The Undead World (Book 12): The Body [An Undead World Expansion]

by Meredith, Peter

  She pulled on her gown and slapped her face shield down. After picking out a long tangle of flesh from her saw, she fired the trigger. “I think I would’ve remembered melting down a bunch of switches.”

  Then what was it?

  Jillybean ground the saw just under Kevin’s right knee, cutting through the tendons and ligaments. In half a minute the lower half of the leg came away and she paused. “If it was me, what would I have used?”

  It was somewhat sad that she was able to mentally list eleven poisons as if they were days of the week. Unfortunately, six of the eleven would’ve killed Mr. Dunnam in minutes and the other five would’ve killed him slowly over time so that no one would’ve guessed he was being poisoned at all.

  “This in-between business doesn’t make much sense, at least not if I had done it. What if Eve had done it for fun? There are plusses to a slower but obvious poisoning. There’d be lots of pain and lots of fear. People would start wondering if there was a murderer on the loose.”

  Jillybean paused just after taking Kevin’s left femur from its hip socket and gazed down on the hacked-up body. “There is a murderer on the loose. It’s me.” Glumly, she dropped the femur in a green trash bag and went for the other leg. As she worked, she tried to take her mind off the gory business by running over Mr. Dunnam’s symptoms. They were too generalized to point to any one thing. A hundred poisons could damage the liver and cause vomiting.

  At least in the process of listing them, Eve was forced into the background of her mind. Practiced as she was, it didn’t take her long to reduce Kevin Dunlap into manageable chunks, each going into its own green bag.

  The head went last and with it went the tarps and gown. “Now what?” She couldn’t leave the bags sitting out for anyone to find and yet she couldn’t move them out of the school, either, at least not in the daytime.

  “Maybe I can…”

  The sound of the side door rattling cut her off. Someone was trying to get inside.

  6

  “Oh God, what now!” In a panic, Jillybean rushed to the door and cracked it far enough to peek out.

  Eve stood right over her shoulder. They’re coming for you. They know what you did. Hey! She’s in the art room! The murderer is here!

  Eve’s voice was a scream in her head. “Shut up,” Jillybean hissed. “They might hear you.” She grabbed one of the bags and slid it to the door, knowing that as she only occupied a few rooms they would be searched first. But what would be searched last? Up and down the hall were lockers, a third of which were hanging open.

  She started to drag the bag holding the torso over to one when movement caught her eye. Out of instinct, she stopped on the spot. Slowly, she turned her head and saw Sheriff Perkins with her nose pressed to the office window, her hands on either side of her face, trying to see into the dark building.

  She knows what you did. She knows. She knows!

  Fear-induced vomit started to surge up Jillybean’s throat and she had to choke it back while remaining perfectly still. Only a few seconds passed before the sheriff moved on to stare through another window; nonetheless, the little girl was drained and she practically wilted.

  “No!” she whispered at herself in a hiss. “We have to hurry.” She backed down the hall away from the sheriff, picked a locker at random and shoved the torso inside. The body was too wide and she had to resort to smashing her shoulder into it again and again before the door would shut. Then she ran for more bags. Just as she brought out a leg and an arm, the front door was yanked on…then hammered on.

  Aren’t you going to get that?

  That wasn’t going to happen. Instead, she stuffed away the bags and ran for the last group. These went into a third locker. After a last look around the art room, she raced to the office, grabbed a few books she felt would come in handy and sped for the lunchroom, telling herself that she’d come back as soon it got dark.

  The doors on the west side of the lunchroom led to the school’s playground, where a girl of eight should’ve been playing on such a beautiful day, instead of running around trying to hide a corpse. Once outside she put her head down and quick-marched for the clinic, hoping that Mr. Dunnam was still alive. She didn’t think she could handle it if he wasn’t.

  She was straining to hold it together when she got back to the clinic and found Chris Truman still waiting.

  “Linda only suggested Tylenol,” he said, sounding aggrieved at the suggestion of using pain killers to kill pain. “She barely even looked at me.”

  “I’ll get to you when I can,” Jillybean promised.

