Blood Money

I wake up and the first thing I do is scream.

They don’t hear me, though, for two reasons: One, I am upstairs in the bathroom, while they’re in the basement, and two, this entire house is soundproof (as they later explain to me.) Why an embalmer would bother making his house soundproof, I have no idea, and I’m almost certain I don’t want to know.

It seems I’ve forgotten how to use my voice as I lift my gaze from the white ceiling and let a shaky guttural noise escape from my throat. I’m in a bathroom. I’m naked and I’m in cream-colored bathtub full of freezing, bloody water produced by hundreds of melting ice cubes. I scream again.

My limbs are wild, causing me to scramble and slip as I try to escape this morbid bath. Climbing over the edge of a ceramic tub proves to be more arduous than one might think, especially in my apparent weakened state. I feel like I haven’t moved a muscle in weeks as I inch my slippery, bloody body over the rim and flop onto the cold tile floor like a disgusting slug.

A normal person’s first reaction to waking up in this predicament would probably be mortification at the sight of blood. Who’s blood is this? Is this my blood? Am I hurt? Am I dying? And maybe my first step into this mass hysteria of the sociopathic ideology surrounding the human black market was just that—that it wasn’t my first reaction.

Instead, my first reaction after I slide out of the bloody ice water and try to collect my rabid thoughts is to reach up and gingerly feel my head. My dark, course hair is cut short. Like, above the ear short. I don’t remember it being that way. In fact, it’s the only thing I remember, and suddenly I’m faced with an even bigger problem than, “Where the hell am I?”

I am confronted by the fact that I don’t remember a thing. I don’t know who I am, I don’t know how I got here or what I’m doing here, and I certainly don’t know why the fuck I just woke up in a bloody ice bath, but all of a sudden, I’m shaking from the cold that has swiftly impaired me and impeded upon my naked body. I need to get out of here. I need to find someone. I need to—I need—

I can’t even finish the thought as I attempt to stand up and immediately fall to the ground again. Something tells me I haven’t used my motor functions in a while.

With some coaxing and exercising, I manage to stand up successfully, though I’m completely reliant on supporting myself by means of anything stable within my reach. (In this case, it’s the wall.)

I open the bathroom door and observe my surroundings. I’m in a house, that much is certain. A two story house with dark wood paneling that looks like it hasn’t been renovated since the 70’s. I am about to investigate down the hall when I hear the roar of a motor of some sort coming from downstairs, like a chainsaw or an electric meat carver. In retrospect, it must have been one loud contraption if I was able to hear it through these supposed soundproof walls. Or maybe I just didn’t scream as loud as I thought I did.

Anyway, these possibilities don’t phase me somehow, so I slowly climb downstairs, hanging onto the banister for dear life, and I look around the bottom-most floor, discovering a large room with a high ceiling. There are folding chairs placed along a small aisle in the middle of the room, in front of a giant empty casket.

I’m in a funeral home.

Well, that answers one question, though another mystery surfaces as I return to what appears to be a sitting room, where an outdated television set—the kind with dials instead of buttons—is on, playing the evening news.

“Officials report that ten victims from the six car pileup on I-95 that occurred just last Tuesday, have gone missing.”

There’s something about this story that tells me I should listen.

“The victims, nine deceased and one comatose, were being held at Regency Hospital in Florence, when they were reported missing from—”

His handsome voice is interrupted by the same electric sound from before coming in through a door to my right.

The cellar.

Now, any normal person in this situation would run, scream for help, or get out of this place as fast as they could. But nothing about any of this is even slightly normal, so why bother changing it now? Instead, I stand in the doorway in front of the musty, old stairs, and begin to trudge down, hoping to God I won’t slip and fall as the watery blood slides down my neck, over my protruding spine, and splatters onto the creaky wooden steps.

When I arrive at the bottom of the landing, there are two people hunched over a table with their backs towards me. This room is spotless, eerily white, and well-lit. There are multitudes of scary-looking tools and jars of questionable substances lining shelves upon shelves across the walls.

I am marveling at it all when one person turns around, showing me the palest skin I’ve ever seen. I don’t have time to observe anything else about him as I stand there, freezing cold and dripping wet, because before I can utter a single word, his eyebrows raise in surprise—not that I’m bloody or stark naked with no shame, but that I’m alive.

His voice is deep when he speaks.

“We got a walker.”

He says it as if this isn’t the first time it’s happened. This makes the person beside him turn around, too, and before I know it, I am face to face with Ruby Ranson for the first time. The first thing I notice about her are her dark eyes, such a rich, deep brown, that they appear almost black. I knew I was in trouble just then.

My gaze reaches behind them, down at the table they were previously facing, and suddenly, there are much more pressing matters at hand, because there, on the sterile metal, lies the remnants of a meat-colored corpse, with yards of their stretched out skin hanging and drying on the wall.

And I faint.