“Send me home then.”
The woman—his light, his goddess—nodded once. “Do what you can.”
Damien tried to make some reply; what it was, he wasn’t sure, because he was enveloped in light before he could really say anything, and the light drove all other thoughts from his mind.
Chapter 23
11:30 am, December 20, 1999
The snow was falling hard by the time James Dolan pulled into the parking lot of the city morgue, a fact that brought a broad smile to his face. He was a big man, short and round with graying hair that hung to his shoulders, and so had been the obvious choice for the office Santa for years; nearly eight years’ worth of children had received presents from him come Christmastime at the Dolan Mortuary, and he had hoped not to disappoint this year’s crop with the lack of a white Christmas. If it stuck—and it appeared to have every intention of doing just that—he wouldn’t have to.
He dragged himself out of his Oldsmobile wagon, lamenting as always that they didn’t make enough affordable cars for people of his girth but not letting the little things bother him too much. Even the errand—picking up the remains of the elderly Mr. Jonas Starkweather for their interment next week—didn’t bother him overmuch. He had learned long ago that to dwell on those things was to eventually spoil all enjoyment in his life. It was with a whistle and a slight skip in his heavy step that he made his way across the lot toward the door.
The whistle drifted off and the skip stopped almost immediately once he pushed through the heavy door and into the reception area. At first glance, things appeared normal enough. Stephen’s chair was pushed back a bit as if he’d scooted away to get up to run some errand, his coffee cup sitting on the desk, close at hand to where the chair probably had been. Just grounds floated at the bottom of it, which James figured was a good indicator for where Stephen had gotten off to.
Any or all of that seemed okay enough, and normally, he’d simply have kept whistling, peeked around the side of the desk, popped his head through the push door into the freezer, and called out. But his eye stopped on something else, something that wasn’t quite so normal after all, and his nose—almost totally dead to anything but the strongest of smells for years—caught wind of an aroma that he couldn’t immediately place but that he knew was trouble.
The something that had caught his eye was a long splash of blood, running from the bottom of the dividing door and almost up to the chair. He might have written it off as just an accident, something that was always a possibility with Stephen around, except that he had discovered there were really two kinds of blood. Blood from a corpse tended to be purple more than red; sometimes it was even black. There was no liveliness in it, as if the process of dying even leeched the color from all the things in the body as well as the visible external signs of life. What was on the floor retained the Technicolor quality of blood that was spilled from a still-living person but was tacky and drying. Whatever it was, it had happened awhile ago, but that much blood of the living spread around the floor was far too much for it to have been a shaving cut. The apparent drag marks in it, which James associated with lugging a corpse away, primarily from watching one too many bad horror movies, only increased his paranoia.
He tried to swallow, catch his breath. He finally managed, producing a clicking noise that sounded as if it echoed in the room, as he finally placed the smell. Recognition brought nausea, and he stepped back, covering his nose and mouth with one hand. The smell of decomposing flesh was always present, no matter how quickly you froze them or how much Lysol you spilled around, and that was something he’d learned to tune out; the smell of blood was usually easily ignored too, especially dried. But both smells were practically overpowering, much worse than what they should be, even with the smear, and he finally recognized the thick penny-like scent of large quantities of blood spilled very recently. His brother had chosen a much harsher line of work, foreman in a slaughterhouse, and it was something of a family joke that one brother ended lives while the other cleaned up afterward. The smell James was picking up now was reminding him of the one visit he had made to his brother’s place of work. It was thick and cloying—not at all what a morgue should smell like.
The corners of his mouth were twitching, and he was still trying to overcome the urge to vomit, but he had a duty. He and Hollis had known each other for quite some time—Dicky’s father, Martin, had worked for Dolan’s in the dim, dark days of the sixties—and they still played golf on the occasional weekend. He had to at least look, and while the smell was fresh, the blood on the floor suggested that whatever had happened was at least a couple of hours past.
Picking up what courage he could and wishing for a shot of something—whiskey would be nice, but nearly anything short of Everclear would do him—James went through the little divider that broke the monotony of the wall-length desk and then pushed the door open with one gloved hand, peering cautiously into the room and readying himself on the balls of his feet to bolt if he had to.
Even if he had wanted to, even if there had been reason to, James would not have been able to move a single inch once he got a look at what had happened in the freezer.
The freezer should have been a room gleaming with stainless steel, a cold and brilliant chamber where spotlessness reigned and a race of machines would find perfect efficiency. The real world meshed with the proper one in no way whatsoever, as there did not appear to be a single surface that had not been so coated with blood and other fluids that its original color was possible to ascertain. Some of it was thick and black, the blood of the dead, as if the corpses who should be on all the metal trays that protruded into the walking space had been detonated by a high explosive of some sort. A great deal of it was fresh and still red, still dripping in some places. Only one autopsy table was currently occupied, but that was enough.
