Arsenic for the Soul

by Nathan Wilson

  Once she cleared the block, she relaxed. Maybe she needed to arm herself with a pocketknife just in case the worst comes to pass.

  She couldn’t trust ordinary people to behave within the confines of reason while they were besieged by fear—especially if they rationalized the outbreak as a foreign threat.

  It was common knowledge that panic often drove the masses to blind rage. Nowadays, her heart beat a little faster every time she neared a crowd. Who among them harbored resentment for immigrants?

  Who among them might act upon it?

  After all, she knew too well from her ordeal with the killer Viktor Rezník that the human soul was a playground for sin.

  TWELVE

  Bryan Hajek retired to the empty lounge at the University Hospital. Recently, he’d been keeping tabs on the tuberculosis situation and pushing for more inquiries and lab tests. Due to his background in epidemiology, he was retained as an adviser for public response. He was seen as a prominent face in the investigation and less of a figurehead to the nursing program. Maybe it was the thrill of his earlier days in disease control that made him hunger for the truth.

  Over the past week, he spent more time cataloging patients stricken with tuberculosis and tracing it backward. He was still searching for a common factor that linked the cases together.

  “Bryan, what are you doing here?”

  Bryan almost choked on his coffee. He turned around to see he wasn’t quite as alone as he thought.

  “Sorry for startling you. I’m just surprised to see you this late at the hospital.”

  “Yes, clinicals ended for the day, didn’t they? Well, you’ve found out my little secret. When I’m not overseeing the students, I’m trying to do my part in saving the world,” he chuckled. The figure hovered close to Bryan, its shadow creeping across the lounge.

  “You’ve been quite active in this health crisis, haven’t you? We’re fortunate you alerted us to the outbreak.”

  Bryan winced. He never did mention that one of his pupils, Vivian, had been instrumental in his discovery.

  “Sometimes I feel like I don’t deserve the credit. To be honest, one of my brightest protégés tipped me off to the patient symptoms. I thought she was crazy at first when she mentioned tuberculosis, but I trust her instincts so I looked into it. You could imagine my surprise when I discovered she was spot on.”

  “In that case, tell me… Who really uncovered this outbreak?”

  Bryan took another sip of his coffee.

  “Vivian Xu.” Almost as quickly as the speaker appeared, the room became ominously silent. Bryan couldn’t resist looking over his shoulder.

  A needle jammed into his neck. Bryan howled and grappled with the attacker standing over him. His lips began to tingle and a strange floating sensation relaxed his muscles. He felt as though his body was melting in an ice cold bath. The ends of his nerves were seared off to the pain. The face of his attacker became a blur before his world faded to white.

  Approaching footsteps echoed in the hallway outside of the lounge. Growing agitated, the assailant removed the syringe from Bryan’s neck and fled.

  The beloved director was discovered soon after, motionless on the floor without a pulse.

  * * *

  “Please do this for me, Gavin. I want to know what happened to him.”

  Gavin looked positively terrified when Vivian confronted him at the medical examiner’s office. She rushed there as soon as the news broke about Bryan Hajek’s death. The circumstances were suspicious enough to deliver the body to the medical examiner, where Gavin was unlucky enough to find Vivian waiting for him.

  “Why are you so insistent? And frightening?” he said, backing up into the lab.

  “Bryan died shortly after he started digging around in the tuberculosis outbreak. Don’t you find that strange?”

  “For all we know, he could have collapsed of a heart attack.”

  “Level with me here, Gavin. Do you really think his heart just burst and no one was around to save him? In a hospital?”

  Gavin knew better than to challenge Vivian to a debate. He gave a boisterous sigh.

  “Very well. I’m inclined to let students attend an autopsy every now and then. But understand this, you’ll only observe the operation. I suppose Jezebel wouldn’t turn down a spectator.”

  “Who’s Jezebel?”

  “The medical examiner, whom should be here at any moment. You’ll both make splendid playmates, I’m sure. Now let’s get you suited up.” Upon entering the refrigerated morgue, they slipped into shoe covers, latex gloves, caps, and surgical gowns.

