Word Count: 30,063

He stayed in that room all day, never budging, but I noticed as the day went by, and I checked on him more and more, that he was regaining his strength incredibly fast – just as Shane had. It was as though he no longer needed rest to sustain himself, that the weeklong hibernation had given him nearly all of the rest he needed for the day and beyond. I also monitored Victor’s body, hoping to make some enticing discovery along the way that would change the way I thought about the disease, but that wouldn’t come for a little while. The focus was very much put upon the old mortician whose name I learned was Michael Kasten. Kasten had no true medical history – like Shane – except for a case of asthma and a bad back. But neither of these explained how he got the disease.

I thought back to all four cases I’d known so far, and knew that I had little time before the entire hospital was dead. Shane had been the first, but all I knew was that he’d felt woozy and tired a few weeks before passing away and coming back. The man at the warehouse had no history I knew about, but I had never even attempted to question him because I was so scared of him. I remembered that someone had placed my microscope slide in my back pocket, but I did not know who it was. On that slide, however, were trace amounts of the infectious bacteria. Could they have gotten to the man so fast – faster even than I could? That would have meant that the disease worked differently in every body. A naturally weak immune system would not help, but there would probably be some patient dropping dead in the future whose immune system was perfectly healthy, who had passed in only a minute or so. And of course there were now Victor and Kasten, Victor who was most likely exposed during Shane’s autopsy and Kasten who might have been exposed handling Shane’s corpse.

The warehouse case interested me the most, because it was the only case not directly connected to Shane. I decided I’d go and find that man again – a grave mistake that I regret until this day. I would not leave, however, until I found the perpetrator who had stuffed the glass slide containing the bacteria in my pocket. Once I had that knowledge, I would feel ready to exit the hospital and enter the smoggy city. But this time I would not need a new microscope – I would need new information. I was almost prepared to grab that stylish hat and magnifying glass, but I refrained myself and kept the ordeal serious, and by the end of the day I was not only ready to find the man who put the slide in my pocket, but also question Kasten about his mysterious living state.

He was still sitting – or lying down, he kept switching between the two – in the room. He paced, at time, as though he had just taken caffeine pills, though he had been given nothing all day. Recalling, I don’t remember him ever being fed or bathed. But he was still as chipper as ever, and I was just as eager to question him. I told him now not to sit on the bed, but on a chair, and I would jot down notes on a brand new notebook-sketchbook combo I was holding. In it I would document everything, as an engineer might document his or her design project with schematics and labels. I would document the bacteria here, and all information relating to every case I had the chance to investigate. I had already put notes regarding Shane, Victor, and the man at the warehouse inside. I had left an entire section for the man at the warehouse, completely separate from the rest. I had not made subsections like I had for Victor and Shane and now Kasten. I had nothing except a sketch of the broken slide to remind myself of what had happened in the car – the horrible clicking and crunching when I heard the class shatter into a million pieces underneath me.

I knew I had to find who put the slide in my pocket before I left.

But before that, I flipped to Kasten’s page in my notebook. He had three pages to explain himself. I began simply, “Do you know where you are?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m in the hospital, and you’re Ethan Hemmings, and something very strange has happened that you’re not going to tell me about until all of these ridiculous questions are over with.” His voice had a sarcastic ring to it, but there was a heavy air of seriousness that weighed it all down so much that you knew he was genuinely disgusted with the entire notion being seated for questioning.

“Ah, but they’re not all ridiculous,” I said. “Do you want to know what happened? I wasn’t planning to tell you for another minute or so, but you can hear now if you’re so eager.”

“Please, doctor Hemmings – do tell.” He sat back and crossed his arm. He could imagine what had happened to him. What a shame it was.

“Mr. Kasten, I’m going to repeat the sentence I said to a Mr. Shane Evans and see how you react: You’ve been dead for a week. You sleepwalked into this room, found a home in that bed over there, and have remained unconscious until this morning. And now you’re here being questioned because you’re alive and you shouldn’t be.”

There was the face of death again, that odd reversed face that nobody but the awakened dead experience. I knew he didn’t believe the story, much like Shane did not believe it at first. But if I was to continue – if he was to continue as well – he’d have to believe every word. Because every word of it, whether he believed it or not, was true.

It took a minute or two, but his face changed subtly. It was not a dramatic change. Slowly, gradually, he adjusted to the fact and accepted that he was an anomaly. That he was one of three people in existence who had woken from death. What he did not fit into perspective were all of those to follow, all those other people who existences would be compromised. But that did not matter; he only needed to gain control of himself. I saw him try to move his hand, but it would not respond, as though it were dead again. He moved it off of the countertop and onto his knee.

“You’re telling the truth?” he asked, still somewhat skeptical, but knowing the truth in his heart. “That’s not physically possible. I trust your words, Hemmings, but it seems a bit preposterous…”

“I know. I couldn’t believe it at first myself, but you might have heard about Shane Evans.”

