Immortal

3

‘He’s what?’

Lillian moved across to the opposite side of Conley’s corpse.

‘He’s aging,’ Lillian repeated. ‘It’s impossible for biological decay like this to occur so quickly in the absence of an active catalyst.’

Lillian leaned in close and searched through the winding folds of muscle, sinew and bone until she spotted another metallic sphere. The ball was lodged deep in the man’s femur, half concealed by a gnarled overgrowth of new bone that had encased it.

‘There’s another one,’ Lillian said. ‘Fetch me a specimen bag, and then get some shots of this.’

‘Another one?’ Alexis uttered in amazement, grabbing the bag and hurrying back to Lillian’s side to photograph the wound. ‘It would have taken decades for that much bone to have grown back.’

‘It’s a much older wound,’ Lillian confirmed.

Lillian grabbed a pair of forceps and probed deep into the decaying flesh of Hiram Conley’s thigh, gripping the ball and yanking it free from now brittle bones that cracked like splintering twigs. She dropped the ball into the specimen bag, sealed it and handed it to Alexis.

‘Get it to the state crime laboratory, right now. We can’t test the metal here. Drive it there yourself, no delays, and have them send me the results directly as soon as they’ve got them. I’ll start on toxicology and bio-samples here.’

Alexis stared at the crumbling corpse for a long moment as though she were looking back into the past.

‘What’s going on, Lillian?’ she asked. ‘How can this be?’

Lillian snapped her fingers in front of Alexis’s face, and the girl blinked and looked at her.

‘One thing at a time, okay?’ Lillian said. ‘Tell nobody about this, until we’ve figured out what’s going on.’

Alexis nodded and hurried out of the morgue. Lillian turned back to the remains before her, shaking her head. She heard Alexis’s car start and pull away into the distance, the engine noise jolting Lillian from her thoughts.

‘What the hell happened to you?’ she whispered to the corpse.

Suddenly, the lights in the morgue went out and plunged her into darkness. A wave of panic fluttered through Lillian as she struggled to maintain her balance in the complete blackness. She cursed the fact that, like all morgues, there were no windows.

It was a hell of a time for the power to go out. She stood for a moment, waiting for the emergency generator to cut in, but nothing happened. Then the door to the morgue slammed violently shut, the crash sending a lance of terror through her.

‘Hello?’ she called out. At two in the morning she should have been alone in the building.

Nobody responded in the absolute darkness looming around her.

Slowly she backed away from the gurney until she felt the edge of the worktops behind her. She felt her way around the edge, past the sinks and the polished steel scales until she located her handbag, fumbling inside until she found her cell phone. She lifted it out, hitting a button — any button. To her relief, the screen glowed with bright blue light, illuminating the morgue.

A horrific skull-like face lunged toward her from the gloom. She screamed with primal fear as hands grabbed her with vicious force. As the light from her cell phone was smothered so her consciousness slipped away.