Free Undead Much by Stacey Jay Page A

be willing to talk to us.
      “Someone like who?” he asked, picking at a dry piece of skin on the side of his nose. The guy looked bored out of his mind, not a condition I would have thought applied in his kind of work. But then again, I got tired of my job sometimes, and I work with the dead. And my dead people walk and talk and are generally far more interesting than your average corpse.
      “Like, maybe a morgue supervisor,” I said. “Someone who knows everything that goes down around here.”
      “That would be Dr. Blackmon, but he’s not here today.”
      “Oh… well is there anyone else who could help us? We only need a few minutes,” Ethan said with his most charming grin. Too bad bored skinny guy-Caleb, according to his name tag-didn’t seem to respond to charm.
      But maybe he’d respond to a little excitement injected into his humdrum life.
      “Anyone who’s been here in the past few days would work. We just need someone who might be able to explain all the weird stuff that’s been happening.” I did my best to ignore the scowl on Ethan’s face. Sure, this wasn’t the plan, but sometimes a girl had to improvise.
      “Weird stuff?” Caleb perked up. Not much, but at least he stopped harvesting dead skin from his nose. Ew much? Someone should have taught him peeling dead skin was an activity best done in private before he reached his twenties.
      “Yeah, we heard there’s been some issues with the bodies,” I said vaguely.
      I couldn’t get too specific since I had no idea if the zombies I’d worked the spell on last night returned to this morgue or not-if they had come from a morgue at all. The reverto spell was intended to send a corpse back to the person who had raised it for a quick bite and from there back to its grave. So I wasn’t sure where the RCs would go if they had been morgue residents and not in possession of graves just yet. If they hadn’t headed back to their lockers here at UMC, missing bodies would certainly be weird.
      But even if they had, surely someone would have noticed that one of them had singed pajamas and that all of their feet were filthy from tromping about in the forest and-
      No shoes! The zombies last night hadn’t been wearing shoes. Duh, I should have thought about that before, but I’d been so focused on the pajamas that their feet hadn’t crossed my mind. I’d seen a couple Unsettled who were buried in their PJs in my time, but every Out-of-Grave Phenomenon I’d gotten a close look at had sported some kind of footwear. People didn’t like to bury their loved ones without shoes, even if it’s just a pair of bunny slippers.
      I was going to have to share this new clue with Ethan ASAP.
      “I haven’t heard about anything out of the ordinary around here, but…” Caleb narrowed his eyes and leaned a bit closer. “But there’s definitely something going on upstairs. There were policemen all over the hospital today.”
      “Really?” Ethan asked. I could tell he was excited, but trying not to show it.
      “Yeah, there wasn’t a pastry left in the cafeteria by lunch. Not even a stale bear claw. I thought that stuff about cops and donuts was just some stupid stereotype, but it’s totally true. I had to have a nonfat yogurt for dessert. It was disgusting.” He sniffed, and his eyes became distant and unfocused as he slipped into deep thought mode. “I think it might have been expired, but the date was rubbed off the label so I couldn’t be sure.”
      God, this guy was fascinating. Snore. Time to get him back on track. “So what were they doing here, besides scarfing down sugar-coated carbs?” I asked. “Did you talk to any of them? Did they ask you any questions?”
      “No, they weren’t interested in talking to the basement dwellers.” Caleb sighed and returned to his skin picking. “And no one at my table knew what they were up to. It’s being kept very hush-hush, though, so it must be