Beautifully Dead - Chapter 43

An Immortal Affections serialized novel

May 7, 2025

Merriweather Medical Research Foundation,
Fredericksburg’s outskirts, Virginia

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Amelia read the text with one eye, flat on her back, the phone held above her face because even at minimum brightness the screen was doing unkind things to her head.

Your results are in. Come in this morning — I need to show you in person. We’ll talk next steps.

She read it twice. Then put the phone face-down on the nightstand and stared at the ceiling.

Next steps. That hesitation she could feel even in the phrasing, that worry tamped down under professional language. She’d heard enough carefully delivered bad news to know what it felt like coming.

She’d been awake since about three, when her temperature had spiked and then dropped in the space of twenty minutes, leaving her damp and cold and irritated. She’d gotten up and stood in the bathroom with the lights off — she didn’t need it anymore at all, which was something she was still processing — and took stock.

The headache was the same one that had moved in two days ago after coming back from breakfast and made itself comfortable. The floor felt too far and faintly untrustworthy, like it might decide to shift a few degrees in any direction without warning. Focusing on her own reflection was its own battle.

She looked like death.

She texted back: On my way.

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She drove slowly. Pandemic Virginia had emptied the roads down to a specific kind of quiet — essential workers, delivery trucks, the occasional car. It took almost an hour, both hands on the wheel, the radio off because the first twang of a country song had made her teeth ache. Outside, the kind of Virginia morning that would’ve been beautiful if she’d been in any state to appreciate it — pale light through old trees, the fresh stillness of a world that had been emptied out and hadn’t quite refilled.

The Foundation rose out of the trees in glass and steel, almost jarring against the old woods.

Dr. Thanakit met her in the lobby with a mix of curiosity and pity in her face that she didn’t quite manage to smooth away before Amelia could see.

“Dr. Everett. Thank you for coming in so quickly.”

“Of course.” Amelia pulled her sunglasses off. “How bad is it?”

Thanakit’s pause was brief but honest. “Let’s go over it together. Mr. Merrywether is waiting for you in his office.”

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The office was on the ground floor, which surprised her. She’d had him down as a top floor person — the kind of man who’d want the height, the view, the whole Foundation spread below him. But Thanakit led her along the main corridor and stopped at a door that opened directly onto the treeline, the Virginia woods coming almost to the glass, morning light still pale and low through the canopy.

No desk visible from the door. Just a long table against the far wall, two monitors, a whiteboard with nothing written on it, a few stacked journals with their spines turned away from her.

No photographs. No degrees on the wall, which for an academic was either arrogance or deliberate erasure. A single chair pulled up to the table, angled toward the monitors — not a chair for guests.

Thanakit had called it his office. It looked more like a room he worked in when he needed the space.

Dr. Merriweather was at the main workstation. Standing, not sitting, ready to start pacing at a moment’s notice, which she’d noticed he did when he was thinking through something. He turned when she came in, and motioned her to the empty chair.

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Amelia was not a clinician, but she’d spent fifteen years with disease documentation — primary source records of epidemic progression, the dry language of lab reports written by people trying to quantify things that frightened them. She knew how to read these. She read the dual profiles first, then Thanakit’s annotations, then the inflammation panel.

The dual profiles were flagged in red. She took her time with the antigen analysis.

“Profile B,” she said.

“The sealed room.” His voice was steady. “It hadn’t been opened since 1862. It’s possible that some of the sample preserved there—”

“I wasn’t alone in there” She kept her voice level, staring at him meaningfully. “Has she compared Profile B to the hair we found? Is this the same thing?”

He seemed about to answer, then thought better of it.

“Not yet. And I wanted to go over this with you first.”

She looked at him. He didn’t look away. She turned back to the monitor.

Next steps.

“My immune system has gone haywire,” she said.

“Your immune system is doing exactly what it’s supposed to.” A beat. “And in this case it’s a problem.”

She understood. She’d have preferred not to, but there it was.

“How long?” she asked.

He was quiet.

“Elijah.”

