My name was Elizabeth Cadwell. And I had been dead for three years.
Well, that may be an overstatement. We medical examiners aren’t exactly known for our stellar sense of humor.
To clarify, then: My name was Elizabeth Cadwell. And I had worked at St. Bart’s morgue in London for three years.

“Elizabeth! Where’s the bloke you just brought in? The one with the mangled face?” Deadbeat, my good-for-nothing-partner-in-post-mortem (hence the nickname), called, limping forward in a stereotypical white lab coat.
“By the deep-freezer. Why?” I asked, jotting a few more notes on my clipboard, lifting up some old lawyer’s shirt to check if the lacerations listed would have been fatal. They were.
Deadbeat shrugged,
“My morgue, my rules. Thought I’d get a jump on his autopsy. Now get your gloves on.”
I did as I was told, snapping on a pair of latex gloves that don’t actually fit anyone, despite the ‘one size fits all’ label on the falsely cheery box. At this stage of my career, I had successfully defeated the initial gag reaction at copious amounts of blood, but even I had my limit, and I felt a bit of bile rise up in my throat as I uncovered our next victim. The poor sod’s face was torn up in at least ten places, like something out of Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Deadbeat made an impatient noise at the back of his throat, so I pushed the table forward until he could position the light over the man’s face, staring intently at the livid bruising. A slightly guilty smile lit up his paunchy face as he reached for his clipboard and scalpel, like a child opening his Christmas presents early. Innards, toys, same difference, really.
“Lay off the manic grin, Deadbeat,” I chastised, “You’ll scare the dead.”
Deadbeat turned his smile on me next and I backed up a step, holding out my hands in surrender.
“Am I scaring you, Queen?” he asked.
I snorted,
“I’ve seen you on the far side of inebriated with a riding crop in one hand and a poker in the other. Not much left to scare.”
“The naivety off youth,” he clucked his tongue, “you know all these dead could just rise up and eat our brains. That would be fairly terrifying.”
“And entirely impossible, you tosser. This is a morgue, not a Hitchcock film. The only thing we’re going to see rising from the graves are daises.”
I reached forward to finish de-robeing the corpse, hands on the buckle of his trousers, humming a few bars from “Staying Alive.”
Just like usual.
Well, until the mangled man on the metal slab sat up, that is.
“Elizabeth!” he cried through swollen, smiling lips, “Bloody hell, it’s good to see you. For a moment I thought they’d sent me to the wrong mortuary. My back is screaming bloody murder; don’t you get complaints about these things?”
He shot his deathbed a venomous look, then turned to me, frowning as though the pale shock on my face was something unusual when one had witnessed a dead man talking. It did make me feel slightly better, though, that Deadbeat was gawking as much as I.
“How do you know my name?” I whispered when I’d caught my breath, realizing the roaring in my ears was my own frantic heartbeat.
The zombie man blinked, then smiled roguishly, opening his arms as if to hug me in all his blood-splattered glory.
“It’s me,” he said, “Chris. Come off it, just because I look like hell doesn’t mean I’m dead.”
I checked my clipboard briefly.
“Actually, according to this, you are.”
Chris’s face fell a notch past exuberant and I felt a bit bad. I remembered Chris, now I had a name with which to decipher the mauled mass that was his face. He was the son of a banker up on Royal’s, with an inheritance worth more than all of St. Bart’s. I’d met him at a party some months back, and we were friendly enough that an impromptu visit to my morgue would not have been out of place. That is, if he’d come in without a death certificate.
“What the bloody hell is this?” Deadbeat roared from the corner he had backed himself into, “who the bloody hell are you?”
Chris raised a hand to his mouth, as if chastising himself for some terrible fault, sliding from his deathbed and executing a fluid bow that was the sole providence of the wealthy English, as absurdly embarrassing as it was predictable.
It was decidedly odd, seeing that same gesture performed by a dead man.
“Christopher Walsh,” Chris introduced himself, “A living, breathing, not-in-need-of-autopsy human.”
I sighed, deciding to cut short the waffle.
“Look, Chris, as happy as I am that you’re not here for me to cut open, it does beg the question as to why you’re here lying on a gurney, your face mince meat, sending Deadbeat one step closer to his grave.”
“I’m already Dead,” Deadbeat muttered wearily, a step away from just giving up and banging his head repeatedly against a nearby table, “And unless you want a real dead body to dissect today, Elizabeth, I’m going to leave, and not come back until you’ve dealt with your posh Zombie, is that clear?”
