Soup

By Kate DeJonge

Ashley McCormack was brutally abused as a child, but she's found a way to thrive as the sadistic Assistant Coroner at the City of Changusay morgue. Convicts from a nearby maximum security prison get shanked on a regular basis, and Ashley loves to play with their remains, picturing her estranged father wit

• Language: English
• Publisher: AliKat Media
• Release date: Sep 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781738849581

Book preview

Kate DeJonge

Soup

Copyright © 2022 by Kate DeJonge

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Kate DeJonge asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Kate DeJonge has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book and on its cover are trade names, service marks, trademarks and registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publishers and the book are not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. None of the companies referenced within the book have endorsed the book.

First edition

Editing by SD Smyle

Cover art by Enrique Mesegue

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This one’s for all the girls and boys who couldn’t defend themselves as kids, and wish they could do something like this to their abusers. Writing horror isn’t the same as revenge, but damn it feels good to give the Survivor Demon a voice.

Chapter 1

Ashley McCormack stood in her kitchen playing with the bits of flesh she’d slipped into a ziploc bag at work that day. Her trophies were small this time, no more than a divot of skin and fat from the bloated abdomen of a pedophile and the ear lobe of a man who’d beaten his girlfriend to death with a tire iron because she’d forgotten to pick up milk with the groceries. She couldn’t wait to play with them, destroying them in morbidly creative ways that would make her feel alive with power. It was the only thing that made her feel anything, really. Her life had always been surrounded by death and torture, but now it was her turn to inflict pain, even if her subjects were corpses.

Ashley was an angry misfit as a child who’d made it clear that she had no interest in befriending anyone. In high school, she’d draped herself in black layers that hid the scars her father had beaten into her and wore her hair long to cover her face. Her classmates often speculated about her attitude and appearance with snide comments and rumours, but she never gave them the satisfaction of a response. Ashley had adopted selective mutism early in life, deciding that she would never speak to anyone unless it was absolutely necessary, and acknowledging her peers did not qualify.

As a teen, she’d locked herself in her room every night so that she could do her online research with privacy. Ashley loved all things dark and morbid. Death was fascinating to her; she’d been brought close enough to its edge so many times that she felt she needed to understand the mechanics of what was happening to her body when it stopped breathing. Death had become a potential companion to her, something to befriend. Every time she revived after one of her father’s attacks, she cried wishing he’d left her on the other side. She never remembered those moments when she was gone, it was just that her return meant more pain.

When she spotted Funeral Sciences in an online college catalogue in the tenth grade, she knew that was what she wanted to do with her life. She took all of the pre-requisite courses despite her mother’s insistence that art class would probably be easier, acing every one of them. They didn’t know about her plan to get out of their house as soon as she could; they didn’t need to. Ashley was a fantastic artist, and by graduation her secret bank account held more than twenty-thousand dollars from commissions she’d been taking through her favourite online social platform: Darklings. Fellow lovers of the dark and morbid gathered there to chat, and after Ashley posted a sketch of a rotting corpse she’d drawn at 15 years old, the requests for custom work began to pour in. The day after she received her high school diploma she got on a train and never looked back.

She’d made enough to get a tiny one room apartment in Toronto where she could stay while she completed her BSc and Medical Lab specializations before going on to Humber College for her Funeral Services education and licensing. She had worked hard enough to earn scholarships and grants, but continued to create online art to pay for off-campus housing while she studied death and dying more closely. Her life revolved around her education and her art, and the following she was gaining on Darklings. While she still had no desire to maintain friendships in person, there was something satisfying about having familiar people online to share her thoughts with.

At school, the practical embalming labs didn’t phase her at all; she had a healthy respect for the deceased and any ability to feel squeamish had been