209 Anatomy of a Murder

"Strip," she instructed, adding to the terror from her gun.

In the dead of night, she led him at gunpoint to the hospital morgue. The dark morgue corridor was the perfect backdrop for her self-righteous and gender-affirming vengeance.

What he'd done wasn't important--just personal, cruel, and enough to deserve what would happen; a cautionary tale for wronging the brilliant, the clever, and those keeping score.

She held burlap and twine in her other hand, extending them to him.

"Everything!" she barked. A cocking gun commands compliance. Naked, he obeyed her request to self-wrap in the burlap. "Over your head," she added.

Even wrapped, she could see facial expressions of horror and resentment.

Still and naked, the burlap scratched his genitals, nipples, and other points of his anatomy she knew well. It was a constraining papoose; she encircled the twine until his wrappings were taut. She watched him tremble, a shivering cocoon. Finally, he protested.

"What now!" His demand was met with silence.

She stooped, fingering a brass latch, flush with the floor, opening a trapdoor to a recessed chamber. Its creaking was the perfect sound for a dark corridor, a dark morgue, and the subterranean milieu of retribution. The morgue was an oxymoron--death lived here.

The formaldehyde smell wafted. He knew where he was. That smell!

He tottered the edge, a pit of burlap-wrapped corpses in formaldehyde; there they bobbed, imbued with fixatives and chemicals.

"Get in!"

He refused. She fired into his groin.

Doubling over in his brown body-length pall, he fell into the pool of cadavers. She released the heavy metal trapdoor, which slammed shut over him and his new, unidentified friends. It'd be some time before being opened again.

He banged desperately from below. He cried pitifully, scratching at the metal. He audibly choked on fumes.

Where he belongs, she gloated.

That Fall, her gross anatomy dissection team would be surprised to find their cadaver, John Doe, had a bullet in his groin. It made for glib talk in the medical school cafeteria at lunch, and she was there to hear. She impressed her fellow med students with her rapier wit, chortling, "Call me a hopeless romantic, but he probably had that coming."

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AUTHOR'S NOTES:

For Saturday, July 27, Day 209 of the 2024 Story-a-Day Challenge

ABOUT THIS SUBMISSION:

This won a Top Story slot and since I'm accruing each daily piece toward a book/collection, I repurposed my over-366-word (against rules of this challenge) and truncated it to meet criteria. While sometimes this doesn't work, I think this time it does. A good story for my Story-a-Day audience, right?

366 WORDS (without A/N or PS)

Title-accompaniment photo was AI-generated but the cadaver pit was not (actually a thing at the now-defunct Charity Hospital, New Orleans, pre-Katrina).

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THE CHALLENGE GRINDS ON, 366 WORDS AT A TIME:

There are currently three surviving Vocal writers still participating in the insane 2024 Story-a-Day Challenge:

• L.C. Schäfer, challenge originator

• Rachel Deeming

• Gerard DiLeo (some other guy)

Read them. Support them. And behave with those who keep score.