I tried to say something, but what can you say when a corpse comes to life, bows to you, then complains about the comfort of a metal dissection table? I didn’t blame Deadbeat in the slightest for hobbling out of the room. I only wished I could follow.

“Well that was awkward,” Chris said cheerily when Deadbeat had left the room. Looking back, I can’t help but associate his limping departure with the desperate flight of sanity from my beloved morgue. It certainly didn’t return until much later, long after I really needed it.
“He thinks I’m posh?” came next.
I rolled my eyes skyward, wondering if money did this to everyone’s priorities, or if it was just Chris.
“You bow when you introduce yourself, Chris. Fess up, you’re posh.”
He considered it for a moment, a particularly bloody gash rumpling his brow. I couldn’t avoid asking any longer,
“Chris,” I began, “Your face…quite honestly, if you’re not dead, you should be.”
Chris smiled, like an artist who’s had his ego stroked.
“You think so?” he asked happily.
“Yes I think so. Unless your girlfriend finally went through with her promise on the cheese grater.”
I winced slightly at year-old the memory of being backed up against a wall and threatened with my own cheese cutter.
Chris’s face sank in on itself, reminiscent of my cadavers in the third stage of decomposition.
“This has to do with Fray, doesn’t it?” I asked warily, naming Chris’s bat-crazy girlfriend of two years. Well, I say ‘girlfriend.’ To everyone but Chris, it was obvious she was just hoping he would drop dead someday after they married so she could pocket the inheritance.
Chris nodded.
“She’s a bloody menace, I’m telling you. I don’t know why I don’t just murder her and dump her in the Thames.”
“I think she beat you to it,” I observed dryly, “The murder, at least.”
He grinned again, and a particularly bloody gash on his left cheek split open with the effort.
“You’re probably the first person to come in here smiling,” I pointed out, the effect of what I assumed was make-up still freaking me out a bit, “now would you care to tell me why it is Deadbeat is currently having a mini heart attack in the other room?”
“Yeah, sorry about that,” he muttered, “I guess I didn’t think what it would look like to you…”
“You bloody well didn’t. If this is some sort of sick joke, I’m handing you back to Fray and giving her a cheese grater.”
“El! El, please,” Chris’s voice – and my old nickname – followed me across the autopsy room, “I need your help.”
Well. First time any of our victims had said that. First time one of them had said anything at all, come to that.
“It’s about Fray, you’re right,” he muttered, scuffing at the floor with one painfully shiny shoe, “I know you don’t like her. I need your help.”
“What do you need then, Chris?” I asked, rubbing my forehead between two fingers tiredly, wondering why I hadn’t just ordered him out yet, “And don’t say a death certificate, because even I can’t do that with a clear conscience.”
“I need you to pretend I’m just another dead guy while Fray and my brother Yale come in here. Yale told her I died in a car accident, but she insisted on seeing my body.”
“Fabulous,” I replied dryly, “and why couldn’t you have just broken up with her like any normal person? And don’t lie to me Chris. Deadbeat is hyperventilating in the other room and I think my compliance with whatever barmy scheme you’ve cooked up is at least worth the truth.”
For a moment I thought he would risk it, but he proved himself smarter than I had thought, simply running a hand through his matted hair as though the world was all against him.
“She proposed,” he said finally, as though pronouncing his death sentence.
“So? Say no.”
A sheepish grin. I revised my previous opinion of his intellect.
“You didn’t.”
“I did,” he said guiltily.
“You git. Tell her it’s off.”
“I tried!” he burst out, striding around the morgue with more energy than the dismal building had seen in god knows how long, “she just simpers at me and turns those eyes on me and tells me she loves me so much, and I love her too, don’t I?”
“You don’t,” I said bluntly.
“I don’t,” he echoed.
“I fail to see the problem.”
“The problem is that I’m a bloody coward.”
I considered for a moment. I had seen Fray take down armed bouncers using nothing but nail polish the color of curdled blood and lipstick to match. I had also seen Chris run away from spiders the size of my toe ring. Stranger things might happen than him falling in the face of her temper. Charting the problem to the current state of affairs proved a more difficult undertaking.
“And how does this all add up to you dead on a slab?” I inquired. Chris shrugged,
“It was the best option my brother Yale and I came up with.”