  “Just what I always wanted,” Vivian said, topping off her butcher uniform with a plastic apron around her waist.

  “Don’t you look like a doll,” said a voice that definitely didn’t belong to Gavin. Vivian turned around as the shadows spat out a woman with blonde hair and thick-rimmed glasses. She projected confidence and poise with every step.

  “You must be Jezebel,” Vivian said, noting the fox-like smirk on her lips. Vivian considered herself a little eccentric by society’s standards, but Jezebel looked a few short-circuits away from a malfunction. Her eyes definitely looked like they had seen too much of the underworld to admit her back into society.

  “Have we met before?” Jezebel asked. “You look vaguely familiar…”

  “No, I haven’t had the pleasure. I’m Vivian. Gavin was kind enough to let me join you today. I have a personal interest—”

  “—curiosity about becoming a pathologist’s assistant,” Gavin spouted. “She’s a medical student from Charles University.”

  Jezebel looked at this raven-haired girl with renewed excitement.

  “Really? Tell me, Vivian, why do you want to work side-by-side with death? Do you have a penchant for unlocking secrets like I do? There’s so much you can learn about a person’s life from their mortal coil. You’d be amazed at the stories they can render with a blood spatter or an exit wound.”

  “No, Gavin doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about—”

  Jezebel’s almond-shaped eyes glowed a deeper shade of turquoise in the unnatural light. They were ungodly penetrating, as if Jezebel sought to uncover her secrets while her heart was still beating.

  “I hope I’m not intimidating you. There’s no need to hide your curiosity here. Anyway, you’re anxious to see your first autopsy, aren’t you? There’s no sense in us standing in the cold. I’ll fetch the deceased and we can have a little fun.”

  Vivian shot a look at Gavin that unequivocally said, Don’t you dare hook me up with a job at the morgue. You’ll be lying on this cold slab next. He conveyed his deepest apologies with a smile.

  Vivian’s swallowed the lump in her throat when Bryan’s body was wheeled out. He was positioned on an autopsy table with a rubber block under his head. The stubble on his chin revealed one too many nights spent at the hospital. Bryan’s face was a canvas crafted over fifty-seven odd years, and under every wrinkle a tale waited to be told. How strange and tearful this reunion felt to Vivian. Not so long ago, they shared a friendly smile as they passed each other in the hallway. What she wouldn’t give now to hear one of his ridiculous jokes instead of the excruciating silence.

  Vivian couldn’t help but look into Bryan’s eyes. It was the last thing you wanted to do when a person was about to be dissected. His eyes didn’t appear milky in the traditional sense of decomposition. His eyes seemed just as alive as the last time they spoke.

  “There are no obvious signs of injury,” Gavin said, spreading a cloth on the countertop with forceps, scalpels, enterotome scissors, and a hooked mallet that came in handy for prying loose the skull cap.

  Vivian felt uneasy when Jezebel produced a 20-gauge needle and carefully retracted Bryan’s eyelids. She inserted the needle with a syringe into the globe of Byran’s left eye. She gently suctioned the clear gel into a tube as the eye itself slowly collapsed.

  “What are you going to do with that?” Vivian asked as Jezebel detac
hed the syringe but kept the needle in place. She handed a gray-topped tube to Gavin, who promptly fetched a saline syringe.

  “We sample it for biochemical analysis or disease,” Jezebel said, coolly injecting the saline into the eye. “We can also use this to detect drugs and toxins.” Vivian’s skin crawled as Bryan’s eyes inflated under the needle and returned to their former shape.

  Goddamn needles, Vivian thought.

  “Look here on the neck,” Jezebel said, motioning for Vivian to draw closer. To the untrained eye, the object of her interest appeared as no more than a slightly protruding dot on the skin. “A needle is lodged in his neck. If I remember correctly, a syringe was bagged among the evidence at the scene.”

  “It could have broken off during a scuffle,” Vivian jumped in.

