I survived, he thought. The worst is over. This soon will pass.
That night he had a horrifying dream. His children were being chased through the house by some rampaging beast, but when Ansel ran to save them, he found he had monster claws for hands. He woke up with his half of the bed soaked in sweat, and climbed out quickly-only to be gripped by another seizure of pain.
Chapter 7
SNAP
His ears, jaw, and throat were fused together by the same taut ache, leaving him unable to swallow.
CRACKLE
The pain of that basic esophageal retraction was nearly crippling.
And then there was the thirst. Like nothing he had ever felt-an urge that would not stop.
When he could move again, he walked across the hall and into the dark kitchen. He opened the fridge and poured himself a tall glass of lemonade, then another, and another...and soon he was drinking straight from the pitcher. But nothing would quench the thirst. Why was he sweating so much?
The stains on his nightshirt had a heavy odor-vaguely musky-and the sweat had an amber tint. So hot in here...
As he placed the pitcher back in the fridge, he spotted a plate with marinating meat. He saw the sinuous strands of blood mixing lazily with oil and vinegar, and his mouth watered. Not at the prospect of grilling it, but at the idea of biting it-of sinking his teeth into it and tearing it and draining it. At the idea of drinking the blood.
POP
He wandered into the main hallway and took a peek at the kids. Benjy was balled up under Scooby-Doo sheets; Haily was snoring softly with her arm dangling off the side of her mattress, reaching for picture books that had fallen there. Seeing them allowed him to relax his shoulders and catch his breath a bit. He stepped out into the backyard to cool off, the night air chilling the dried sweat on his skin. Being home, he felt, being with his family, could cure him of anything. They would help him.
They would provide.
Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, Manhattan
THERE WAS NO BLOOD on the medical examiner who met Eph and Nora. That alone was a strange sight. Normally it ran down their waterproof gowns and stained their plastic sleeves up to the elbows. But not today. The M.E. might as well have been a Beverly Hills gynecologist.
He introduced himself as Gossett Bennett, a brown-skinned man with browner eyes, a purposeful face behind a plastic shield. "We're just getting under way here," he said, waving at the tables. The autopsy room was a noisy place. Whereas an operating room is sterile and silent, the morgue is its direct opposite: a bustling space hectic with whining saws, running water, and dictating doctors. "We've got eight going from your airplane."
Bodies lay upon eight guttered tables of cold stainless steel. The airline fatalities were in various stages of autopsy, two of them fully "canoed": that is, their chests had already been eviscerated, the removed organs laid out on an open plastic bag on their shins, a pathologist paring away samples on a cutting board like a cannibal preparing a platter of human sashimi. The wounded necks had been dissected and the tongues pulled through, the faces folded halfway down like latex masks, exposing the skullcaps, which had been opened with the circular saw. One brain was in the process of being severed from its attachment to the spinal cord, whereupon it would be placed in a formalin solution to harden, the last step of an autopsy. A morgue attendant was standing by with wadding, and a large curved needle threaded with heavy waxed twine, to refill the emptied skull.
A long-handled pair of hardware-store pruning shears was being passed from one table to the next, where another attendant stood on a metal footstool over an open-chested body and began cracking ribs one at a time, so that the entire rib cage and sternum could be lifted out whole. The smell was an absorbing stew of Parmesan cheese, methane, and rotten eggs.
"After you called, I began checking their necks," said Bennett. "All the bodies so far present the same laceration you spoke of. But no scar. An open wound, as precise and clean as any I've ever seen."
He showed them to an undissected female body laid out on a table. A six-inch metal block beneath her neck made her head fall back, arching her chest, extending her neck. Eph probed the skin over the woman's throat with his gloved fingers.
He noticed the faint line-as thin as a paper cut-and gently parted the wound. He was shocked by its neatness as well as its apparent depth. Eph released her skin, and the breach closed lazily, like a sleepy eyelid or a timid smile.
"What could have caused this?" he asked.
"Nothing in nature, not that I know of," said Bennett. "Notice the scalpel-like precision. Almost calibrated, you might say, both in aim and length. And yet-the edges are rounded, which is to say, almost organic in appearance."
"How deep?" asked Nora.
"A clean breach, straight in, puncturing the wall of the common carotid, but stopping there. Not going out the other side, not rupturing the artery."
"In every case?" gasped Nora.
"Every one I've looked at so far. Every body bears the laceration, though if you hadn't alerted me, I have to admit I might not have noticed it. Especially with everything else going on with these bodies."
"What else?"
"We'll get there in a moment. Each laceration is on the neck, either front or side. Excluding one female who had hers on the chest, high above her heart. And one male we had to search, and eventually found the breach on the upper inside thigh, over the femoral artery. Each wound perforated skin and muscle, ending exactly inside a major artery."
"A needle?" ventured Eph.
"But finer than that. I...I need to do more research into it, we're just at the beginning here. And there's plenty of other freaky shit going down. You're aware of this, I assume?" Bennett led them to the door of a walk-in refrigerator. Inside, it was wider than a two-car garage. There were fifty or so gurneys, most containing a crash bag unzipped down to the corpse's chest. A handful were fully unzipped, those bodies nude-having already been weighed, measured, and photographed-and ready for the autopsy table. There were also eight or so corpses unrelated to Flight 753, lying on bare gurneys without crash bags, bearing standard yellow toe tags.
Refrigeration slows decomposition, in the same way it preserves fruits and vegetables and delays cold cuts from spoiling. But the airplane bodies hadn't spoiled at all. Thirty-six hours out, and they looked nearly as fresh as when Eph had first boarded the plane. As opposed to the yellow-tagged corpses, which were bloating, effluvium oozing from every orifice like a black purge, flesh going dark green and leatherlike from evaporation.