Blood pooled in the plateau of torn flesh and slipped through cupped fingers. It didn’t matter how much pressure Andy Barclay put on the gash in his gut, there was no stopping the bleeding. He was going to die. The world went foggy as he shouldered his way in through the door and out of the cold, and he nearly slipped down the stairwell that he didn’t realize was there, catching himself on a railing before he could fall all the way. He left smears of red on the wall and all the stairs. It followed him like a comet’s tail, burning in bright crimson behind him. But like a comet, Andy couldn’t stop. If he stopped he’d die, and he couldn’t die yet. There was still some good he could do.
When Andy got out of Harrogate Psychiatric Hospital six months earlier, he thought he was the one on the hunt. He thought that he, she, they; the cult, Chucky’s cult, had forgotten about him, moved on. He was wrong. Chucky, in his new Nica suit, was waiting for him, anticipating that Andy wouldn’t let sleeping dogs lie. Maybe they had more in common than either would admit. It amounted to an ambush, a would be slaughter. Andy was split open, but managed to escape with his flickering life and then some. Or maybe Chucky was getting cocky… maybe he wanted a hunt. Whatever the case, Andy ran and didn’t look back. He couldn’t look back, not until he was ready.
There was a moment at the bottom of those stairs where Andy thought he wasn’t going to make it. He took a sharp breath and could feel his lungs quiver from the stress of it. He winced, forced himself to stand straight, and pushed forward. He was so close. He couldn’t stop now. Andy threw his weight at the door at the bottom of the stairs and spilled into the brightly lit, sterile room on the other side. The cold was brisk and artificial, but it woke him up, giving him a little extra buzz. Maybe it was the extra buzz that he needed. He made it to the morgue… the rest should be easy.
The morgue was a small room with white stone walls. Whatever town they were in, it was small, didn’t have need for a big fancy mortuary. There was a metal slab in the center of the room for autopsies, a tiny desk crammed in the opposite corner by a second door that probably led out to the rest of the hospital, and one wall lined with cold storage; six metal hatches, three rows of two stacked on one another. According to the labels, only two of them had occupants. Small town meant limited choice when it came to corpses. It didn’t matter. Whatever was in stock would do. Andy knew there was no going back now. It was find a new body and live on to fight another day, or bleed to death and die on the morgue’s cheap linoleum floor. No brainer.
Andy went for the nearest occupied slab, first. In the reflection of the polished metal he could see his pale and blotchy face staring back to him. He was losing a lot of blood, spilling most of it on the floor at his feet. He had to hurry. The name on the outside of the hatch was listed as Jane Doe. He went over to the other one, his breathing slow and labored now, and read the name outloud, “Michael…” but just speaking made everything hurt and he couldn’t even finish the name. Andy grunted, pushing through the pain of dying, and then threw open the hatch and gave the slab a pull, letting it roll out for him.
“Oh, f***.”
Andy almost fell over. Michael’s corpse wasn’t even much of a corpse. It was a pair of legs in bloody old blue jeans, severed at the waist with a few extra entrails hanging out. It looked like the body went through a woodchipper, but whatever happened to it… it wasn’t a viable option. Andy caught himself on the autopsy table to keep from falling over, and once it dawned on him that he wasn’t going to be able to save himself using the blank vessel of the Michael corpse, his head turned toward the slab labeled ‘Jane Doe’.
There was no time to brace himself for this one. He opened the hatch and pulled out the slab, praying that this corpse was at least in one piece. Relief washed over him when he saw that it was. Jane Doe was pale and stiff, at least twenty four hours dead. She was almost a decade younger than Andy, with red hair and chapped lips. There were track marks running up the length of both arms. Andy guessed that all that had something to do with what did her in, but he didn't know for sure. Other than that, the body was in one piece. It was something, better than death, an escape. Feeling left Andy’s legs and he leaned against the storage wall to keep himself upright. He had to act quickly. He was running out of time.
Andy was six years old the first time Chucky tried to steal his body. All those years, all those near possessions, it never occured to Andy to take a move from the devil’s playbook. Chucky put his soul in the body of Nica Pierce back at Harrogate. He walked right out of there in the stolen body of a paraplegic woman. If he could make a paraplegic walk again, Andy could surely do more with a corpse. At least in this case, no one was using Jane Doe’s body anymore. Andy’s flesh was cursed anyway, he never had any luck with it. This would be a new beginning, a chance to start over, to hide, or figure out how to kill the soul of Charles Lee Ray once and for wall. It was a new life, and he’d figure out what to do with that new life once he got it.
Reaching a bloody, shaking hand into his coat, he pulled out a palm sized golden amulet, the Heart of Damballa, and clinging to it was a plastic, severed doll hand that held onto the chain with a death grip. The doll hand was bleeding, too, leaking from the joint it had been torn from. Andy pried the doll hand away and tossed it across the room toward a trash can, and then reached into his other pocket where he pulled out a piece of folded up notebook paper. He opened it up, saw the spell he needed, and read through the bloody fingerprints he left on the page, while clutching the amulet close to his chest and hovering over the body of Jane Doe.
“Ade… due… damballa…” the words vibrated in his throat. He could feel a storm flowing around him. Outside, thunder rumbled. “Give me the power, I beg of you!” He continued the spell, pushing the words out of his mouth best he could. He felt sick, vile, he felt like… he felt like Chucky. The thunder was so loud now, it was right on top of him. It made the entire basement morgue shake. The lights flickered. Andy continued the spell. He didn’t slow down, he didn’t stop. He couldn’t stop. He kept going and going and going and then…
Everything went black.
Eyelids shot open and a gasping breath filled otherwise cold and still lungs. Andy sat up with a startle and realized that he wasn’t where he was before. He tried to move but stiff joints were slow to react. When he looked down he found that he was on the slab and his body was floating in a pool of blood on the ground, lifeless eyes staring up at the ceiling, and the Heart of Damballa still clutched in his hands. Andy looked down at his fingers and only then just noticed the longer hair that was itching the back of his neck. He looked at the curly orange locks and then took a moment to let everything settle in.
It took a secondto figure out how to make the new body work. After 36 years of one body, adjusting to a new one would take a minute. Andy swung their legs over the edge of the slab, in the opposite direction of the old body, and tried to put weight on the new legs. Andy fell to his knees, but then gave a little burst of strength and forced his way back up again. Each step was slow, like learning how to walk again, but he figured it out, and crossed the room and made it to the small desk in the corner. There was a mirror on that desk. Andy took it and held it up to the new face. He did it, or she did it… they did. Gender was a construct anyway, the pronouns didn’t matter, only survival mattered. Andy had a new lease on life, a new chance, thanks to an old voodoo spell and the body of a Jane Doe in a small town morgue. Unlike Chucky, Andy would respect the body he wore now. Jane Doe might not have had a real name that could ever be known, but it was part of the package now, it was part of Andy Barclay and that would mean something. One way or another, that would mean something.
Sirens coming from somewhere outside yanked Andy from their daydreams. The cops were probably following that trail of blood that led right to the morgue. If everyone was lucky it would be the cops, anyway. Andy didn’t have time to mourn or say goodbye to the old body. Life was funny that way, no time for sentimentality. She ran to the other side of the room and closed the hatch over Jane Doe’s slab. He took the Heart of Damballa back and put it in her new pocket. She closed the eyes of his old body. And then they left, disappearing into the night.
The world would think that Andy Barclay was dead. In a way, he was. But death was just the beginning. The game was only getting started.
