All fear loses its power once it's explained, don't you think? Maybe it doesn't go away entirely, but it doesn't bite as hard as it did at first. Still, what truly churns our guts leans toward the primordial and the basic. You know... things that move when they should stay still, strange sounds in the night. Places where life is not... welcome. Cemeteries. Morgues. Death isn't the worst thing that can happen to you in the Foundation. On one hand, they deal with it every day, and on the other... it isn't always permanent. Come with me.
It began in the morgue of a British hospital. I can't tell you the exact location because the Foundation censored it, but I do know the anomalies started manifesting in some November in the eighties. Up to that point, nothing strange had happened... just another morgue in a normal hospital. Once they received the first round of reports, the agents moved fast: They declared the whole area under quarantine, invented a story about a demolition, and assigned a name... SCP-022.
They're still working to measure the frequency, but what happens is that sooner or later... one of the morgue doors opens on its own. Inside, there is always a corpse, covered from head to toe. In less than six minutes, the dead person gets up and tries to leave the morgue. No matter how decomposed they are or how advanced the damage is. In some cases, they couldn't even get off the table... but believe me, they try. Every time they 'die again' on the table, SCP-022 retrieves the corpse and closes the door again. Some who witnessed this mentioned a smell of burnt meat afterward.
The real problem are the ones that can walk. They don't breathe, don't eat, don't sleep... and they're stronger than a normal human. We don't know what energy source makes them move, but the state of the body has nothing to do with it. Each part keeps moving even after being cut off. If you're thinking of a 'zombie solution', it doesn't work here: Destroying the brain or decapitating the bodies is useless.
The good news (if we can call it that) is that the corpses die a second time. Sometimes it takes a couple of days, sometimes... three or four weeks. Do you wonder where they come from? So far, each instance (SCP-022-1, to be more formal) matches reports of stolen corpses in morgues across the United Kingdom. That's right, something or someone is dedicated to extracting dead bodies and 'processing' them in SCP-022. But that's not the worst part.
You see, some bodies come out of SCP-022 in very good condition... with their mouths, tracheas, and tongues intact. That allows them to speak without too much difficulty, and as you can imagine, the Foundation didn't waste the opportunity. Now, if you think talking to the dead isn't that disturbing, maybe the fact that the dead are not who they seem. is enough.
The first was a man named John, trapped in the corpse of a 54-year-old Asian man. He went crazy, started screaming, and six agents had to hold him down because of his strength. After that interview, the Foundation placed Class D-5619 on the SCP-022 table. The subject disappeared when the door closed... and then returned in the body of a 12-year-old girl who had lost her right arm and part of her torso. Three weeks later, SCP-022 returned D-5619's body, controlled by an 89-year-old woman.
SCP-022 isn't just reviving the dead. It's also recycling souls... or doing something worse with them. The Foundation decided to introduce several things into SCP-022, living and dead. Almost everything appeared in the room directly above the morgue, with varying levels of decomposition. Anything metal ends up rusty, and what isn't, just rots there. The only exception is human bodies. SCP-022 stores them elsewhere... to use them later.
