Norman let out a loud yawn, rubbing his tired eyes before slapping the wet mop down on the floor to continue mopping the already spotless hallway.

His boss had called him the night before and told him to be here bright and early. Norman was annoyed at having to be up so early but he needed the money. If it wasn’t for bills, he would have told his boss to shove this where the sun doesn’t shine. Or at least that’s what he dreamed about doing. He wouldn’t actually do that, he really didn’t mind the job, most of the time. The random calls to come in and clean at any time of day were annoying but infrequent. And it wasn’t like taxes and bills had simply gone away after the apocalypse.

He paused after cleaning the hallway for the second time this morning and sighed.

“This is bullshit. Why did he need me to come in so early if he was going to take hours to finish?”

He had been here for three hours already – per his boss’s request – and he had been made to do busy work. Why couldn’t he have come in after his boss was done? Just as Norman was about to rest against the wall for a bit of a break, the door to the room his boss was working in opened up and his boss came strolling out.

The balding and overweight man had an exhausted look on his face and he was covered in blood. Norman winced at that, knowing the room was probably going to be in a similar shape.

The man looked over to Norman almost in surprise to see him here. “Norm! Oh my god, I forgot I called you. Sorry to wake you so early. I thought this would have only taken an hour, but the mayor asked for a full autopsy. Unfortunately, the Mayor is expecting me to report my findings here so I wasn’t able to tidy up. Sorry about that. I will get out of your way and let you get to it.”

Norman suffered in silence because he needed this job. “Not a problem, I will get right on it, boss.”

“Thanks for understanding, Norm.” Norman ground his teeth but remained quiet. He hated when people called him Norm, yet he never bothered to correct his boss. parents had always called him that, so every time he heard someone shorten his name it reminded him of those deadbeats that had given life to him and then just up and left one day.

A cold blast of air rolled over Norman as his boss strode past, bringing him back to the present.  A bloody trail led back toward the room, courtesy of his boss's plastic apron he had forgotten to take off. That wasn’t what annoyed Norman though. It was the fact that his boss had figured out magic first that annoyed him.

Norman wanted to flip the man off out of spit, but settled for sending nasty thoughts his way while mumbling to himself, “I still need this job, it isn’t worth it.”

Not that Norman hated his boss. He got annoyed with him at times but the man was decent enough. His boss had taken a chance by hiring Norman and he could at least appreciate that fact, even if the job he was hired for sucked ass.

Norman pushed his bucket of mop water towards the coroner’s room or was it an exam room maybe a dissection room? He wasn’t exactly sure what the actual name of the room was and he didn’t particularly care. His job was to clean, not to understand the nomenclature used for a room.

As he opened the door, the cold air inside hit him full on and he shivered despite wearing coveralls over his normal clothes. The coveralls were far too big for him and tended to chafe and rub but his boss made him wear them anyway.

According to his boss, it was so he didn’t get his good clothes dirty, and maybe that was true. But Norman noticed none of the other support staff had to wear this outfit, even though some had to work with the body parts and disposal. Honestly, it was probably because Norman refused to wear pants or normal shoes most of the time. He was a shorts and flip flops kind of man and damn proud of it. Although it was nice not to have his legs going numb due to the cold.

The once-clean stainless steel room had blood all over the floor and even the cabinets, where the saws and other dissection implements were kept. Norman didn’t know how a coroner could be so messy. If Norman hadn’t known the man for almost a year, he might have suspected the guy did it on purpose. But he knew the man was just a bit scatterbrained.

At least one good thing came out of the room's frigid temperatures, the room didn’t smell.

Norman turned his gaze toward the body on the table. Its chest cavity was cut open and the organs had all been removed and placed on other trays like gruesome little trophies before the cuts had been stitched back together, leaving the chest looking slightly deflated. Even the skull had been cut open and the brain removed. The staples along the skull made Norman think of Frankenstein’s monster. Yeah, Norman knew the difference between Frankenstein and his monster, he wasn’t a moron.

