The dead were supposed to stay dead.
That was Rule One, the kind of rule you didn't need to write down because the universe handled it just fine.
Until it didn't.
Elijah Mercer had been interning at the city morgue for barely six months. He was still learning which veins to cut first, which instruments were reliable, and how to keep his hands from shaking when he had to take the first incision on a body that was not supposed to move again, officially.
He hated the night shift. Everything looked colder at the morgue.
Then the lights started flickering.
He froze mid slice, his scalpel hovering above the pale skin of his first cadaver of the day. Heart attack, late fifties.
Exactly the kind of body he needed to practice on without freaking out.
"Are you shitting me?" Eli muttered, pulling the scalpel back.
He stopped, waiting for the surge to stabilize. This facility was old, the wiring down below was clearly held together only with duct tape.
"Just on already, goddammit," he ground out under his breath.
He didn't expect the lights to obey. He just needed his brain to stop scrambling and find a reason to remain calm.
Dr. Harper, the senior assistant and the only person who hadn't looked at him like he was a waste of space all day, looked up from the slide tray. Her eyebrows furrowed.
"Eli… are you okay?"
"I… think so," he said, forcing a normal smile. "Just… tired. And probably hallucinating."
Tired wasn't even close. He was nervous, inexperienced, slightly terrified.
Normally, interns didn't handle bodies after nightfall without supervision, but the hospital was overrun by some kind of flu or mass trauma. Management had shoved the routine processing onto the only warm body they could find.
Him.
'Why did I think becoming a doctor meant dealing with dead people?'
Across the stainless steel table, the heart attack victim provided his answer.
The body twitched.
It was just a small spam, maybe a post mortem relaxation.
Except, Eli knew that wasn't what it was. He had seen plenty of those, and this one was intentional, making his stomach try to relocate to his throat.
"Okay… That's new," he whispered.
Harper's coffee cup slipped from her hand, and its content spilled onto the floor. "Did… did you actually see that?"
"Yes. And don't you dare gaslight me into thinking I didn't just see a corpse twitch," Eli snapped, his eyes darted to the monitor for the body's vitals.
Flatline. The heart monitor clearly showed death.
And yet… the chest moved again. A slow and unbelievably shallow rise and fall.
Eli stepped back, gripping the scalpel more like a shield than a tool.
"This is… this is definitely not in the textbook."
Just a s he finished the sentence, the old morgue generator on the basement groaned, flickered one last time, and then gave up completely.
Darkness fell. Only the weak glow of the emergency lights remained.
But it was enough to see the impossible happen next.
The corpse didn't just twitch this time. It sat upright unnaturally fast. Like someone had pulled the strings on a poorly made marionette.
And then the blue light bled from within the body. It was tracing the path of the veins, making the skin translucent.
Eli squinted, trying to find a medical explanation. 'This is impossible.'
He realized he was seeing something fundamentally wrong with reality. Something that didn't just violate Rule one but violated the physics itself.
The air in the room changed. It smelled like a faint metallic tang of fresh blood, and something sweet, and absolutely rancid.
It made him gag.
He stumbled backward, tripping over Harper's coffee cup. He pulled her arm and ran to the outer glass door.
"Harper… lock the door. Now. Seriously. Lock the damn door!"
She was frozen with wide eyes, fumbling uselessly for the heavy latch. "Why-what the —?"
Eli held up a hand, and he had no answer. His brain was still trying to process what was happening.
The corpse's jaw moved unnaturally, and the eyes… were glowing faintly blue.
Then the hospital PA system above shrieked into life. It was static at first, then a panicked scream burst out.
"All personnel… autonomic failure reversals… repeat… patients reviving… stay in secure areas…"
The voice broke, then came back, screaming louder.
"... Death Surge ongoing… I repeat… "
The message cut off mid sentence.
Eli's stomach plummeted past his feet. He hadn't expected a name for this new chaos, but now he knew.
"Death Surge…" he breathed out. "That's what they're calling this shit."
Harper's hands were shaking so hard. "The… dead…The dead… are actually waking up?"
"Yes." His voice was flat, but his mind, however, was running at triple speed.
Looking at the deceased patient he was supposed to autopsy, who was now standing up from the steel bed, he thought, 'What the hell do you even do when the dead start walking?'
*******
The next hour was chaos.
Through the small observation window, Eli saw bodies moving in the hall. Their movements were jerky, unnatural.
Not fully alive. But terrifyingly, not fully dead.
Those supposed to be dead patients were still wearing hospital gowns. Even the poor old janitor who they thought had died of a stroke last Tuesday, was moving.
Eli grabbed a clipboard. His hands trembled, but he forced himself to write.
"Document this. Every movement, every anomaly."
Harper stared at him like he had lost the last fragment of his mind. "Document it? Are you serious, Eli? The world is ending!"
"Then someone should at least record what the hell happened!" he shouted back. He needed data. If he couldn't control the walking dead, he could at least log their movement patterns.
The air kept thickening. Every surgical tool rattled faintly on the trays. The floor tiles vibrated.
The blue glow in the bodies grew exponentially brighter.
And then the visual data stream seared into his vision.
Numbers, geometric symbols, lines, erupted across the walls of the morgue.
A voice spoke inside his head, louder than his own panicked thoughts.
[ATTENTION: GOD OF DEATH - PROTOCOL INITIATED]
Eli stumbled back again, knocking his hip against the steel sink. "I—what?"
[HOST IDENTIFIED: ELIJAH MERCER]
[STATUS: INTERIM AUDITOR]
[OBJECTIVE: RESTORATION OF AFTERLIFE BALANCE - EMERGENCY DEPLOYMENT]
An interim auditor? Afterlife balance?
[BEGIN SOUL PROCESSING TRAINING (F-RANK)]
The system message pulsed, obliterated every other thought in his skull.
He could feel it from the very center of his chest, where his soul resided.
Threads of cold and bright energy began weaving themselves through his central nervous system.
Then, he heard Dr. Harper screamed.
Eli turned his head around. His vision momentarily blurred by the intensity of the blue white light radiating from his own chest.
But when it cleared, she was just… gone.
The last of Eli's physical strength gave out, then the room spun violently.
He collapsed, fainting onto the cold hospital floor.