  He followed her past the reception desk and had every intention of going with her into the back. “And when will that be?” he demanded. “You’re spending all your time on one guy. It’s Jonathan, right? What’s he got? Is it bad?” He seemed a little too eager, as if he was hoping he could get a small dose of whatever was ailing Jonathan.

  “I’m not allowed to say. Patient confident-iality is what means it’s private.” Although Chris loomed over her, she crossed her arms and stared upward unmoving.

  Chris looked like a boy being sent to detention as his shoulders drooped and he turned. Over his shoulder, he muttered, “You have a little blood on your ear by the way.”

  Dashing into the bathroom, she hopped up onto the counter and saw that she had more than a little blood on her. She had an entire constellation of blood freckles across her nose. There was more blood on the jacket of her pink warm-up suit. “Holy moly.”

  She washed quickly and practically jumped into her lab coat. Afraid that someone…or half the town, would barge in at any second, she faced the wall as she buttoned it up to her throat. When she looked in the mirror again, she didn’t just see a sweaty, frightened child, she also saw a murderer.

  “I didn’t do it,” she said. The girl in the mirror didn’t believe her.

  With a long sigh, she went to see Jonathan, who she imagined would be on death’s door by now. Happily, she was incorrect. Not only was he still alive, he was also doing much better. He even smiled at Jillybean when she came in, something he rarely did.

  “I’m feeling a hundred times better. I must’ve been dehydrated. That’s what Linda said. You think I can get unhooked and go?” He lifted his left arm to her, exposing the end of the IV catheter stuck in the inner part of his arm.

  “You feel better?” This was the first good news she’d had all day. She crossed to him but after three steps she saw the news wasn’t all good. The yellowing in his eyes was more pronounced. “Maybe we should hold off on discharging you. That’s what means letting you go. Your eyeballs are getting worser.” He blinked as if that would allow him to feel the yellow in his eyes. She took his wrist and felt a thready pulse. She popped her mouth open and he did as well. The sores in his mouth had not changed in any way. She said, “Hmm,” to this.

  Jonathan had almost no chin and when he frowned, it disappeared altogether. “What? What’s hmm supposed to mean? I feel better. It was probably the fish like everyone said.”

  She made a face. “I don’t think so. You definitely show signs of liver damage. Let me take a look at what we got from your tummy before you go anywhere.”

  “I’m fine,” he insisted.

  “Maybe,” she answered.

  His lips pursed in irritation. “What if it’s a residual effect? Isn’t that a possibility? You can test for that, right?”

  “If you stay, I can.”

  He pouted over this. Turning away, she rolled her eyes and left, wondering if she was going to get any sort of break that day. She found the contents of his stomach in the small lab she’d set up in one of the offices. Linda had done nothing with the syringe of gastric juices Jillybean had collected. It was sitting next to a plastic jug that was half-filled with a red-brown fluid. It was darker than she expected.

  The lab facilities on the island were not bad. What they were missing were properly trained lab techs. Out of the thousands of tests that could be run, Jillybean had taught herself
only the basics, one of which was a pH test. An empty stomach will have an acidic pH level of about 4. Jillybean figured the acid levels would be stronger in Mr. Dunnam’s case. Stronger stomach acids register as a lower number; 1 would be bad news.

  “A 6? What the hey? That’s not right.” She ran the test again and the new strip gave the same results. She sat back trying to remember everything she knew about the various infections of the stomach. Many of them raised the pH of gastric juices to a six or even higher, but none of these ailments also caused the burns she had seen or the clear liver damage.

  She glanced over at the jug of red-brown fluid and sighed. It would have to wait. Going through the particulates without the aid of the old technologies would take hours, and with his jaundice progressing as rapidly as it was, she needed answers quickly.

  “What do you think? Should we scope him first?” She paused, expecting to hear a voice in her head answer her. When none came, she frowned. She had lived with Ipes and Sadie inside of her for so long that she missed them sometimes. Still, it was nice to know the Zyprexa was taking effect and was holding Eve in check.

  Jillybean prepared the endoscope and then prepared Mr. Dunnam who would have walked out if he knew how to disconnect an IV. He was adamant that he was fine. She was just as adamant that he wasn’t.