In fact, Norman had been top of his class in grade school and into his early high school years. Until his parents vanished. Well, that wasn’t true, they didn’t vanish, it wasn’t some big conspiracy or murder mystery. They simply packed up their stuff and drove off one day while he was still in school.

His grades went downhill from there as he struggled not to become homeless or let on that his parents had run out on him. It only lasted a few months before the school caught on. But Norman wasn’t about to be stuck in some shithole halfway house or adoption center. So he was forced to drop out of school and hide out until they stopped looking for him. That was when he ran into his friend and mentor figure, Toby.

Toby wasn’t perfect, but the man meant well. He helped Norman stay afloat. Sure it involved selling some drugs, but it wasn’t like the job prospects for a teenage runaway dropout were very promising.

Norman looked back at the body, shaking himself out of his reverie.

The first time Norman had seen a corpse, was a bit of a shock. It also hadn’t been at this job. He recalled there was a lot less blood then, oh, and also no signs of being cut open. It eluded Norman as to why anyone would need a full autopsy of this body. It was pretty clear from the two bullet holes in the man’s chest that they were the likely cause of death. But that wasn’t for Norman to worry about, he wasn’t the coroner, he was only the janitor.

With a wet slap of the mop on the floor – partly from the water and partly from the congealing blood – he got to work. Norman needed to get this done quickly or his mop would freeze to the floor. He didn’t need to get another lecture from his boss about how to clean properly. It was both embarrassing and humiliating to have someone so bad at cleaning up after themselves, lecture him on the subject.

Not that his boss wasn’t wrong. Norman certainly didn’t give his all towards the role of being a janitor. It was a job and that was that. And not one he particularly cared about even if he did need the money. He only stayed due to a very specific perk that only this job allowed him access to. But he was getting ahead of himself. Cleaning first, then came the exciting part of his job.

Norman emptied and refilled his mop bucket three times before he got the majority of the floor clean. There had been a lot of blood spilled on the floor. He suspected most people would be surprised by the volume of blood in the human body. Norman certainly had been the first time he had witnessed it. Blood was something Norman had come to see pretty regularly since starting his job at the morgue and he was kind of numb to it by this point. He really just wished his boss wasn’t such a slob about it.

The tables had drains that led to a bucket on the floor but when Norman looked, the bucket had no more than a thin layer of blood coating the bottom. Certainly far less than normally should have drained into the bucket. It helped explain why so much blood was on the floor though.

It took a bit of effort for Norman to get the drain bucket off the floor, the blood that had spilled around the exterior of the bucket had fixed it in place. With a wet popping sound, it finally came free making Norman stumble backward. Norman carried the bucket over to the sink and let it soak in the hot water while he went back to mopping the area where the bucket had just been.

Norman let his mind wander as he cleaned. The work was boring and repetitive but required little in the way of mental effort allowing him to think about more important stuff. Things like paying his house payment.

The job paid enough along with Norman’s other forms of income for Norman to keep his home, barely but barely was all he needed. The only reason his job was enough to pay that bill was that the city charged him very little for his residence. His house was cheap because it existed outside the city’s fancy new wall. A wall that few people wanted to live beyond due to fear. Even if Norman could somehow afford to live within the wall, he wouldn’t. Norman preferred his autonomy.

As Norman was mopping around the base of the table he caught a whiff of the corpse. He instantly gagged and rushed over to the sink where he threw up a bit. He wiped his mouth and sighed. He might have gotten used to the sight of blood, but the smell of a corpse still got to him. It only got worse as the city had run out of formaldehyde. At least he had gotten to the sink this time. Having to remop the floor because he puked on it again would suck.

Halfway through the process of cleaning the tools, he got a call. Norman fumbled his phone out, almost dropping it in the sink due to his wet hands. Thankfully that didn’t happen. He didn’t even bother looking at who was calling as he stuck the phone to his ear. “Norman, here.”

“Norman, sweety, you at work?” Charise asked sweetly as soon as Norman answered the call. Her tone instantly made Norman wary and he paused his cleaning.

