It was unclear how long later but Laura suddenly felt herself wake to a throbbing in her head. She put her hand to it but only realized then that the cause of the throbbing wasn't actually her head but her neck. Not relenting, she guided her hand to her neck and it came back wet and sticky. Blood, she realized, I've been bleeding.
And then, it all came back to her. "Oh God, I was murdered!" she exclaimed as she swiftly opened her eyes, almost blinded by the light which met her straight up ahead and she quickly closed them again.
Opening them again a few minutes later, she looked up to see John Doe standing, all dressed up in what could only be clothes he grabbed from the personal effects of other dead people in the hospital and walking about.
"I must have finally lost it like my therapist warned me I would if I'm starting to see dead men rising," she groaned to herself, somehow catching the attention of the standing guy.
"You're alive," he said, looking genuinely surprised to see her still breathing. "I could have sworn you were dead."
"And I could have sworn you were!" she returned, groaning again at the sound of her own shout.
"How can this be?" John Doe mumbled to himself, beginning to pace to and fro like it was some big problem.
Laura wasn't sure if she was comfortable with John Doe, who was supposed to be dead to begin with, debating the incidence of her alive, or even explain how it could be that she somehow had the memory of him killing her.
But whatever the head case was, she had a bigger fish to fry in that moment.
"Hey," she called up to him, "can you please help me off the floor? It's freezing down here."
He looked hesitant at first, seemly still debating her living status, but he finally gave in and carried her off the floor, setting her down on the slab which was stained with blood; and her labcoat too when she looked at it. It's official, Laura, she said to herself, John Doe really did murder you.
John Doe seemed ready to explain then and he began, "Lady-"
"Laura," she corrected.
"Laura," he corrected himself, his pronunciation coming out with an unknown accent when he pronounced Laura, almost like he had knowledge of some older variant of it, "it appears that I may have unwittingly gotten some of my blood into your system during our incident earlier. And... Well... Now... Well, I'm sorry but you've become an undead, like me."
Laura stared at him like he just spoke Mandarin.
Thinking that perhaps she didn't understand what he had meant, John Doe tried again. "Laura, you're an immortal now," he said. "You know, a vampire."
He seemed prepared to list all the different names he knew but she quickly stopped him with the raise of her finger. "I got the picture the first time you said undead," she said.
Thing is, while Laura herself wasn't a fan of the paranormal, she had lot of friends who were crazy for the stuff and they gisted her a number of things about the genre regardless of how uninterested she looked, chief among of which was what the word "Undead" meant.
What she couldn't wrap her head around however was how the hell could she have become undead. That thing was supposed to be fictional, she thought to herself.
"Look, Doe," she began.
"Frederick," he corrected.
"Frederick," she continued, "there's no way in the world that I'm a vampire, an "undead" as you called it. That's supposed to only happen in the movies. You know, fiction."
Frederick smiled. "Sometimes, fiction isn't so fictional, Laura," he replied. "But that's the least of our problem right now, believe me." He scratched his head like someone unsure of what to do next; and Laura vaguely suspected he was.
"Look, there's so much I need to explain to you," he continued anyway, "but first, we need to get out of here. Morgues and hospitals aren't places for our kind."
Laura was about to protest and tell him that she wasn't his "kind" or whatever it was that he believed but the stern look he shot her when she looked up at him was enough to state that there was nothing she could do to dissuade the next sequences of action.
"Where's the nearest exit out of this hospital?" he asked.
"A little bit down the hall but it leads to the fire escape," she replied even against the remaining embers of rebellion still raging within her.
"Good enough."
Without waiting to explain what he was doing, Frederick brought a stretcher out from the corner of the room and proceeded to lay down on it. Laura quickly catching on realised that it would be very difficult for the both of them- a bloodstained ME and a previously dead guy- to just walk down the hospital. So, she was going to wheel him out instead.
