"When the devil bites you, you don't feel pain; you only get the taste of a candy melting in your mouth."
— Anonymous Street Graffiti, 1999
The morgue's cooling system was struggling to cope with that goddamn hellish heat outside. The sound coming from the ventilation ducts resembled the rattle of a dying animal more than a steady hum. Dr. Aris wiped the bead of sweat gathering on his forehead with the back of his hand and focused on the metal table in front of him.
"Is the AC broken again?" he asked, his voice muffled under the mask.
His assistant, Cem, tapped the thermostat in the corner and said, "I lowered the temperature, sir, but it's not doing a thing. The city is burning, and we're roasting in here. They say it's thirty-five degrees outside, even though it's midnight."
Aris grunted. "Forget the weather. Let's open this sewer package."
The thing lying on the table resembled a shriveled fruit peel forgotten in the sun more than a human being. According to police reports, the man was homeless, unidentified, and had been found wedged in the bars of a grate in the rainwater channels beneath the city. But it wasn't the condition of the corpse that bothered Aris; it was the *texture*.
The skin hadn't turned gray. It was a pale, waxy white and strangely taut. It was as if the flesh and muscles beneath the skin had melted away, leaving only a sheath stretched over the skeleton.
"It's like it's been vacuum-sealed," Cem murmured as he prepared the voice recorder in his hand. "As if someone sucked the air out of him."
"No rigor mortis," Aris said, lifting the man's arm and letting it go. The arm hit the metal table lifelessly, like a rag doll. "No signs of decomposition either. But according to reports, he'd been there for at least three days. It's interesting that the rats didn't gnaw on him."
Aris picked up the scalpel. The coldness of the metal could be felt even through the gloves. Elara's ridiculous "truck without an engine" theory was still spinning in a corner of his mind. He was sure the woman was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, but the void under that truck... That dark void had bothered Aris too.
"I'm starting," he said.
The tip of the scalpel touched the point designated for the Y-incision, just below the ribcage. The skin was much tougher than he expected; it showed resistance as if he were cutting through rubber. Aris applied a bit more force, and the skin finally split open.
At that moment, the air in the room changed.
Within seconds, the sterile air of the autopsy room was filled with a heavy, nauseating scent of strawberries.
Aris instinctively recoiled. "What the hell is this?"
What flowed from the homeless man's veins on the table was not blood. There was no metallic smell of oxidized iron. Nor was it a clotted black liquid. What leaked out of the incision was a thick, bright pink syrup that resembled a synthetic dream.
The liquid moved slowly, defying gravity. It didn't flow toward the edge of the table; it bubbled and swelled like chewing gum around the wound.
"Sir..." Cem's voice was trembling. The boy had clenched his fingers to keep from dropping his notebook. "This smell... It smells like ice cream."
"Don't be ridiculous," Aris snapped, but that was exactly the scent reaching his own nose. Stale vanilla and overly sugary strawberry flavoring. That artificial sweetness that reminded him of the carnivals of his childhood—a sweetness that should never be in a morgue.
Aris poked the pink substance with the tip of the scalpel. The liquid stuck to the scalpel and stretched. Just like melted marshmallow.
"No blood," Aris said, his voice no longer so confident. "No hemoglobin. Is there... glucose circulating in this man's veins?"
"Maybe it's some kind of drug?" Cem said, taking a step back. "A new synthetic substance or something? Like that 'Bonzai' stuff they talk about?"
"What drug turns a person's blood entirely into strawberry syrup, Cem? This is biologically impossible. It's impossible for the heart to pump this; the viscosity is too high. This is sludge."
Aris plunged the scalpel in again to fully open the corpse's ribcage. This time he made a deeper cut. He felt his stomach churn at the sight before him.
There were no organs inside.
Liver, stomach, intestines... none of them were there. The chest cavity and abdominal region were completely filled with that pink, fibrous structure. It was as if the man's internal organs had melted and turned into this sticky cocoon that looked like cotton candy. And the most terrifying part was that this pink mass was *vibrating*.
It was pulsing with a very slight, almost invisible rhythm.
"Sir, it's moving," Cem said, his voice now a whisper.
"Muscle spasm," Aris said immediately. "Post-mortem reflexes." But he was lying. There were no muscles left.
The smell coming from that pink mass became so intense that Aris felt his mask was useless. His throat was burning. An intense sweetness that made him hate sugar was stuck to the back of his tongue.
Aris reached for a specimen container. He tore off a piece of the pink fibers with metal forceps. The substance resisted being torn, stretching into thin threads before finally snapping with a *click*.
The moment he put the sample in the container, the substance began to swirl inside the glass.
Yes, it was swirling. Like a living organism, it was searching the surface of the glass, trying to find a way out.
"Fuck," Aris said. It was the first time in his professional career he had used that word over a corpse.
Just then, the flickering fluorescents of the morgue buzzed and blinked. That broken motor sound from the ventilation stopped. It was replaced by a distorted melody coming from far away, perhaps from within the mind.
*Di-la-li-la...*
"Did you hear that sound?" Cem asked, his eyes wide with terror.
"Just a power surge," Aris said, tightening the lid of the specimen container. But his hands were shaking. What Elara had said... She'd said "pink vomit." She'd said "the car was alive."
Aris looked at the container again. The pink liquid had stopped. But its color had darkened, turning from that cheerful pink to a bruised purple.
"We're sending this to pathology," Aris said, trying to keep his voice authoritative. "And you don't say a single word to anyone, Cem. I'll write the report. We'll call it 'severe chemical poisoning.'"
"But sir, the organs..."
"Melted!" Aris shouted, his voice echoing in the empty room. "He swallowed acid and it melted his insides. Do you understand? That's what we saw."
Cem swallowed and nodded.
Aris took off his gloves and threw them into the medical waste bin. As he walked toward the door, he felt as if that sweet smell had seeped into him. He needed a shower. He needed to wash until he scraped his skin off.
Before leaving the room, he took one last look back at the table.
He might have been wrong, but he thought he saw that pink liquid, instead of draining through the metal channels of the table and dripping onto the floor, clinging to the leg of the table and trying to climb *upward*.
He turned off the lights and threw himself outside. Even the coolness of the hallway wasn't enough to shake that sticky feeling. Could Elara be right?
He pulled his phone out of his pocket. He thought about dialing Elara's number, but his finger hung suspended in the air. Not yet. First, he needed to smoke a cigarette and put this trick his brain was playing on him onto a logical footing.
Because if what he saw was real, science was over. And hunting season had begun.