In the Black

by Patrick S. Tomlinson

  * * *

  Tyson kept himself from scanning the skies above for the hornet Paris had inserted among the bumblebees always buzzing overhead. The pod had dumped him out right at the Emergency Room doors to the Xanadu Hospital. There were four hospitals in Methuselah, just for the sake of redundancy in case of a natural disaster. The city had at least two of every major component of its infrastructure for exactly that reason, often more. That was the beauty of living in a city with a three-century-long central development plan. But everyone knew Xanadu was where you wanted the med-flight to land if it was your ass in the stretcher.

  Tyson adjusted his jacket, cut without lapel and with a high collar as was the current fashion. Several reporters had been tipped off by their camera drones and managed to beat him to the scene even before his pod had slid to a stop. Tyson consoled himself in the knowledge the service fees for their air taxis on such short notice had been ridiculous.

  Ji-eun Park stood out among them.

  Tyson grimaced, but quickly put on his best poker face as the camera drones overhead descended to capture the scene in glorious UHD close-ups.

  “Mr. Abington!” one of the reporters barked. “Are you here to see the body?”

  “Body?” Tyson echoed. “I’m here to see to my body, if that’s what you mean.”

  “You know it isn’t,” Ji-eun said. “Are you here to identify the body MPD brought in less than an hour ago?”

  “I don’t know anything about a body, Ms. Park, no matter who brought it in. I’m here for my tri-annual colonoscopy.”

  The rest of the press pool recoiled a bit at that, but Ji-eun remained undeterred. “You mean to tell me that you’re here to have a camera stuck up your … nether-regions?” she said, catching herself before committing a faux pas that would have earned INN a significant broadcasting fine.

  “Yes. And as much as I’m sure you’d love the honor, I’m afraid I must leave my prostate health in the hands of trained medical professionals. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” Tyson politely, but firmly, pushed past the knot of journalists trying to block his way, most of them wearing faces of discomfort or outright disgust. Indeed the only one not looking at him like he was covered in shit was Ji-eun, who wore a small smirk on her gently shaking head. Tyson gave her a breezy, two-fingered salute with his right hand as he passed through the automatic ER doors.

  Once inside, he was met by a middle-aged sergeant of the MPD whom he didn’t recognize, not that it meant anything. Tyson had experienced very little contact with the MPD since he’d graduated from primary school. Its independence as a police force was a polite fiction maintained by their labor union and the city’s public council. In reality, the police, like all civil servants on Lazarus, had their checks cut by Ageless Corp.

  “Mr. Abington.” The sergeant stuck out a hand. Tyson took it. “I’m Officer Berg. Sorry to have to call you out for this. Messy business. But your, ah, assistant messaged the precinct to say you might be able to help us ID the, um, deceased.”

  “It’s all right, Officer. But if we can move somewhere more private before we continue this conversation?”

  “Doesn’t get much more private than a morgue, sir.”

  “I suppose that’s true.”

  “This way.” The sergeant led him toward a set of elevators. Once inside, he keyed for a subbasement that required code verification. “Can’t be too careful who comes and goes down here,” Berg said. “The dead have a way of bringing out the worst in folks, you know?”

  “No,” Tyson said. “But I can imagine.”

  “Better you don’t have to. Believe you me.”

  “How long have you been on the force, Sergeant?” Tyson very consciously didn’t say “my” force.

  “Seven years next month. Best decision I ever made.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “No doubt. I wasn’t exactly a model citizen as a youth. If the Academy hadn’t straightened me out, mum would’ve been visiting me down here by now.”

  “Well, Lazarus is the place for second chances. We’re proud to have you, Officer Berg.” The lift came to a stop as Tyson said it. The doors opened, and the most disturbing smell Tyson had ever experienced washed into his nose. It wasn’t a disgusting smell, exactly. It was too sterile for that. Instead, the lingering undertones of rot and death had been chopped up and overpowered by cleaning solvents and preservative agents. It smelled like a butcher shop run out of the back of a dentist’s office.

  And it was cold. Unseasonably cold.

