The corpse’s left eyelid twitched.
Moira saw it and dismissed it. Post-mortem muscle reflex was normal, and this was especially minor. The tiny muscles around the eyes were especially subject to contraction. She’d heard of cases where a corpse sat up on an autopsy table. Something like that would certainly be enough to frighten the inexperienced, but not Moira. The dead couldn’t hurt you. What they carried in their fluids and tissue could, however. That was the only scary thing about them.
What she saw inside Terry Butters’ head was still startling, though. The brain was encased in a clear, gelatin-like sac of fluid, the gray matter visible beneath it. Moira hesitated for a moment, then spoke. “Subject’s meninges are absent.” Those were the filmy coverings that in a normal brain protected the gray matter from the inner surface of the skull as well as outside material. “They have apparently dissolved and been replaced with an unclassified sac of fluid or mucous.” This was something new medically, and Moira was fascinated. She’d been briefed on this sac, seen images, but this was her first true contact. The fluid beneath the covering was in direct contact with the brain.
Moira used a hypodermic to draw 10 mL of the fluid into a glass tube, labeled it and set it aside. Normal autopsy procedures required her to sever the spinal stem and remove the brain, weighing it and setting it aside for biopsy. She didn’t want to, though. She feared handling it would rupture this strange, new fluid sac (though it had seemed tough enough when she’d put the needle through it a few minutes ago) and she didn’t want to risk that just yet. Instead she left the head and moved to the torso, selecting her scalpel again to make the classic Y incision.
“Moira Rusk’s guide to half-assed autopsy,” she muttered into the microphone, then explained what she was doing and why. Fifteen minutes later, after employing the bone cutter, rib spreaders and a liberal number of clamps, the deceased lab tech’s chest cavity lay peeled back, the inner workings exposed like an amphibian dissection project in a high school biology class.
“Subject’s heart is encased in a similar-but-probably identical sac as the brain.”
The heart wasn’t beating, of course, but the sac surrounding it experienced a little ripple across its surface. Terry Butters’ left eye twitched again, but Moira didn’t see it this time. She was preparing another hypodermic and test tube to draw fluid from the heart sac when the door between the autopsy room and the lab opened.
“Dr. Rusk?”
Moira looked up, annoyed at the interruption. “What?” she said. It was a young, female lab tech, and she’d been crying. Moira softened her tone at once. “What is it?”
“It’s Dr. Fisher,” the girl said, sniffling. “Please, you have to come.”
Dr. Rusk put down her instruments at once and followed.
They were standing in the office adjacent to the lab, the room full of cubicles with a door to the outer hallway. A handful of lab workers stood and stared, rubbing their eyes, awoken from where they’d been sleeping on the carpeted floor.
“She just…just left,” the girl said, her voice hitching with a sob. She pointed to a desk near the door. “She left that right before they went out.”
Moira picked up the plastic access card. “What did she say?”
The girl shook her head. “Just that it was safer this way, and for us to take care of ourselves.” Another sob.
Moira moved to the small window set in the door and looked out. The hallway was empty. Annabelle, the lab tech who had killed Terry Butters in self-defense, had been at Infection-plus-ten, and Karen Fisher, at I-Plus-Nine herself, had taken them both out of the lab suites rather than risk endangering the others. Moira’s throat tightened as she thought about her friend, and she took a deep breath. The others were watching her.
“Try to get a little more sleep,” she told them, surprised at the steadiness in her voice. “We have a lot of work to do, and you need to be rested.” Then she pocketed Dr. Fisher’s access card and went back into the lab, where two more techs were perched on stools, resting their heads on folded arms at counters as they slept. They’d missed the whole thing.
The thought of her friend unprotected out in those hallways, and the woman’s act of compassion by not making Annabelle face a death sentence alone made Moira want to hug herself and cry. She needed distraction, needed to lose herself in work. Getting back to the autopsy would accomplish this. But she needed her laptop, wanted to be able to refer to the notes Dr. Wulandari had sent her from Indonesia, so instead of the post-mortem room she key-carded her way into the patient ward with a soft, electronic chirp.