  “We need to consider the possibility of suicide. A broken needle isn’t enough for us to go on. In any case, we need to harvest a brain tissue sample to determine if toxins played a role in his death.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “Depending on the specific tests required, the final results could take up to four to six weeks. Contrary to popular forensic TV, we can’t whip out a toxicology report overnight.”

  For the next twenty minutes, the autopsy consisted of long periods of silence and brief interruptions of questions from Vivian. The autopsy didn’t take a turn for the exciting until Gavin inspected the arms and wrists.

  “One of the first things I look at in homicide investigations are the hands. Notice the defense wounds on his knuckles. It looks like he attempted to fight off an assailant. Perhaps there is something to your theory about his murder after all. We should check for tissue under his nails that may belong to the killer.”

  As they went about the task of collecting the nail scrapings, Gavin piped up.

  “He was your mentor, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes, he was. I suspect his death might have something to do with the tuberculosis outbreak. He’s been digging into it and looking for the source. Maybe he got too close to it.”

  “I’m afraid I’m losing you. Why would anyone want to kill him for that?”

  “I think Camilla’s mother is secretly responsible for spreading the disease. I can’t ascertain her motives but it may be connected to her imprisonment.”

  The corpse jerked and lifted its arm. Vivian tripped and almost landed in the wire racks stocked with pathology specimens.

  “Careful! Nothing to worry about,” Gavin quickly reassured her with a chuckle. “They probably don’t lecture you in your nursing class about reflex actions, do they?”

  “Actually, this isn’t the first time a corpse has been excited to see me.”

  “In essence, the nerves continue to send signals to the spine instead of the brain after death. This can result in the occasional muscle twitch or kick, so don’t come too close. The first time I saw a corpse stand up in the morgue, I almost fainted dead away! One of nature’s more morbid miracles, I suppose.”

  “Oh yes, I remember my first experience with the walking dead,” Jezebel heartily agreed.

  She proceeded to cut into the shoulder joint to begin the Y incision. She carved the stem of the Y from the middle of the chest into the pubic region.

  “Pay special attention to this when I extract the organs. We’re going to use the Rotikansky technique to remove them as a connected group.”

  Vivian winced at the sight of the scalpel rending skin.

  Jezebel’s handiwork could almost pass for artistic if it wasn’t so gruesome. She’d been through this routine too many times to sense anything egregiously wrong. In fact, she wasn’t too alarmed when the man she was dissecting opened his mouth. Normally the jaws will relax after decomposition and the lips peel back in a feral scream. She was, however, horrified when the corpse reached for the scalpel parting his abdomen.

  Arterial blood spewed from the excised chest, something that wouldn’t be possible from a dead body. Bryan’s heart was still beating and generating enough blood pressure to force arterial spray across the cadaver lab.

  “He’s alive! He’s still alive!” Gavin screamed. Jezebel hysterically tried to restrain Bryan on the autopsy table but she slipped in the blood deluging onto the floor. Vivian watched in shock as the naked man reared up with his chest carved open. His organs were still encased despite the flesh-rending damage from the Y incision.

  Bryan staggered several steps across the lab as a scarlet waterfall cascaded down his chest and groin. Nothing could have prepared Vivian for this vision of animated death. Bryan’s blind, needle-gouged eyes cut right into her.

  He only took five steps before he toppled to the floor and frothed in a puddle of his demise.

  THIRTEEN

  Camilla felt unnaturally secure when she was surrounded by books. Those infallible walls of knowledge brought her comfort when little else could. Cocooned in the library of Strahov Monastery, it rekindled memories of an innocent childhood spent reading classic literature and Greek mythology. She pried open a weathered tome and the smell of wood pulp and hints of vanilla practically wafted off the pages. It was a strangely intoxicating scent that spirited her away to every realm of the imagination.

  Camilla was expecting Vivian to call her at any moment now with news about Bryan Hajek’s grisly death. It didn’t take long for news to spread about a man being autopsied alive. Camilla only took an interest in the matter because Vivian swore up and down that it was related to the outbreak at the hospital. She was so engrossed in her book that she barely heard her cell phone ring.

