Chapter Six
A/N: This is one of my favourite chapters so far, featuring an original character inspired by someone I thought I knew well. I had such fun writing it! Some of the stuff this character gets up to is quite awful, and I actually had to tone it down a little for so my story could retain its 'T' rating. In any case, enjoy!
Forty-something divorcee Gerry Crowley had been in this lonesome job as a porter at the Galbadia City Morgue for about ten years and, if he were honest, it was the dead that kept him from killing himself. For one thing, they were the only friends he had, or, to be more accurate, the friends he never had. More importantly, some of the corpses that came in gave off the most incredible odours, after having been left for days, sometimes weeks, with no one around to discover them. He didn't want to be found like that by anyone, not decomposing in a bath of blood, nor dangling from the ceiling, or rotting into his own filthy, stinking mattress on his bedsit floor, after overdosing on the Valium his doctor had prescribed for him when his life had been torn a part by a series of stupid mistakes, and ugly rumours.
It all began when he was a builder, living and working in Timber, working on what was to become the Aphrora pub. Whilst there, he met someone who changed his life forever.
Kevin. A vision of lanky loveliness in his tight stonewashed jeans, and loose white T-shirt, which rode up whenever he bent down. Gerry wanted him the moment he set eyes on him. And one magical evening, Kevin proved that he felt the same way.
That evening, Gerry and Kevin were among the last to leave the site, when Kevin playfully snatched Gerry's hard hat, forcing him to give chase. When Gerry finally caught up with Kevin, he grabbed him and began to touch him gently, his effeminate, girlish hands sliding up his T-shirt. Kevin didn't complain; in fact he stroked Gerry's face in return and whispered, "Take me, babe." Thus began a three-month affair with his handsome co-worker. They were eventually outed when Gerry was caught in a compromising position. In a portable toilet with Kevin, discovered by none other than the site's foreman.
The gravity of the situation, and the depravity of the act, caused Gerry to lose his job on the spot. Kevin kept his, as he made out he was some sort of 'victim' of this act of love. This rejection and betrayal from his boyish lover drove Gerry to drink, and although his wife Susan forgave him his indiscretion, they never slept in the same bed again.
Feeling his wife had turned her back on him in his hour of need, Gerry's drinking problem became worse. Sometimes he was drinking up to an entire bottle of neat Jack Daniels a day, and often he would find himself passed out on the aged, uncomfortable couch. Coupled with an almighty hangover, his bad back gave him an aggressive temper. The target for this temper was, more often than not, Susan's fourteen-year-old daughter Chelsea, whom he had raised as his own since she was eight. When she returned from school one day, Gerry beat her so badly she was admitted to hospital. He told Susan that Chelsea had been hit by a car, and she, the stupid useless bitch (to use Gerry's turn of phrase at that moment in time) believed him.
When Chelsea returned to school, however, he noticed that a week later, people on he street were giving him a wide berth, and shooting disgusted looks at him, even when he was sober. The local off-license owner also advised his staff to stop serving him, and he was suddenly barred from the local pub, which he had helped to build. He believed it to be due to his now well-known drink problem, but discovered this wasn't the case when he decided to try and get some precious liquor from neighbouring Winhill. Even the locals, total strangers to him, were avoiding Gerry, and the landlord of a pub he'd never been in before refused to serve him, even though he was in a perfectly competent state.
The mystery was solved when he returned from that sojourn, to find Susan and Chelsea gone, and a note, explaining that Susan apparently knew that he had been repeatedly interfering with Chelsea, and she knew that, when she finally fought back against her wicked stepfather, he beat her to within an inch of her life. She had always known it wasn't a car that had injured Chelsea so bad, but she had refused to believe it until she had heard exactly what he had been doing to her little girl.
Upset and confused, Gerry had phoned Susan, and said that although he admitted beaten her in a drunken rage, he had never done anything else; he was certainly no paedophile. He could only deduce that Chelsea had said such hurtful things to get back at him for beating her. Even so, Susan refused to believe him, and told him that she had wasted seven years of her life with a depraved, alcoholic sex maniac.
Now, wrongly branded a pervert, and stuck in a council-maintained bedsit in Deling City, Gerry was lonely, and wasn't getting any younger. Although being branded a homosexual rapist and a child molester, he was definitely not a necrophiliac either. His past hidden, he decided to socialise with some of his workmates a little more. He made friends with a young lab technician Justin, who had just got together with a pretty student named Elena. He was reminded so strongly of Susan in her younger days whenever he saw her and one night, told her as much, along with telling her he wished he'd met her before she'd met Justin, and that he would give everything he owned (although it may have been very little) to spend just one night with her. He then proceeded to touch her breasts, and try to kiss her, which had warranted him a slap round the face and the remark: "I'd rather sleep with a woman," which he thought was thoroughly deserved.
