Even then, in those early hours, the situation felt weird. Who steals a body from the coroner’s office? I was struck, too, by the bite marks. And where was all the blood? All those years trying to avoid blood, and now I was wishing for it to be there. Always, it was about the blood. I thought of Macbeth: “The near in blood, the nearer bloody.” I think my father taught me that. It seems so apropos in hindsight, as I’ve felt covered in the blood ever since.
I transferred the pictures to my iPad and tried to consider what type of animal could leave that mark. I attempted to find significance in the loose upper molars and what systematic disease could cause this. Diabetes and cancer were obvious ones, but the body looked to be in good health, so I eliminated those possibilities. Another type of autoimmune disease could be a contributing factor, but that would take more tests. I made a mental note to get a tissue sample sent to Atlanta. This was my first solo assignment; I needed to cover all the bases.
I had pretty much just laid my head on the flat pillow when a knock on my door almost caused me to leap out of my skin.
“Dr. Scott? It’s Sheriff Wilson and Dr. Gomez.”
I unlocked and opened the door. They stood there, looking like a mixture of shame and frustration. “Sorry,” the sheriff said. “We tried calling but your phone must be on silent—”
“What happened?” I cut him off. I was probably overtired by this point. “Did we get the results already?”
Wilson glanced at Gomez like neither of them wanted to talk. The sheriff won the silent battle. “The body is—well, it’s not in the morgue anymore,” Dr. Gomez said.
On the way back to the morgue, Sheriff Wilson tried to explain. “We’ve never been broken into before,” he said. That was an ambiguous accomplishment at best, I thought. “It’s a bit more than that,” the sheriff continued. “The guard at the back door says the woman walked up to him and hit him with a surgical hammer. He doesn’t remember much after that.”
“I’m sorry. What woman?”
“The woman you saw. The corpse on the table.”
I laughed. “What? That can’t be true.”
The car was silent for a moment, until the sheriff said, “He swears it.” I glanced out the window again and it was like a movie on repeat, the identical saguaro cactus every few miles with its crooked arms locked in a permanent wave at random tumbleweeds along for the ride.
When we arrived back at the morgue, a deputy surveyed the scene we had left just hours earlier, as if looking for his keys. I saw the empty table, and then the materials from the shelf strewn across the floor as if an earthquake had hit. My eyes became fixated on a roll of gauze and scissors on the table.
Wilson saw what I was looking at. “The deputy says that the woman’s head was bandaged,” he said.
I exchanged a glance with Dr. Gomez. All he could do was shrug. We walked into the other room and another deputy, who looked all of nineteen years old, sat on the floor, his head bandaged. He recounted the story to us as he held an ice pack to his head. He said, “One minute I was by myself, and in a flash that girl—”
“The presumed corpse,” I said.
He nodded slowly. “Yeah. Her. She was standing next to me. I was eating a Twix bar. The girl, she—”
“The presumed corpse,” I said again.
The deputy paused. He looked nervously at the sheriff, then continued. “Yeah. The presumed corpse. She was wearing pants. Also, a sweatshirt. No shoes.”
Sheriff Wilson said, “There’s a locker down the hall. Used by techs and deputies assigned to the morgue. Broken into—missing those exact clothes.”
“I wanted to ask her what she was doing but it’s like the words wouldn’t come out,” the deputy said with a frown on his thin face. “Then, when I just about found the words, my head caught the end of that hammer.”
I nodded and tried to keep my face from looking disgusted. “Now the other body that disappeared yesterday. Were there any—”
Sheriff Wilson completed my sentence. “Clothes were missing out of the locker also.”
I couldn’t help thinking that the deputy himself looked like someone half dead, and maybe on meth. And it wasn’t the recent hammer to his head. I suppose good help was hard to find. Without anything else to do—no preliminary tests back, no body to examine, and everyone wide awake—we decided to head out to the desert area where the bodies were found.
