Free Undead Much by Stacey Jay

chicken.”
      “Because morgues are creepy and the smell is seriously disturbing?”
      I managed a tiny laugh. “I thought I was imagining how bad the smell was.”
      “No way, it’s awful.” He smiled before turning to peek through the door in front of us.
      I saw bright fluorescent lights and clean white walls and caught a whiff of coffee mixed with the dead chemical smell. I couldn’t decide if that made it better or worse, but at least it reminded me that there were living people down here. People who would have to be dealt with if we wanted to get our information.
      “Okay, what’s our story again? We’re college kids doing a report for our cultural anthropology class?”
      “Yeah, let me grab a notebook and pen from your backpack so we’ll look official.” He closed the door and turned me around so he could get to the zipper of my bag.
      “Get me one too,” I said, though I wondered if I’d even be able to hold a pen with the amount of palm sweat I was presently producing. “And shouldn’t we have a thesis or something in case they ask?”
      “Like what?”
      “I don’t know, like, Investigating Rituals of Death in the Twenty-first Century?”
      “Did I ever tell you how totally hot it is when you get all smartypants?” Ethan finished digging around in my backpack and handed me a notebook and pen.
      I smiled. “Not as many times as you told me you love that stupid hat.”
      “That hat is not stupid. It’s sexy.” He leaned down to kiss me, which was great for a second. But then I started to get this weird feeling… like someone was watching. Everything was quiet and I hadn’t heard a door open or close, but the certainty that we weren’t alone quickly grew so strong I thought I’d go crazy if I didn’t check for peeping creeps.
      “Sorry.” I pulled away and glanced up. Nothing. There was no one there. But still, the feeling we weren’t alone didn’t go away. Maybe I was suffering from paranoid delusions as well as profuse palm sweat.
      “Is something wrong?”
      “No… my lips were just cold,” I said, not wanting him to think I was chickening out again.
      “Oh, okay.” Ethan looked a little hurt, but shrugged like it was no big deal. “I’m sorry. I should have made you take my coat. Here, take it now.”
      “No, it’s fine. It’s just my lips.”
      “Megan, take my coat.”
      “No, really, it’s-”
      “Take the stupid coat,” he said, loud enough I was afraid someone would hear. Great, now he was mad at me. Geez. Sometimes it seemed like things between us were easier before we threw all the kissy stuff into the mix.
      “Fine.” I ditched my backpack, put on his brown corduroy jacket-which did feel good and smelled yummily of Ethan-and then grabbed the pack off the ground. “Ready?”
      “Let’s go.” Ethan opened the door for me, but he still didn’t look happy. I was going to have to make it up to him by proving how addictive I found his kisses… later, in all my spare time, when I wasn’t trying to avoid going to jail.
      We found the front-desk guy within a few minutes of easing into the blindingly white hall. The morgue was a lot smaller than I’d thought it would be, even though I knew Little Rock had a lot of hospitals and they each had their own cold storage. It wasn’t like the university morgue had to be big enough to handle all the stiffs in town.
      Though that sure would have made it easier. If there were one central holding area, we wouldn’t have had to worry about investigating five or six different hospitals trying to figure out where the weird zombies had come from. That is, if they had even come from a hospital and we weren’t on some kind of wild goose chase.
      “Hey, we’re students from Williams and were hoping we could ask a few questions.” Ethan quickly filled the skinny guy at the desk in on our cover story and asked if there was someone around who might