Immortal

by Dean Crawford

  ‘Jesus!’

  Lillian stared at the gurney as Alexis stifled a tight scream, one gloved hand flying to her mouth. Overcoming a momentary revulsion, Lillian took a cautious pace forward and peered into the depths of the plastic bag as Alexis began taking photographs.

  The body that lay within seemed as though it had been stripped of its skin, the internal organs were exposed and decayed, the slack jaw only held in place by frayed tendons and muscles that had either contracted into tight bands or fallen off the body altogether to coil like snakes beneath the corpse. The eyeballs had shriveled and sunk deep into their sockets, and what skin remained drooped in leathery tatters from the bones. Tentatively, Lillian reached out and touched a piece of skin. It felt brittle, like a leather rag left too long in the desert sun. Specks of material crumbled beneath her touch to lightly dust the steel surface of the gurney.

  ‘He’s mummified,’ she murmured.

  Alexis shook her head as if to rouse herself from a daze.

  ‘That’s not possible. He died yesterday,’ she insisted. ‘The rangers and the police independently verified his age, and there are photos taken at the scene by state troopers. He’s been on ice ever since. He had papers on him too.’

  Alexis handed Lillian an evidence form that listed the deceased’s name and social security number: Hiram Conley, born Las Cruces, New Mexico, 1940. She then handed her the photographs taken by the troopers. Lillian looked at the images of the elderly man killed at the scene of the crime, and then at the decomposed and desiccated remains before her.

  ‘There’s got to be a reason for this. Let’s see you make the case.’

  Lillian started making notes and drawings of the observations as Alexis led the autopsy.

  ‘Weight at time of death, approximately one hundred forty pounds. Some evidence of malnutrition and exposure prior to desiccation. Victim had applied field dressings to numerous wounds around the area of the chest, right shoulder and left arm consistent with . . . er . . . some kind of gunshot injuries.’ Alexis hesitated before continuing. ‘Victim is clothed in what appears to be some kind of fancy dress or memorial attire, consistent with Civil War era. Note: attire may provide evidence of cause or location of death.’

  Lillian set her clipboard down and took another long, hard look at the body as Alexis carefully undressed the corpse. With the broad-shouldered jacket and baggy pants gone the body looked entirely skeletal, a bone cage from which hung shriveled tissue and muscle, but this was not what shocked Lillian the most. The remaining tatters of skin on the man’s chest bore multiple lesions, deep pits of scar tissue peppering the surface.

  ‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’ Alexis asked.

  ‘Smallpox.’ Lillian nodded, noting the position of the lesions before examining the remains more closely. The body was a silent witness to more scars and lesions than Lillian had seen in her many years working in New Mexico. Barely an inch of his body seemed clear of damage, and even the bones bore testimony to breaks, cut marks and disease.

  ‘This guy looks like he’d lived a hundred lives,’ Alexis remarked in wonderment.

  ‘And all of them violent,’ Lillian agreed.

  ‘Most of his teeth are missing,’ Alexis said, ‘and his gums are heavily receded. Could be the mummification, but it could also be scurvy.’

  Lillian stood back from the body and shook her head.

  ‘Doesn’t explain the mummification,’ she answered. ‘Smallpox was eradicated in the late 1970s and scurvy disappeared over a century ago.’

  Alexis peered into Hiram Conley’s sightless eyes and examined the strange blue-gray irises.

  ‘Odd,’ she said. ‘Looks like extensive cataracts, but the cataract cortex hasn’t liquefied. This guy should have been blind as a bat by now.’

  Lillian leaned over for a closer look as Alexis shot more photos.

  ‘Long-term ultra-violet radiation exposure,’ she identified the cause of the cataracts, ‘denaturation of lens protein. But you’re right; they should have blinded him by now.’

  ‘And they’re an odd color,’ Alexis continued, ‘blue-gray. It’s like the proteins were constantly being repaired, fending off the liquefaction.’ Alexis gestured to Hiram Conley’s recently removed clothes, now lying nearby in an evidence tray. ‘And he was wearing clothes that look a hundred years old.’

  Lillian stared blankly at her assistant.

