Edmund scratched the bald top of his head as he read the distinction over and over again, trying to keep the terms straight. On another page, he analyzed gunshot diagrams, saw dotted lines indicating the passage of bullets through the body cavity, how one course could be instantly fatal while another could be easily healed.
At least it was quiet here so he could concentrate, and when Edmund finally got all of the explanations clear in his mind, they usually stayed in place. The back of his head throbbed with a tension headache, but Edmund didn’t want to get more coffee or take aspirin. He would think his way through it.
Just when he thought he was on the verge of a revelation, ready to grin with exhilarated triumph, he heard something moving . . . stirring.
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Edmund perked up, squaring his shoulders and looking around the room. Only a week before, another morgue attendant had told him a whopper about a cadaver—a man decapitated in an auto accident—that had supposedly gotten up and walked out of the Allegheny Catholic Medical Center. One of the lights flickered in the left corner, but Edmund saw no shambling, headless corpses . . . or any other manifestations of ridiculous urban legends.
He stared at the dying bulb, realizing that its strobe-light pattern was distracting him. He sighed and jotted a little note for the maintenance crew. Maintenance had already double-checked the temperature in the refrigerator drawers, had added more freon, and claimed that everything in the small vaults—including 4E—was exactly the way it should be.
Hearing no further sound, Edmund turned the page and flipped to another chapter about the various types of trauma that could be inflicted by blunt weapons.
Then he noticed the sound of movement again—a brushing, stirring . . . and then a loud
thump.
Edmund sat bolt upright, blinking repeatedly. He knew this wasn’t his imagination, no way, no how. He had worked here in the morgue long enough that he didn’t get easily spooked by sounds of settling buildings or whirring support machinery.
Another thump. Something striking metal.
He stood up, trying to determine the source of the noise. He wondered if someone was hurt, or if some sinister lurker had slipped into the quiet morgue . . .
but why? Edmund had been at his station for the previous three hours and he had heard nothing, seen nothing. He could remember everyone who had entered the place.
Again, he heard a pounding, and a thump, and a scraping. There was no pretense of quiet at all any-antibodies
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more. Someone hammered inside a chamber, growing more frantic.
Edmund scuttled to the rear of the room with growing dread—in his heart, he knew where he would find the source of the noise. One of the refrigerator drawers—one of the drawers that contained a cadaver.
He had read horror stories in school, especially Edgar Allan Poe, about premature burials, people not actually dead. He had heard spooky stories about comatose victims slammed into morgue refrigerators until they died from the cold rather than their own injuries—patients who had been misdiagnosed, in a diabetic shock or epileptic seizures that gave all the appearance of death.
From his limited medical expertise, Edmund had dismissed each of these anecdotal examples as urban legends, old wives’ tales . . . but right now there could be no mistaking it.
Someone was pounding from the
inside
of one of the refrigerator doors.
He went over, listening. “Hello!” he shouted. “I’ll get you out.” It was the least he could do.
A RESTRICTED sign marked the drawer making the sounds, yellow tape, and a BIOHAZARD symbol. Drawer 4E. This one contained the body of the dead security guard, and Edmund knew the blotched, lumpy, slime-covered corpse had been inside the drawer for days.
Days!
Agent Scully had even performed an autopsy on the man.
This guy could not still be alive.
The restless noises fell quiet after his shout, then he heard a stirring, almost like . . . rats crawling within the walls.
Edmund swallowed hard. Was this a prank, someone trying to spook him? People picked on him often, called him a geek.
If this was a joke, he would get even with them.
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But if someone needed help, Edmund had to take the chance.
“Are you in there?” he said, leaning closer to the sealed refrigerator door. “I’ll let you out.” He pressed his white lips together to squeeze just a little more bravery into his system, and tugged on the handle of 4E.
The door popped open, and something inside tried to push its way free. Something horrible.
Edmund screamed and fought against the door.
He saw a strange twisted shape inside the unlit chamber thrashing about, denting the stainless-steel walls.
The sliding drawer rocked and rattled.
A fleshy appendage protruded, bending around in ways no jointed limb would ever move . . . more like a stubby
tentacle.
Edmund wailed again and used his back to push against the door, squirming out of the way so the groping thing would not be able to touch him. His weight was more than enough to force back the attack.
Other protrusions from the body core, twisted lumps that seemed to have been arms or hands at one point, scraped and scrabbled for a hold against the slippery metal door, trying to get in.
A sticky coating of slime, like saliva, drooled from the inside ceiling of the drawer.
Edmund pushed hard enough that the door almost closed. Two of the tentacles and one many-jointed finger were caught in the edge. Other limbs—
far too many for the normal complement of arms and legs—flailed and pounded, struggling to get out.
But he heard no sound from vocal chords. No words. No scream of pain. Just frantic movement.
Edmund pushed harder, crushing the pseudo-fingers.
Finally they jerked and broke away, yanking themselves back into the relative safety of the refrigerator drawer.
Biting back an outcry, Edmund slammed himself antibodies
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against the steel door, shoving until he heard the latch click and lock into place.
Trembling with a huge sigh of relief, he fiddled with the latch to make sure it was solid. Then he stood in shock, staring at the silent refrigerator drawer.
He had a moment of blessed peace—but then he heard the trapped thing inside pounding about in a frenzy. Edmund shouted at it in panic, “Be quiet in there!”
The best thing he could think of was to rush to the temperature controls, where he dialed the setting as low as it could possibly go—to hard freeze. That would knock the thing down, keep it still. The refrigerators had just been charged, and the freezers would do their work quickly. They were designed to preserve evidence and tissue without any chance of further decay or handling damage.
Inside the coffin-sized drawer, the cold recirculat-ing air would even now be intense, stunning that
thing
that had somehow gotten inside where the guard’s body was stored.
