4338.207 · July 26, 2018 AD
Not Finished Dying
Four people stand over a corpse that refuses to make sense. The doctor finds healed arteries and empty veins. The nephew watches his uncle's anger turn cold and sharp. The partner keeps his calm a little too well. And somewhere beneath grey skin and a ruined throat, a chest keeps rising and falling like the dead man hasn't quite finished dying. Everyone sees something different. No one sees the whole truth.
The tent is dim and close, canvas walls filtering harsh light into something almost gentle. It doesn't help. Nothing gentle belongs in a room with a murdered man on the only mattress.
Glenda works with clinical precision, her hands moving over the body while her mind tries to reconcile what she's finding with everything she knows about medicine. The throat wound is catastrophic — should have severed major arteries, should have drained him in minutes. But the arteries appear healed. The veins are empty. And his chest, impossibly, is still moving.
Jamie's fury has been building since the river, cold and contained and aimed squarely at Luke. He knows something — or suspects it — and his questions land like accusations. How did Luke know the throat was slit? How did he know about the blood? What exactly happened before the rest of them arrived?
Luke absorbs the hostility without flinching, his answers measured and calm. Too calm, perhaps. The steadiness reads as either innocence or careful performance, and the others are left to decide which.
Paul hovers near the entrance, still grey from what he witnessed at the lagoon, calculating the distance to the tent flap. Kain does the same, his mind cycling through impossible explanations — zombie, monster, nightmare — while his eyes keep returning to that breathing chest, those open eyes, that sense of something still present behind the glass.
The examination raises more questions than it answers. No defensive wounds. No obvious cause for blood loss. A body that should be dead but hasn't quite committed to the role.
Outside, the beautiful landscape waits with patient indifference. Inside, five people circle a mystery that none of them are equipped to solve — and at least one of them knows more than they're saying.