“I did, but only hearsay. I thought it was ridiculous, too,” he said, regaining control of his hand and arm, and then crossing both arms in front of his chest. Mr. Clean had come to clean up his existence at that moment, and he could only sit idly by while it was washed away from him.

“I wasn’t ridiculous, it was real. The man woke up during his autopsy, and I assumed you picked up what he had while handling his body. Did you handle it?”

“I did; kept it in the bottom drawer on the left.” I recalled what drawer Kasten himself had been kept in, and was quite sure it had been that same drawer. It must have been completely lined with trace amounts of the bacteria. They might have spread through the air. The man in the warehouse had no open wounds that I could see, and no markings of any kind. The same was said for Kasten, who was visibly in perfect shape. Looking at him now, one would not have been able to determine that he’d ever been dead, save that he was a little pale from learning that fact.

“That’s the same drawer you were kept in,” I said confidently. “Your partner, the new mortician in the building, kept you in that drawer every day making sure they never ripped you apart. Do you know why?” Of course he didn’t. “It’s because your body didn’t rot. You showed us how we can detect this disease after a person passes away. You showed us that a person with this disease is bound to wake up. Right now, we have one more patient sick with this disease that has entered death. I expect him to wake up soon, but there’s no guarantee that he will. Did you know the pathologist?”

“No, not really.”

“Well, his name was Victor, and he helped cut Shane Evans open. I’m also guessing that’s where he picked it up, even though he had no open wounds. Then again, you don’t have any either, so my best guess is that the disease is transmitted through the air.”

“Is my only purpose to tell you more about the disease? And what’s bad about it if I’m alive?”

“Well, do you remember dying?”

“Not at all. I was working in the morgue, and now I’m here. Like I fell asleep and woke up.” His face was dazzled and confused, and mine followed. I felt the eyebrow once again rise up off of its pedestal above my eye. We exchanged those looks, looks of confusion, amazement, despair.

“You didn’t feel strange beforehand?”

“No, sir, not a bit. I felt pretty damn good beforehand, actually. A bit tired, maybe – I had been taking some naps on the job more than usual. That count for anything?”
“Quite a lot actually, considering that the Shane Evans told us basically the same thing. Why were you tired?” I knew he wouldn’t know precisely why, but to pinpoint where the exhaustion was originating from I had to query him. Perhaps the bacteria were strangling his insides, making it difficult to breathe or function properly, and thus fatiguing him by making his body work twice as much as it needed to. Or maybe he just skipped sleeping the night before and was genuinely sleepy, but there’s a thick line between fatigued and sleepy.

“I don’t know why I was tired, but the part of me that failed most often was my arms. I didn’t find it significant; I just couldn’t lift heavy things.”

“Like bodies?”

“Yeah, like bodies. I had to have James do it for me. That’s the new mortician, if you didn’t know his name. It seemed like you didn’t. Anyways, I had to have him lift the bodies for me. One day, I decided to help him out, since all I was doing was sitting there watching him shove heavy bodies into drawers. I got up and tried to lift a body myself, but I guess I was pretty slow, because I felt like I was going to fall asleep. Next thing I know, I wake up next to you.”

I jotted down everything in my notebook. There was nothing to sketch, not until I was done speaking with him and was prepared to show him the cultures I’d grown of his tissue samples. By this time I was sure they’d grown vast amounts of skin, enough to show him that is was entirely possible that the bacteria sustained him in death long enough for him to, eventually, wake up from it. When I walked over to the refrigerator, claiming I had something “special” to show him, I made sure to open it slowly. He was shocked enough about the news of his own death, and didn’t need the shock of my opening the door of the refrigerator as though a ghost were inside. The cultures were just as I’d expected them to be, fully grown and almost completely peach colored. I smiled, and picked up the most peach colored Petri dish I could find to show it to Kasten.

“This is what’s been going on inside you,” I told him. “We don’t know the details yet – and, actually, a lot of the general stuff is still fuzzy, but as far as we know the bacteria actually kept you alive. The peach stuff is your skin. The white stuff is the bacteria that infiltrated you.” I didn’t tell him how the bacteria kept him alive, because I didn’t really know myself. But I knew that they had kept him alive, just as they were keeping his skin cells alive. The thought played over and over again in my mind. My smile grew, my eyebrow returned to its pedestal above my eye. He looked at the agar plate with such intensity that I thought he might actually press his face against the culture as he leaned in to get a better look. He noticed how smooth and skin-like the peach cells were, and how choppy and lumpy the white cells were, like lumps of snowflakes piled high. He gasped, and asked if they were still inside him.

“I can do another culture to see, if you’d like. They are still inside Shane Evans. I gave him a special antibiotic to cure the disease, but it’s been completely ineffective. I doubt it will do anything for you. These bacteria simply cannot be killed. Rather, it seems, they like to kill themselves,” I said, ensuring that the statement was made completely clear that his case was hopeless until further notice. The bacteria were completely resistant to all existing medicines. Emeticillin was the most powerful tool I could have recommended to him, and yet I knew it was a failure of a product. It would not cure this man – at this stage in the disease’s development, nothing would.