Dicky Hollis would be cutting no more bodies open, today or any other day. His own was lying on the table, spread-eagled, and missing most of its flesh. His chest had been sliced open in a Y-incision, and judging from the dark shapes sitting on the scale, someone had removed all his organs. The eye sockets, which James could see because someone had taken Dicky’s head and twisted it completely around and then snapped the neck so he was looking right at the door, were empty. Red holes that looked at everything and saw nothing stared at James as he doubled over and vomited between his shoes, spoiling the spit-polish shine of the Santa boots. The smell of vomit joined the other scents in the room, driving James to vomit again, and then try for a third time.
Still retching but with nothing left in his expansive gut to send down the pipes, James tried to stumble back through the door, only managing to trip over his own feet and fall into the reception area, landing hard on his ass with an outrush of air from both ends.
He could feel his heart laboring in his chest, could feel every muscle in his body twitching with his heartbeat, and heard his wife’s high, shrill voice telling him again that he should lose some weight, buy the pillow, no reason he had to be Santa year-round. He kicked at the floor, shoving himself through the smear of blood and blurring it further. He felt it slip against his palms, bringing on another gag reflex, and he turned and spat. His breathing was growing rough and harsh, and bands of pain were starting to tighten around his chest, sinking in like barbed wire. Finally, he was out, crab-scrabbling out the front door and back to his car, patting down his pockets for his cell phone.
He heard a new noise, and he whirled just as he was gaining his feet, nearly sending himself back down because of the wetness of the ground and the snow building underneath; even though he couldn’t have been inside the morgue for more than five minutes, the buildup was already two inches high and turning to slush against the heaters under the blacktop. Nothing was there, and he came to realize that it was his own ragged breathing, as he muttered, “Christ,” under his breath repeatedly.
Now what have you gotten into, you
stupid old man? His fingers, feeling like stone blocks, continued to fumble with his zipper. He dug his phone from his pocket and nearly crushed it as he tried to press the speed dial for 911. He didn’t know what had happened there, but somebody needed to be aware of it, and if one old fat man couldn’t at least manage that much, what good was he anyway?
It seemed to take forever. James sat in the snow, leaning against his car. He didn’t feel like he had the strength to get up and crawl in just yet. The phone made secretive little clicking noises in his ear, as if it had to stop and call Timbuktu for an authorization before it could put the call through to the emergency folks.
Come on, hurry up, you stupid gadget, he thought, before he at last heard the blessed sound of ringing and saw the word “Connecting…” appear in the little picture window. Wuh-unn ringy-dingy, he thought randomly and emitted a husky chuckle, trying to keep calm even though he suspected he might be having a heart attack.
The ringing went off once… twice… a third time, and then, blessed release as a pleasant—though somewhat snooty sounding, in James’s opinion—female voice spoke the blessed words: “Reno nine-one-one, what is the state of your emergency?”
He sighed, relaxed, and felt the bands of barbed wire around his body release in tandem; perhaps he was getting off light after all. He found a bit of calm in the sea and managed to make at least a little sense in his reply. “Dicky Hollis is dead. At the morgue. I think… I think his assistant is too.”
Then the questions began, and by the time they were through, James was beginning to think he might have been better off just kicking the bucket back in the freezer room, but the warmth of the ambulance and the comforting smiles of the paramedics when they picked him up were almost worth it all. Almost.
Chapter 24
12:00 pm, December 20, 1999
The halls of St. Mary’s were almost unnaturally quiet, with not even the sound of crepe shoes squeaking along the tile to give any sense of place. Brokov found herself thinking it was lucky she wasn’t a patient here; if she were and had woken up to this silence, she might have mistaken it for the morgue.
Brokov had been sitting by the bed, in a wire-frame chair that felt like it had been designed with the specific purpose of getting people out of the room as quickly as possible. She couldn’t imagine what it would have felt like for someone like Parker to sit in it, since it was pinching her pretty severely. She was fairly sure that when she finally stood up, she’d have the pattern of the damned thing tattooed on her ass for at least a couple of hours. It wouldn’t be the first time.
The ruins of a Subway sandwich were folded into a neat little packet on her lap, and she was bent over a battered copy of The Firm, rereading it for the umpteenth time—and the second since the beginning of December—and trying to ignore the steady beeping of the monitoring equipment.
While the pain in her rear and the spooky stillness of the hospital were uncomfortable, they were still miles ahead of what she’d left behind back at the station. Before Perez had finally come down to give her some relief—practically kicking her out the door—she’d felt like the main attraction in an aquarium. The last time she’d bothered to check the call sheet, which had probably been forty minutes before she’d punched out, there had been over two hundred calls and seventy-five on-site complainants. Given that she’d been evacuated prior to the lunch rush, she dreaded what the board looked like now.
She was used to things getting a little crazy around the holidays—you didn’t spend years in law enforcement without discovering that right before Thanksgiving, the shit hit the fan and didn’t stop being flung about until roughly late February—but even so, this was madness. Everyone in town seemed to be just a little more antsy than usual, a little more likely to ram someone with a car, break an ex-boyfriend’s window, or slap their kids around.