Quickly, she discarded the bloodstained labcoat into the trash can and grabbed another one off the rack; covering him up with a cloth before she wheeled him out of the room. As luck would have it, the entire corridor was deserted as they passed; everyone either busy with some activities in their offices or already left for their homes. The plan began to look like it might actually be accomplished without any hitch.
Suddenly, the big fat man showed up. "Dr. Wall," he called; more like bellowed, actually, "where are you going?"
Laura wasn't prepared for that line of question, especially not from him and she appeared stumped.
But like a flash, inspiration struck. "I finished with the autopsy, Mr. Grayson," she replied. "I'm taking the stiff to storage. We can't leave everything to the junior staff and interns, you know?" She added a big smile to help her cause.
But it didn't. "The storage's the other way, Dr. Wall," said Mr. Ted Grayson, pointing in the complete opposite direction of where Laura was headed.
Oh-Oh! she screamed in her head, panicking. There was no way to get around it.
Laura was about to give up and start going the other way when Frederick suddenly grabbed Ted's hand from under the cloth and said, "Let her do whatever she wants."
"You know what?" he immediately repeated. "Do whatever pleases you." And with that he turned and walked away without even taking a backward glance.
Looking down at Frederick, Laura saw him holding smug smile on his face "That's how you deal with that situation," he said, still smiling smugly.
Laura didn't have a clue of what that was. One minute Ted was his pain-in-the-ass ungrateful self, and the next he was as compliant as a puppet.
"What did you do to him?" she asked.
"That's the power of compulsion, my dear Laura," he replied. "An undead specialty."
Frederick gave no other explanation than that as he closed the cloth over his own face and Laura wheeled him out to the fire escape; a part of her afraid that perhaps she herself was under some kind of compulsion from her increasingly mysterious companion.
On getting to the fire escape which placed them about eight floors above the ground, Frederick got off the stretcher and jumped down from the rail; landing gracefully on the ground like it was nothing. Nearby, in the parking lot, he spotted a guy about to get into his car; and walking purposefully up to him, Frederick knocked him out with one punch.
"Come on!" he shouted up at Laura who was rooted to the spot where she was since he first jumped down. "We haven't gotten all night, you know."
But Laura had no intention of going anywhere. She would have to be insane— extremely much more than she already was— to follow a complete stranger who might have just murdered and unwittingly changed her to something bordering on fiction out of her workplace to jump down eight stories at his request.
Unfortunately, walking down would also take forever and Laura was starting to feel like she would soon pass out; or even worse.
As if reading her thoughts from where he was, Frederick ran up, carried her and arrived back at his spot beside the car, all in the blink of an eye.
"What in the world?!" she exclaimed when she oriented herself to where she was. "You're fast."
"And you're welcome," he returned, settling her down before opening the passenger door for her like some Victorian era gentleman.
"By the way, why didn't you work your compulsion charm on this man like you did on Ted?" asked Laura as she looked down at the unfortunate man lying pitifully on the floor. "I'm pretty sure he would have appreciated that more than the punch."
"There was no time for it." Frederick shrugged. "Now let's go, sunrise's almost upon us." He didn't expatiate on that as he rounded the car in seconds, started it and drove off into the streets of New York.
It turned out that Frederick knew the city quite well, Laura realised. He had no problem navigating the traffic, which was still busy even at that early hour of the morning. Neither of them spoke as the journey progressed; both of them deciding to retreat to the corner of their minds with only themselves as companies.
After a while, Frederick spoke up again. "Regardless of how it may have looked, I really am sorry for what I did to you," he said. "But being undead isn't all that bad, Laura. In fact, it can really be fun, you'll see."
Laura looked up at what turned out to be a sincere expression on his face, but she didn't say anything.
To be honest, she could only take his word for it. In under an hour, her life had taken a different turn. She had woken up a human; full of life and the passion she held for her work. But now she was an undead; on a journey which she had no way of predicting how or where it would end.
I really hope you're right, Frederick, she thought to herself as she looked back out of the window to the passing streets and its people and sighed, for my sake.