  Tyson braced himself against the chill, unwilling to let it harm the air of calm competence he maintained at all times and all costs. He wasn’t entirely unprepared. Lazarus had been a largely desert world when the first terraforming rigs were set up. Unlike Earth, the problem here had been too much heat and not enough atmospheric humidity. Even after a century of solar-radiation-reflecting sulfates being injected into the upper atmosphere, the days on Lazarus still hit the high fifties C during summer. But like any desert, the lack of cloud cover at night meant temperatures plunged into single digits or worse. Everyone had gone on “nature” excursions in primary school, if only to drive the dangers of the open desert into the children at an early age.

  Still, Tyson was a few decades removed from those miserable, windblown nights in a paper-thin Mylar tent out on the Aldrin Plateau. It took concentration not to shiver.

  “The morgue’s just up here.” Berg held a hand out down the corridor toward a set of stainless-steel double doors, scratched and dented from a thousand gurneys, with copper handles polished to a bright shine in the middle. Round windows offered a very narrow view of whatever lay beyond. The whole thing looked like it had been stolen straight from an old movie set.

  “You should know, sir. The coroner here is a little…” He wiggled his palm.

  Oh, great, Tyson thought quietly, without letting it reach his features. The last week had already been strange and stressful enough. The last thing he wanted to be doing right now was to be led around in a subbasement labyrinth by a juvenile delinquent turned cop on a pilgrimage to some sort of antisocial crypt-keeper with the only prize being a dead body.

  But some things one just had to endure.

  “Be kind, Officer Berg,” Tyson said instead. “I’m sure we would all be a little…” Tyson wiggled his own hand. “… in their position.”

  “Too true.”

  The doors swung open with a clack that made Tyson wonder what exactly was holding them fast to their hinges. Half a dozen exam tables arranged in rows of three lay under harsh, unnaturally white light streaming down from the ceiling. Probably all the better for inspection and photography, but it cast the entire room in an unsettling hue. Four of the tables already had customers lying in repose beneath thin green sheets stained brown in places by blood, or worse.

  “Who’s this?” a gruff female voice called out from around a corner of the room over the sound of a running sink.

  “This is Mr. Abington,” Berg said. “He’s here to identify the halfsie, remember?”

  “Halfsie?” Tyson asked, suddenly very aware of everything he’d eaten up to that point throughout the day.

  “Er, yeah,” Berg said. “Didn’t they tell you? It’s not going to be an open-casket funeral.”

  “As dead as one of you can be,” is what Paris had said. Tyson swallowed. “They may have mentioned it.”

  The sound of running water ceased abruptly. A moment later, a squat woman settling comfortably into her sixties walked into the main room toweling off her hands. A vaporizer hung pinched at the corner of her mouth like an outgrowth of her lips, while a haze of smoke rose from her mouth and nostrils as if she was preparing to breathe fire.

  The coroner looked Tyson up and down like she was mentally fitting him for a coffin. “Well, aren’t you a fancy-looking one?”

  “I’m not sure I approve of your tone,” Tyson said, unaccustomed to open insolence.

  “Heh, strap in, honey. I’m not one for diplomacy. Why’d you t
hink they keep me down here?”

  “Should you really be vaping?” Tyson asked with an unplanned edge to his voice. “I thought hospitals were supposed to be sterile.”

  The woman squeezed the vaporizer straw between two fingers. The tip lit up purple as she took a long pull before blowing the smoke out through her nose. She waved an arm at the bodies lying dead on the tables. Her tables.

  “Haven’t had any customer complaints yet.” She smirked.

  “I suppose not,” Tyson allowed. “But I’m complaining, and I’m alive and standing in front of you. So, do you mind?”

  The coroner made a display of removing the pen from her mouth and powering it down with her middle finger.

  “Thank you,” Tyson said.

  “Bein’ a health nut never saved anyone, Mr. Abington. Everyone ends up on the slab sooner or later. All you’re doing is making the time before your appointment boring. So, you’re here to ID my Jane Doe?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, I hope you have a strong stomach for this sort of thing.”

  “I guess we’re about to find out.”

