He had more bodies on the way and had to make room. He already had the men stacked in two’s and in his drunken mind worried about the propriety of where to put the women. He had two that he kept in the examination room. The one was charred to ruin and had to kept in the body bag, the other had been strangled and wasn’t that worse off for the wear. The men on the other hand had mostly been riddled with bullets, shot in the extremities and just a fucking mess. He preferred to keep those out of sight where he wouldn’t constantly be reminded of what it was he was dealing with every day for a week. One woman, the gypsy had been shot in the face and he piled her into a drawer with the skinny guy who had also been shot in the face, each zipped in their separate body bags like ration kits.
He flipped off the radio as it was announcing more casualties and figured he had a good half an hour before the medic’s were ringing his bell yet again. He had kept the windows open during the storm to air the place out, but the combined odor of formaldehyde and death, as used as he was to it was not mixing well with the alcohol he stunk of. He’d been in this war for two years and had never smelled it so powerfully; it had never filled his lungs and polluted his breath with the pungency it did now. He needed to sleep because he was dreaming already, imagining the corpses doing a mad Dance Macabre before killing one another all over again. He saw them doing a roundelay with their stiff yellow fingers around each other’s throats.
Sure he was dreaming, cadaverous scarface Germans in bloody uniforms, skipping with glee to a merry mournful tune. He dreamed the he was the one playing the devil’s trill to all their amusement. He even had a chorus off hell sent Americans to slap their disembodied knees and sing along. It was hoedown in Hades; come one, come all and come as you are! The party growing so huge the dead was dancing in the streets! And the fiddle player played on, and on and on and on!

He awoke with the shakes, reached for his bottle of rye and someone handed it to him.
“Thanks, Josef,” but it wasn’t Josef the medic. It was the woman, the one with the bright red ring around her throat where the very life had been strangled out of her--the woman who had dies of asphyxiation and whose face was pale as a cloud, and whose body was as full and soft and round. He was draining the bottle, looking through the round distorted bottom at the face, lips so red they hurt his eyes to look at them, eyes so black there were no eyes, there were maggots for pupils and the lips smiled teeth yellow as cat urine in the snow. He brought the bottle away from his face, looked at it like maybe he’d snatched the wrong one; maybe he was drinking the goddamned formaldehyde. Then he looked at the woman standing before him. Nope. Before he screamed she had her hands around his throat, squeezing as she brought his lips nearer to her and then he felt the kiss, the Devil’s kiss that began to suck the life out of him. He felt his tongue leaving his mouth, his teeth being pulled and ripped from the gum. The air in his lungs was being inhaled like someone taking a load of helium to make funny voices, but his blood boiled like hot oil and he felt it being siphoned from his lips, pouring from his nostrils, filling his eyes and spilling from his ears. His pickled brain was going dry and the woman was getting tipsy from it. She giggled and hiccuped and his mind never comprehended exactly what had happened. She released the freshly drained corpse from her fingers and it rolled off the desk where it had been lying no more than a shrunken wrapper. She teetered barefoot around the room, giggling maniacally, making her way until her dead eyes began to see and her cold fingers feeling what they touched. She found the door and naked but for the black lace she had been killed in, yet again—she didn’t know how many times she had died in lace, she made it to the street and ran cackling into the moonlit night.