Snarls greeted her, along with cries of fear.
Three of the test patients had fully turned, and were now raging beasts that hurled themselves against their restraints, thrashing hard enough to make the beds move. They locked onto Moira with hateful, hungry eyes. Four others had slipped into Phase-Two and lay there semi-catatonic, twitching fitfully. They would probably be like the other three within the hour. The remaining patients, still showing no symptoms, screamed every time one of the savage ones did, begging to be released from their own restraints.
Three turned. Four more are about to. Moira looked at them, not moving. Only one of them was an I-Plus-Ten, and several of the others weren’t even close. It didn’t make sense, and she bit her lower lip.
She looked to the other end of the room, about to order the ward nurse to sedate the three who had not yet turned. But the woman was still seated at her desk, head down on folded arms and turned away.
How the hell could she sleep when-
A high-pitched scream from the lab behind her made Moira spin and look through the window in the intervening door. She let out a cry of her own.
The young lab tech who had first summoned her from the autopsy room was standing in the doorway between the lab and the outer office, hands to her mouth as if to hold back her screams. It wasn’t working. Ten feet away, Terry Butters stood facing her, his chest cavity pinned open with clamps, skull cap off and the gelatinous sac covering his exposed brain giving off soft ripples. His scalp hung down to cover his face, raw and red on the outside, a thatch of dark hair on the inside.
With a quick movement, Butters grabbed the scalp and tore it from his face, ripping away a new ribbon of flesh down to the bridge of his nose as it came free.
Paralyzed, the girl didn’t move, only screamed.
Terry Butters attacked, slamming her into a wall, pinning her so he could tear her throat out with his teeth. The two other techs who’d been sleeping in the lab were awake now, and they started yelling. Terry looked up from his kill to the source of the noise, lunged after them and after a brief race around a pair of lab tables, took them down and bit the life out of them. When the rest of the staff rushed in from the office, Terry killed them too. Their attempts to fight him off with their hands didn’t slow him in the least.
Moira stood at the door, one hand on the handle and whimpering as she watched the slaughter. She wanted to run in to help, knew it would mean her death, wanted to open the door so the staff could escape the monster, but none were close enough, and none survived long enough to cross the short distance.
She thought the screams and guttural howls would drive her mad.
It was over quickly, and Moira watched in horrified fascination – unable to look away - as Terry knelt and fed on his victims, a bloody-faced glutton. And then he looked up, noticing her at the small window, and walked over. His face was a scarlet mask, as if he’d been dipped head-first in red ink, and a surgical clip slipped loose from his exposed chest to ping-ping-ping across the tiled floor.
He tried the door handle, couldn’t move it, then pressed his face against the glass. Even through the thick door she could hear Terry Butters utter a thick chuckle.
Moira backed away, staring at the thing on the other side.
Terry Butters stared back with eyes that no longer looked like cataracts, but small, mercury-colored discs.
-27-
DANCER
and DESIGN
Eastern United States – October 29
It turned out that the road they’d been hoping to find wasn’t all that far from the crash site. At the edge of the field was a narrow strip of woods and brush, followed by a shallow ditch and then a two-lane stretch of asphalt, empty in both directions. Kylie helped her mom through the trees and up the embankment, cringing every time she heard her mother hiss from the pain of her broken arm.
Trees lined the road on each side, and there were no signs to tell them where they were or which way to go, no lights to guide the way. Above, the sky was changing from dark blue to sea colors as the night receded, but down here along the road it was as dark as a canyon floor. Even the flames of the burning jet behind them made little more than a flickering orange glow through the trees.
“Are you okay?” Kylie asked her mom.
Patricia gave her a smile. “I survived a plane crash. Every day from now on is a bonus.”
