Jaela Thompson washed blood off her hands for the seventh time, and turned to smile at the fresh corpse cooling on the slab.

"Sorry about the mess, Mr. Swansea. I swear I'm usually better at this." Jaela maintained her mindless chatter as she snapped on a fresh pair of powder-free nitrile gloves. "Your blood volume is above average for a person of your age and stature. Must be nice to be above average," she laughed at her own private joke.

Her giggle echoed through the cavernous morgue, bouncing off the chilly, pale blue tile walls that were meant to be soothing but mostly left Jaela depressed. With a careful hip check, she repositioned the stainless steel slab over the recessed drain in the tile floor. Slightly congealed blood began to flow anew. "Finally. Won't be long now, sir. Just sit back and relax."

Jaela grabbed a pair of surgical scissors from a steel instrument tray to begin snipping away at the black sutures holding his chest cavity closed. A postmortem Y-incision. Typical. She could have done better in her sleep.

She dropped the clipped sutures into a metal bowl to be discarded and set about spreading Mr. Swansea's ribs like French doors to peer inside his body. She ticked off his anterior organs as she saw them.

"Heart. Lungs. Check. Appendix, check." Isn't that lucky? Or not, I guess. "Gallbladder, check. Took some damage, though, didn't you?" The spongy tissue of his lungs sat heavy in his abdominal cavity, soaked through with fresh red blood. "That kind of bleeding, they loaded him up with unit after unit of O-negative to keep his heart pumping while they attempted to staunch the leak." She grabbed a large beaker from the autoclave to collect the sloshing fluid before it seeped toward the drainage tube. "See, not a total waste, sir."

Mr. Bartholomew Swansea of Mortland, Ohio was 53-years-old, according to his state ID, Caucasian, though he favored one of Jaela's white-passing great-uncles from Mississippi so maybe not.

His 53 years looked hard lived and harder dying. Where age lines had crossed his weathered face, slashes a quarter-inch deep followed. His flesh curled at the edges, peeling away from the white muscle and orange, blood-tinged fat clumped underneath. The effect was almost mask-like, like a foiled magic trick. Only there was no magic and the magician was dead.

"I'd ask if it was a good party you were leaving, but the bruises are all wrong for a car accident." She had seen plenty of accident victims in the years since she'd completed mortuary school; she could spot a steering wheel, windshield, or airbag fatality easily. No conspicuously circular bruising, no tell-tale bleeding into the whites of the eyes indicative of a skull fracture; not even facial or abdominal malformation indicative of a high-speed crush injury. "All right, Bart-can I call you Bart? I'll say yes; you look like a friendly type. Bart, my man, why exactly are you on my slab, tits up on a Tuesday morning?"

While Bart's blood continued its sluggish flow from his corpse into the sewer system beneath Mortland Community Hospital, Jaela commenced satisfying her 5 am curiosity. "Oh, you were an organ donor, eh," she remarked when she turned him over to examine his back. A c-shaped wound scored his skin. "But for who?"

Jaela's overnight shift as morgue attendant in the desolate basement morgue ended at 7:30 am, but she had a nagging feeling she'd be staying late today.

Heron Prescott covered her mouth to stifle her yawn. Doing overnight deliveries made Heron popular in her neck of the woods, but it didn't help her sleep near enough. Most popular food spots in central Mortland opened early and closed late, but not this late. Heron had to travel farther to fill orders, and burned a lot more gas getting where she needed to go. But the tips were generous for the most part and she resided permanently at five stars. She was a hustler and hustlers never slept.

Her Bluetooth headset chirped.

"Holla if you hear me."

The hospital dispatcher laughed in her ear. "Aight, Biggie, I need you to head to the East Mortland Blood Bank. Mortland Central's low on O-neg."

Heron kissed her teeth. She'd been heading for home, too. Damn. "Usual fee?" Heron didn't skip out on her beauty sleep for free.

"You know it."

"Emergency?"

The dispatcher sighed. Fulla Baldwin was in charge of distributing needed whole blood and blood plasma for multiple area hospitals. For a city full of emergencies, they were damned underfunded and understaffed. "It's always an emergency in the ER, Slim."