The desert was still dark, but I cannot describe how dark the desert gets close to the border. We were only a ten-minute distance from the morgue, and it was like our vehicles’ headlights had led to another world, one closer to the black sky. We ended up on a slight hill near an eight-foot metal fence with barbed wire strewn on top and with concrete bollards every couple of feet. A cold wind blew in from the south with not a bird or animal in sight. I guessed this was the border—it was a bit anticlimactic. Stepping out of the police van, I was surprised to see the ground covered in grass. Not desert sand.
Sheriff Wilson slapped a hand on the fence. “On the other side of this you’d be in Mexico. Doesn’t look much different, does it?”
As far as I could see over the fence, it appeared pretty much the same, albeit farther from our lights. I couldn’t shake the feeling something was staring back at me from somewhere in that murky distance. My eyes strained to see into it. I felt years of nothingness scattered across these plains and it made me shiver and cough.
The headlights from the van illuminated the shallow hole nearest the fence. The cold desert wind tickled a chill down my back. I knelt down in front of the hole but I saw only wet dirt. Dr. Gomez, hunched in a catcher’s position next to me, ran a hand through the dirt.
The corpses had been found by a trucker whose engine had burned out on the side of the road while transporting salvaged computer parts. No one could determine why he took such an indirect route, although the sheriff said suspicion was that he may have been carrying illegal cargo. The trucker was waiting on the side of the road for a wrecker to arrive when he spotted what he said looked like a figure running away at a high rate of speed. Then he noticed a hand, some distance away. When he went out into the field to investigate, he found the body.
“Border Patrol showed up before the wrecker,” Sheriff Wilson said with a voice disembodied from the headlights. “Then they stayed with the body while checking the fence. They called our office. The rest you know.”
I shined my flashlight over the area. I placed some dirt into a plastic bag for testing. I shined the light on the plastic bag. The dirt appeared reddish. I looked over at Sheriff Wilson. “Is that dried blood?”
He took the bag, pushed back his cowboy hat, and studied it with his small flashlight. “Might be.” He handed me back the bag and shined the light onto the ground. He pushed his hand into the ground and put the light on it as he rubbed his index finger and thumb together. “Damn. Looks like wet blood also.”
Wondering about Border Patrol protocol, I poked a finger in the same spot as Wilson. Dried and wet blood mixed on my fingers. In hindsight, of course, the whole area looked like a dug-up shallow grave, but in the moment that early morning it simply looked like loose dirt near a fence. At the time, none of us knew about the mass grave on the other side of the fence.
I arrived back at my hotel at about five in the morning. I leaned back on the hard pillow and thought about emailing an update to the CDC, but they were wrapped up in another Ebola scare in Africa, and there were potential carriers in Minnesota. No one would read my report for another two weeks, if even then.
I must have slept for an hour before my phone began to buzz. It was Dr. Gomez, and his tone was urgent, although to be honest in the short time I had known him, he always sounded like he was beside himself.
“The lab called,” he said quickly. “They want to see us immediately.”
At the science lab of the University of Arizona, Santa Cruz—about a thirty-minute drive from Nogales—I grabbed coffee from the cramped office, stirring in lumpy sugar as I introduced m
yself to the med student and professor waiting for us. Gomez looked like he hadn’t slept in two days. He shook Professor Chen’s hand as if they had met before. Chen was a skinny, animated older man with professor hair and rumpled clothes. His assistant, Jimmy Morton, looked like a hipster out of central casting. He wore a red flannel shirt and a mustache that sprang off his face like a twist tie. He must have left the monocle at home.
Chen waved us over to the computer. “Okay, so we did a preliminary test of the blood. It’s been pretty slow around here so we were able to do it quick, but let me just say, we really need a hematologist to look at this.” His eyes sparkled like fireworks. “Prepare to have your mind blown.” He clicked the mouse on the computer and a 1000x microscopic HD image appeared on the screen in neon green and red looking like an animated video game. “A light microscopy image would be better but we obviously do not have access to that equipment here.” He pointed a bony finger at the red circles on the screen. “See the platelets. At first we thought it was some type of sickle cell anemia—one that we weren’t familiar with—but look over here. It’s like a classic case of leukemia. But even that didn’t register in our further tests. And it has a distinct hypercoagulable state at times, and then it adapts again.”