In a few moments he heard the frantic thrashing begin to subside—but it might have been just a ruse.
Edmund wanted to run, but he didn’t dare leave. He didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t think of any other way to deal with the problem. Cold . . .
cold
. That would freeze the thing.
The thumping and scrabbling slowed, and finally Edmund got up the nerve to hurry to the telephone.
He punched a button and called Security.
When two hospital guards eventually came down—already skeptical and taking their sweet time, since they received more false alarms from night-shift morgue attendants than in any other place or any other time in the hospital—the creature inside the drawer had fallen entirely silent. Probably frozen by now.
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They laughed at Edmund, thinking it was just his imagination. But he endured their joking for now.
He stood back, unwilling to be anywhere close by when they opened up drawer 4E. He warned them again, but they slid open the drawer anyway.
Their laughter stopped instantly as they stared down at the hideous remains.
Ross Island Bridge
Portland, Oregon
Thursday, 7:18 A.M.
The bridge spread out into the early morn-X ing fog. Its vaulted and lacy metal girders disappeared into the mist like an infinite tunnel.
To Jeremy Dorman it was just a route across the Willamette River on his long and stumbling trek out of the city, toward the wilderness . . .
toward where he might find Patrice and Jody Kennessy.
He took another step, then another, weaving. He couldn’t feel his feet; they were just lumps of distant flesh at the ends of his legs, which themselves felt rubbery, as if his body were changing, altering, growing joints in odd places.
At the peak of the bridge, he felt suspended in air, though the dawn murk prevented him from seeing the river far below. The city lights of skyscrapers and streetlamps were mere fairy glows.
Dorman staggered along, focusing his mind on the vanishing point, where the bridge disappeared into the fog. His goal was just to get to the other side 104
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of the bridge. One step at a time. And after he succeeded in that task, he would set another for himself, and another, until he finally made his way out of Portland.
The wooded coastal mountains—the precious dog— seemed an impossibly long distance away.
The morning air was clammy and cold, but he couldn’t feel it, didn’t notice his sticky clothes. His skin crawled with gooseflesh, but it had nothing to do with the temperature, just the rampant disaster happening within all of his cells. As a scientist, he should have found it interesting—but as the victim of the change, he found it only horrifying.
Dorman swallowed hard. His throat felt slick, as if clogged with slime, a mucus that oozed from his pores. When he clenched his teeth, they rattled loosely in their gums. His vision carried a black fringe of static around the edges.
He walked onward. He had no other alternative.
A pickup truck roared by on the deck plates of the bridge. The echoes of the engine and the tires throbbed in his ears. He watched the red taillights disappear.
Suddenly Dorman’s stomach clenched, his spine whipped about like an angry serpent. He feared he would disintegrate here, slough off into a pool of dissociated flesh and twitching muscles, a gelatinous mass that would drip down beneath the grated walkway of the bridge.
“Noooo!” he cried, a howling inhuman voice in the stillness.
Dorman reached out with one of his slick, waxy hands and grabbed the bridge railing to support himself,
willing
his body to cease its convulsions. He was losing control again.
It was getting harder and harder to stop his body.
All of his biological systems were refusing commands from his mind, taking on a life of their own. He antibodies
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gripped the bridge rail with both hands and squeezed until he thought the steel would bend.
He must have looked like a potential suicide waiting to leap over the edge into the infinite murk of whispering water below—but Dorman had no intention of killing himself. In fact, everything he was doing was a desperate effort to keep himself alive, no matter what. No matter the cost.
He couldn’t go to a hospital or seek other medical attention—no doctor in the world would know how to treat his affliction. And any time he reported his name, he might draw the attention of . . . unwanted eyes. He couldn’t risk that. He would have to endure the pain for now.
Finally, when the spasm passed and he felt only weak and trembly, Dorman set off again. His body wouldn’t fall apart on him yet. Not yet. But he needed to focus, needed to reestablish the goal in his mind.
He had to find the damned dog.
He reached into his tattered shirt pocket and pawed out the wrinkled, soot-smudged photo he had taken from the broken frame in David Kennessy’s desk. Lovely young Patrice with her fine features and strawberry blond hair, and wiry, tousle-haired Jody grinning for the camera. Their expressions reflected the peaceful times before Jody’s leukemia, before David’s desperate drive for research.
Dorman narrowed his eyes and burned the picture into his brain.
He had been a close friend of the Kennessys. He had been Jody’s surrogate uncle, practically a member of the family—far more than the skittish and rude brother Darin, that’s for sure. And because he knew her so well, Dorman had a good idea where Patrice would think to hide. She would imagine she was safe there, since Darin had loved his secrets so much.
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revolver he had taken from the security guard hung like a heavy club.
When he finally reached the far end of the Ross Island Bridge, Dorman stared westward. The forested, fog-shrouded mountains of the coast were a long distance away.
Once he found them, Dorman hoped he could get away with the dog without Patrice or Jody seeing him.
He didn’t want to have to kill them—hell, the kid was already a skeleton, nearly dead from his leukemia—
but he would shoot them, and the dog, too, if it became necessary. In the big picture, it didn’t really matter how much he cared for them.
He already had plenty of blood on his hands.
Once again, he cursed David and his naiveté.
Darin had understood, and he had run to hide under a rock. But David, hot-headed and desperate to help Jody, had blindly ignored the true sources of funding for their work. Did he really think they were giving DyMar all those millions just so
David Kennessy
could turn around and decide the morally responsible approach to its use?
David had stumbled into a political minefield, and he had set in motion all the events that had caused so much damage—including Jeremy Dorman’s own desperate gambit for survival.
A gambit that was failing. Though the prototype samples had kept him alive at first, now his entire body was falling into a biological meltdown, and he could do nothing about it.