The fluorescent lights above buzzed with a low, constant hum, casting harsh shadows across the cold morgue. Marty, the night-shift technician, moved through the sterile room, the muted sound of rubber-soled shoes sliding across the tile the only interruption to the silence.

  He had been working long hours, the usual dead-eyed fatigue sinking in. A stack of paperwork, too many bodies, not enough time. He sighed, running a hand through his messy hair and glancing at the cold metal slab before him.

  The body needed to be prepped for autopsy. He pulled on his gloves, glancing at the ID form before checking the toe tag, a part of the process, standard procedure.

  A faint chill crawled down his spine.

  The name on the toe tag was Camilla Stern.

  He stared at the name for a second, his mind struggling to place it. Maybe he’d seen the name on a police report earlier, or maybe it was just another case, another night. It didn’t matter much. What mattered was the process, the next steps in the procedure.

  He looked down at the body.

  The gunshot wounds to her chest were obvious, the blood dried, dark and thick. But something felt off. The wounds, the jagged edges, seemed... smaller than they should be. Tighter.

  He leaned in for a closer inspection. The blood had dried, but the edges of the wounds appeared to have closed in, as though healing.

  He pulled out his phone, dialling his superior immediately. His voice was strained as he spoke, trying to mask the uncertainty that was creeping up his spine.

  “Hey, um, I’ve got something weird happening here,” Marty said as soon as the line clicked open. “The wounds on the body... they look to be healing. Slowly, but it’s definitely closing up. Am I seeing things, or is this possible?”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line, followed by a calm but concerned voice. “Healing? You’re sure about that? Are you certain the body hasn’t been tampered with? Look, Marty, I’m going to need you to get a pathologist in there to take a look. You can’t make assumptions on this kind of thing. Get someone with the right expertise to assess it. Understood?”

  “Yeah, of course,” Marty muttered, his stomach twisting. “Thanks. I’ll call them now.” He hung up, his mind racing.

  He rubbed his eyes, still staring at Camilla’s body. Something about this didn’t sit right with him. The wound... it shouldn’t be healing. But, still, he had been working long hours. Maybe it was just exhaustion playing tricks on him.

  Marty immediately dialled the pathologist on call. His hands shook as he held the phone to his ear.

  “Dr Stevens,” came the voice on the other end. “What’s up?”

  “Hey, it’s Marty from the morgue. I’ve got something weird down here. The gunshot wound on the body — it looks like it’s healing. It’s not fast, but it’s definitely... closing up. I don’t know what to make of it, but I think I need you to come down and take a look.”

  There was a slight pause on the other end. “Healing? That’s... strange. Alright, I’ll be there as soon as I can. Stay put and don’t touch anything. I’ll be right over.”

  “Thanks,” Marty replied, feeling a cold sweat on the back of his neck. He hung up and took a deep breath, trying to steady his nerves.

  That’s when it happened.

  As he stood there, closing his phone, something shifted in the room. A subtle movement, a shift in the air. Marty blinked and looked back at Camilla’s body.It wasn’t just the wound he needed to worry about now.

  The body on the slab... moved.

  Marty froze. The body—Camilla—had begun to sit up.

  It wasn’t a sudden jerk or twitch. It was slow, deliberate, like a marionette being pulled by invisible strings.

  His breath caught in his throat. He’d seen dead bodies before, but this? This was something entirely different.

  This wasn’t happening.

  For a long moment, he couldn’t move. He couldn’t even blink, his mind struggling to process what he was seeing.

  Is this some sort of prank?

  His head jerked around, scanning the morgue as if someone might jump out from behind one of the drawers or pop up from the shadows, laughing at his expense. Yeah, it’s a joke. It has to be.

  But there was nothing. No laughter. No movement. Only the soft hum of the refrigeration units and the buzz of the fluorescent lights overhead.

  She didn’t make a sound. No twitch of her lips, no shift in her stance. Her body was stiff, unnaturally so. But she was twisting, sliding her legs off the side of the gurney. Alive, or something like it.

  This has to be a joke!

  He opened his mouth, forcing a laugh, trying to break the tension. But when he did, his voice cracked. The sound felt wrong, too loud in the sterile room.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “Okay. Very funny,” he said, swallowing hard. “You got me. You can come out now. I’m not—”

  His voice trailed off as he took a step forward, closer to the table, almost as if trying to will himself to believe this was just some sick trick. But then Camilla’s eyes—those eyes — locked onto him. Cold. Dead.

  She didn’t speak.

  The room felt smaller. The air thicker. Marty’s breath became shallow, each inhale like sucking in too much dry air. His legs started to tremble.

  “Stop it,” he mumbled, backing away, but he couldn’t stop himself from staring at her. “This isn’t funny anymore. Come on! Whoever’s doing this...”

  She moved again. It was slow. A shift, a subtle twist of her torso, but the movement was unnatural. The way she shifted, her limbs moving without stiffness, almost like she was walking in a dream.

  Marty’s pulse surged. The laughter died in his throat.

  She wasn’t supposed to be alive. He’d just — he’d just examined her dead body, the bullet wound in her chest. He’d filled out the paperwork.

  This wasn’t right.

  “Okay, okay, no more games,” he said, panic crawling up his spine. His legs felt like jelly. He stumbled backwards, tripping over the edge of a metal drawer, his hand shooting out to catch himself, but it was too late.

  His back slammed into the hard steel of a nearby cabinet, and he fell hard to the floor. The sharp edge of a drawer hit his head, a sickening crack as his skull collided with metal.