Sheriff Wilson raised a hand. “What is a hyper…whatever?”
“It means that the blood has a tendency to clot very easily,” Jimmy answered. I secretly prayed he might start twirling his mustache as he talked. “It’s not a good thing because it can cause life-threatening blood clots in a person. A person with blood this advanced would have clots throughout their veins.”
Professor Chen continued as he rubbed his calloused hands together. “Honestly, this is what probably killed the person, I would think.”
“She’s alive,” I told him. I glanced at the sheriff. “Allegedly.”
Chen and Morton stared at us and exchanged a glance. “How? That’s absurd,” Professor Chen said. He didn’t wait for an answer before he continued. “But then you’re not going to believe this, but the blood thins to a level—and what I mean is the blood-clotting cells begin to mutate to a level akin to Ebola. I’m serious.”
“He is,” Jimmy concurred.
“It’s like a type of essential thrombocytosis that I’m not familiar with at all,” Chen said. “This needs to be sent to the University of Arizona and their lab for more testing. In all honesty we should probably be wearing level A hazmat suits or be looking at this in a level four biosafety lab. I would love to see if Niemann-Pick C1 cholesterol transporter is essential in the transmission as in Ebola.”
“I need to get a sample to the CDC as soon as possible,” I said, entranced by his computer screen. I started to feel the rush of adrenaline. Had this dusty old town actually birthed a new virus?
Sheriff Wilson’s phone rang. He stepped away to answer it.
“Hematology is not my specialty, obviously,” Dr. Gomez said, “but can a body survive long with this particular condition?”
“Not likely,” Professor Chen said. “I suppose there are outliers for every disease, but I wouldn’t think that a body could withstand any of the conditions. I mean, for example, Ebola will kill a body in a short period of time, and this is as bad—if not worse—from all appearances. I can only imagine that was the cause of death. But now you’re telling me this woman isn’t dead? I find that unreal, to be exact.”
“I find it unreal too, but it happened,” Dr. Gomez said with a shrug.
Sheriff Wilson walked back to the computer. “Well, good news, you see. We have an actual lead. A girl named Liza Sole was reported missing by her roommate and she matches the description of our former dead body.”
“Mind if I tag along?” I asked.
“I was just gonna ask you the same thing,” Wilson said.
We ended up at an older apartment complex only three miles away. The sun had come up and I could feel my body drained of energy. I was itching for another cup of coffee but I was pretty sure that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. Strangely enough, I used to hate the smell of coffee. Reminded me of going to my aunt’s house in Florida in the summer, which always smelled like coffee, and was so god-awful hot and humid. Coffee used to smell like boredom and mosquitoes to me, but medical school will make you change every habit and attitude you hold dear.
I counted about twenty units in the complex—not big by any means. Two floors and some parking—that was it. We walked up the stairs looking for apartment 221. Sheriff Wilson’s face darkened as we reached the top steps.
“What’s wrong?” Dr. Gomez asked.
“One of my deputies was supposed to meet us here. He should be waiting for us already. He said he was here already.” He frowned and looked around. “You know, we’re a small county here. I expect my deputies to be available when requested.”
Wilson rapped on the door a few times, waited, thought for a moment, then grabbed the handle and twisted. The door swung open. But he didn’t walk inside. We glanced at each other. With a long sigh, Sheriff Wilson stepped into the apartment.
“Thought I heard someone in distress,” he said without much conviction.
We stepped inside and I was struck by the peculiar familiar smell. At the time I couldn’t place it, but of course I now know that it was the same sweet tinge from Nogales not six hours before. And of course we should have been wearing masks before we walked inside. I had violated so many protocols so far this visit, it’s a wonder I still had a job later.
