The dead were meant to stay that way.
This was the first and foremost rule that the universe took care without anyone having to write it down.
Until one day it stopped working
In the city morgue, Elijah Sterling had been just a mere intern for about six months.
He was still in the process of learning the anatomy well enough to know which veins were the first to cut, which tools to trust, and how to control his shaking hands when he had to make the first cut on a corpse that had already officially been declared dead.
He really hated the night shift. The whole place felt even colder under those lights.
At that moment, the lights began to flicker.
He halted his cut, and the scalpel poised over the body of his first corpse of the day.
Heart attack victim. Man in his late fifties.
It was the exact type of corpse he would prefer to practice on without freaking out.
"Are you shitting me?" Eli muttered to himself. He pulled the scalpel away.
He waited a moment to see if the power cut would continue or he would be able to operate quietly.
The building was old, and the electrical wiring below was probably in a very bad condition, only supported by duct tape.
"Just get the damn thing on already" he cursed softly.
He was not really expecting the lights to come on. He was just trying to calm his mind and make up a good reason for not losing his temper.
Dr. Harper, the senior assistant and the only person who hadn't treated him like he was a total loser, glanced up at him from her slide tray. Her brows furrowed.
"Eli… are you okay?"
"I… think so," he replied, trying to give a normal smile which did, in fact, look more like a grimace. "Just… tired. And maybe hallucinating."
Tired was a very mild description of his mental state. He was actually anxious, inexperienced, and a bit scared.
Normally, interns were prohibited from dealing with corpses during the night without supervision.
But the hospital was overrun with patients suffering from a strange flu or injuries due to some mass incident. The management had decided that the only warm body available should take care of the regular processing.
Him.
'Why did I think becoming a doctor involved hanging out with corpses?' he was musing.
The heart attack victim's body, lying on the stainless steel table back across, answered him.
The body twitched a little.
It was just a small twitch, possibly a post mortem relaxation.
Except, Eli knew that wasn't what it was. He had gone through a lot and this one shook him, so he felt the bile rising in his throat.
"Uh… That's new," he whispered.
Harper dropped her coffee cup and the coffee spilled onto the floor.
"Did… did you see that?" she asked.
"Yes. And don't even think of telling me I was just imagining a corpse moving," Eli retorted, his gaze turning to the monitor for the vital signs.
Flat line. The heart monitor clearly confirmed it was dead.
Still… the chest heaved again. A slow and unbelievably shallow rise and fall.
Eli stepped back, tightening his grip on the scalpel as if it were a shield and not a tool.
"I guess… this is definitely not in the textbook."
At the same time as he finished the sentence, there came a loud groaning from the old morgue generator in the basement, and it flickered one last time before it finally quit completely
Total darkness fell. Only the dim light of the emergency lights remained.
But it was enough to see the impossible happen next.
The corpse didn't just twitch anymore. It rose up, sitting upright, and this was much faster than just a delusion.
It was like somebody had pulled the strings on a poorly crafted marionette.
And then the blue light started leaking from inside it. The glow followed the veins, and the skin turned translucent.
Eli squinted, trying to find a medical explanation. 'This is impossible,' he thought.
He became aware that he was witnessing something fundamentally wrong with reality. Something that only went against the first commandment but also violated the physics itself.
The atmosphere in the room changed. It smelled like a metallic tang of fresh blood, plus something sweet, and absolutely rancid.
It made him gag, a bit too much for him to handle.
He stumbled backward, accidentally stepping on Harper's cup of coffee. He grabbed her hand and hurried to the outer glass door.
"Harper… lock the door. Now. Seriously. Lock the damn door!"
She was frozen in her stance with eyes wide open, trying to grasp the heavy latch but in vain. "Why-what the —?"
Eli signaled with his palm, and he was speechless. His mind was still in the process of understanding the situation.
The corpse's jaw now was moving unnaturally, and the eyes… were glowing faintly blue.
At that moment, the hospital's public address system that was installed right above exploded with a shrill sound and then it became static for some time.
Then, a panicked scream came out.
"All personnel… autonomic failure reversals… repeat… patients coming back to life… remain in secure areas…"
The voice was interrupted again, but this time returned even more agitated, screaming louder.
"... Death Surge ongoing… I repeat… "
The message cut off mid sentence.
Eli's stomach plummeted past his feet. He had not anticipated that a term would be given to this new chaos, but now he knew.
"Death Surge…" he exhaled. "That's what they're calling this shit."
Harper could not control her trembling hands. "The… dead…The dead… are really waking up?"
"Uh-huh."
Although his voice was flat, his brain was running at triple speed.
Looking at the deceased patient he was supposed to autopsy now standing up from the steel bed, he thought, 'What the hell do you do when the dead start walking?'
*******
The next hour was a mess.
Eli saw bodies moving in the hall through the small observation window. Their movements were jerky and unnatural.
Not completely alive. But not completely dead, either.
The patients who were supposed to be dead were still wearing hospital gowns. Even the poor old janitor who they thought had died of a stroke last Tuesday, was also moving.
Eli took a clipboard. His hands shook, but he forced himself to write.
"Write this down. Every movement, every anomaly."
Harper was looking at him as though he had lost the last fragment of his mind. "Document it? Are you serious, Eli? The world is ending!"
"Then someone should at least take a note as to what the hell happened!" he shouted back. He needed data. He would be able to track the pattern of movement of the walking dead, though he could not control them.
The air kept thickening. All the surgical equipment was clattering on trays. The floor tiles vibrated.
The blue light in the bodies was increasing exponentially.
Then the stream of visual information burned into his eyes
Figures, geometrical icons, lines, burst through the walls of the morgue.
He could hear a voice in the depths of his head, which was greater than his terrified thoughts.
[GOD OF DEATH PROTOCOL INITIATED]
Eli fell backwards again, his hip bumping the steel sink. "I—what?"
[HOST NAME: ELIJAH STERLING]
[STATUS: INTERIM AUDITOR]
[GOAL: AFTERLIFE BALANCE RESTORATION - EMERGENCY DEPLOYMENT]
An interim auditor? Afterlife balance?
[INITIATING THE SOUL PROCESSING TRAINING (F-RANK)]
The voice wiped out all other thoughts in his head.
He was able to feel it on the very core of his chest where his soul resided.
Strands of cold and bright energy started weaving themselves along his central nervous system.
Then, he heard the scream of Dr. Harper.
Eli turned his head around. The blue white light that fell on his own chest momentarily dimmed his vision.
But when it cleared, she was just… gone.
The remaining of Eli's physical strength gave out, then the room spun violently.
He collapsed and fainted on the floor that was cold.