Charise was Norman’s thiccc with three c’s big titty goth girlfriend. Well, off again, on again girlfriend. Despite the fights they always had, he missed her. Sure he had other friends, like Toby and his sister, but that wasn’t the same as having a girlfriend. They were not currently seeing each other, but if she was calling…

“What’s up my little vixen?” Norman knew Charise was trouble, but she was the fun kind of trouble.

“Oh, not much, I missed you.”

He managed to suppress the joy at hearing her words. He didn’t want her to know how much her leaving him had messed him up. But there was a reason he kept going back to the woman.

“Oh…I missed you too, you wanna get together tonight?”

Norman didn’t want to beat around the bush.

“Hmm,” she purred, getting Norman’s hopes up. “I called because I heard you’re at work and a new body came in. I’ve been experimenting with a new strain but it needs a… special ingredient.” Of course, she wanted something from him.

Charise was also his dealer which sometimes made things a bit awkward.

He was confused by the request though. What could she possibly need from him, he tentatively asked. “What type of ingredient?”

“Oh nothing too onerous, I've been using animal brains in my fertilizer and you won’t believe the results. But I need the real deal, babe.”

Norman shuddered at the raw sexuality she put into that last word. He glanced at the human brain sitting on one of the trays like some macabre gelatine dessert.

“Uh, I don’t know. If my boss found out, I could lose my job.” It was a flimsy argument and he knew it.

“I’m sure it’ll be fine. Why don’t you come over this evening for a bit of fun, hmm? Don’t forget to bring it with you,” she purred.

Before Norman could respond, Charise hung up. He could try calling her back but he knew from experience she would just ignore his calls and if she even got his text, she would ignore that as well. He vaguely recalled the reason for their last fight. Something about him needing to stop wasting his time trying his hand at magic. It couldn’t have been a very serious argument if he barely recalled it. Of course, that could be because of the bender he went on to drown his anxiety after she walked out.

Norman didn’t know how to make her understand. He just needed to figure out one spell and he could convince her that he had been right all along.

He debated the ethics of stealing the brain of a dead person, for about five seconds. In the end, having her back in his life was just too tempting an offer to pass up. He grabbed the small cooler that he used as a lunch box and emptied it out. It wouldn’t be the first time he had stolen something from work, but this was the first time he would be taking human remains. It felt a bit wrong to steal body parts, otherwise, Norman would have done it before to help with his own experiments.

Then again, was it? The guy was dead. It's not like the brain was going to be used for anything. It would be taken to the incinerator with all the rest of the organs. Wouldn’t it be better for it to be put to actual use?

Norman paused once more as he looked at the brain. It wasn’t the ethics of stealing body parts that gave him pause this time, it was getting found out by his boss. His boss was forgiving, but this might be beyond what even he could forgive.

After a few more moments of wrestling with his thoughts, Norman worked up the courage to pick up the brain. The risk was worth the reward.

“Ew.”

The brain was cold and slippery in his hands. It reminded him of a bowl of jello left out to coagulate. Don’t ask how he knew what that felt like. Norman managed to carry the brain over to the lunch box without dropping it. That’s when he ran into a bit of a problem. It was too large for the cooler. He tried shoving the brain into the cooler but it would just pop back out the other side with a sickening slurp sound that made him shiver.

He fumbled about attempting to get the brain into the container for a few minutes to no avail. This was taking too long. Norman was starting to get worried his boss might pop in and see him messing with the dead man’s organ. And Norman knew getting caught would not end well for him. Looking around, Norman got an idea.

He ran over and grabbed one of the bone saws that was drying next to the sink and hacked off the bits of the brain too large to fit inside the cooler. Surely Charise didn’t need the whole thing. With a click, the cover of the cooler finally slid back over the top and locked closed. Norman cleaned up the mess and threw the remaining bits of brain in his trash bag. With the mess cleaned up, his boss would never know. The rest of the organs would be taken to the incinerator with nobody the wiser.

Just to ensure that nobody noticed the brain was missing, Norman would take the remaining organs to the incinerator himself.

He washed his hands before walking towards the door to leave but he stopped and slapped his forehead. In his rush to finish up and get back with Charise, he had almost forgotten something important.

