In a laboratory, not a dark laboratory or even a spooky one, there were things happening. The walls were plain and white; it was located at the end of a plain, white hallway. Not a hallway that just anyone could go down, mind you. It required passing through a security checkpoint and signing yourself in on a sheet of yellowed paper.
In truth, it wasn't even a real laboratory. It was a morgue, a place filled with cold and lifeless bodies and whispering medical students, residents with their heads full of facts and clouds.
The head technician was dreading that night's work. The woman had been the wife of a somewhat prominent scientist, an up and coming future Nobel Prize winner perhaps, who had dropped dead for no apparent reason in her kitchen while tending to her young infants. And the man, the scientist, wanted to be there for her autopsy. It seemed that he refused to believe that there were things in the world that couldn't be explained.
Pulling on white gloves that stank of industrial processes but were necessary to keep tainted blood off the fingers, equipment was laid out. The corpse, stripped and helpless, faced straight up into lights that were hidden by closed eyelids.
They began working. Such a request had only been made once before in the history of this particular morgue, and the man who had made that request had been out in a dead faint before they'd barely even gotten started. But this man, this man staring out at them with eyes they couldn't see, didn't even so much as breathe it seemed. How could he stand to see them remove a loved one's organs like that? How could he sit there and not break down into sobbing, hysterical tears over the dead flesh that had once been so full of life and promise?
A flicker of light tricked the aged technician's eyes. He'd thought he'd seen the woman's slender fingers move. Then he noticed the golden ring, still tightly attached. "Hey, they forgot to take this off," he commented, reaching down and grasping the ring in his hand.
With a hiss, the woman leaped up, her face the unhealthy gray of a preserved organ and not the fading pink of one freshly dead. He saw her yellow eyes, saw her fangs and she reached out and grasped him in her fingers, which had become like claws as they ripped into his flesh. She forced his head down, her bare ribs scraping past his cheeks as his face was thrust up against her still bleeding heart, dripping raw blood onto his face. He could taste it in his mouth; he could feel the icy grip of fingers around his neck…
He had kicked the blankets off the bed, and his window was open. Flopping back down onto the bed, a young Dib tasted the salt rolling down his face. Why? Why were his only memories of his mother horrifying images of her as an undead being, ripping into flesh? His father hadn't been present at her autopsy… he'd been taping a segment of his show when it had been carried out, Dib had discovered only after much researching and hacking.
His mother also hadn't died of unknown complications, she'd dropped dead of a rare and unpredictable heart condition, a genetic one at that but one that neither he nor Gaz seemed to inherit the genes for. The one piece of luck he'd had in his life, he supposed as he sat up and pulled the blankets up off the floor. And, as far as his research had found, there certainly hadn't been any morgue workers who had turned up dead after her autopsy.
No, his mother had gone quietly to the crematorium, where only ashes of a once beautiful woman remained in the end. From his research on the autopsy process he had discovered that it was possible, although highly unlikely, that her brain still remained somewhere in formaldehyde. There was no point in finding out, for anything that made it the mind of the woman it used to be would have been gone to the preservation fluids and ebbed into the world. It had ebbed in the world to visit her son only in the form of vicious nightmares.
Dib stood up to go to his window, realizing when his vision cleared that dark bars crossed the window and fell in a patch of white and black across the floor of his room. It was only then that the twinge of recognition hit him. Not safe in his own bedroom, but spending another two days, three days… a week, perhaps, locked up inside the Crazy Home for boys.
He hated it. He hated it so much. One day, they'd see that they were wrong. He wondered why he even bothered. Let the aliens, let the machines, let whatever the hell was out there with a taste for human flesh and a standard of morals that allowed them to have it take people. Then they'd see he was right.
Then they'd see that he was dead right.