  ‘Where are you going with this? You think this guy walked out of a wormhole to the past or something? This isn’t Star Trek, Alexis. We need to keep our brains engaged here.’

  ‘I’m not saying anything like that,’ Alexis said quickly, reddening. ‘You ever heard of that Japanese guy, Hiroo Onoda? He was a soldier during World War Two who was on operations in the Philippine jungles when the war ended. He didn’t believe the leaflets dropped on the jungles to inform soldiers of the end of the war, thinking it was propaganda. He only surrendered when his former commanding officer came to get him after he was spotted by a traveler in the region.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘1974,’ Alexis said. ‘He held out for thirty years. My point is, what if this guy’s part of some family out in the Pecos who’ve just kept on going as they were? The Amish have been doing it for long enough. It explains the injuries, the disease, the old-style uniform. Bad water and improper sanitation can cause dysentery and exposure to the elements frequently leads to pneumonia. Typhoid fever, chicken pox, whooping cough, tuberculosis – I bet if you screen for them half will turn up.’

  Lillian shook her head.

  ‘It still doesn’t explain the mummification, especially not when it’s occurred overnight. This isn’t somebody who’s walked out of an Amish town. The only explanation is that this is absolute desiccation – the body has dried out in a matter of hours.’

  Lillian was about to continue when a metallic sound echoed through the morgue, as though someone had dropped a coin into one of the steel sinks and it was rolling round and round toward the plughole. She looked at Alexis, who stared back before glancing down at Hiram Conley’s remains. The metallic sound stopped, and then something fell with a sharp crack onto the tiles of the floor. From beneath the gurney rolled a small, dark sphere no bigger than an acorn. Lillian squatted down and picked the object up in her gloved hands.

  ‘That’s a musket ball,’ Alexis said in surprise. ‘It must have dropped out of him and rolled down the blood-drainage chute.’

  Lillian turned to Conley’s remains, moving slowly across to where the crumpled, emaciated flesh was dropping in clumps from the very bones themselves.

  ‘He’s still decaying,’ Alexis gasped.

  Lillian shook her head slowly. ‘He’s not decaying,’ she said. ‘He’s aging.’

  3

  ‘He’s what?’

  Lillian moved across to the opposite side of Conley’s corpse.

  ‘He’s aging,’ Lillian repeated. ‘It’s impossible for biological decay like this to occur so quickly in the absence of an active catalyst.’

  Lillian leaned in close and searched through the winding folds of muscle, sinew and bone until she spotted another metallic sphere. The ball was lodged deep in the man’s femur, half concealed by a gnarled overgrowth of new bone that had encased it.

  ‘There’s another one,’ Lillian said. ‘Fetch me a specimen bag, and then get some shots of this.’

  ‘Another one?’ Alexis uttered in amazement, grabbing the bag and hurrying back to Lillian’s side to photograph the wound. ‘It would have taken decades for that much bone to have grown back.’

  ‘It’s a much older wound,’ Lillian confirmed.

  Lillian grabbed a pair of forceps and probed deep into the decaying flesh of Hiram Conley’s thigh, gripping the ball and yanking it free from now brittle bones that cracked like splintering twigs. She dropped the ball into the specimen bag, sealed it and handed it to Alexis.

  ‘Get it to the state crime laboratory, right now. We can’t test the metal here. Drive it there
yourself, no delays, and have them send me the results directly as soon as they’ve got them. I’ll start on toxicology and bio-samples here.’

  Alexis stared at the crumbling corpse for a long moment as though she were looking back into the past.

  ‘What’s going on, Lillian?’ she asked. ‘How can this be?’

  Lillian snapped her fingers in front of Alexis’s face, and the girl blinked and looked at her.

  ‘One thing at a time, okay?’ Lillian said. ‘Tell nobody about this, until we’ve figured out what’s going on.’

  Alexis nodded and hurried out of the morgue. Lillian turned back to the remains before her, shaking her head. She heard Alexis’s car start and pull away into the distance, the engine noise jolting Lillian from her thoughts.

  ‘What the hell happened to you?’ she whispered to the corpse.

