The body drawer clicked open at 2:59 AM.
Elijah wasn't near it.
He was in the staff room, stirring instant coffee that tasted like embalming fluid. The buzzing fluorescent light above his head blinked in uneven Morse code.
Another sleepless night.
Another whisper waiting to crawl down his spine.
The buzz turned to silence.
The air changed.
He didn't hear the drawer open. But he felt it. Like a sudden shift in gravity, like a bad thought becoming a sound.
He rose. The mug trembled in his hand. He didn't drink it.
He walked toward the cold room again.
This time, he locked the door behind him.
Not to keep others out.
To keep something in.
---
Drawer 8 was open.
It had been empty for three days.
Now, it held a body.
A man. Mid-50s. Burn scars across his face. Missing three fingers on his left hand. One eye sunken like a rotted fruit.
No tag.
No name.
But Elijah knew him.
Knew that face.
Knew that voice.
> "You remember me now?" the corpse whispered.
The mouth didn't move.
The sound was in Elijah's head, like a memory being spoken aloud. Too real. Too familiar.
It couldn't be…
> "We met in the fire."
---
It hit him then.
The apartment blaze.
Six years ago. Back when Elijah was an EMT. He arrived too late. The door had been locked from the inside. One survivor—a woman coughing up black smoke, hysterical, saying "He started it. He laughed while it burned."
They found a man's charred corpse in the living room.
They said he'd been trapped.
They never investigated.
Elijah saw the burns on the outside of the corpse's arms.
Which meant he wasn't trying to get out.
He was shielding himself from something inside.
He knew, and he said nothing.
He just wanted to forget.
---
"I didn't kill you," Elijah whispered.
The corpse blinked.
> "You let me die."
Suddenly, Elijah couldn't move.
His feet froze. His fingers locked. His lungs burned like smoke had filled them again.
The cold room temperature dropped five degrees.
Frost crackled along the drawer handles.
Another whisper rose from Drawer 3:
> "Why didn't you say something?"
Then Drawer 2:
> "Why didn't you scream?"
And Drawer 5:
> "You're not supposed to hear us unless we want you to."
Elijah turned, breath fogging.
> "What do you want from me?"
A voice replied from behind him.
> "The truth."
---
He spun back around.
The burned man was sitting up.
Mouth sewn shut.
But the voice still echoed:
> "You think listening is enough?"
> "You think silence makes you innocent?"
> "You wore gloves… but we burned anyway."
Elijah staggered back. His shoulder hit the metal cabinet. A scalpel clattered to the floor.
He picked it up.
Not to defend.
To cut.
He slashed the corpse's sutures open.
Lips parted.
No blood. No breath.
But something thick and black oozed out.
A tape recorder.
Old. Melted. But intact.
He grabbed it. Pressed PLAY.
A child's voice.
> "Please help me. He locked the door. Mommy's screaming. I can't get out. There's smoke—"
Click.
Then nothing.
---
Elijah collapsed against the wall.
The sound was from the apartment fire. A tape recorder from the scene. Buried in the rubble. It had never been logged. Never turned in.
And now… it was in his morgue.
Birthed by a corpse.
Brought back by the dead who refused to stay silent.
He wanted to scream.
He wanted to burn it all down again, just to shut them up.
But then he heard another voice.
One he hadn't heard since he was twelve.
> "Elijah…"
> "Why did you leave me?"
He turned.
Drawer 10 was open.
Inside: a boy.
His brother.
---
The death they never talked about.
A drowning.
An accident.
A lie.
Elijah had gone inside first. Left the gate open. Left the pool cover off.
By the time he came back out, his little brother's face was blue.
No one blamed him.
But he did.
And now the dead were lining up.
Not for justice.
Not for revenge.
For remembrance.
They needed someone to carry the truth they couldn't scream in death.
But the price was rising.
Each whisper left a mark.
A sleepless hour.
A missing tooth.
A black vein crawling up his wrist like ink.
Elijah was rotting from the inside.
And the morgue was smiling.
---
That night, he dreamed of the cold table.
He was lying on it.
Tag on his toe.
Eyes sewn shut.
But his lips still moved.
> "I'm not ready."
> "I'm not ready."
> "I'm not—"
A hand silenced him.
One of the corpses leaned in.
Smiling.
> "Then tell our story. Or we'll keep telling yours."