Death of Connor Sanderson: Chap 1:Part 4.

Chapter One: Part 4.
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“Sanderson, you are...” Sir John blinked as though a pistol shot had startled him. “...late.” He darted a puzzled glance towards the closed door before finding Connor's face once more.

The apology for being late died on his lips as he struggled to decipher the scene unfolding. Connor absorbed Sir John’s open-mouthed, shocked expression, and as a static hum of alarm ionised the air, tingling though his nerve endings, he realized...he didn’t see me move.
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Sir John’s puzzled air persisted. A bouquet of iron and sugar swelled to fill the spaces left inside Connor's brain that were not yet cramped with his own fear, and this time he realized the pounding, accelerated heart rate that vibrated through his ribcage like a bass drum...is not mine. It is Sir John’s.

“Oh! I didn't see you standing there, Sanderson.” Sir John’s brows were undecided as his face fought to smother his unsettled reaction, and rediscover his usual quiet authority. Clearing his throat, Sir John started again, injecting disapproval in to his tone once more. “What happened last night?”

I wish I knew. Connor stiffened, “In what regard, Sir John?”

“I charged you with tagging Mr. Donahue, and arranging for his delivery to the teaching hall in readiness for my lecture first thing this morning. And, you were to choose a specimen of your own for dissection. It would appear that you managed to achieve neither one.” Sir John rose up out of his seat, meeting Connor’s carefully neutral regard with a spark of disappointment in his brown eyes. “My teaching hall is still empty. So, what happened?”

“My apologies...” Connor ran through his own recollection. Descending the stone stairwell down into the morgue was a clear image now that Sir John's words had stirred the mire of his thoughts. “...I'll go now, and remedy the situation.”

Ten minutes later, Connor was re-enacting the lost hours of last night. Walking with a determined stride down the stone steps in to the bowels of the hospital, muttering the incantation that had seeped into his brain like a dim recollection of a childhood playground chant. “Mr. Donahue, and one for you.” He remembered it now. It was all that had kept him awake. I was literally dead on my feet, and longing to fall into my cot and sleep as soon as this was done.

Connor arrived at the basement level and the dusting of quartz-fragments in the stone floor distracted him as a scattering of sparks. He hastily hooded his gaze as a shower of needle-sharp pinpricks of light stabbed at his eyeballs, imprinting bright dots on to his retina. Staring straight ahead this time, he drove forward and shouldered the rubber-sealed door to the morgue open, recoiling as, instead of the sucker-like resistance he was accustomed to, it swung back, cracked into the tiled wall, and a shower of annihilated porcelain hit the floor.

His palm moulded to the cold tiles as he leaned around the door to inspect the crater of crumbling ceramic fragments and he snatched it away as if an electric shock had jerked through him. The cold tiles were warm. I'm going crazy. Connor expelled a deliberate breath, and, when there was no reassuring plume of warm vapor fogging the air and warming his cheek, the muscle in his jaw ticked as fear gripped the back of his neck.

His foot tapped out the rhythm of his agitation as his muscle fibres locked tight, and he resisted the urge that shrieked through his brain...RUN AWAY.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he muttered.

Using his eyes as a scouting party, he scanned the room. Running slowly down one wall, his glance touched briefly on each cadaver chamber door, and finally took in the snowy landscapes of the white linen-draped corpses. His silent footfall followed the path as he steeled himself to walk slowly across the slick ceramic tiled floor, avoiding the slippery trough of the terracotta gulleys in which a copper-colored stain meandered like the shed skin of a bizarre boa constrictor.

He flipped back the hem of the sheet on the eighth body in the row. “Bingo,” he whispered as he read the toe tag. “Mr. Donahue.” So, I had found him...then what?

Connor’s features tightened, whitening his cheekbones as he concentrated on chasing down that elusive memory. He idly plucked at the toe tag, the back of his fingers brushing Mr. Donahue’s foot, and then, he froze. He pressed his hand more firmly against the hard, cold flesh.Not cold? His harsh intake of breath hung in the air as a taunting whisper as Connor whipped his hand away and folded it into a fist. No...how can I be colder!

The gasped breath was trapped inside his chest as panic slammed his vocal chords shut, and the lump in his aching throat swelled like cotton gauze dipped in water. Connor waited for his brainstem to recognise oxygen starvation, to turn the lights out inside his brain, and bring him the blissful release of a blackout. But, no such luck.

Ten minutes passed before he forced his eyes open and faced facts. I’m not sure what on earth is going on...but, this is no dream. Connor inspected his milk-white palms, turning them over to focus on the blue-tinged rims of his nail beds. Cyanosis, that can’t be good. Anaemia, maybe? The straws of hope he grasped at were hard to wrestle from his grip. “I don’t need to breathe” was a realization he ran away from.

His gaze wandered past his outstretched hands to settle on the brown coloured residue that clung to the curved terracotta tiles. A frown etched a into his smooth white skin as he considered the network of channels in the floor, and focused on the darker, thicker puddle that clustered around the square iron-grated drain.

Tracing its path back up the line, his eyes followed the trail that reached beyond Mr. Donahue and the irregularly shaped bulk of three other bodies which loomed as outcrops of quarry chalk obscuring his view.

The morgue attendant would have sluiced the gulleys with buckets of water. So, why is that one branch of the conduit...dirty? The fluid must be blood. The candy-sweet smell that clung to his nose and suddenly punched a hole into his mind told him he was right. The alarm bell humming through his cerebral cortex, strangely, filled his mouth with a wash of citrus-tainted emulsion again...and he felt hunger gnaw through his stomach lining.

Fear knotted his insides as he took a side-step that gave him a better view, and his roving vision settled on an empty stainless-steel trolley with a soiled sheet lying like a tumbled avalanche of ice punctuated by dark shadows of reddish-brown stains.

Dread-filled curiosity moved him slowly along, passing at the foot of each of the three corpses, to arrive at the scene of what looked like a murder...of a dead person?

Nervous laughter grated through his vocal chords as reaching out to twitch the rust-blotched sheet aside plumed the cloying smell of congealed blood into the air. A flood of saliva soaked his lips as he tried to breathe and his pupils dilated to polished beads of jet framed by rims of steel-blue. His touch skimmed the tacky surface, collecting the brownish-red paste on trembling fingertips that moved inexorably to brush across his lips as though an invisible grip on his wrist compelled them.

As his tongue collected the smear of blood, a electric shock yanked every tendon in his body tight, snapping his head back on a guttural breath which stirred gravel in the back of his throat as the taste coated his mouth. Connor fought for control as his muscles in spasm crushed his ribcage, clenching his sluggish heart in a relentless fist which emptied the chambers until it collapsed.

The acid bile of thirst rushed up from his stomach and corded sinews of his neck tightened like vines around a tree trunk. As unbearable heat trailed over his skin, his spine yanked into a taut bow, pulling him up on to his toes, and he hung there for an endless moment as a macabre puppet with invisible wires crimping his limbs into a grotesque pose. The death rattle in his throat was the only sound that broke the silence.

As the sip of blood, firing the synapses in his brain at random like a hit of cocaine, dissipated, he suddenly snapped forward, his cold fingers grappling for support folded around the edge of the metal trolley and crushed ingots of steel into his palms.

His muscles relaxed and he gasped for breath, dry heaves racking his chest as he hung his head, and as he squeezed his eyes tightly shut a vision darted across his retina like a faded slideshow. He saw his own body lying there on the trolley, with his vacant eyes staring up at the white ceiling, and his muzzle and upper torso covered in blood. The dried blood on my chest? No!

To be continued...