  Thud.

  Pain exploded through his temple, sharp and blinding, but it wasn’t enough to stop his thoughts from spiralling. He could barely keep his eyes open as his head spun, the world tilting sideways.

  The last thing he heard before everything went black was the softest, most unsettling sound—her footsteps, approaching him.

  Then there was nothing.

  The morgue fell silent once more, save for the soft hum of the refrigeration units. Camilla, once a lifeless corpse on the steel table, now stepped woodenly in the centre of the morgue. Her body was pale, her movements stiff at first, but still, she was walking, unnaturally so. Her eyes, cold and dark, were fixed ahead, unblinking.

  Her posture was rigid, but there was a quiet power in the way she held herself, as if the space itself was bending around her, waiting for her to command it. The air in the room felt charged, heavy with something both ancient and new.

  She was no longer the thing that had once been dead, but something else—alive, yet not alive.

  Marty remained motionless on the floor.

  For a long moment, Camilla stared at him, her eyes cold and fixed on the space in front of her, her body radiating a quiet intensity.

  She moved toward Marty. Her cold fingers brushed his neck, checking his pulse with detached efficiency. His heart was faint but still beating. She lingered for a moment, her fingers pressing into the soft skin of his throat, but there was no aggression in her touch, only the quiet acknowledgement of his state.

  With a pained grunt, Camilla began to undress him with slow, methodical care.

  First, the technician’s coat was removed from his body. She tugged at it, easing it off of him as though it were something foreign to her, as if the fabric wasn’t meant for someone like her, but it would do. It fit her just fine, despite its size.

  Her fingers slid under his shirt, lifting it, and she paused for a brief moment before pulling it off entirely, her movements fluid and precise. She didn't waste time. Each movement was purposeful, deliberate, making the most of her limited range of motion. She stripped the unconscious man of his clothing, a sense of routine settling over her as she dressed herself in his coat, the sleeves too long for her slender arms. The coat swam on her, but it didn’t matter.

  The act of clothing herself seemed to restore something within her.

  Her skin began to regain its colour, her cheeks flushing faintly with the blood returning to her limbs. The pallor that had once marked her as a corpse started to soften, her features taking on a more natural tone. The stiffness in her body melted away, the fluidity of life slipping back into her veins.

  Camilla’s eyes remained empty, focused, distant, but her movements were growing more fluid, less like a corpse and more like a woman waking from a long slumber. She stepped back from the unconscious technician’s body, no longer interested in him. He wasn’t part of her plan anymore. As she pulled the coat tighter around her shoulders, she took one last glance at him, lying there, unaware of the shift in the world.

  With a final, quiet breath, she turned toward the door.

  Her bare feet made no sound as she crossed the floor, her body now fully reanimated, fully alive in a way that was unnatural, unsettling. She passed by the CCTV cameras without a glance, disappearing from their view as though they had never captured her at all.

  She was gone.

  The morgue remained silent, the only trace of her presence the faint echo of her footsteps disappearing into the dark hallway beyond.

  The rain hadn’t let up. It battered the city streets in sheets, turning gutters into streams and sidewalks into slick black ribbons. Camilla moved barefoot through the downpour, her coat too large for her frame, flapping behind her with each stride. Her feet splashed in puddles, the skin mottled with cold and grime. Rain clung to her hair, ran down her face, soaked the hem of her sleeves.

  Her expression remained blank, unreadable.

  She turned a corner and paused under the awning of a shuttered storefront. A mutter escaped her lips, soft, almost conversational.

  “Gone... stolen.” She tilted her head, water dripping from her lashes. “Passed on… in death.” She growled softly in frustration.

  She kept walking.

  A tram rumbled in the distance. Headlights swept the fog as a car turned the corner and passed without slowing. Camilla didn’t look up. Her path veered off the main road, deeper into the skeletal blocks of the industrial fringe. Here, the buildings stood silent and forgotten. The light grew dim. The rain thickened.

  She spoke again, her left hand rubbing the bullet scar on her chest, under the coat.

  “One of them fired it. One of them has it now.”

  She didn’t say more.

  She moved through the fog like a figure drawn from it — unhurried, unnaturally calm. Her direction never wavered. Eventually, she turned into a lane way choked with weeds and rusted bins. A recessed loading dock waited at the end, half hidden by stacked scrap metal.

  Camilla crouched, pushed aside a sheet of corrugated tin, and revealed a rusted metal door. Her fingers worked the lock quickly. It opened with a groan.

  She stepped inside.

  The space beyond was silent and stale. The scent of dust and dry herbs lingered. Shelves lined the walls, cluttered with bundles wrapped in cloth and jars cloudy with age. Camilla lit a small lantern. The flame flickered to life, revealing chalk marks on the floor that had faded but not disappeared.

  She moved with familiarity, retrieving a canvas bag from a corner shelf. From it, she took a cracked pendant and a cloth-bound book, worn at the edges. She knelt on the floor, flipping pages until she found a diagram marked with loops and slashes.

  Her voice broke the quiet again.

  “Sympathetic link... last breath, last wound…”

  She drew a circle in chalk, steady and deliberate, then placed the pendant at its centre. Her hand reached for a blade. She sliced her palm without pause and let the blood fall in a line across the symbols.

  There was no flash. No shimmer. But the space around her seemed to pause.

  She didn’t speak again.

  Outside, the rain fell harder, rattling the roof. Inside, Camilla remained still, focused on the circle.