What he didn't think he deserved was Justin ignoring him at work. He tried to lighten the mood with friendly jibes about his girlfriend. "Hey," he would say, "have you knocked her up yet?" or "You moving in together yet?" One day he'd asked Justin, "When's the wedding?" to which Justin, no longer able to see the funny side, replied "You know what? It's none of your fucking business!"
Soon after this incident, Justin left the city morgue for a job in Esthar, and Elena had gone with him. So that was it; he had lost everything and not even spent so much as a night with anyone since Kevin, let alone Elena.
He related this story to the residents of the morgue many times, and his colleagues, who had now all but shunned him, knew it. Perhaps, they would say, it was to bore the corpses so much, to make sure they were really dead.
Suddenly a silver drawer in the icy room rattled. Maybe his story had perked the stiffs up, Gerry thought. Which was strange, as corpses weren't ever animated.
The banging resumed, now louder than before. Maybe it was the water pipes disturbing the cabinets of dead folk. Or an earthquake. Yes, that was it. But why was only one drawer moving? He had to investigate.
Gerry tiptoed over to the offending drawer why he was sneaking around in a room full of dead people who couldn't hear him was beyond him) and slowly pulled it open.
The corpse, a fifty-year-old heart patient, was pale and drawn, exactly how Gerry expected a dead person to look. He sighed in relief and went to push the drawer closed, but as he did so, he noticed the corpse's eyes snap open, showing milky white irises, and pupils that narrowed to dark slits, which focussed on Gerry. His prey.
As a surprised Gerry looked closer at the body to investigate, and push the eyelids gently shut again, the corpse sat up, and with lightning quick reflexes, grabbed Gerry's upper arm, and crushed it so hard that the bones splintered.
Gerry screamed so loud, the cry echoed around the room, and seemed to disturb more corpses. This time the drawers began opening of their own accord, and similar bodies began sitting up. None of the living came to his aid, assuming it was "mad old Gerry going on a tirade again."
The stench was almost unbearable; it was nothing like even Gerry, used to the smell of the dead, had ever smelled before. He tried to struggle out of his assailant's grip, but the more he struggled, the tighter the creature's grip became.
Gerry began to sweat, even though the room temperature never reached above three degrees. More of these moaning, animated bodies were coming towards him. Though their approach was slow, he could not loosen the grip of the monster that had him tightly by the arm. He decided to take drastic action, and punched it in the face. However, his punch barely even marked the thing. Gerry had always been weak and weedy, and although he could beat a fourteen-year-old girl into submission, he had nothing on a dead person. He had never been good at sports, even at school, where he just sat at the back of the playing field and pissed in his gym shorts whilst the other kids ran about, threw javelins and jumped hurdle. He wished he had been more like the big boys who used to pick on him, calling him 'Smelly,' 'Pee-Wee' 'Pissy McGee' and other nasty epithets. If only he was able to get away from these… things.
The monster snapped back with its surreal expanding jaws, managing to clamp its rotten teeth around Gerry's bony wrist. Gerry struggled to get free and finally managed – minus his hand. Screaming, and with blood spurting from the stump on his arm, Gerry pulled, with a last act of desperation and rare strength, away from the thing clinging onto him. He left his arm behind, though, and yet more blood sprayed from his shoulder.
The blood seemed to make the creatures, crawling from their drawers, curious about this screaming, handless form, encouraging them to taste more, perhaps some flesh, some muscle… some brain.
These pale wan figures with a hunger for living flesh were closing in on the sad, weakening Gerry, who was becoming dizzy through lack of blood. His head was hurting and he was beginning to hallucinate. He thought he saw the door, a clear path to freedom, right in front of him… a path to salvation. It was however, just a mirage in Gerry's oxygen starved mind.
In reality, he ran straight into a bulky mass, which grabbed and tore at his torso and thighs. One creature got a hand on his genitals, and squeezed until his testicles exploded like tomatoes in a microwave.
Gerry uttered a last, ear-piercing scream, and fell to the floor, and let the hungry masses feed upon him.
His last thought was of his beautiful stepdaughter, Chelsea. "I'm sorry," he whispered as his stomach was removed from his body, several ribs snapping in the process. "I'm sorry for what I did…"
By morning there was nothing left of Gerry Crowley, just a few fragmented bones, and a lot of blood. But for this mess, the morgue was now empty…
A/N: I must apologise for this sickness of mind; I read a lot of horror books as a young teenager.