  Suddenly, the lights in the morgue went out and plunged her into darkness. A wave of panic fluttered through Lillian as she struggled to maintain her balance in the complete blackness. She cursed the fact that, like all morgues, there were no windows.

  It was a hell of a time for the power to go out. She stood for a moment, waiting for the emergency generator to cut in, but nothing happened. Then the door to the morgue slammed violently shut, the crash sending a lance of terror through her.

  ‘Hello?’ she called out. At two in the morning she should have been alone in the building.

  Nobody responded in the absolute darkness looming around her.

  Slowly she backed away from the gurney until she felt the edge of the worktops behind her. She felt her way around the edge, past the sinks and the polished steel scales until she located her handbag, fumbling inside until she found her cell phone. She lifted it out, hitting a button – any button. To her relief, the screen glowed with bright blue light, illuminating the morgue.

  A horrific skull-like face lunged toward her from the gloom. She screamed with primal fear as hands grabbed her with vicious force. As the light from her cell phone was smothered so her consciousness slipped away.

  4

  CICERO, CHICAGO

  ILLINOIS

  14 May

  Keep running. Don’t quit.

  Ethan Warner’s heart pounded in his chest and his lungs burned as he ran down the sidewalk, dodging past pedestrians who had already leapt clear of the teenager in the gray hoodie dashing past them on West 27th Street.

  Ethan focused on the target, lengthening his stride and trying to control his labored breathing. Several weeks of circuit training had improved his fitness, but he was still nowhere near the level he’d been in the Marine Corps and right now the kid ahead of him was running with the added benefit of fear coursing through his blood. Semper fi, Ethan chanted to himself over and over again as the kid sprinted across St Louis Avenue with casual disregard for incoming traffic.

  A distorted voice sounded in his ear.

  ‘Where you at?’

  ‘Heading west, 27th on South Central,’ Ethan wheezed into a Bluetooth earpiece and microphone. ‘Where the hell are you?’

  ‘Stand by,’ came the affronted response. ‘No need to get yourself agitated.’

  Stand by, my ass, Ethan thought as he struck out across South Central Park Avenue, an SUV honking its horn at him as he swerved around the front fender, staggered onto the sidewalk again and almost collided with a woman and two children leaving a convenience store.

  The kid ahead of him suddenly turned right, dashing into an alley that cut between rows of buildings and stores lining the streets.

  ‘He’s off the main, heading north toward West 26th!’ Ethan shouted, hurling himself into the alley in pursuit before seeing the kid standing facing him not twenty yards away.

  A gunshot shattered the air in the narrow alley, and Ethan hurled himself down onto the asphalt, rolling sideways and slamming into a large trash can.

  ‘He’s got a piece!’

  ‘Copy that.’

  Ethan peered round the side of the dumpster and saw the kid was running through puddles toward the end of the alleyway, which was half blocked by an unoccupied black jeep. Ethan leapt up, shouting as he ran.

  ‘Don’t make me shoot!’ he bellowed, hoping to hell that the kid didn’t look back and see that Ethan wasn’t carrying. ‘Lose the piece!’

  The kid ducked sideways to dash past the parked jeep. Ethan accelerated and was about to follow him when the jeep’s door suddenly opened. A deep, solid thump echoed down the alleyway as the kid hit the door at full speed, staggering backwards and toppling to the ground. Ethan slowed as he saw his partner, Nicola Lopez, leap from the jeep and stride toward the disorientated kid who staggered to his feet and whirled, striking out at Lopez with the butt of his pistol. Lopez blocked the blow with a fluid movement of her left arm, batting the pistol aside and following immediately with a roundhouse right that smacked into the kid’s jaw. The boy slammed onto his back as Lopez, drawing a black T-baton tonfa, placed one booted foot on his wrist to prevent him from using his gun and jabbed one end of the baton into his throat.

  ‘You have the right to remain silent, else I kick your sorry ass further,’ Lopez snarled down at their quarry. ‘Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney the state will appoint one to you who will most likely be goddamn useless. Do you understand?’

  A weak voice squealed up at her as Ethan approached.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’

  Lopez flashed a badge at the kid on the ground, a silver shield with ‘Bail Bondsman’ emblazoned beneath it.