  The coroner, who still had not shared her name, knelt and grabbed a small recycling bin from next to a cabinet and pushed it into Tyson’s stomach. “I’m not cleaning it up if you pop. I have to deal with enough bodily fluids as it is.”

  Tyson took the bucket, offended, but also not entirely confident he wouldn’t be in need of it. “Fair enough.”

  “Mr. Abington,” Berg said. “If you don’t mind, I’ll just be guarding the door. I’ll escort you back up when you’re ready to leave.”

  So, even the seasoned cop didn’t want to stick around for the messy part. It must’ve been bad. “That’s just fine, Officer Berg.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “She’s just over here.” The coroner pointed to the far table as she walked. Tyson realized he was avoiding looking down at the green sheet with the prominent brown stain slashing diagonally across its middle. He forced himself to do so. Whatever lay beneath it ended about halfway down the examination table.

  The coroner grabbed the top corners of the sheet. “Are you ready? I’m not going to sugarcoat it. What’s under here isn’t pretty.”

  Tyson steeled his nerve, promising himself he wouldn’t flinch. “I am.”

  She grunted a nod and pulled back the sheet.

  He flinched.

  “Jesus…” For a moment, Tyson’s stomach felt like it was going to implode. An unexpected wave of panic washed over his consciousness as long-buried instincts fought for attention.

  “Yeah,” the older woman said knowingly. If there was any mockery in her tone, he couldn’t hear it.

  Through a force of will, Tyson tamped down both his sudden urge to take flight and the nausea. He took a breath, then made himself look down at the table again. The body, or what remained of it, was nude, because that’s how it … she had been found, or because the clothes had been removed prior to examination, he couldn’t say. Deep lacerations gouged out valleys in the dead woman’s flesh. Everything below the rib cage, as well as her left arm below the elbow was missing, the flesh at the edge torn and shredded as if by a shark or another such monstrous predator. But there were none native to Lazarus, at least none that had survived to the present day. The Methuselah City Zoo held a number of big cats from Earth, but he’d have heard immediately if one had escaped.

  “What the hell did this?” Tyson asked in a hushed tone.

  “Organics reprocessor. One of the maintenance techs down at the central recycling plant found the body half chewed up by the second-stage shredder. It’s basically a big wood chipper that breaks organic waste down into pieces small enough to be composted easily. But it wasn’t meant for things this big. It got through her legs all right, but bogged down by the time it reached the pelvis. Someone didn’t do their homework.”

  A perfectly horrible thought crossed Tyson’s mind. “Was she, you know…” he trailed off, afraid of the answer.

  “Alive? No, no. Thank God. The meat grinder was postmortem. Cause of death was a nail from one of those pneumatic drivers through the base of the skull, up into the brain stem and cerebellum. Doubtful she even felt it.”

  “A small mercy.” Tyson was relieved. He’d been furious with the mystery woman, of course. But no matter how angry he was, wishing that kind of death on anyone was beyond him. The nail driver was a makeshift weapon. Guns were illegal for private ownership on the planet and had been from the earliest days of the colony. Only the police were allowed them, and even then only among the Critical Response Team, which had a great deal of additional specialized training for dealing with hostage rescue, active attacker situations, and the like. Guns were occasionally smuggled in and used in crimes, but customs and security at the spaceport were highly competent and made sure such occurrences were exceedingly rare. Murderers had to be a bit more creative as a result, but this was the first time Tyson had heard of a nail driver being used.

  He inspected the woman’s face. Her eyes were closed, fortunately. The hair was different than he remembered, shorter, darker. Probably she’d either been wearing a wig or she’d cut and dyed it immediately after his lunch meeting with Sokolov so she would be harder to recognize. But the young woman he’d known as Cassidy was still there in the chin and cheekbones. And more tellingly, there were still traces, barely noticeable, of the henna tattoo on her right hand and wrist. Tyson probably wouldn’t have spotted them if he hadn’t known to look. Cassidy had tried to wash them off, and had mostly succeeded, but a slight discoloration in the lines of her skin remained from the dye.

  “Yes, this is her,” he said.

  “You’re sure?” the coroner said with a strong, commanding undertone.

  “Yes, I’m certain of it.”

  “Great, who is she?”