"It's in the name," they chorused, repeating a habitual refrain.

Heron slapped the steering wheel. So much for them Z's she was missing. "Be there in 30."

Good thing Heron knew all the best shortcuts.

She narrowly avoided a speeding ticket and two fender benders reaching the East Mortland Blood Bank before 1 am. The fire lane was already occupied by a blood donation van offloading the daily blood donations for screening. She parked in an empty employee parking spot and scooted quickly past the phlebotomists in the black scrubs. There was something about a bunch of medical technicians whose whole job was sticking people with needles that made Heron uneasy. She could never resist the urge to check them for fangs.

Heron swiped her security pass at the automatic sliding doors and ignored the night receptionist to go in search of the night shift director.

"You can't just come in here whenever you want," Jordan sniped at Heron's back.

"Mortland Central is critical for O-neg; I'm their preferred courier. Do you want to tell them we're letting patients die of hypovolemic shock while you wake up the Blood Bank Director instead of reading my security pass and minding your underemployed, busybody business?"

Jordan's nostrils flared. She was six-foot-nothing, tall tall and all leg, with a jump shot that would have made Sue Bird want to give up her spot in the WNBA. She also had an attitude about Heron, so Heron gave an attitude back.

"I'm calling Mortland Central."

Damn, how you that fine and don't got nothing better to do than snitch? Unreal.

"Nah, baby, call Fulla." Heron flipped her honey brown jumbo box braids over one shoulder. "Now please, let me make my cash. Mama got bills to pay."

Heron exited through the lobby without acknowledging Jordan fifteen minutes and a hurried signature later with a dry-ice packed cooler of blood plasma under one arm and a temperature-controlled cooler of whole blood under the other. It wouldn't be enough to keep Central stocked for more than a shift, maybe two of there weren't any mass-casualty incidents before then, but hopefully the hauls from recent donation drives would have passed sickle cell screening, blood typing, and infection disease testing. Once that happened, East Mortland Blood Bank would make a delivery that should keep the hospital stocked for weeks.

She secured the coolers in her backseat with seatbelts. Heron was all play when she wanted to be, but she did not play about her job. Delivering food was one thing, delivering blood and tissue donations for hospitals like she did on the side? That was serious, and not just because the money was good.

Heron slid her thirdhand 2016 Mazda out of the illuminated parking lot of the blood bank, easing into the dim, deserted streets of the neighborhood around it. Shuttered storefronts dotted the streets. Security fences were padlocked to the concrete, security bars covered the windows, and those were the places that were going to open in the morning. Those that had folded were desolate, uncovered windows gaping to reveal hollow, cavernous insides like disemboweled bodies. Their organs strewn everywhere.

This was Mortland, Ohio. Dying building by building, body by body. This was Heron's town.

She flipped on her police scanner to fill the silence in her car. Her murmuring heartbeat was not enough.

"All available units proceed to Dunne Memorial Park for a possible 187 with multiple victims." Heron flicked in her dark eyes to the scanner in disbelief. Another homicide. A multiple homicide? The third this month. "Be advised of a possible suspicious person reported in the area. I say again, all units be advised of a potential 10-66."

The dispatcher received several overlapping 10-4's. A cacophony of sirens cut through the night, bursting into red and blue from alleyways and the shadowy speed traps beneath highway overpasses. Police cruisers cut around Heron's car before she had time to pull to the shoulder of the road. The best she could do was freeze while they burned rubber into the night, shrieking toward the park thirteen blocks away where more bodies had been discarded by a killer they had no idea how to catch.

Heron shivered, carefully pulling through an intersection that was empty but for a bedraggled looking individual pushing a rusted shopping court along the faded crosswalk. She'd come back with cash in the daytime, see if they needed that or something else. She didn't carry money at night. That could be a death sentence for a night time delivery driver, and Heron had no intention of dying.

But that wasn't promised in Mortland anymore. Left and right, bodies were piling up ceiling-high and Heron was just the faceless woman ferrying the blood.

Nights like these, that was how she liked it.