Necromance in the Air - Chapter XIII (fiction)
Matters of the heart
Felix and Lucy have been tasked with preventing the resurrected call centre heads from exploding. Debs has run down to her office/laboratory where she hopes to stop serious damage coming to the giant undead whale’s heart pumping cursed ichor around the facility… just another day at the office…
Here’s where to catch up if you’ve missed anything…
The green emergency lighting was bouncing off something by her feet, and she paused in front of the door to her laboratory at the bottom of the stairs. “Oh, now you’re just taking the piss, these are limited edition,” she said, lifting one foot up and watching black ichor drip from the sole of her trainer. The fluid had leaked out from beneath the door and she took a deep breath before grabbing the door handle and pushing the door open.
Some people, people who Debs did not think highly of, referred to the laboratory as the ‘server room’. As if she was fortunate enough to only be dealing with terrible cable management and technologically illiterate colleagues who didn’t understand that coffee mixes poorly with motherboards.
She stepped over the threshold and placed her foot down into the thick fluid, her step sending a slow-moving ripple through the liquid. The huge tank at the back of the room was leaking and the solution the massive whale's heart was floating in bubbled as it mixed with the sticky, black, cursed muck it pumped through the tubes to the heads above.
“Son-of-a-bitch,” Debs said as she moved towards the tank, inspecting it for leaks. The heart beat with a loud lub-dub, valves snapping open and shut. The dampening wasn’t working, but Debs was more worried about the air bubbles mixing with cursed ichor—something had definitely burst.
“All I need is for someone to suggest turning it on and off again, and I’ll spontaneously combust with incandescent impotent rage. Twats,” she looked around the room, daring one of the heads sitting on a workbench in the corner to say something.
Moving to the opposite side of the room, she opened a metal cupboard and pulled from it a pair of ear defenders and thick rubber gloves, donning both, before reaching into the bottom of the cupboard and pulling out a mop and bucket. She turned, looked at the mess covering the floor, and threw the mop and bucket into the centre of the room. Ducking back into the cupboard, she retrieved a caulking gun with an unlabelled black tube loaded into it. Holding it up, so it was pointed at the ceiling, she faced the huge tank and nodded. “Time to go to work.”
“Um, sorry, but is there any chance we could be somewhere else?” One of the heads, a woman with an eye dangling from one socket, asked.
Debs took a breath and turned to glare at the counter. “What’s the rule, Mavis?”
“Yes, I know, don’t talk. The thing is, that looks like it might just…burst.”
“Oh, I’m sorry Mavis, I didn’t realise you’d passed the ritual of Um-Rah, very impressive. How did you manage in the anatomy tests, you know, as it involved manually assembling a corpse from parts? Tricky work without a body yourself.”
“Well—”
“Mavis, stop talking. Remember what she did to Elvis,” another head, a man with half a moustache, said.
The heads, there were four of them, all looked to their right. Not that they could turn, but their eyes flicked (Fine. Only one of Mavis’ eyes moved) to Deb's desk. On it, upside down, was Elvis. From what remained of his neck sprouted an assortment of pens and pencils. Several of them had some kind of cute animal attached to them.
Debs turned, ominous black sealant gun in one hand, and glared at the heads. “If it bursts—and it won’t, unless the universe hates me today—all your upstairs buddies will turn into brain-hungry psychos. And trust me, I’m not spending another night scrubbing zombie goo off the ceiling. This—” she waved the caulking gun “—is the same stuff I have to shove up your necks every few hours to stop you from doing the same. Of course, if it bursts, and that heart ends up on the floor of this lab, I’m not going to be able to do anything about it. So, you undead twatwaffles, can you shut up and let me try to stop it?”
There are a lot of issues surrounding being resurrected and trapped in your former head. There’s the terrifying flashbacks to experiences in hell, the decomposition, the careful balance between fury at the situation and relief that you have a respite from somewhere even worse. Then, there’s the bitter resentment that you’re reliant for every moment on this side of the mortal veil, on people who don’t really want you here. The heads fell silent.
“Yeah. I thought so.” She said, turning to the huge tank. The brass and rubber seals plugged into the top of it were starting to bubble and leak at an alarming rate. She dragged over a step ladder, climbed up, and reached for the top of the tank.
Stretching, she squeezed the caulking gun, but the crimson paste missed the seals.
“Oh, come on,” she muttered, as the goo dribbled down the side.
Satisfied that she wasn’t going to do a better job, she shrugged, stepped down, and walked towards her computer. A long curved screen on her desk glowed, green text scrolled down, an array of runes and arcane symbols, until she shook the mouse and revealed windows 3.1.
She clicked through various menus until she found what she was looking for. A paperclip with devil horns popped up onto the screen. ‘It looks like you’re trying to find a dark ritual. Would you like some help?’
“No. Sod off,” she said, closing the paperclip. She used the search bar to find the rite she was looking for: a simple incantation that activated the sealant providing a temporary sticky plaster over a permanent problem.
“Okay, just got to activate the incantation, and—” the screen flickered, then went blank. “No. No, no, no, not now. She checked the cables plugged into the back of the screen, then looked down at her feet. The computer was a tower unit, and it was sitting in several centimetres of thick black fluid.
“Uh-oh, bit of an error from the technical wizard, eh?” The upside-down head with a neck full of stationery said from her desk.
Meanwhile…
Daniel squinted at the emergency exit map. “You are here,” he said, jabbing the arrow.
He walked towards the shutters at the end of the reception corridor, then turned, striding with purpose to the reception desk. He paused, looked around, then carried on to the door that led to Felix’s office where he stopped and spun in a circle, before continuing to the end of the corridor where the exit to the stairs was. “That doesn’t make any bloody sense.”
The office door he’d walked past opened and Lucy tumbled out, falling to her hands and knees before standing once more. “Daniel? Daniel, where are you?”
“I’m right here. Just, uh, securing the perimeter.”
“Felix’s hand wrote something on the computer.”
“That’s…how computers work?”
“No. I mean, his hand wrote. It doesn’t matter. This whole place isn’t what it seems.”
Daniel nodded. “Yeah. I know. You should see that map of the fire exits. It doesn’t make any sense at all.”
“What? Felix’s hand—”
“Just say Felix typed something. That phrasing is really weird.”
“His hand is the tentacle creature. That is his hand.”
“What?”
“His hand typed we’re all screwed.’”
“No shit. Did it also suggest we panic and run in circles?”
“No, but I’m starting to think it’s a good plan. Now, come see the heads before they go all popcorn on us.”
“The what who now?”
Thank you for reading! What’s going on with the office building and why is Daniel confused? Just what did Felix’s hand type on the computer? What’s going to happen to the giant whale hearts? Is anyone going to go in there and try to save the undead heads?! WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON!?!?!
You can do that think where you make me believe you want to read more (it’s nice to let me pretend) by pressing like, or sharing, or revealing your presence by writing a comment! No, you’re right, that’s too much, YOU GO TO FAR! I’m kidding…talk to me!
The paper clip had me laughing. Nice touch. 🤣
The paperclip line was 👌