  “Maybe this will show you. Lie back.” Reluctantly he leaned back until he was contorted on the table in a guarded position. “All the way,” she ordered, getting a stool so she could be high enough. “This won’t hurt if there’s nothing wrong with you.” She started by listening to his bowels. They were going crazy. He had to feel his intestines twisting in on themselves and she raised a downy eyebrow at him.

  He acted innocent. “What?”

  She gave him a “Hmmm,” and went on listening, now to his heart and lungs. His heart was running at ninety-six beats a minute and although she didn’t have a base number for him, she guessed that it was high. After this she started tapping his abdomen. When she got to his liver, he flinched.

  “That’s not good, you know,” she told him. “Good is when it don’t hurt.”

  “Yeah, I guess. But that scope thing doesn’t go all the way to the liver, does it?”

  “No. For the liver we’ll use ultrasound.” Although she sounded confident, Jillybean was far from it. She had only just started using the machine and was still trying to understand the images it produced. Still, she figured she’d be able to see a tumor or cyst if it was large enough.

  Once gloved and everything sterilized, she took a deep breath. “This is going to be a little different. This’ll go into your mouth. Just keep swallowing and don’t bite down.” As she advanced on him with the camera end of the scope he began panting and she thought: He’s going to puke on me, I know it.

  Thankfully, he didn’t, though it was close. “Okay, we’re in the esophagus.” The image on the monitor showed more of the sores that were in his mouth; some were bleeding slightly. When the camera-tipped tube hit the stomach, Jillybean leaned back in shock. There were no sores here. Instead, there were a dozen deep, bleeding ulcerations.

  This was so unexpected that Jillybean didn’t know what to do next.

  “What?” Jonathan asked. Because of the tube, the word came out garbled. His fear was unmistakable, however.

  She spun the monitor towards him, and he recoiled in horror. “A bad fish or a spicy burrito didn’t cause this much damage,” she said. “It’s something else. It’s…”

  Poison, Eve said, her voice little more than a ghostly echo.

  Jillybean swallowed hard and went on. “It’s probably a kind of toxin or uh, poison like we thought.”

  “I’ve been poisoned?” He was close to tears, and so was she.

  “Maybe not on purpose.” She was grasping at straws. Whatever caused this wasn’t normal. It wasn’t like Jonathan was the kind of guy who left the island to taste-test unknown chemicals in the industrial section of Seattle. “Either way…”

  Deanna came in just then, carrying a fish in a plastic bag. She opened her mouth to say something but saw the monitor and froze. The colors, especially the pool of blood that was collecting in the pit of stomach, were startlingly vibrant. “What is that?”

  “It’s his stomach,” Jillybean answered. “He’s been poisoned like we thought.”

  “Are those burns?” Deanna asked. “Like he drank bleach or something? Could bleach do that?”

  Jonathan looked at Jillybean as if the question had merit. The little girl shrugged. “I think he mighta noticed if he drankded bleach. This was something more…soft? No, subtle. That’s the right word.”

  Insidious is better, Eve suggested. She was right. Jonathan had ingested a poison unknowingly. He had eaten it or drunk it and went to bed without any idea he was dying.

  “So, it wasn’t the fish?” Deanna asked, holding up the bag. “Hanson said as much. He was offended at the idea.”

  There was a tap at the already open door and Angela Lenna came in. She too saw the monitor and went grey in the face. “Oh crap. Is he going to be okay?” In her hand was a forgotten trash bag. Behind her was Chris Truman, his sling as forgotten as the trash bag. He was busy trying to peer over her head into the crowded room.

  “What’s all that stuff?” he said in a cawing voice, meant for a nightclub instead of a clinic. “Is that blood? Damn, Jonny, that don’t look too good.”

  Behind Chris was Linda, the long lines on her face pulled in by a grimace. “I told her not to come in with that bag. It smells like old fish. And you, Chris, please leave this room this instant.”

  “Not until I find out what that is. How do we know it’s not contagious? Huh? I heard you talkin’ about poisons but it could be something in the air. There’s all sorts of crap floating about unseen. Jonny might be spewin’ stuff right now even as we speak. He should get a mask on.”

