Chapter 1 The steady droning of fluorescent lights buzzed through the perpetually cold morgue. A sound that, after three years, had woven its way into my sense of peace as comforting and familiar as my own breathing. Carl muttered under his breath as he wrestled with the finicky coffee machine before it spurted out the coveted drink. It wasn’t just the vending machine that put him in such a grumpy mood. We had gotten another new intern. Some emo kid with a gauge piercing and nose ring, obsessed with seeing a real live corpse up close, who would likely ghost us by tomorrow morning. Today’s workload was refreshingly light, and I was already tasting that cold beer I planned to…

When I was in high school, my friends and I had a peculiar pastime. Like any teenage delinquent, we liked to cause trouble. We weren’t vandals, we didn’t deal drugs, and we certainly didn’t bully kids in school. No, we liked to scare the living shit out of new parents by “hacking” their baby monitors. We were insufferable little punks who thought we were too good to get caught, and that our little acts of mischief would go unpunished. One night; however, I learned my lesson, and realized that I wasn’t quite as bulletproof as my tremendous adolescent ego made me out to be. Dimitri, Kurt, and I went to the same school, shared many of the same classes, and…

Call me a misanthrope, an introvert, whatever. The fact is, I always thought I preferred being alone. I had a couple of friends. Well, mainly acquaintances. People I worked with. People I lived near. Family. But I had tried doing the companionship thing, and it never seemed to be for me. I had a girlfriend for two years, but she left me because I rarely wanted to go out with her friends, preferring to stay home, just the two of us. The feeling that was most prominent after she left was relief. I also tried hanging out with a group of people I met online. As in, hanging out with them in the real world. I did this because my…