Club Monstrosity Read Online Free Page B

mean getting taken off the case because of personal involvement, and that meant she wouldn’t know what the hell was going on.
    For self-preservation, she had to know.
    “Sorry, I was just commenting on the bruising around the eyes,” she croaked. “Looks like more than just fists caused this.”
    She turned away, gathering her composure with a few deep breaths as she walked across to the gurney and came back to transport Ellis’s broken body to the examination table.
    “Good catch,” Grimes said with a wide grin she hid as she slid her mask up. “There were several baseball bats involved.”
    Natalie flinched, but continued to shift Ellis’s body (monster strength came in handy at these times). Once he was fully on the gurney, she rolled him a few feet over to her boss, who waited at the exam table. A few more quick motions, and Ellis was laid out for autopsy. Once again, Natalie blinked to keep her eyes clear before she started breaking the seals on the sterilized equipment they would use to perform their gruesome task.
    “All right, let’s get to it,” Grimes said as she clapped her hands together with glee that was way beyond what the situation required. “I want to see what made the Invisible Man tick, don’t you?”
    Natalie closed her eyes briefly. No, she did not. But she had no other choice.

    Natalie stood at the big metal sink, letting hot water scald her hands as she stared straight ahead of her at nothingness.
    When she’d first taken the job at the ME’s office, autopsies had been hard on her. Cutting up bodies had been a bit too reminiscent of her own slice-and-dice past.
    Over time she had managed to move past discomfort and become numb to the grossness (most of the time) and weirdness of being a human butcher. After all, her job had a purpose, unlike her father’s experiments. What she did helped families get closure and brought criminals to justice.
    Of course, she’d never autopsied someone she knew before. Now all of her initial reactions to the process returned in force. Her stomach hurt and she just wanted to go home and shower for about a week.
    “So have you ever read the book The Invisible Man ?” Grimes asked as she tugged bloody gloves off her hands, tossed them in the medical waste container, and moved in beside Natalie at the big sink to scrub up.
    Natalie blinked. As she’d allowed her shock at dissecting someone she actually knew to sink in, she’d sort of forgotten Grimes was still in the room.
    “Um, no,” she said with a shake of her head. “Sorry. I’m not big on monster stories.”
    She did not add that her aversion to the genre had more to do with their frustrating lack of accuracy and the simplicity of the “monster’s” motives than with anything else.
    “Oh.” Grimes tilted her head almost like she pitied Natalie. “It’s a classic, you know. We read it in our book club last year. You really should join. Expand your horizons a little.”
    Natalie blinked. Was this really happening? Were they really talking about her horizons at this moment?
    She pursed her lips. “I’m sure it is a classic. But what does it have to do with our friend on the autopsy table? Aside from somebody’s foolish notion that he might have had perimortem, um, invisibility.”
    Grimes sighed. “It’s a weird thing; in the end of the book, the way the Invisible Man dies is by being beaten to death by a mob, too.”
    Natalie turned to look at Grimes. The other woman was cheerily washing her hands and forearms with antiseptic soap.
    “Huh,” Natalie said with as much disinterest in her tone as she could muster. “Did he? That is sort of weird.”
    “Of course, like you, I don’t really think this guy was invisible,” Grimes added. “There’s got to be some reasonable explanation of why no one saw his hands or his face after his sunglasses got knocked off, until after he was dead.”
    “Yes,” Natalie hastened to agree. “Of course. I mean, an invisible man is just crazy