… this thing in his mouth! It wasn’t fucking human!”
One of the detectives came over to Setrakian’s booking sergeant’s cubicle, wiping sweat off his face with a paper towel. “Crazy-ass Mex. Two-time juvie loser, just turned eighteen. Killed a man this time, in a fight. Him and a buddy, must have jumped the guy, stripped off his clothes. Tried to roll him right in the middle of Times Square.”
The booking sergeant rolled his eyes and continued pecking at his keyboard. He asked Setrakian another question, but Setrakian didn’t hear him. He barely felt the seat beneath him, or the warped fists his old, broken hands made. Panic nearly overtook him at the thought of facing the unfaceable again. He saw the future. He saw families torn apart, annihilation, an apocalypse of agonies. Darkness reigning over light. Hell on earth.
At that moment Setrakian felt like the oldest man on the planet.
Suddenly, his dark panic was supplanted by an equally dark impulse: revenge. A second chance. The resistance, the fight—the coming war—it had to begin with him.
Strigoi.
The plague had started.
Isolation Ward,
Jamaica Hospital Medical Center
JIM KENT, still in his street clothes, lying in the hospital bed, sputtered, “This is ridiculous. I feel fine.”
Eph and Nora stood on either side of the bed. “Let’s just call it a precaution, then,” said Eph.
“Nothing happened. He must have knocked me down as I went through the door. I think I blacked out for a minute. Maybe a low-grade concussion.”
Nora nodded. “It’s just that … you’re one of us, Jim. We want to make sure everything checks out.”
“But—why in isolation?”
“Why not?” Eph forced a smile. “We’re here already. And look—you’ve got an entire wing of the hospital to yourself. Best bargain in New York City.”
Jim’s smile showed that he wasn’t convinced. “All right,” he said finally. “But can I at least have my phone so I can feel like I’m contributing?”
Eph said, “I think we can arrange that. After a few tests.”
“And—please tell Sylvia I’m all right. She’s going to be panicked.”
“Right,” said Eph. “We’ll call her as soon as we get out of here.”
They left shaken, pausing before exiting the isolation unit. Nora said, “We have to tell him.”
“Tell him what?” said Eph, a little too sharply. “We have to find out what we’re dealing with first.”
Outside the unit, a woman with wiry hair pulled back under a wide headband stood up from the plastic chair she had pulled in from the lobby. Jim shared an apartment in the East Eighties with his girlfriend, Sylvia, a horoscope writer for the New York Post. She brought five cats to the relationship, and he brought one finch, making for a very tense household. “Can I go in?” said Sylvia.
“Sorry, Sylvia. Rules of the isolation wing—only medical personnel. But Jim said to tell you that he’s feeling fine.”
Sylvia gripped Eph’s arm. “What do you say?”
Eph said, tactfully, “He looks very healthy. We want to run some tests, just in case.”
“They said he passed out, he was a bit woozy. Why the isolation ward?”
“You know how we work, Sylvia. Rule out all the bad stuff. Go step by step.”
Sylvia looked to Nora for female reassurance.
Nora nodded and said, “We’ll get him back to you as soon as we can.”
Downstairs, in the hospital basement, Eph and Nora found an administrator waiting for them at the door to the morgue. “Dr. Goodweather, this is completely irregular. This door is never to be locked, and the hospital insists on being informed of what is going on—”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Graham,” said Eph, reading her name off her hospital ID, “but this is official CDC business.” He hated pulling rank like a bureaucrat, but occasionally being a government employee had its advantages. He took out the key he had appropriated and unlocked the door, entering with Nora. “Thank you for your cooperation,” he said, locking it again behind him.
The lights came on automatically. Redfern’s body lay underneath a sheet on a steel table. Eph selected a pair of gloves from the box near the light switch and opened up a cart of autopsy instruments.
“Eph,” said Nora, pulling on gloves herself. “We don’t even have a death certificate yet. You can’t just cut him open.”
“We don’t have time for formalities. Not with Jim up there. And besides—I don’t even know how we’re going to explain his death in the first place. Any way you look at it, I murdered this man. My own patient.”
“In self-defense.”
“I know that. You know that. But I certainly don’t have the time to waste explaining that to the police.”
He took the large scalpel and drew it down Redfern’s chest, making the Y incision from the left and right collarbones down on two diagonals to the top of the sternum, then straight down the center line of the trunk, over the abdomen to the pubis bone. He then peeled back the skin and underlying muscles, exposing the rib cage and the abdominal apron. He didn’t have time to perform a full medical autopsy. But he did need to confirm some things that had shown up on Redfern’s incomplete MRI.
He used a soft rubber hose to wash away the white, blood-like leakage and viewed the major organs beneath the rib cage. The chest cavity was a mess, cluttered with gross black masses fed by spindly feeders, veinlike offshoots attached to the pilot’s shriveled organs.
“Good God,” said Nora.
Eph studied the growths through the ribs. “It’s taken him over. Look at the heart.”
It was misshapen, shrunken. The arterial structure had been altered also, the circulatory system grown more simplified, the arteries themselves covered over with a dark, cancerous blight.
Nora said, “Impossible. We’re only thirty-six hours out from the plane landing.”
Eph flayed Redfern’s neck then, exposing his throat. The new construct was rooted in the midneck, grown out of the vestibular folds. The protuberance that apparently acted as a stinger lay in its retracted state. It connected straight into the trachea, in fact fusing with it, much like a cancerous growth. Eph elected not to anatomize further just yet, hoping instead to remove the muscle or organ or whatever it was in its entirety at a later time, to study it whole and determine its function.
Eph’s phone rang then. He turned so that Nora could pull it from his pocket with her clean gloves. “It’s the chief medical examiner’s office,” she said, reading the display. She answered it for him, and after listening for a few moments, told the caller, “We’ll be right there.”
Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, Manhattan
DIRECTOR BARNES ARRIVED at the OCME at Thirtieth and First at the same time as Eph and Nora. He stepped from his car, unmistakable in his goatee and navy-style uniform. The intersection was jammed with police cars and TV news crews set up outside the turquoise front of the morgue building.
Their credentials got them inside, all the way to Dr. Julius Mirnstein, the chief medical examiner for New York. Mirnstein was bald but for tufts of brown hair on the sides and back of his head, long faced, dour by nature, wearing the requisite white doctor’s coat over gray slacks.
“We think we were broken into overnight—we don’t know.”