The apartment looked like it had been vacated in an emergency. The television was tuned to some celebrity reality show. Two plates of half-eaten sushi sat on the living room table with two glasses of wine near the edge. Wilson and Gomez looked inside one of the bedrooms while I moved over to the kitchen. Nothing seemed amiss. I saw a piece of floral cardboard tacked to the refrigerator with a SpongeBob SquarePants magnet. In block letters at the top it stated, “LIZA’S THINGS TO DO THIS YEAR!!” Without thinking, I pulled it off the fridge and stuck it in my jacket pocket. The sheriff strode back into the den and looked around again. “No sign of the roommate or the dead girl,” he said. The roommate who made the report was Glenda Jones. Not that it matters now. He looked at me. “The presumed corpse.”
I didn’t even try to hide a smile—and the smile hadn’t left my face when a yell from Dr. Gomez cut through the moment. We both rushed to the hallway and almost ran into Gomez, who was running in the other direction. He pointed behind him, as Sheriff Wilson pulled out his pistol.
“In the bathroom,” Gomez cried.
Wilson took the lead and ordered me to stay back, but I was right behind him as we approached the bathroom. Wilson waved his gun as he stepped inside. It was a small bathroom, so I parked at the doorway.
“No, God, no,” Wilson said. He knelt next to the bathtub and holstered his revolver. I stepped inside and looked over his kneeling figure. A young man in the same uniform as Wilson lay in the bathtub. His face was white. His eyes open.
He was obviously deceased. For now.
That’s how it really started. A back-from-the-dead girl, a dead deputy, and a missing roommate. Later, I would hate myself for not calling the FBI and ordering a quarantine of the area immediately. But things were moving too quickly. From that moment in Liza Sole’s bathroom, it was a cascade of action from the police and the CDC—meaning myself.
Of course I wanted to take samples in that apartment, but there was nothing to be found. Strangely enough, no blood. An autopsy by Dr. Gomez determined that Deputy Shawn Miller died from exsanguination. Gomez spent hours on that autopsy attempting to find another cause of death, but the only cause could be a draining of all of his blood.
I made my own examination but came to the same conclusion. Two holes in the carotid artery were determined to be the only source of the exsanguination. No trauma, bruising, scratches, or lacerations whatsoever.
Dr. Gomez couldn’t believe it. Not even a butcher knife could have drained the blood in such an efficient manner.
I spent that first day with him, trying to hash out how those two holes could have drained an entire body of blood in a matter of minutes. Deputy Miller had arrived at the scene not more than an hour before we did, took his report, called it in, and waited for us. It didn’t seem possible.
The trace amounts of blood Dr. Gomez and I found on the body bore the same indicators as the samples from the escaped body from the morgue. The sample was sent to Galveston, Texas, and the University of Texas with their level four biosafety lab; it indicated the same structure as the previous sample. However, when studied through an electron micrograph, it showed a mutation of what they identified to be the Marburg virus, a hemorrhagic fever virus considered as serious as Ebola. My supervisors still did not recognize the importance of these findings, yet they ordered me to stay in the field, in the event that other persons reported symptoms indicative of the virus. I could only imagine what my apartment back in Atlanta would look like after another month away from home. And as if on cue, my mom called me, hysterical. “Lauren, thank goodness! What’s going on? Why does your apartment look abandoned?” she sputtered. I had asked my sister if she would check on my apartment every few days, but it’s never good to ask a twentysomething girl with a new boyfriend to remember anything important.
It was only a matter of a month before more bodies started to show up in Arizona and then New Mexico. All the exsanguinated bodies were accompanied by another person from the same household disappearing. All the dead bodies either had their blood drained or they exhibited the same blood characteristics that the original dead girl—Liza Sole—had in her system.
Liza Sole was a twenty-eight-year-old woman from Dallas, Texas, who worked various retail jobs and went through a few marriages before she decided to return to school to finish her degree at the University of Arizona. That didn’t last too long: she met another man and moved to Nogales, Arizona, where she worked at a Pizza Hut. As with many of her previous relationships, this one did not last long, and soon she moved out of his house and rented an apartment with various Craigslist roommates who stayed for short periods of time and then moved on.
A People's History of the Vampire Uprising Page 2