  “Perfect timing, Vivian. So what’s the update on Bryan?”

  “Jezebel is almost certain that toxins were involved to keep Bryan in a heavily sedated state. The toxicology reports are still pending but he may have been exposed to tetradotoxin. Under a heavy dose, it can present death-like symptoms for days. In case you’re wondering, I’m on my way home now. I just made it through the crowds of reporters gathered outside the medical examiner’s. I expected to see you there.”

  “I’ve decided to take a hiatus from the newspaper, or as I like to call it, a mental health retreat. So tell me more about tetradotoxin.”

  “It’s a very potent muscle relaxant. I can’t even imagine what it must have felt like to be paralyzed on the autopsy table and unable to call out for help. He could have been conscious the entire time.”

  “So he was being preserved? For what?”

  “Maybe he was supposed to die in the morgue, dissected alive.”

  “That’s a lot of pre-meditation and gambling.”

  “Either way, he would have died. He must have been practically overdosing on tetrodotoxin to show those symptoms and conceal the heart rate. It’s a miracle that he stayed alive as long as he did—only to regain control when his chest was being sawed open.”

  The thought made Vivian’s skin crawl. Thank God she wasn’t the one wielding the scalpel.

  “So why do you suspect Bryan was killed?” Camilla asked.

  “Isn’t it obvious? He was trying to find out more about the outbreak. Maybe he stumbled upon something that your mother didn’t want him to know.”

  “You’re certain that my mother is working in the University Hospital?”

  “There’s no other explanation.”

  Vivian remembered Crenshaw standing outside of Milo’s patient ward, eavesdropping on her conversation with Bryan. He seemed extremely sensitive to news of tuberculosis—almost as if he wanted the situation to remain hush-hush. Vivian sneered as the worst possible scenario occurred to her.

  “God, I hope you’re not related to Crenshaw. That would be disgusting.”

  Camilla slammed her book shut where she was sitting in the monastery.

  “Trust me, I saw a woman outside of my apartment. It’s my mother.”

  “Crenshaw could be her lover.”

  “Now you’re just being gross!”

  Vivian’s car pulled into the driveway as Camilla ended the conversation amidst shrieks of disgu
st. The sun lowered over the brow of the horizon. Vivian couldn’t wait to sink her teeth into dinner and doze off on the couch. Maybe she would work up the inspiration to write a few stanzas of poetry in the evening.

  Vivian stopped dead at the porch. Racial slurs were sprayed across the side of the house. The Chinese bells that once chimed in the evening breeze lay in the dirt.

  “Oh my God…”

  Rage and pain collided when she saw the xenophobic imagery.

  “Sons of bitches,” she hissed, looking frantically over shoulder. She expected to see a gang of kids laughing from the street corner but no one was around to take the blame.

  She breathed a little easier when she noticed the lights weren’t on in the house. Her mother hadn’t seen the damage inflicted yet. Vivian would have to work fast to clean up the graffiti. Her mother didn’t need to be exposed to this hate.

  Vivian wasn’t much of an artist, but it didn’t matter now. She scrounged through the garage for a few buckets of paint and hastily set to work.

  She was so furious she could barely speak. Protestors who blamed the epidemic on foreigners were likely responsible. She wondered who was watching her family and knew they lived here. She felt a sickening sense of dread but the anger overpowered it by a mile.

  When would prejudice ever end? Was it natural for the human heart to isolate one another and fixate over miniscule differences like race, skin color, sex, orientation, and religion? She couldn’t fathom why so many people held these differences in such high regard. It seemed that every society valued a scapegoat to blame their problems on, whether it was the economy, crime, or an epidemic.

  Every man and woman needs an inferior to elevate their pathetic standing in life. That scapegoat all too often manifested itself in race.

  She bit her lip before she could spout off a string of curses. Instead, she channeled that anger into furiously painting over the words before her mother came home. The least she could do was spare her the torment.