Setting his stuff next to the door, he walked back toward the corpse on the table. He held his breath as he dipped a finger in the blood near the stitched cavity and used it to draw a pentagram on the dead man’s forehead.

“Exsurge anima mortuorum!” Norman spoke in Latin before pressing his hand against the dead guy's face. “Arise.”

Norman waited a few minutes for anything to happen but nothing did. With a sigh, he pulled out his notebook and added a new entry.

Day 687

Attempt to use Latin as a catalyst along with a blood-drawn pentagram has failed to awaken the dead. Body is brainless, possible cause of failure. Will need to test with an intact body.

…what am I missing?

Norman closed the notebook and stuck it back inside his coveralls. “Why couldn’t the apocalypse come with instructions?” This wasn’t the first time he had wondered this and it wouldn’t be the last.

After almost two full years of tests and nothing much to show for it, he was growing frustrated. But he didn’t quit because he had this feeling that he was on the right track. This new world certainly wasn’t making it easy for him though.

How was Norman to know that this world wouldn’t give him a single prompt on how to succeed or that knowledge of how to bring the dead back to life was a prerequisite to bringing the dead to life? Where was the system? The wonderful blue boxes, the levels, or the stats? It was bullshit.

Norman shook the thoughts of the past away and got back to work. Dwelling on what might have been was not gonna pay the bills. He would keep trying to raise the dead, eventually, he might get there. It’s not like he could change course now even if he wanted to. He had tried if only to make Charise happy at one point.

He tried his hand at being a standard mage figuring at least that would be easy considering some people were making minor progress in forming spells. But every attempt Norman had made to cast what few spells people had uncovered left him reeling from severe vertigo and vomiting. Nothing he found online could explain his symptoms but Norman figured it was probably due to the unique type of magic he was going for. Everything online was elemental magic, necromancy certainly wasn’t anywhere close to that.

As for switching to be a physical classer like Charise had wanted him to do. Even Norman couldn’t make that happen. And besides, whatever rules this world worked on didn’t seem to allow you to go in another direction after a conscious choice was made. At least it seemed that way once you reached maturity.

From everything Norman read online and learned in person, minors didn’t enjoy the same ability to cast magic or enhance their bodies as adults. That meant most adults got royally screwed if they picked something they had zero ability to understand, so at least Norman wasn’t alone in that mistake. The fact was that over eighty percent of people were unable to manifest a spell or body enhancement at all. So Norman actually had it slightly better than most people, a first for him.

Norman did one last pass around the room to make sure it was clean. The tools were washed, dried, and put away. The body had been stored in the freezer – after his attempt to raise it from the dead – for later disposal, and all of the organs were in the cart ready to be wheeled to the incinerator.

This was the most precarious part of his plan. If you could call it a plan. He needed to get the cart down the hall without his boss catching on to what he was up to. Norman looked at the clock on his phone, it was around eleven in the morning. Norman breathed a sigh of relief. His boss should be busy in his office by this time of day. Norman peeked into the hallway, finding it empty, it was the weekend so there shouldn’t be any other employees around to give him grief either. He pumped his fist in celebration and pulled the cart into the hallway. His celebratory mood didn’t last long though as a voice interrupted him.

“Oh done already, Norm?”

Norman froze as his boss approached. The timing couldn’t have been worse, Norman had just gotten the cart into the hallway when his boss came out of the bathroom down the hall.

“Um…” Norman’s mind was spinning to come up with an excuse, luckily his boss spoke first, saving him from coming up with some lame lie.

“Oh, taking the organs to the incinerator? I like the initiative. Keep that up and you might have my job one day,” the man chuckled at his own joke as he patted Norman on the shoulder when he strolled by. The man paused next to Norman, his hand still on his shoulder. “Oh, I hate to do this to you, but could you remop the hallway before you leave? It seems I dripped all over it and didn’t even realize.”

“Uh… yeah, sure thing, Boss,” Norman replied, barely keeping the relief out of his voice as his boss gave him a light squeeze on his shoulder before wandering back to his office.

“Charise better take me back after all the trouble I went through today,” Norman grumbled quietly as he pushed the cart quickly to the incinerator before something else could go wrong.