The cold was the first thing that Eli experienced upon waking up.
His cheek was moist on the floor. It was formed as a result of condensation of the failing air system in the morgue and blood.
He opened his eyes and saw that all the stainless steel was covered with frost.
The temperature had dropped, and the cold had gotten long since the thermostat in the building could not even indicate it.
Eli raised himself up, groaning. But his palms slipped in something sticky. He looked down and immediately swore.
"Oh, shit!"
His hands were covered in dark brown liquid which also spread on the tiles.
Blood.
The memory of what had happened returned.
The corpse that stood back up, Harper's scream, and the blinding blue light that had torn through his chest before he fell face first to the floor.
He got on his hands and knees, and made his way to Harper's workstation. Her coffee cup was still there on the floor. Her ID badge lay half drowned on the red liquid.
"Dr. Harper?"
His voice was brittle, and broke in the dead silence.
No answer. Just the sound of the broken cooling systems somewhere below the floor.
He looked around at the other part of the room. It was messed up.
The heavy steel table was bent, as though an explosion had taken place beside it.
He staggered toward the glass observation door.
Outside the door, no one was visible. Only overturned carts and surgical sheets scattered on the floor.
Blood, spurted here and there in long strands upon the floor.
At this moment he saw his own breathing. Each exhale was a puff of blue mist, and could be seen in the air.
Eli raised a hand, trembling. Beneath his pale skin, he saw lines of blue light all over his veins.
He could see the blue veins throbbing with the same beat with his heartbeat.
And the voice came back, monotonous and machine like. Yet it carried the definitivity of command.
[SOUL AUDITOR SYSTEM - BOOT SEQUENCE STABILIZED]
[PRIMARY HOST: ELIJAH STERLING]
"No no no… I can't deal with this bullshit right now," he whispered hoarsely, stumbling backward until his shoulder hit the wall.
The voice ignored his emotional meltdown.
[BREACH OF NECROMATIC FIELD: LOCAL]
[SOUL ANOMALIES DETECTED WITHIN 20-METER RADIUS]
[BEGINNING CALIBRATION]
The atmosphere vibrated and the small puddles of water mixed with blood on the floor trembled. His ears rang like a tuning fork hitting concrete.
"Stop! Just stop the damn thing!" he shouted, grabbing his ears.
[AUDITOR COMMAND RECEIVED]
[ERROR: INSUFFICIENT AUTHORITY TO TERMINATE PROCESS]
The calibration didn't stop.
Eli sank to his knees.
"What the fuck is that…what… insufficient authority?" he mumbled, feeling the rising panic clawing at his brain.
The threads of blue light began to rise from the floor beneath him, and spiraling like smoke.
For a second, he initially thought it was steam. Until one of the threads touched him.
It was cold.
And as it touched him, a flood of alien thoughts struck him.
Bursts of images of a hospital bed, the flatlining heart monitor, a hand of a woman. Then absolute darkness. The morgue. Then him.
"Holy shit!"
Eli screamed and jerked away to see his own image, gasping.
The blue thread broke apart and vanished into the air.
He clutched his chest, and instinctively realized he had seen a soul.
"That was… that was someone's last memory."
He wished to deny it, but when his veins were glowing, there was no use denying it. His body shook, but his mind began to analyze the situation.
He examined the morgue one more time at a lower pace.
At the far end of the room, near the autopsy bay, he caught a movement by some form against the wall. Hunched and twitching.
The heart attack victim. The very body that he was about to cut up.
It wasn't glowing blue any longer. It looked like a dried husk.
"What the hell…" Eli whispered.
He crept nearer, peeping over.
The chest of the body was ghastly sunken as though the air were sucking out. The eyes were open but hollow.
And above the corpse was a shape of humanoid blue smoke.
Eli's breath caught.
The system came into immediate action.
[SOUL DETECTED: UNPROCESSED]
[THREAT LEVEL: PASSIVE]
[RECOMMENDATION: AUDIT AND RELEASE]
Eli backed away, horrified.
"Audit? What are you…? I'm not gonna touch that thing!"
The smokey blue figure swung around towards him. Not physically, but in one way or another concentrating its consciousness.
There was a magnetic pull in his chest, something out of the inevitable, which responded to the soul. The same cold energy surged within him, threads of light weaving outward from his own soul.
[INITIATING FIRST SOUL AUDIT]
"Don't…" he began to speak, when the light swept.
The morgue disappeared for one moment within the blinding light.
He was now in the weightless black space full of millions of motes winking like dying stars.
The half formed shape of the dead man hovered before him and whispering incoherent bits of regrets and fear.
Eli wished to run, but something made him speak instead.
"I… release you."
There was a single pulse of light around his chest, and the blue mist curled inward like it was being sucked by the universe itself.
[SOUL PROCESSED: 1]
[MORTUARY ESSENCE: +5]
[CORRUPTION: 0.1%]
The black emptiness vanished and the morgue went back into reality.
The blue shape was gone. Only the inert husk remained.
Once more, Eli fell on the floor, gasping for air.
"Mortuary Essence? Corruption?" he muttered, looking at his trembling hands. "What the hell am I becoming?"
No answer came.
Then there was a sound somewhere down the long and dark corridor.
A door slammed open.
Then another.
Eli struggled to his feet, and grabbed the latch of the door.
By the time he came out from the building, the night was darker than it should. The distant car alarms echoing in the distance.
But he could hear the distinct whisper of countless souls stirring around the city.