  ‘You jumped bail, Mickey,’ Lopez said as she turned him over, knelt on his back and cuffed him. ‘You’re going back to jail.’

  Ethan glanced at the vehicle from which Lopez had leapt.

  ‘How’d you get into that jeep?’

  Lopez flashed him a dazzling smile as she jerked Mickey onto his feet.

  ‘Door was unlocked,’ she replied with an innocent shrug.

  Ethan shook his head as Lopez guided Mickey ‘Knuckles’ Ferranto out onto West 26th Street and along the sidewalk to where she had parked their black SUV. He waited until she’d shoe-horned Mickey into the vehicle and shut the door before speaking.

  ‘You broke and entered?’ he said in disbelief. ‘Jesus, we’re supposed to be finding criminals, not becoming them.’

  ‘Got the job done,’ Lopez replied without remorse. ‘I’d left it to you, you’d both be halfway to goddamn Ohio by now.’

  ‘I was getting there,’ Ethan said defensively. ‘He hotfooted out of the mall the moment he saw me.’

  ‘The job’s done,’ Lopez said, brushing a strand of black hair out of her eyes. ‘Who cares about the small print?’

  Ethan blocked her path as she made her way toward the SUV’s passenger door.

  ‘The police? The attorney’s office? You can’t keep doing things this way, Lopez. What the hell happened to going by the book?’

  ‘It got me nowhere in the force.’

  ‘Yeah, and breaking the rules got your partner killed.’

  Lightning flickered behind Lopez’s dark eyes as they locked onto Ethan’s, and he forced himself not to take a step back.

  Since they had begun working together, Ethan had found out about what had befallen Nicola Lopez’s former partner in the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington DC the previous year, crumbs of information that had slipped out during conversations. Detective Lucas Tyrell, a long-serving officer, had been shot and killed by his own superior in an apartment way down in Anacostia. To say that Lopez had taken the hit badly was something of an understatement. Now, despite their partnership, Ethan often felt as though he were running a poor second best to Tyrell. Lopez seemed unwilling to share directly with him what had happened, as though she hadn’t quite moved on yet. Her casual disregard for the law was a direct and, for Ethan, somewhat unsettling manifestation of that.

  Ethan had since watched Lopez abandon
the moral principles with which she had conducted her work as a detective in favor of bagging the perps by whatever means necessary. Lucas Tyrell had been a liability to the Metro PD, but he’d gotten results, and Lopez was emulating her fallen mentor just as closely as she could.

  ‘Corruption got Lucas killed,’ she shot back. ‘Justice got him revenge. You gonna get out of my way or do I have to put you on your ass too?’

  Reluctantly, Ethan took a step back. Lopez had a reputation as a short fuse, but since losing her partner she seemed to have relinquished whatever remaining grip she had on her temper. The last time he’d seen her lose it was when they hunted down a bail-runner to a shabby roadside diner in Battle Creek, Michigan. Three heavyweight bikers from the local chapter of the Devil’s Disciples had taken a liking to the fugitive and were vaguely amused to see Lopez arrive with her badge, nightstick and bad attitude. It wasn’t their deliberate obstruction that had set her off, just their idle dismissal. Two broken noses, a severed knee tendon and one fractured collarbone later, fugitive James Watson sheepishly surrendered and was dragged by Lopez over the groaning bodies of his would-be protectors. It had been over before Ethan had even got through the door.

  ‘Just looking out for you,’ he said finally, raising his hands and making for the driver’s door. ‘We’re no good to each other if one of us is in jail.’

  ‘You’re the one with history,’ Lopez remarked as they climbed into the SUV. ‘My record’s pearly clean.’

  ‘You’s a jailbird?’ Mickey Ferranto muttered from the back seat, looking at Ethan.

  ‘Can it, Mickey,’ Ethan snapped as he started the engine and looked at Lopez. ‘I’m a reformed character. You’re the one on the slippery slope into shameful lawlessness.’

  Lopez shook her head and laughed as they pulled out into their lane.

  ‘We set ourselves up to catch bail-jumpers and fugitives. They don’t obey the law, we have to bend the rules to pick them up.’