Rebirth: Chapter 71: Alone In The Morgue

Wednesday, 20 June 2007

Chapter 71: Alone In The Morgue

Private Skinner had a lot of work to do. He stood alone in the morgue, looking down on a large pile of body bags. The leftovers from the battle of Hartley House.

This delivery was the largest Private Skinner had ever seen. The attack had been unprecedented in recent history and from the comments of the staff at the base and the recovery crew as they made the drop-off, everyone was still reeling from it. The vampires had now set the standard. Their numbers were significantly greater than The Brotherhood had anticipated. The humans would have to wake up to the threat the vampires imposed or they would leave themselves wide open to greater defeats.

Private Skinner’s usual job was to arrange the bodies of the fallen soldiers into two sections: bitten and just plain dead. For the bodies that had been bitten by vampires, he had to remove their dog tags and make a note of who they were before the silver bullets they had been treated with caused their bodies to burn when they turned.

Only this time it would be different: they had been shot with regular bullets. No one ever checked what type of bullets the recovery crew used. Once a soldier had gone through the acceptance process, it was assumed they were human. There were never any follow-up tests.

Private Skinner’s orders were to let the new-born vampires loose into the headquarters and allow them to run amok, killing as many members of The Brotherhood as possible.

This would cause a distraction that would allow him to capture the doctor and make their escape. He had a helicopter fuelled and waiting on the tarmac many floors above.

There had never been a successful attack on such a heavily guarded compound as this, but everything so far had been surprisingly easy. It made Private Skinner wonder why they hadn’t tried it before.

Then he realised all the work that had gone into getting him to join The Brotherhood and the necessity of the situation he found himself in. He had never known a mission to be carried out with so much urgency.

He had to return the doctor to his brothers and sisters. If he didn’t, Doctor Owen would continue his work and eventually discover a way of ridding his brothers and sisters from the world. Private Skinner knew Roxy wouldn’t allow that to happen and he wanted to be the one to make a difference.

But for now, Private Skinner was hungry. He had never fed on the blood of live humans. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to do it, which is why he was happy to take care of the bodies in the morgue.

His canine teeth shifted in their sockets as he approached the pile of dead human bodies.