“The progression depends on variables we don’t have enough data to model yet.” he edged, “Which is part of why I wanted to ask you whether you’d consent to further tests. And more samples.”

“And how long would that take?”

He demurred, “It would be best if you stayed here, where we can monitor you. We have facilities upstairs. You won’t believe it, but this was a clinic once, and the spaces have been maintained and we now function as a private clinic, from time to time. You will be well cared for. Please consider it, at least for the day. I would say take some time and think about it, but…”

She put her hands flat on the workstation. They weren’t shaking. She noted that.

A line from James Merriweather journals rose unbidden in her mind. Something he had written about Eleanor’s death.

Subject ceased autonomous function at approximately 11:40 PM. Cellular breakdown proceeding as anticipated.

She’d read that entry half a dozen times, looking for the person behind it — some trace of acknowledgment that a woman had died under his care. She hadn’t found it.

This Merriweather. Elijah, was not James Merriweather though. She’d been telling herself this for days. Rationally, she knew he was not. She believed it.

The breakfast they’d shared. The coffee he’d remembered she took black. The way he’d let her drive herself this morning instead of sending a car, which — she hadn’t realized until just now that she’d noticed that. Small things that showed her this Merryweather was a good man. Sensible, Empathetic. Not the monster his great-great-whatever had been.

And here she was, standing in his descendant’s laboratory being told she was dying and being asked for more. More time, more energy, more blood, and she was so tired she could barely hold the thought in one piece.

“If I stay,” she said, “I want access to everything Dr.Thanakit runs. Every result, in real time.”

“Of course.”

“And I’ll need a charger, and a change of clothes.”

Something crossed his face — surprise, the look of a man recalibrating. He’d been braced for conditions, for negotiation, for questions and possibly even denial. He had not been expecting to be asked a charger. He smiled.

“You will have everything you need.”

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The lab was busier than she’d expected — people moving through the corridor beyond the keycard door, equipment running in a section she hadn’t been taken to before. Dr. Thanakit was waiting at the main bench, everything already laid out.

She was quick and quiet about it. Four vials, a cheek swab, a sputum sample. Amelia answered the intake questions in a clipped register, concentrating on not letting the wooziness win — precise, brief, clinically accurate. At some point she noticed Elijah, had left.

The private room on the third floor was what he’d promised: clean, a window with soft light coming through privacy glass, a proper bed. She sat on the edge of it and looked at her hands for a while. She needed to email her department chair. She needed to call her mother. Maybe her ex-husband. Her lawyer for certain. But that could come later. She laid down instead.

The ceiling was white, whiter than the hotel’s. The HVAC hummed on — low and constant, the kind of noise that either faded into the background within ten minutes or became the only thing you could hear. She closed her eyes. Only for a minute.

When she opened them again, the light through the privacy glass had gone warm and slanted. She’d been out longer than a minute.

Someone was standing in the doorway.

She blinked. No, the doorway was empty — partway open, the corridor beyond it dim, distant footfall, soft voices down the hallway. She lay still, her heart slowing down, telling herself it was the fever. Only the fever.

She closed her eyes again.

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He stood outside her door, his back against the wall. He hadn’t meant to come. He’d found himself taking the private elevator without really deciding to — thinking about her results, about which tests to run on her blood, which to run alongside his own — and somewhere in the middle of that he’d ended up there.

He’d found her asleep, the door most of the way closed. Sunlight warming the foot of her bed. He had just stood there for a moment, looking.

Eleanor’s pointed message chain had been sitting in his pocket for the better part of an hour.

Thanakit forwarded the panel. I’ve seen the profiles.

I know what you’re thinking.

Call me before you do anything, James. I mean it.

He read it one more time. Deleting it didn’t help as much as he’d hoped.

Through the door, he could feel her breathing steadying back into sleep. He put the phone in his pocket and walked back toward the stairs.

-

to be continued…

Photo by Akram Huseyn on Unsplash

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© 2025-26 E.M. di V. - writing as Morgan A. Drake & Joe Gillis. All rights reserved.