  Deanna rubbed her forehead, saying, “If you’re worried about catching something, perhaps you shouldn’t hang around sick people. Listen, everyone needs to clear out of here this instant.”

  She was a natural leader and Chris started to turn, but bumped into Linda, who turned around and bumped into Neil Martin who was just squeezing into the room. He too, carried a bag, though his was small and brown.

  “Oh, wow. This is a lot of people. I brought your lunch. What’s going on? Oh my, what are we looking at? Is that your insides, Jonathan?”

  Jonathan nodded sorrowfully, while Chris did so with a greater excitement. “Oh yeah,” Chris said. “Jonny got hisself an enemy who’s gettin’ him with arsenic or some such. Who you think it is, Jonny? Danny McGuinness? He’s always givin’ you a hard time. Oh, what about Todd Karraker? He said that you were a fussy budget that one time and I know you…”

  “That’s enough!” Deanna snapped. “This is not the time or place for that sort of thing. And what did I say about leaving? Alright. Everyone out.”

  With a grumble on his lips Chris collided a second time with Linda, who considered herself essential to the care of the patient. Still, without much room, she was forced to turn and when she did, she knocked straight into Sheriff Perkins. The sheriff wasn’t budging. She stood with her squat body planted firmly in the doorway. She, like almost everyone else held a bag. In this case it was a backpack—pink with Barbie’s strangely perfect inhuman face drawn on the front.

  7

  The sight of the backpack sent a spike of fear flashing into Jillybean’s chest. The backpack with the bloody knife and bloody dress inside was hers. She had thrown it off when she found Kevin Dunlap’s corpse and had completely forgotten about it.

  Jillybean felt a numbness creep up from her fingertips as Sheriff Perkins pushed through Chris and Linda and into the now crowded room.

  “Hi there, sheriff,” Neil said in a controlled voice. He felt the sudden tension in the air and although he didn’t know the cause of it for certain, he guessed it had to do with Jillybean. Tension and Jillybean frequently went hand in hand. “Is there some
thing I can do for you?”

  “No. I’m here to talk to her.” She pointed a thick finger at Jillybean. Its nail was uneven and ragged. Perkins was known to sit on the steps of her jail, chewing her nails and spitting them between her splayed knees. “I have some questions for her concerning this.” She held up the backpack.

  The numbness in Jillybean’s fingers had leached upward and extended into her forearms. Neil saw his daughter go stiff and he smoothly stepped between them. “As you can plainly see, she’s with a patient right now. In fact, she’s got a tube down his throat. Out of deference to Jonathan, I think discussing backpacks and other mundane items can wait.”

  “Unfortunately, it can’t wait for very long,” Perkins said, unzipping the bag and showing Neil, as well as everyone else, the crumpled bloody dress. The knife was just visible poking out. The room went dead silent as eyes flicked to Jillybean. “Do you care to explain this?”

  Jillybean’s mouth fell open, showing off a little pink tongue. She was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She couldn’t explain the knife, the blood, the body, the poison or anything else. She didn’t even know if she could talk. Her entire body was numb right down to the core.

  “And would you like to explain why your school was locked and why I found…” Perkins was interrupted by the muted sound of a bell being hammered on. It was one of the coastal alarm bells, and before anyone could move, more of them began to ring.

  Deanna’s first thought was of Emily, who was being watched by Gina Sanders. “Look out,” she ordered. She pushed through the group and headed outside. Chris and Linda followed. Neil did not. He and Perkins locked eyes, neither willing to budge.

  Then came a cry of “Corsairs!” This had them both moving for the door. This left Jillybean and a stunned Jonathan Dunnam alone again. “What the hell’s going on?” he muttered around the tube.

  “I’ll find out,” Jillybean said. “Hold this and don’t move it.” Before he could say anything, she thrust the controlling end of the endoscope into his hand and rushed from the room. She did not follow the crowd out of the clinic. Just then, her life was on the line. There was a bloody dress to explain and only one way to do it. Darting to the right, she ducked into the storage closet and locked the door behind her. Under a bare bulb she ripped open a roll of gauze—it exploded from her shaking hands and scooted across the floor looking like a shrunken version of a roll of a toilet paper.