  “You mean you don’t know?” Tyson asked.

  “No, that’s why we brought you down here in the first place. What’s your relationship to the deceased?”

  “None. She was a waitress, or at least pretended to be.”

  “Pretended?”

  “Yes. I’m fairly certain she was acting as a corporate spy.”

  The coroner shrugged. “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”

  “You don’t have any ID on her? Not facial recognition, DNA profile, fingerprints?”

  “Ran them all. Nada. Do you at least have a name I can give her other than ‘Jane Doe’?”

  “She said her name was Cassidy. But that was almost certainly an alias.”

  The coroner smirked and scribbled on her pad. “Well, it’s her real name now. Any guess at a last name?” Tyson shook his head. “Okay, Cassidy Castalia it is. Mmm, that’s not bad. Almost sounds like a real name.”

  “Why Castalia?”

  “I give all my unclaimed stiffs the surname Castalia. Figure if they can’t find their way back to their families, they may as well join a new one.”

  “How sentimental of you.”

  “Don’t push it.”

  “How many?” Tyson asked.

  “Hmm?”

  “How many people in this postmortem family of yours?”

  “Seventeen.” The coroner retrieved the vape pen from her pocket and took a drag. Tyson didn’t object.

  “Sorry. I’m sure the family reunions are … lively.”

  “Har har.”

  “What’s your name?” Tyson said. “Seriously?”

  “You really think we want to know each other?”

  Tyson touched his ear. “No, I suppose not. Is there anything you can tell me about her? Anything at all? It’s important.”

  “Already done the standard autopsy. Deeper dive costs money.” She rubbed her thumb and forefingers together.

  “Isn’t that part of your budget?”

  “Was, until someone suffering from altitude sickness way up there in the top of Immortal Tower cut ‘unnecessary procedures’ from the budget. Been having to charge the families for, oh, four year
s now for anything beyond a cursory exam. Or the life insurance companies when they want to fight a payout.”

  “So, you recognize me after all,” Tyson said. It wasn’t a question. The coroner just smirked. “Then you know money won’t be a problem.”

  She pointed at the incomplete cadaver on the cool, stainless-steel table. “For her, no. But it’ll be a problem for the next unlucky soul that gets wheeled in here tonight, tomorrow morning, whenever.”

  Tyson’s brow furrowed. “Are you holding me hostage, madam?”

  She folded her arms. “Can you blame me?”

  “A little, yes.” Tyson frowned. “Seems like everyone’s shaking me down lately. Show me what you’re worth, then we’ll talk. That’s my offer.”

  The coroner took a bonus drag from her pen, but blew the smoke down and to the side. A courtesy? She moved with surprising speed to a cabinet at the far corner of the room, presumably by her desk, to retrieve a pair of implements that wouldn’t look at all out of place at an inquisitor’s table.

  “You don’t want to watch this part,” she said. “I’m not questioning your manliness, or whatever. It’s just really not going to be pleasant.”

  Tyson waved a hand over the gore on the table. “And this was?”

  “Suit yourself, suit. Snap on a pair of gloves and give me a hand if you’re just going to stand around.”

  Tyson pulled a pair of blue latex gloves from a box on the counter and slipped into them. The coroner hefted a pair of pliers.

  “What are those for?” Tyson asked with a rapidly souring stomach.

  “Oh, you’ll see. Hold her mouth open.”

  Tyson obeyed before really thinking through the order. He pulled down on Cassidy’s lower jaw, gently at first, but rigor mortis had set in and fought back against the attempt. With some strain, he managed to leverage the mouth open a few centimeters.

  “That’s good. Just hold it there while I…” The coroner stuck the pliers into Cassidy’s mouth and gripped one of her incisors. Then, she put a foot on the table and cranked back, aggressively wrenching at the tooth trying to loosen it in its socket.

  With a final wet snapping sound, the root of the tooth gave way, sending the coroner tumbling back almost a meter before catching herself. Between the clammy feeling of dead flesh under his fingers and the sound of the extraction ringing in his ears, Tyson’s stomach finally rolled over. He just made it to the wastebasket before throwing up everything he’d eaten and drank in the last several hours.