Trembling With Fear 07/11/21

The Midnight Tubes by Harris Coverley

It’s amazing what you can end up doing if you’re not careful. I guess I drifted for a few years after I left school, and by total accident became a porter at the local hospital. That’s where I first met Pete, and we got on straight away. In fact, the management thought we got on a bit too well, slacking about and so on, so it wasn’t long until we got bumped down to the worst duty on the shift: corpsing.

There are two types of people in this world: those who think they know how hospitals work, and those who have actually walked through the guts of one.

When a person dies, they have to be moved to the morgue, right? They can’t just lie in the bed stinking and bloating away…

But a lot of a people die in hospitals, and you never see ’em being moved do you? Who would want to see that? It’d put people off.

That’s where we come in. Almost nobody outside the hospital system knows about the “dark corridors”. That’s what the management calls ’em—we call ’em the midnight tubes.

Ever notice all those little doors along hospital corridors that all say “DO NOT ENTER”? That’s where you go in. They’re thin and they’re short, about six foot tall and not more than four-and-a-half feet wide at the most, lit up by strings of LEDS. They’re pretty bleak and nobody ever cleans ’em, not that anybody would want to, but that’s how me and Pete move dead bodies.

There’s an odd history of corpse-slinging in the hospital system, because on this shift you’re not paid by the hour, you’re paid by body delivery to the morgue itself. It’s actually a good wage, especially during say a pandemic or a bus crash, but it can have its problems.

Take just last week: this guy at seventy-odd had popped his clogs around eleven at night—a cardiac arrest they’d said. His wife was in his room weeping away, and the second doctor had just signed off on the cause of death form, meaning it was time for us to move in and take him down.

We slid him onto a gurney, covered him with a sheet, and slipped into the nearest hatch, Pete at the front, me at the back.

Now, of course, us being corpsers, we deal with the dead, not the living, but fate had something else in mind.

About a minute out from the morgue, Pete stopped.

“Stew,” he said, turning around. “I heard something.”

I looked up and down the corridor and saw nothing. I knew that we were the only two on duty.

We then both heard a moan. We looked to the gurney, and the head was moving from side to side.

“Shit!” I said, as the old guy’s hand pulled the sheet down and he stared up at us.

“Get a stick!” I told Pete.

Pete ran up the corridor as I leaned over the old guy and pressed my hands about his mouth as he started to kick and shout. The bastard had bit me before Pete had returned with one of the wooden clubs we kept hidden every dozen metres or so in the tubes. It took four good hits on the top of the skull, but we got him, and that was the end of it, and we wheeled him to his slab. If the hits didn’t do it, the cold in the fridge would.

You’d be surprised: this has happened about two dozen times in the past two years, so we’re careful to be prepared.

Why club ’em though? Well, a man needs to eat when he’s paid only by commission. Besides, in the eyes of the medical establishment, and therefore the law I guess, they’re already dead, and there’s gonna be no autopsy in a case where two doctors have already signed off on what the cause was.

Yeah, corpsing’s not the nicest job you can do, but hell, it’s a living…