Azure Heart Horror Short Story

Chapter 17

It was as if the culprit was an invisible man, or perhaps an insect… but Zhou Yu dismissed all of these possibilities. Even if an invisible man existed, the loud noise of opening the freezer would surely alert him; and how could an insect possibly crawl into a tightly closed freezer and drain its spinal cord? How big of an insect would it be?

This week, Zhou Yu was on the day shift. He noticed that the bodies seemed to be destroyed at night.

Should he remind Lao Liu, who was taking over the shift? But would doing so scare him? Zhou Yu hesitated.

Suddenly, Zhou Yu realized a grave problem: although fresh corpses were constantly being added to the morgue, judging from the rate of destruction, it seemed that it would soon be "completely empty." If the mysterious creature's appetite grew larger and larger, would it start sucking the spinal cord from living people?

This idea is truly frightening.

He made a decision to at least find out what was causing the trouble so as to warn others.

After using two bottles of liquor and a pack of cigarettes, Zhou Yu successfully obtained the surveillance footage of the time when Li, the security guard in the monitoring room, was on duty.

What puzzled him was that almost every night in the latter half of the night, there would be a video that was black. It wouldn't last long, only ten or twenty minutes.

Before the screen went black, Zhou Yu clearly saw himself standing within the camera's surveillance range, awake. But he couldn't recall anything unusual happening during that time.

After reviewing the tapes several times, Li Baoan finally found the suspicious detail: Zhou Yu's position remained unchanged before and after the image went black. Several tapes showed the same thing. This was clearly illogical—had he been standing there in a daze for 20 minutes straight, every single day?

Li Baoan suggested checking the camera, but Zhou Yu told him to put it on hold for now, because if there was really a problem, this action would definitely alert the enemy.

To everyone's surprise, the very next afternoon, Li, the security guard, brought technicians to the morgue. They inspected all the cameras and optimized their angles, eliminating almost any blind spots. During the inspection, Li discovered that someone had stuck a piece of chewing gum to the base of the camera monitoring the entrance. The camera, which originally could rotate 90 degrees, now had a 30-degree blind spot, completely obscuring the entrance.

Zhou Yu was both delighted and alarmed. He was delighted to have discovered the problem, but alarmed that these actions might alert the murderer, leading to more meticulous crime-solving.

When Zhou Yu was leaving get off work, he noticed that Li Baoan was not in the security room. Was he not on duty today? Just as he was about to go up and say hello, he saw someone standing next to him, and the two of them were chatting and laughing as they were about to cross the road.

The person next to me looked familiar; he must be a doctor at the hospital, but I couldn't immediately recall which department he was from.

Since that's the case, Zhou Yu didn't want to bother him and just continued on his way.

He hadn't walked far when he heard a screeching sound of brakes coming from the middle of the road, followed by screams from the crowd.

Turning his head, he saw that half of Li Baoan's body was caught in the rear wheel of a cement mixer truck.

He died on the spot.

Although Zhou Yu deals with dead people all day long, he is still terrified.

Asking passersby revealed that everyone was waiting for the red light when, halfway through, Li Baoan suddenly rushed into the middle of the road, as if he were waiting for that car to arrive.

After finding out what had happened, Zhou Yu's intuition told him that things were definitely not as simple as they seemed on the surface.

Only then did he remember the doctor who had been standing next to Li Baoan, but he couldn't find him anywhere.

Out of professional habit, he went over to look at the corpse, but unexpectedly saw something he shouldn't have seen—a small, three-inch-long centipede crawled out of Li Baoan's ear and disappeared in an instant.

Zhou Yu began to recall the scene of Li Baoan talking to the person next to him. It seemed that it was that person talking, and Li Baoan either nodded or smiled, without making much movement.

Oh, right, the ear! That stranger whispered something in Li Baoan's ear. Although I don't know what he said, the action now seems a bit suspicious.

Did he spit a long centipede into Li Baoan's mouth?

Zhou Yu felt like he was going crazy.

After Li Baoan's body was taken to the morgue, Zhou Yu went to take a look. His entire abdomen was crushed to a pulp, with yellowish fat and dark brown internal organs mixed together. He suddenly had a thought and looked at Li Baoan's neck, but there was nothing there. He chuckled to himself that he was being too suspicious.

The next day at work, he brought some offerings to pay respects to Li Baoan. For some reason, he felt that if he hadn't asked Li Baoan to investigate this matter, Li Baoan wouldn't have died.

When he lifted the shroud covering Li Baoan's body, he found that the corpse's head was tilted to one side. He quickly helped to straighten it. Suddenly, a thought flashed through his mind, and he tilted the corpse's neck back to take a closer look.

Sure enough, teeth marks appeared.

All day long, Zhou Yu was absent-minded and restless.

A few days later, he saw a woman accompanying a patient on a walk and doing rehabilitation exercises at the hospital.

A casual glance was like a thunderclap.

That patient…it turns out he wasn't a doctor, he was a patient. Wasn't he the one standing next to Li Baoan the day he had the accident?!

Oh right, I remember now, he was one of the seventeen patients who recovered from severe paralysis that the hospital announced a while ago.

Could it be that... their recovery relies on sucking human bone marrow?

Impossible. First of all, those aren't human teeth marks; besides, they were all bedridden at the time, so it's impossible for them to have committed the crime in the morgue...

Zhou Yu started to wonder if he should call the police. But there was no evidence and no victim.

Even when accusing someone of intentionally damaging a corpse, there needs to be a suspect. Besides, two small holes wouldn't cause much damage to a corpse.

For a moment, Zhou Yu was both scared and somewhat at a loss.

Could it be that the hospital is researching some new treatment and secretly removed the spinal cord from the corpse? Were these seventeen patients all experimental subjects?