Kylie nodded without smiling back. It was the kind of thing her father said every time he returned from war.
They looked up and down the road. Which way? Kylie flipped a mental coin. “Come one,” she said, and her mother followed. She kept their pace easy, knowing that each step jarred her mother’s fracture. Patricia kept up, uncomplaining.
After fifteen minutes they came upon a mailbox beside a packed dirt lane leading off through the trees and into the darkness. The name Oost was painted on the side of the box, and the lane was rutted by thin buggy wheels instead of car tires. More Amish. They’d find no phone in that direction, and Kylie didn’t think she was brave enough to walk down that road, despite the Sig-Saur in her back waistband. They kept walking.
Although morning was slowly approaching, it was still in the low forties and the First Lady was visibly trembling. Kylie removed her short leather jacket and draped it around her mother’s shoulders without a word.
Patricia looked at her daughter for a moment, searching her expression. “I’m sure he’s fine.”
“Who?”
“Terrence. He’ll be okay. And I’m sorry I was so cruel about him. I know you’re worried.”
Kylie walked and said nothing. It was the first time she’d thought about her so-called boyfriend Terrence Weaver since they’d been arguing before the crash. Funny, now that she was thinking about him, everything felt changed. What a difference a few hours of perspective made.
“I just…” Kylie started. “I don’t know. I wonder if I was with him because he was just so different from everyone I knew, not all wrapped up in staying in line and getting along. Maybe I picked him to get back at Daddy.”
Patricia said nothing, but noticed that her daughter was referring to Terrence in the past tense.
“He wasn’t a good person, not good to me, angry all the time. Abusive. It’s not like he ever hit me, but…”
The First Lady looked sharply at her first-born. “If he’d done that, he would have needed the Secret Service to protect him from your father and me.”
Kylie grinned. “You wouldn’t have gotten the chance. My Detail didn’t like him either. They nicknamed him The Puke, and thought I didn’t know they called him that.” She shook her head. “Maybe I didn’t want to see him for what he really was because you and Daddy already knew what he was about, and I was like a dumb kid who needed to have the obvious pointed out. It’s embarrassing.”
“Your father and I shouldn’t have…”
“No, you were right. He was an asshole.”
“Asshole,” Patricia agreed, nodding, then stopped herself. “Sorry.”
Kylie laughed. “It’s okay, Mom. I’ve heard you say worse.”
“That kind of trash talk wouldn’t go over too well on CNN though, would it?” Patricia said.
“Is there a CNN anymore?” Kylie said, and the thought quieted them both. They walked in silence then, but Kylie reached out and clasped her mother’s good hand.
They couldn’t say how far they’d gone, certainly not as far as it felt considering their pace, and the vacant, dark country road made judging distance difficult. The only sign they passed was a yellow deer crossing marker with a pair of rusty bullet holes in it. The cool, early morning air was soon joined by a late October wind that made dry leaves tumble across the pavement. The decaying scent of fall rode the breeze. Season of death, Patricia Fox had always called this time of year, her least favorite season. They were both shivering now.
Kylie broke the silence. “Daddy and Devon are going to be okay, right?”
For Patricia at that moment, Kylie was a little girl again, worried about her father overseas and asking questions that Patricia couldn’t truthfully answer. As President of the United States, her husband was arguably the best-protected man on the planet, and even at that, as both a Marine and in his current role, he knew the risks and accepted the grim possibilities. Devon was another matter, a boy caught in circumstances not of his choosing.
“I don’t know,” the First Lady said, deciding that being truthful was best. “We have to put our trust in the people who protect them, and worry about ourselves right now.” Easily said. The very thought of them made her want to cry. “Both our boys are smart, Kylie.” It was all she had, and of little comfort to either of them.
They started around a long curve, keeping to the shoulder even though they’d see the lights of a car long before it reached them and have plenty of time to get out of the way. Kylie noticed it first, the soft flash of red and blue lights reflected off the trees ahead.