“What was the worst?”
I wondered if I dared know.
“Where do you think I got the body dump in the Thames from?”
I punched him on the arm, resolving to do the same to Yale when next I saw him. Honestly, killing people was not a fix-all solution, no matter how convenient it might be.
“There had to be something you could think of that didn’t involve death,” I almost pleaded, my exasperation and annoyance surfacing at last.
He shrugged, a little smirk tugging disgustingly at his mangled mouth.
“It’s surprisingly cheaper to kill yourself than it is to stop a woman from marrying you.”
I punched him again. It seemed to be becoming a habit, but I really couldn’t be bothered. I mean, really, who kills themselves then invites their homicidal girlfriend along for an impromptu wake?
“Oh, by the way” Chris piped up guiltily, scattering my thoughts, “she’ll be here in ten minutes, just so you know.”
For a moment I thought fondly about just shoving Chris out the door and letting him wander about London for a bit looking like a zombie from hell, but my heart’s always been too soft for my own good. I wished suddenly that Deadbeat had stayed; he would have had no qualms whatsoever with tossing the dead man out onto the streets.
“Kindness is going to kill me one of these days,” I murmured to myself. Then Chris’s expectant, puppy-dog eyes caught mine, and I gave up. Who was I kidding?
“I’ll do it,” I admitted, wondering what I’d gotten myself into.
Chris’s face lost a year in his relief, and I let out a frustrated sigh. Screw Chris, I was the idiot, for letting this farce continue.

The next ten minutes were spent in companionable silence as I had tea with a dead man and the dead man regaled me with tales of his girlfriend who, quite honestly, would have been the cause of his death as soon as they were legally wed – and she had legal access to his money.
He did, of course, inquire as to Deadbeat's name, leading eventually to a prolonged discussion about the validity of morticians referring to themselves as 'Dead,’ which I won by the simple expedite of threatening to tell Fray the truth if he didn’t agree with me. He shut up rather quickly after that.
Nine minutes later I helped Chris back onto his deathbed, warning him to keep still and silent, preferably not breath too loudly, look too peaky, crack any jokes, smile, punch anyone, or roll off the table. The ungrateful pillock asked me if he could breath at all, and I replied he would be doing the world a favor by abstaining as far as possible. We were still bickering when Fray and Yale came in, and they caught the tail end of my retort:
“…hit you over the head with Grey’s Anatomy. And trust me, that will not be pleasant.”
“Excuse me?”
I whirled around, staring straight into the gorgeous, malicious, face of Fray Badellechi, flanked by Chris’s brother.
Bollocks.
“Hello,” I smiled with false cheeriness, stepping in front of Chris’s “corpse” to disguise the fact that he had been laughing a moment before, “May I help you?”
“Hello, Ms. Cadwell. I’m Christopher Walsh’s brother. This is his girlfriend, Fray.” Yale said smoothly, keeping up the pretense we had never met when I had, in fact, managed to drunkenly hit on him during one of Chris’s ridiculous parties.
“Yale?” I confirmed in Chris’s file for images’ sake, holding out my hand to shake. His grip was warm and comforting, more vigorous than manners dictated: a silent thanks for not throwing his brother out on his ears. I should have, too, if I were any sane person.
“Yes. I’m so sorry to trouble you, but…well, you know how grief is. It has its own agenda,” he said emotionally, letting out a sigh that was just this side of too dramatic, and I covered my mouth to hide the beginnings of a snort.
“Yes, it’s a tragedy” I muttered, with as much conviction as I could muster, hoping I wouldn’t blow the entire thing by laughing, an all-too real prospect if Yale continued with his maudlin sighs.
Fray, apparently deciding some display of grief on her part was called for, emerged from her position behind Yale, ignoring me completely as she sobbed out:
“I can’t believe it. I can’t believe he’s dead.”
She covered her eyes with slender, perfectly manicured hands, burying her face in Yale’s chest and sobbing as though the world had ended. Or someone had broken a teacup; you never knew with those sorts.
Yale rolled his eyes at the woman clinging to him, mouthing 'she’s after me next,’ over her head, and I couldn’t help but giggle into my palm.
Eventually Fray’s sobs trailed off into a depressed wheezing and she wiped her eyes of imaginary tears. I saw Yale’s massively relieved expression as he pried the woman’s hands off his lapels and almost felt sorry for him.
