This is what Charlotte writes.

11.02.07

That’s the fifth one today. They’re dropping like flies. The expression strikes me as odd fro some reason and I explode with laughter, guffaws bursting from my gut and shaking the air. They all turn to stare at me, shocked. Frightened. I can’t stop laughing to explain myself, my face is already red as I gasp for breath and turns steadily redder with embarrassment as they all wait for an explanation I cannot supply. What must be seconds but seem to be hours stretch into infinity as I attempt to calm myself, eventually letting the question “Did you ever see flies drop?” escape before I succumb once again to giggles.
A quick and silent exchange of views occurs between them and I can tell that I’m on shaky ground so I calm down. As the last chuckle dies the air seems do disappear with it. We are surrounded by silence, because, even though the huge room is filled with people we are the only ones in the position to speak. We resume our slow walk down the aisles of piled corpses, the body bags on pallets reminding me of a gruesome, nightmarish Costco, where instead of deals on 40 packs of Snickers bars and 100 toothbrushes, you get another victim’s body.
He walks ahead, pulls one bag slightly out and unzips it so that we can see the face. I recoil involuntarily, cringing as I do so more from my own cowardice than from any real fear or disgust of what I see before me. Her eyes are open, staring up at me, blankly, without any emotion. After all, what interest do the living hold to those who are dead? Her hair has been, as according to procedure, shaven. It gives her an unsettling, mass-produced look. As if we are gazing upon the spent body of a clone.
She came in yesterday. They found her at her desk at work, slumped over as if she had been napping. There were no signs of illness prior to her expiration. Now I remember. I hadn’t seen her face, but I had been there when we got the call. Rigor mortis had set in, her joints stiffening, molding to the form of her chair, of the way her spine arched as her head rested on her keyboard. The retrievals man had complained, I hate sitters, he whined into the phone, but went anyway, coming back with her already in the bag, swinging her onto the forklift and driving her here, to her final resting place.
The low temperature of the warehouse, kept that way to keep the corpses from rotting and filling the place with a foul odor, meant that spending any extended period of time inside without some sort of jacket was uncomfortable. Goose bump inducing. The hair on my arms is standing up and I rub them to try and warm up, but it’s a futile effort.
Sigh. Let’s get out of here, yeah? We leave the rows of chilled corpses and step outside where the cement beneath our feet is radiating an intense heat that is disconcerting after the refrigerated air in the warehouse. We smoke cigarettes and watch the trucks dropping off bag after bag. When we go back to the office we’ll sit at desks and answer phones that deliver the news of another mysterious death, and another. We’ll pretend to care about these illnesses, these diseases. We’ll offer words of false sympathy for their loss before scheduling the removal. But, for now, in the still, hot air, squinting against the sun and smoke, each inhale bringing us closer to cancer, closer to death, closer to what the rest of the world is fleeing from, we don’t give a damn.