They started to hurry.
The lights against the trees grew brighter, and now flashed across the pavement, the source just around the curve. At last the two women reached the point where the scene came into view; a dark blue, New York State Police car – a Dodge Charger – at an angle in the road, crunched against the side of a Honda CRV. The rooftop light bar and one working headlight on the police car illuminated a scene of broken glass and twisted metal. The police car appeared to have broadsided the Honda on an angle, the SUV catching the worst of the impact, and a body was slumped out through its broken driver’s window. The trooper’s driver’s door stood open. Both women slowed as they approached, smelling the sharp tang of the Honda’s ruptured radiator. Spreading fluids made the pavement shimmer in the flashing lights.
They looked inside the Charger – it was empty and the airbags had not deployed, despite the impact – then went to the CRV. The driver, a woman in her thirties, hung out the window with her head sagging on a broken neck, her face bloody. Starred glass and a circle of blood marked the spot on the windshield where her head had originally impacted. Not wearing a seatbelt, Kylie thought. An empty booster seat was buckled in the rear but there were no other occupants. Both passenger doors on the right side stood open.
“Where are they?” Patricia whispered, feeling her chest tighten at the sight of the booster seat. Both her kids had used one until they were about eight.
“Where’s the cop?” Kylie wanted to know, matching her mother’s tone. The whispering was a primal response, as if the dead woman in the driver’s seat and the tragedy of the scene demanded reverence. Or caution.
There were no immediate answers. Together they moved back to the trooper car – it wasn’t nearly as damaged as the Honda – and looked inside. Kylie recoiled. There was blood on the seat, dashboard and windshield, rivulets of crimson starting to congeal on the glass. Worst of all was the steering wheel. An adult incisor was buried in it where the trooper must have hit, the enamel roots sticky with blood.
Patricia gripped her daughter’s arm. “He had that happen and still got out?”
Kylie spotted a big, five-cell Maglite clipped to the inside of the door and switched it on, panning it across the trees on both sides of the highway. The lightening of the sky above seemed to only deepen the shadows down here. “Maybe he’s in shock and wandered off.”
A steady hiss of soft static came from the dash-mounted radio.
“What the hell…?” Kylie sai
d softly to herself, turning in a slow circle with her flashlight.
Headlights appeared further up the road, hi-beams on, drawing steadily closer.
“His back-up?” Patricia said.
Kylie shook her head. “No lights or siren.”
The brightness intensified, and they could tell it was more than headlights. As the vehicle reached them, the two women had to shield their eyes with their arms. A full-sized pick-up of some sort, with not only headlights but additional spotlights close together on the grille, further supplemented by a roll-bar lined with high-intensity spots. It was blinding, and turned the scene a stark white. A big engine rumbled to a stop, a door opened and heavy boots hit the pavement.
“You ladies alright? Shit, can’t believe you walked away from that.” The voice had a twang that Kylie had always unfairly associated with the word redneck. But this redneck had a vehicle and had stopped to help, both good things.
Patricia squinted into the light. “We weren’t in the car. We were in a plane.”
A short laugh. “A plane! Goddamn, don’t you have a story!” A large silhouette moved briefly across the lights. “Where’s the trooper?”
“We haven’t found him,” Patricia said, not noticing that her daughter, who was also trying to look into the light, had placed a hand on her shoulder.
A pause, and then a voice from inside the white blaze. “So you’re alone?”
Before Patricia could answer, Kylie gave her mother a squeeze and said, “No, we’re-”
“Goddamn!” the truck driver yelled. “There’s your trooper right behind you!”
Kylie spun, and in the stark light saw a female state police trooper in her early fifties, the color of her short haircut a near-perfect match to her gray uniform, scrambling up over the embankment at the side of the road. Her eyes were locked on the two women, eyes like bright silver discs, and when the woman snarled she revealed an empty socket where one of her front teeth had been.
CANNIBAL KINGDOM Page 23