Heartless Read Free

fact that I wasn’t was, simply put, terrifying.
    I’m dead. Dead people don’t escape the morgue because they’re dead.
    It was absurd, but I was afraid to laugh, afraid another terrible moan might escape. Instead I took a deep breath, pulling air into lungs that didn’t need it, and stepped over the threshold. The door slammed shut behind me.
    Once again, what I faced was nothing like what I expected, with as much of a passing thought as I devoted to any one thing in those first moments. I expected to find myself in a hospital basement. I expected to find stairs leading to a waiting room, or a nurses’ station, or somewhere, anywhere, that I could find help.
    Instead, I stood in a snowdrift on a blinding, sunny winter’s day. I was outside, somewhat sheltered by an overhanging roof, but not at all in a sterile hospital wing. There were stairs in front of me, leading down to more than a foot of snow. I stopped in my tracks and spun around.
    Behind me, framing the door I’d just exited, stood a small, innocent-looking mountain cabin. I happened to be standing on its quaint, downright picturesque front porch, in a snowdrift that had blown in from a storm. The wooden banisters were well-covered with white, and there was evidence of a welcome mat beneath my toes. A cozy-looking wooden swing hung on my right, rocking slowly back and forth in the gentle breeze.
    That was when I realized I was really in trouble. Waking up inside a normal morgue was bad enough; waking up in a morgue in a quaint little mountain cabin was something else entirely. I swallowed a mouthful of nothing, not even saliva, and I reopened the front door to make sure I hadn’t dreamed up the whole thing. But there it was, the morgue, complete with cadaver cabinets and dead girls on tables. Naked dead girls on tables, I noted. Whatever had happened to me, and to them, hadn’t just been your average snowy-mountain accident. Because that was no average, snowy-mountain morgue.
    I shuddered, and reached up my arms to hold myself together. I realized, then, that I was naked too, just like the girls on the tables, which led to my next realization: even though the breeze blew frozen snow particles through the air around me, I wasn’t cold. At all. I wasn’t shivering, I didn’t quite feel the breeze’s bite, and I couldn’t see my breath. Probably because I wasn’t breathing. Again.
    I wanted to throw up, but my body didn’t seem able to cooperate so instead I just opened my mouth and made a pathetic attempt at gagging. Nothing happened. So I decided it was probably time to go, since leaving felt more productive than standing there, waiting for something to happen. Inside the morgue, I’d noticed a giant snow parka hanging on a hook beside the door, less than three feet away. I walked inside one last time, grabbed it, and yanked it over my arms. It was a reflex gesture, a reaction to being naked and exposed and not wanting to run without something covering me up. The coat was long, reaching almost to my feet. Outside again I zipped it up with a yank. Terror bubbled up again as I stared at my feet, bare beneath the parka, toes touching the icy snow. They weren’t cold either. They were fine, cozy, even as I stood barefoot in a snow bank.
    This is wrong. Bad. All that money I’ve spent on shoes…
    I ran. I didn’t know what else to do.
    I ran through the snow, through the forest, down the face of one mountain and up the face of another. I ran blindly, not paying any attention to where I came from or where I was going. It was a panicked run. There was no sense of reason or rationale left anywhere in me. I ran from the morgue, from the devastating absence of feeling I remembered in my fingers and toes. I ran from the grim sense that I was in the worst danger of my life.
    As I ran, and as roots and rocks hidden in the knee-deep snow tripped me up and sent me tumbling, and as branches grabbed at my face and coat, I tried figure out what could be going