Nobody had reported this whole incident to his family, who was wondering now why he’d been gone an entire week. They’d phoned the hospital earlier that day and the staff, knowing why the body was being kept after hearing it through word of mouth, told them that he’d been excessively busy and had slept at the hospital for the last week.

The family didn’t buy it at first, but we all made sure they eventually would by planning extensively for the family’s visit the next day. I informed Kasten of this plan, and he obliged to play along so that his family wouldn’t worry about his health. His wife and two children would walk in the next day to see if he was truly alright, and everybody in the hospital knew that an argument would ensue between Kasten and his wife about why he hadn’t called. She’d learn the horror of his condition in due time, and not because somebody would accidently slip her information about her husband’s death. She would learn on her own, through her own experiences, and her own course of life.

The moment he’d seen the cultures was when he’d become a true believer. I showed him some SEM images I’d taken of the bacteria – all three types of them – and told him that I only saw two of the three within him. He lacked the icy cold, frozen looking type. I could only imagine that this was because he’d never been frozen, and that these strange bacteria were equipped with the ability to adapt to cold environments by forming a hard, protective spore-like shell. I also showed him images of the bacteria siphoning their cytoplasm off to skin cells, and keeping the cytoplasm in place by turning their flagellums into literal syringes.

“They’ve got to still be in me,” he said. “Nothing’s cured yet, Hemmings. What if there’s a relapse and I die again?” He was worried – the fire in his eyes was dimming.

“I can only guess that if you die again you’ll wake up, but it seems highly unlikely. Shane has been alive for months without any signs of a relapse. In fact, he’s doing better than ever, and I want to blame that on the bacteria. They seem to be very good at revitalizing and repairing dead cells, like an extra layer of immunity. You said you weren’t hungry this morning – that made me think. What if you had too many bacteria inside you and the bacteria knew that somehow? They’d try to diminish their numbers by literally feeding themselves to you. You wouldn’t be hungry for a while, I’d bet. Obviously, I’ve got nothing to back up that claim, so take it with a grain of salt.”

“I can’t, because I wasn’t hungry for lunch, either. I did eat dinner. I stole something from the fridge; didn’t pay attention to whose dinner it was.”

“That was inconsiderate.”

“Yeah, well by that time I was pretty hungry. I just told you that I hadn’t eaten all day,” he said, putting on the first smile I’d seen him wear since he woke up from death. I was intrigued now that he was telling his story with a smile on his face. It seemed that his partner, James, was the only cheery man in the morgue. I knew that Kasten had been bitter from the beginning, from when I first spoke to him in the morgue before Shane’s autopsy up until this very moment. A change of heart was nice to see, especially in a situation that was more than like the dreariest and most upsetting situation he’d ever been in during the course of his life.

We finished talking a little while after that, and my notebook was now full of sketches not only of the bacteria, but of Kasten himself – how he looked, notes on how he acted, and notes on his physical movements so that I could compare them to Shane’s and, eventually, Victor’s. I closed the journal, noticing after finishing all of my notes and sketches that Kasten had actually gone to sleep. I hadn’t even seen him move, I was so absorbed in my work. Figuring that I, too, deserved some rest, I put the cultures away in the refrigerator and tucked myself into the bed next to Kasten, happy that I was without a family, entirely alone and free to sleep where I pleased.

I awoke the next morning to an empty room. Kasten was gone, and I was alone. Everything was untouched, but the door was ajar. Before thinking about how a diseased man was up and walking around the hospital, I thought of the man in the warehouse, and how I would find him later that day. How I would find the person who places the glass slide in my back pocket. I ignored breakfast, ignored Kasten, and ignored Victor. When Shane called my cell phone, I ignored that as well. He would leave a message about his wife. I would continue to search for the man who put the slide in my back pocket.

I began to suspect it was one of my patients, but I was far too busy during the day to probe each and every one of them for answers. Instead I looked around the rooms, hoping to see signs of where the slide might have come from. While looking around, I remembered that the microscope, when broken, had been in a crazy patient’s room. That crazy patient who broke it, I thought, might have wanted to make amends my ensuring that I got my slide back. If so, it was a case of sheer stupidity that put the slide in my back pocket, but that was unlikely, I thought. Once I was in that patient’s room (he was still in the hospital, and his condition had not improved, though I won’t go into details about what it was), I looked at the man and asked him about the slide.

He had no idea what I was talking about. I explained it to him, said that it was of the utmost importance. I told him that unless he answered me, I could have him thrown out of the hospital. He remembered the slide immediately, and said that he did not put it in my back pocket. I looked awkwardly at him, but trusted him all the same. But the slide was gone; I could not examine it nor search any further. Feeling the search’s futileness approaching fast, I gave up and decided that it was time to go to the warehouse and find the worker who had died there.