PROLOGUE
She stood over the professor, breathing heavily. It wasn't because of nervousness; she hadn't been nervous at all. It was the right thing to do. It was the only way to make it right.
The lights flickered. The damn power was on the fritz again. No matter. She knew her way around, light or no light. And it wasn't like there was anywhere she could go.
She dropped the professor's scalpel on the floor with a metallic clatter, and sat in a chair in the corner. The walls of the room were Spartan in their décor: a few medical charts and illustrations, and a corkboard with notices tacked to it. The corkboard was worn out from years of use, and flecks of it had fallen to the floor.
The lights flickered again. She looked across the room to the white medical cabinets with glass doors. The boxes of supplies and medical instruments were askew, in contrast to their usual orderliness. The glass on the farthest right cabinet was cracked from where she had hit her head during the struggle. She ran her fingers through her hair and felt the beginnings of a welt, but no blood. Somehow the glass door had not broken. That could have been bad.
There was a speck of blood on her nametag. She didn't think it was hers; her body showed signs of having been in a fight, but she didn't feel any open wounds on her torso or appendages. She ran her thumb across the drop of blood on the nametag, leaving a thin red film. "Susanna Sharpe," the name said. Everyone was required to wear their officially issued name badge. She thought it was stupid; everyone knew each other, and it wasn't like there were any new arrivals coming.
There could have been, Susanna thought, as she cast her eyes toward the examination table in the center of the room. She became aware of a dull ache in her hip, from where she had been thrown against the corner of the table. She rubbed it through her torn shirt, wincing in discomfort. It would leave a bruise; that was for sure.
Susanna drew her gaze on the table again. Subconsciously, she realized that the last time she had been in this room was when…it had happened. That was five months ago. Or maybe it was six; it was hard to keep track of the passage of time anymore. Minutes, hours, days, weeks…everything just seemed to mush together. She'd stopped wearing a watch a long time ago; she didn't see the point of it.
The ceiling lights tripped off and on again, casting a dull yellowish glow on the body lying face down on the floor. It didn't look anything like the dead bodies she'd seen in movies; what the silver screen had rendered as beautiful and peaceful reality rendered as grotesque. The professor's neck was twisted at an awkward angle, pressing his face into a ghoulish mask against the cold floor. She could see into his dead eyes; one was cast downward while the other had rolled into the back of his head. Gravity had forced his tongue out of his mouth, and it lay disgustingly against the aluminum-tiled floor. Rivulets of blood ran from his nose and mouth. His arms and legs were at angles that would be uncomfortable for any living person, and his skin, pale in life, had already begun to take on that wan shade that only comes with death. He'd pissed and shit himself; the room was starting to stink.
The professor's blood had spread along the floor tiles in a pool that covered nearly half of the room. Soon, his assistant would come in and slip in the puddle of coagulated crimson and fall on the body, pushing the professor's innards out on the floor in a sickening display. Soon, the body would be examined, with the autopsy report concluding a death by stabbing. Soon, Susanna would be asked why she had felt the need to stab him over fifty times. She would reply that she just wanted to make sure the job was right the first time.
She rested the back of her head against the wall and felt a sting of pain, but ignored it. She instead concentrated on the hum of the overhead lights. Everything hummed around here. She liked it; the droning helped her sleep. Her mind wandered to better times. To use the term "better" was a misnomer, she thought. Times had never exactly been good. But compared to now, things had definitely been better.
She thought of the things that had brought her some measure of happiness: the musty smell of the paperbacks in her father's closet. The water ice that had occasionally been served with meals. The nights in the filter room…especially the nights in the filter room.
She thought of the jukebox in the common area. It was an old Wurlitzer style model that had been modified to play compact discs. It mostly contained what her father had called "classic rock," and she'd come to like it very much. She thought of Nick Lowe, and the time she decided to get up and dance. She even remembered the title of the song, which surprised her. She was usually terrible with things like that.
The song was called "7 Nights to Rock," and she'd gotten up to dance. Later, she would laugh and think that everything that had happened to her all came about because she liked Nick Lowe and had danced with someone else who liked Nick Lowe. It was a funny way of thinking, but life could be funny, couldn't it?