Once released from the insanity, Sheila had hit the sub shop and then dropped in at the hospital, figuring it was as good a place to eat as any other. They hadn’t wanted to let her in with the food at first, citing hospital regulations, but at the moment, Sheila was not totally against abusing her authority, so she flashed her badge and cited guard duty, so they let it pass.
Drakanis’s tape recorder was still sitting on the little table beside the bed, which she noticed was suspiciously devoid of the usual get-well cards, flowers, and other paraphernalia that accumulated during the first couple of weeks someone was in the hospital. Occasionally, the reels would spin for a moment or two when Damien muttered in his sleep. Sheila wasn’t holding out much hope for anything useful from the tape, but when the idea had hit him, Michael had seemed to think it was exceptionally important—case-breaking even—so she had done it anyway. She planned to swap the cassette with a fresh one and drop this one by Parker’s desk when she got back to the office.
She turned the page—Mitch was currently occupied explaining his BMW’s insect infestation to Tarrance—and started to read on, but then the whole tone of the room changed. She couldn’t put her finger on it at first, but something was definitely different. A moment later, she had it. When Tarrance had been asking about what had happened to the hotshot lawyer car on page 399, she had felt alone in the room. After turning to page 400 and the beginning of the insect explanation, she had the distinct sensation of another presence in the room.
She folded the book closed—something it didn’t want to do, with the spine in the condition it was in—and jerked her head up, suddenly wary. She wasn’t sure exactly what she was looking for, but her wind was up, her bright blue eyes piercing and looking for someone to attack. It wasn’t until that moment that she realized how on edge she had really been. When she saw nothing, it only made her angrier. There was nothing to jump at, nothing to stop from bringing any more misery on this miserable little city.
Christ, Brokov. Paranoid much? She tried to laugh at herself, tried to give some indication that she wasn’t scared, that she wasn’t about ready to leap out of her skin and start screaming, but she knew she wasn’t doing a particularly good job. Then the voice came, causing her to jump and hit the floor, startled right out of the too-tight, shitty chair.
“Your taste in books…” the voice, full of sarcasm and apparent pain, said quietly and then stopped for a second to cough once. “ . . . still sucks, Brokov.”
Sheila was trying to pull herself back up but stopped when the words were really processed in her head and she recognized the voice. She froze. Then she broke into a smile.
“Welcome back, Mr. Man. Gonna stay this time?”
Damien turned his head, feeling the tendons creak, but he counted himself lucky that he wasn’t hit with the blast of pain he was expecting. Apparently, while he was out of it—and he wasn’t sure how long that had been; it might have been anywhere from an hour to a day, he guessed—he’d had some time to heal up. Either that or the goddess had done it somehow. God only knew.
He tried to talk, but a coughing fit came over him. He felt like the lining of his throat had been replaced with coarse-grade sandpaper, and while the first statement had come easily enough, hooks were really digging into the meat of his vocal chords now.
Brokov scrambled up, grabbed her soda cup, and tried to get the straw into his mouth. It wasn’t an easy job, since the coughs were racking his body and his head was bobbing around, but she finally managed. “Drink up.”
Damien did as he was told, and the blast of ice and sugar nearly put him into shock. He felt like if he tried just a little harder, he could feel every pore in his body processing the moisture out of it, sucking up the sugar like the sweet, sweet crack it really was, flooding every cell in an attempt to pull himself back from whatever hole he’d been in. When he couldn’t take any more—without vomiting, at least—he shook his head, drew back, and took a shuddering breath as he felt sweat break out all over his body.
“Christ,” he managed. “I didn’t know a Coke’d ind
uce orgasm.”
Brokov just looked at him, as if the sense in the words hadn’t sunk in yet. Then she burst out laughing, and Damien answered with a grin.
I could get to like that sound, he thought. But is it safe? He wasn’t getting any of the vibe from her that he usually did when that old ghost was getting ready to unload on him, but that didn’t seem to make much difference. Truth be told, he wasn’t getting much of a vibe from anything at all. There was a little spark, just a hint of what she was feeling, but it seemed like his sixth sense was on the fritz.
Bullshit. It’s not on the fritz, and you know it. He thought he did. When he’d been wandering on Memory Lane, he had begun to put it together. He was back to square one. He’d always had little sparks, little flashes of intuition and sometimes other things, but it hadn’t been until he was chosen that those talents really bloomed. That was what it felt like now; it was like what he’d had before the thing with Sheila and before he’d become the Disciple.
Fuck a duck. Tall order, and stuck with parlor tricks. He was not looking forward to doing whatever it was he was expected to do, but for now, he felt at least a little relief that he was still alive and kicking—that and that Brokov had come to see him.
“I think the docs will want to see you, Damien. They’re counting you as a practical miracle at the moment.” She got back up, set the soda on the bedside table, and started to head out but was stopped when his hand snapped up and grabbed at her wrist.
He looked almost desperate, almost pleading. In a way, he was. Until he knew how much time he had left, he wouldn’t know how fast he had to move. His tongue ran over his lips, and he whispered, “How long?”
She shook her head, not knowing what he meant at first. “Not very; he’s just down the—”
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