She resigned herself to just sitting there. Waiting. Breathing.

Existing.

It was still a pleasant surprise that she was alive. Alive, despite being trapped in a morgue, and in a room coated with death, the old muted odor of it still clinging to the walls much like she herself had done. She’d used the wall as a guide, clinging to it for safety like some nocturnal animal. Her excursions away from it led her to some unfortunate discoveries, like the drain in the middle of the room, and the single large weight-bearing post that led up to a large metal operating table.

But she was sure that it had been cleaned and sterilized. It had to have been. She was so certain that she gritted her teeth and ran her hand over it, hoping to find some tool that might help either defend her, or open the door. But if she’d used that same rationale of the table being clean and sterilized, then what was she looking for?

Paint cans.

They were full. Heavy. She had picked one up, swinging it gently by the wire handle, considering its effectiveness as a weapon. If the door eventually opened and her attacker entered, whoever he was, she would at least have something waiting for him. Or would she be better off opening the lid and splashing paint into his face, into his eyes? Would that blind him?

She had time to think it over.

After an hour of sitting back against the wall—or what felt like an hour—she tried her luck with the door again. She felt up along the door, searching for the handle. It jerked stiffly in her hand, moving only fractions of an inch. She shook it harder. Maybe something would move the latch if she rattled it.

Nothing moved. It all felt so rigid and fixed in place. So she just tried the obvious, gripping the handle with both hands and shaking as hard as she could, the door rattling in its frame. It stayed firmly in place. Locked. From the outside. When the rattling got too loud, she forced herself to back away in defeat.

It was better to be anonymously locked in somewhere. It was better to stay undiscovered in the dark. Alive in the dark.

She walked blindly, slowly, brushing around and past the operating table, to a long metal countertop that ran the length of the far wall. Above the bench were metal cupboards. Empty cupboards. She tried them all, swinging open the doors, feeling inside, and then leaving the doors open while she moved on to the next set. When she ran out of cupboards to check, she lowered her hands back down to the countertop, feeling all the way across its empty, dusty surface, until her hand bumped over a rubbery mat, and then knocked into some piece of plastic. A computer mouse. And then another, much larger piece of plastic, a keyboard, her hand dragging across, fingertips softly thudding over the keys. And then it was back to the blank metal countertop. And then a wall. Another wall. It was as good as any to turn her back against and slide down to the ground. It didn’t quite matter where she was, so long as it wasn’t on top of the operating table—or any other in the near future.

She’d done enough blind searching, enough wandering and hoping. There was enough dirt and whatever other disgusting remnants caked on her hands. She rubbed them together in the dark, feeling the dusty, oily grime, hoping to at least shed some before resorting to wiping it onto her pants.

It took six wipes across her pants before she was satisfied enough to just sit there and wait. Just waiting. Not even thinking. She didn’t bother thinking about how, if there weren’t some attacker out there, she could find something heavy to bang against the door. She’d already made enough noise with the door rattling. If she were sure he wasn’t still out there, she could scream at the top of her lungs. Maybe scream down the floor drain, something loud enough to motivate a rat to go scurrying for help like some carrier pigeon. A smart, helpful rat. It could do its best Lassie impression, finding Jasper, and then playing charades until Jasper could respond with, “What? Fiona’s stuck in Autopsy Room 5 down at the morgue?”

Fiona forced herself to stop thinking about rats. There were a lot of things she was trying to ignore, but as she sat there on the floor in the dark, rats were suddenly at the top of her list.

What if one tried scurrying behind her along the wall and got tangled up in her shirt?

Fuck . . .

What if one really did find Jasper and tell him exactly where she was? And then he’d come and bust down the door, grab her off the floor, and haul her straight into a hot shower somewhere.

A shower.

He could help her clean up the grime. He could help with everything.

* * *

The lights flickered on and off.

She wasn’t sure if that was part of the dream.

Then came the sounds, the rattling and buzzing. More flicking of the lights until they stayed on in a single, solid glare. The florescent ceiling panels illuminating every inch of what was once so mysterious and elusive, an empty autopsy room. It revealed the true dimensions, the architecture, everything accounted for. The operating table, the long countertop with the open cupboard doors. And the computer. She wasn’t brave enough to push open the door and see if anyone was still on the other side, but perhaps she could get help another way.

She stood and pushed off the wall, walking quickly toward an old desktop computer. A big white monitor was stacked on top of a horizontal computer case. There was a keyboard, a mouse, and a whole mess of wires. It took her a few minutes to attach everything correctly, especially finding the wall outlet for the ethernet cable. She let the machine boot up while she continued her search.

So what was she going to do?

Send an email?

If she could log into the hospital website, there was a customer relations live chat available. She could open that, get a receptionist on the line, and go from there.

She thought over the words she would use, how she’d describe the situation, what room she was in. A gross fucking autopsy room.

“Listen, I’m in this fucking room. And there’s this fucking guy . . .”

Slow down . . .

And did she really need to curse so much?

Right when Fiona had it all figured out, a bunch of words flashed onto the computer screen. It looked like . . .

Fuck!

It looked like gibberish. A command-line interface she’d never used before.

There was a blinking cursor. And a question.

She relaxed slightly, seeing that it was just a login screen. She’d used one every day at the nurses’ station. It was a different interface, but she could always just try her usual login and password.

Fiona typed in her name and then pressed the tab key to move the cursor to the password box, where she typed in 7cherrycola7.

She pressed enter.

The screen blinked away for a millisecond, only to return with another text-filled screen.

It might not be as simple as she had thought, starting a chat, sending an email. Anything. She was probably better off down the drain pipe with her rescue rat.

She scrolled through her options, most of it still sounding like gibberish, when she came upon another login screen. This time it was for something called Environment. Temperature controls for the morgue. And then she remembered something Jasper had told her about their cybersecurity efforts, and how access points were being live monitored.

So if she could pretend she was a hacker . . .

That was giving herself too much credit.

But if she could at least keep failing the login process with wrong passwords, it might at least raise some red flags upstairs.

What else was there to do?

Fiona mashed the keys and failed the login as many times as she could, over and over again until her fingers started cramping. Almost sinking to the floor in tears, she forced her fingers to move again, typing out one last word.