The growing number of questions overwhelmed him.

For the past two weeks, Zhou Yu has stopped caring whether the corpse is good or bad, as long as it's not a zombie sucking human blood.

At least the living are safe, for now.

That being said, sometimes trouble comes knocking even when you don't commit any crimes.

That day, Zhou Yu was on the day shift, and he went home after handing over his shift.

When I got home, I realized I'd left my keys at the office. So I went back to get them.

Old Liu wasn't in the office; he'd probably gone to the morgue. Zhou Yu was about to grab the key and leave when he heard rustling sounds coming from the morgue.

It seems that new bodies have been brought over.

But why can't I hear anyone speaking?

Through the plastic curtain of the morgue, you could see shadowy figures moving around inside.

Zhou Yu was puzzled and was about to peek through the crack when he heard footsteps coming from the corridor.

Unsure of the situation, he quickly hid in the large locker in the office.

Looking back, it was this action that saved his life.

I don't know how much time passed inside the cabinet. Occasionally, I heard the sound of many people walking by, followed by a strange hissing sound, like a gas leak.

Then, the footsteps faded into the distance. After a while, someone was heard walking into the office.

Zhou Yu pushed the door open a crack and peeked in; it was Old Liu who had come in.

Zhou Yu pushed open the cabinet door and walked out, startling Old Liu into letting out a strange scream!

"You... what are you doing here?"

"I came back to get the keys..." Zhou Yu didn't know whose side Old Liu was on. "Where were you just now?"

Old Liu patted his chest, somewhat angrily: "You'd scare me to death even if I wasn't scared to death by the person inside. Why did you hide in the closet with the key!"

“I came in just now and you weren’t here, and then…” Zhou Yu hesitated for a moment, “I heard some strange noises, and I got scared and hid.”

Old Liu found Zhou Yu's words amusing: "You're in this line of work and you're afraid of this? I just went into the morgue for a quick look and came right back. It was only two minutes."

"Are you alone?"

"If I were alive, I'd be the only one..."

Zhou Yu didn't find the joke funny at all. He suddenly remembered that he had stood there dumbfounded for 20 minutes when he watched the videotape.

Could it be... hypnosis?

The next day, after Zhou Yu finished his shift, he didn't go home. Instead, he wandered around outside for a while and then quietly slipped back into the morgue.

Old Liu was idly reading a magazine in the duty room. Everything seemed normal.

Zhou Yu had surveyed the terrain during the day. There was a bed in the room with broken wheels that hadn't been repaired and hadn't been used recently. He secretly stuck a pre-prepared wireless camera under the bed, disguising it so as to be undetectable.

To ensure the signal wouldn't be interfered with, he hid in the cleaning room to the left of the morgue.

There are cleaning supplies and miscellaneous items like mops here. The smell isn't very pleasant, but he's gotten used to it.

To prevent himself from falling asleep, he turned the volume of his headphones up to the maximum so that if there was any movement in the morgue, the wireless microphone on the camera would transmit the sound.

In the damp and smelly cleaning room, every minute felt like an hour.

He was so nervous that he urinated three times before he had even finished half of the bottle of mineral water.

Fortunately, the room had a sink, otherwise a living person might have actually died from holding their urine.

After finally making it to 2 a.m., Zhou Yu had already fallen asleep and woken up several times.

Still nothing.

Damn, I really brought this on myself. I could have just turned a blind eye; it's none of my business.

He began to feel some regret.

Just then, he heard footsteps in his earphones. He looked at the video and saw that it was Lao Liu going into the morgue for a routine check.

Suddenly, he saw a white figure appear outside the morgue door.

The shadow moved so lightly that even a highly sensitive microphone couldn't pick up a single sound.

The plastic curtain was gently lifted, revealing a familiar face.

Isn't this Dr. Liu Zihu, who was recently praised by the hospital director?

Liu Zihu's face was deathly pale, except for his striking white teeth and red lips. He slowly opened his mouth and stuck out his tongue... Zhou Yu almost cried out when he took a closer look.

That wasn't a tongue at all, but an unusually large and fat caterpillar—a brown star anise!

The insect's tongue sprayed green mist into the air like a sprayer, and soon, Old Liu was frozen in place, as if he had been put under a spell.

Then, Liu Zihu swallowed the insect's tongue and opened his mouth, spitting out several black centipedes. The centipedes seemed to possess a spirit, swaying their bodies as they slithered towards the wall. They climbed straight up the morgue's security camera and tightly wrapped their bodies around the lens.

Now Zhou Yu understood why the surveillance footage went black for a while. He also understood why he had stood there foolishly in front of the camera for 20 minutes.

After arranging everything, Liu Zihu confidently walked in. He took out the morgue's entry and exit registration record and opened the refrigerated cabinets containing the newly arrived bodies.

"Damn it, there are fewer and fewer of them," he couldn't help but curse.

Then he faced the door and stuck out his tongue—this time not an octagonal tongue, but a pair of centipede antennae, vibrating rapidly in the air. Immediately afterward, a group of people walked in; they were the seventeen recovered spinal disease patients.

Zhou Yu then realized that these seventeen patients were not under the care of the same attending physician, but their recovery did indeed occur after Dr. Liu Zihu arrived at the hospital.

There must be something strange about this!

The patients entered the morgue and split into several groups around the corpse. It seemed that one of them first bit through the back of the corpse's neck, and then each of them grew a tentacle from their mouth and inserted it into the wound to suck the spinal cord.

Zhou Yu was horrified. Luckily, they only attacked the dead. What if they did the same to the living?!

Since there weren't any fresh corpses today, these people... well, they were monsters, and they finished quickly.