Almost.
“Pardon me, Ms. Cadwell,” Fray said shakily after checking her hair to make sure none if it had escaped its perfectly symmetrical blond-dyed bun, “I’m afraid my sorrow’s left me something of a mess.”
I nodded in sympathy, checking behind me to assure that Chris was thinking Opossum-y thoughts on his metal slab before stepping aside and allowing Fray to see him. He was holding his breath, I noted, pleased to see he seemed to have at least grasped the concept that dead people don’t move. I wouldn’t have put it past him to start giggling again, the idiot.
Sadly for Chris’s newfound sagacity, the average human can only go for about 40 seconds without air before it gets seriously uncomfortable. Chris wasn’t an Olympic swimmer or anything, so after about 30 seconds I could see the slight rise of his chest as it inflated with air again and the dead man breathed. Fray – unfortunately more observant than she looked – squeaked and stepped back, pointing one ridged finger at her one-time fiancé’s corpse.
“What was that?” she asked shakily, “I saw…he breathed, Yale, darling, you saw that, didn’t you? He breathed!”
“Relax,” I held up my hands pacifying, trying desperately to think of something intellectual-sounding enough to be believable, “It’s nothing. During decomposition, the tissues in the body break down and produce gas. Sometimes some of the gas leaks into the lungs and can cause periodic inflation that mimics breathing patterns. I’m sorry, but he’s dead. If it’s distressing I can show you out.”
Damn, I would have made a good conman. Conwoman. Whatever.
“No,” Fray replied, brave-faced. She carefully positioned herself so Yale had an unobstructed view of her ‘brave face,’ “I want to say goodbye.”
I backed up, giving them a little privacy, as seemed polite, praying to whatever twisted God there might be above or below that Chris wouldn’t mess it up.
I really should have known better, thinking God might ever venture down here.
Halfway through what was obviously a very heartfelt, completely bogus, speech by Fray – spoken more to Yale than to Chris’s body, I was amused to see – I heard a great snort from the table, followed by a snarl of ‘Oh, for the love of God.’
That was when it all went to hell. Semi-literally.
Fray screamed, pressing herself onto Yale, who fell backwards at the unexpected weight, tumbling onto Chris, who let out a great huff and something that rhymed with ‘floody ditch,’ arms pin-wheeling up to knock the light around, hot from hours on high power, where it careened into Fray’s face who, in turn, screamed bloody murder once for the burn, twice when she saw the fake blood Chris’s face had spread over her hands. She fled from the room sobbing for real, cursing Yale and Chris, and me once she got around to it, her perfect hair losing a thread. I waved her out with a cheery smile and a friendly ‘Ta!’ which I wasn’t sure she heard. Well, no one can say I didn’t try.
Chris, gormless idiot that he is, just stared back, smirking.
Yale was a bit more subdued, but only a bit, the relief on his face a palpable force.
Out of respect, and whatever good will I had left in my Dead heart, I gave them a few moments to recover from the shock, counting to ten in my head before letting loose with all I had:
“You blooming bloody idiots; are you really that gormless, you bloody tossers?! Go stuff yourselves you bloody nancy boys the pair of you! Smarmy little wankers! You – “
I trailed off, punctuating each word with a hard slap to shoulder or head – including the punch I had promised Yale in my head earlier – absolutely furious now that I was allowed to be, my rural English heritage surfacing. Chris and Yale, bloody eejits that they are, just smirked. When I ran out of words, Yale let out a little laugh,
“That was possibly the most horrendously British insult I have ever heard. I believe congratulations are in order.”
I stared mutinously at the pair of them.
Chris, at least, had the decency to look abashed.
Yale just looked elated at having the simpering woman off his shoulder.
“Dinner Elizabeth?” he asked me, holding out an arm like the ridiculously antiquated gentleman he is, apparently determined to act as though the preceding afternoon had never happened. I contemplated telling him to go stuff it again, but my stomach roared in protest.
“Better be somewhere good,” I muttered, looping my hand through his and allowing myself to be led away, “You’ve me to thank for your little plot’s success.”
“Thank God in heaven for that,” Yale agreed fervently, just as Chris murmured,
“Thank the Devil and death.”

My name is Elizabeth Walsh, and I’ve been Dead for four years.
I’ve seen corpses rise from the grave and a woman with money signs and malice for a brain.
And I’m honestly not sure which scared me more.