Chapter 3
Landon switched off the light in his office and called it a day. His work here didn’t keep him as busy as his duties in the hospital, but he still sometimes needed to put in a late night. He guessed the discrepancy in the workload between the morgue and the main hospital was normal, whether he worked in a small town or in a large city. The number of people who needed medical care always outnumbered those who needed a spot in a morgue. That was, of course, for an obvious reason. Dead people didn’t know what they needed anymore. And those who ended up in the morgue usually didn’t have relatives or anyone who cared for them.
This was the first time he had received a body from an active crime scene. Not that there wasn’t any deadly crime occurring in the area. Sometimes criminals even used small towns just outside the city as dump sites for bodies. But since the town was only forty minutes’ drive from Melbourne city, the bodies from cases that involved the central police would usually be transported straight into the city.
He sighed and thought of the dead female body from the B&B. He had never seen anything like it before. The body was half changed between a human and some kind of furry animal. It was lucky they called him first instead of the central police.
The B&B owners had abandoned the premises, left the keys to Jasmine, and fled the town. He couldn’t blame them.
When Beatrice called him, she told him the half-animal was a form of werewolf.
He was a paranormal empathizer, but he had his limits. His knowledge of and sympathy toward the paranormal pretty much came from all the supernatural novels he had read and movies he had watched.
He’d never seen anything paranormal in real life.
Beatrice and Jasmine had been telling him they were witches. He took their word for it. He’d seen Beatrice perform some magic tricks. But he had to admit, he couldn’t tell the difference between the magic she did and what he saw when he went to the circus. If Jasmine claimed her meals were magic, that was something he would definitely believe. But apart from that, the paranormal community they’d mentioned, the one they said would need his support, had existed only in fiction.
But now, the paranormal world was as real as it could get.
As he reached the end of the corridor and was about to exit to the car park, he heard a crash from the morgue. He knew the dead weren’t responsible for it because he was quite sure they had no need of what he had in there. But it wouldn’t be the first time some junkies from the city broke into a medical center to steal meds. Landon would rather deal with paranormal creatures, whatever they might be, than addicts once the drugs took control of them.
He did what he thought he would never do in a situation like this—he returned to the morgue.
“No cash or drugs are kept here if that’s what you’re looking for …”
A large shadow standing in the darkness turned toward him. The light switch conveniently chose that moment not to work for him, and the only reason he saw the large shadow was because of the dim light from the medical equipment and the temperature control panel.
To Landon, the shadow looked more ape than human, over six feet tall and bulky. He backed up toward the door from which he had entered, hoping to make a getaway, but it had slammed shut behind him.
A dead body in a bag draped over the shoulder of the ape-shaped shadow.
“Look, if you want to take this one, help yourself—I don’t think the dead care. I don’t know who you are, and I won’t tell anyone about this. I didn’t see a thing. Okay?”
He tugged at the handle of the door again. It didn’t budge.
The shadow lay the body down onto a bench.
Then it charged at him. Landon had no firsthand experience of being hit by a truck. But he knew this was what it must feel like. His body was slammed into the wall so hard he could hear his bones rattle. Then he dropped to the cold cement floor.
A quick mental medical examination of himself told him that he might have a broken rib or two, and his left shoulder was dislocated. But he knew his head and neck was still attached to his shoulders. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be able to think right now.
He couldn’t move or speak to negotiate with the attacker. His body wasn’t obeying him. Maybe staying silent and playing dead was a better strategy. Or maybe he was dead.
He lay still, his eyes closed, and heard the clanking sound of his metal mortician’s tools being dropped into a plastic bag. It didn’t take too much thought on his part to know it was a body bag.
Whoever was in the room was trying to steal a body and all his medical equipment.
He pressed his eyes shut and kept still until consciousness left him.