It said that he was alive. Something as sustaining his body, and I had the answer, because just as the bacteria were restoring the dead skin cells of Victor and Shane, so too were they restoring – or keeping alive – all of the cells in this mortician.

It seemed like there were enough white bacteria to sustain a person for about a week, and it took that long for them to wake up.

“I’m getting closer to figuring this disease out. I know it,” I said. “But that’s not going to help get rid of it. I will need Victor, the supposedly dead pathologist, taken out of the cadaver chamber and put into a drawer. Before we do that, let’s splash this guy with some water and see if he wakes up.” Together we filled up a few cups with water and splashed it on the mortician’s face. Nothing happened. We shook him. He was very much unconscious, but I wanted him awake as soon as possible for questioning. When it seemed like that wasn’t going to happen, we moved onto moving Victor’s body.

I had never known how bodies were added or removed from the cadaver chambers until that day. In a locked room of the hospital there were several special cold-resistant suits. Wearing them, I felt like the white bacteria. I was resistant to everything in the room. I stepped into the cadaver chamber where Victor and twenty or more corpses lay in silence, and felt none of the cold that froze the dead into an even deeper death. Together I and the mortician lifted Victor’s body onto a gurney, and wheeled it out of the room. It remained frozen for hours, and by that time I was no longer observing the body. It had been put in a drawer with the other bodies – the same drawer, in fact, that the old mortician’s body had been in just the day before.

“I will be here every day to monitor him. When he wakes up, which I think he will, I’ll be there. Count on it.” I smirked and shut the drawer, sealing Victor until he would awaken again.

“I’ll lock the drawer. You can have the key tonight, just ask me for it, or else I’ll forget to give it to you.”

“Of course,” I said, and bid him farewell. I went back to my room to look at the old mortician, to see if he was almost awake. He was no yet awake, but he was stirring. A good night’s rest would mean he’d awake normally tomorrow morning. That also meant that I slept in that room to monitor him. He made no noise; it was difficult to tell that he was in a room with me. That night, the new mortician remembered to bring me the key, and realized that I would be studying in my secluded laboratory. He found this room and quietly slipped the key underneath the door. The clang of metal falling against the tile startled me, and I raised a single eye from the microscope. The golden key gleamed in the nighttime atmosphere with the help of the moonbeams shining through the window. I picked up the key and stored it in a cabinet above the countertop where I had placed the microscope, hoping I would remember where it was.

I’d stolen sever sheets and blankets from the repositories of items we kept around various parts of the building. From the pillow repository I stole two pillows; one for my humble roommate, one for myself. It was cold that night and, knowing that the old mortician would probably not feel the cold, I used the many blankets I had brought with me for myself. I hate my dinner that night under the painting; it felt like home, even though it was in the most disturbing of places to be at night. The wooden frame of the bench did not improve this experience, but as long as I knew that the painting was above my head, I knew that I was in the right place. “Don’t look at me like that,” I said to the painting with my full mouth. “We’ve been over this.” I laughed at my own pitiful joke, and threw out my pitiful dinner before trudging back to the makeshift lab and falling asleep next to the makeshift patient.

He awoke with me the next morning. In fact, we awoke at the exact same time, and shared the same numerous yawns. He asked how long he’d been sleeping for, and how he got into this room. I didn’t break the news to him just yet, though I planned to let him know about his own death. I was sure he’d be happy to find out that he hadn’t been cut apart like Shane. “Where am I, anyway?” he asked. “I must have fainted, right? That’s why I’m in this room.”

“You could say that,” I told him. “Want some breakfast? You look starving.” I didn’t know if he was actually hungry, but I assumed that after a week of death-like sleep one would have worked up quite an appetite.

“Actually, I’m not hungry at all. You don’t need to feed me; I feel like I just ate.” He lifted himself out of bed. He actually looked like he’d gained weight while he was dead. It must have been the bacteria making him look bigger. They were probably filling his insides as he spoke.

“That’s strange,” I mumbled, thinking he wouldn’t hear me.

“What?” he asked. I told him that it was nothing, as any normal man afraid of his own words would say. “Alright,” he began. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to go back to sleep for a little while longer. I’m very tired.” I told him that it was fine. That he should sleep as long as he wants.

“I’ve got a long day ahead of me,” I told him. “Make it easy on yourself, and don’t lose track of time,” I told him.