Empty Bodies (Book 2): Adaptation Read Online Free PDF

enough of him to where he wouldn’t be noticed.
    A woman appeared from around the corner, heading toward the double doors. She had a clipboard in her hand and was shaking her head as she walked, still grumping indistinctly to herself. David watched her as she pushed hard through the double doors, hearing them crash into the walls as they swung in.
    At the end of another short hallway, the woman headed around a corner, disappearing from David’s vision.
    He stepped away from the elevators and followed.
    ***
    The hallway was only dimly lit. A sign on the double doors read “Employees Only” written on notebook paper with a black marker and then taped on with Scotch tape. He ignored it, curious to know where the frustrated woman was headed.
    At the end of the room, he turned the same direction the woman had, and walked down the lengthy corridor.
    On either side of him, there were closed doors. It looked very similar to the area he was staying in, only this part of the hospital was dark and cold. He opened a couple of the doors and noticed that they were simply abandoned hospital exam rooms. The two rooms looked identical, both containing the uncomfortable, table-like bed you’d sit on if you were a patient, the doctor’s small rolling stool, a sink, and a small cabinet.
    At the end of the hall, he could only go left, which put him in another hallway. This time, though, he could see a glowing light at the end.
    David crept down the hall, and as he made it near the end, he heard the woman scratching notes onto the clipboard while still mumbling to herself. He stood with his back against a door that was slightly ajar, and listened.
    “They send me here to deal with this shit, but they don’t trust me to go outside,” the woman said, then sighed. “Such bullshit.”
    She continued to mumble to herself, and David stepped out of the doorway and peeked around the corner.
    The woman was standing there, as he’d imagined her, looking through a window and jotting down notes on the clipboard.
    David narrowed his eyes when he heard something else. A faint sound was coming from near the woman, though he couldn’t make out what exactly it was.
    The woman sighed again and then reached up and hung the clipboard on the wall in front of her.
    David backed up around the corner, ducking into an open room just as the woman stepped away from the window and headed toward him.
    From inside the room, he watched her walk away through the crack in the door.
    David counted to twenty, then poked his head out of the room.
    He looked out and saw that no one was coming or going, so he stepped out into the hallway. The noise he heard earlier became more distinct. Along with a low hiss, there was a repeated clatter.
    His bare feet moved gently over the floor as he headed around the corner toward the lit room the woman had been standing in front of.
    And as he approached the window and looked inside the room, his eyes went wide.
    “Holy shit.”
    All he could do was stare at it. The room appeared to have once been a gift shop, its contents pulled out so that the room was empty except for a bed, a small table, and some sort of machine. The thing was strapped into the bed, chomping its jaws and trying to break loose as it spit and hissed into the air. There were cords coming off of its body, hooked up to various machines. David looked at the clipboard, which had various numbers scribbled next to acronyms and initials that he couldn’t translate.
    He stood there watching the Empty squirm and try to break free for what seemed like an hour.
    “Amazing, isn’t it?”
    David jumped when the man’s deep voice came from his left, and his dark shadow loomed in the bits of light. As a reflex, he reached to his pants for a knife that wasn’t there. If it had been, the man in the shadow would have been dead.
    Lawrence approached David, smiling and looking into the room.
    “Her name is Joanne. She was a patient here when everything happened.”
    David sighed