“Don’t go,” she whispered to him. “Wait for them, just a little longer.”
“Did you say something, Stefanie?” one of the other nurses asked.
“Just a shame they won’t get to say good-bye,” she admitted.
“It always is,” the other woman replied.
On the monitor, Mr. Haupt’s pulse flat-lined. Stefanie did not need to see it to know the man was dead. His cold hand had twitched once, squeezing her fingers as though trying to send her a signal.Then it had been still.
Almost instantly, at least it seemed to her, his skin had taken on the waxy sheen of dead flesh. No longer was the thing before her a human being, but a dried husk, a hollowed-out shell.
Tenderly, Stefanie reached her fingers up to touch the man’s cheek. When she did, she hissed and pulled her hand away. The dead man’s skin was not simply cold; it felt icy, frozen.
“Karen?” she said, softly at first. Then louder. “Karen, could you come over here?”
The other nurse approached. Even as she did, Stefanie watched in horror as Mr. Haupt’s skin began to change. He had been drawn and pale at the end, of course, but now his flesh began to look mottled.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Karen said quickly, alarm in her tone. “Could be some sort of virus or something.”
For the dead man’s skin had lost its mottling, but now had become even paler, with the webbing of blue veins beneath the surface clearly visible.
Like marble, Stefanie thought.
Mr. Haupt’s right hand darted up, snakelike, and locked in a vise around her wrist. His eyes opened wide and stared up at her.The irises were huge and almost completely black, ringed with burning halos. It was as though the dead man’s eyes were a window, and something was peering through from the other side.
Stefanie screamed.
Mr. Haupt sat up and tore the tube from his throat with a gagging noise and the sound of tearing as the tape came away from his face.
“Janine,” the dead man rasped in a heavily accented voice. It sounded as though he were speaking on a bad telephone line, tinny and far away. “Where is Janine?”
Out of reflex, she reached out a hand to try to stop him from standing. Those black eyes like dying planets bore down upon her, and Stefanie fell backward and sat heavily upon the floor. A chill raced through her that seemed to come both from without and within.
Her breath fogged the air in front of her face.
In her peripheral vision, she saw the cardiac monitor. It still showed nothing but a flatline.
With a single thrust of his outstretched hand, he propelled her face into the monitor, shattering both glass and bone.
“Come on, come on.”
Shane Dowling bounced a little on the balls of his feet as the elevator creaked slowly upward. At six-foot-seven and two hundred and sixty pounds, he made the ancient contraption sway unsteadily with just that motion.
“Shoulda taken the goddamn stairs,” Shane grumbled. He ran an enormous hand over the black, gleaming skin of his shaven scalp. “Told you, Noah.”
Beside him, Noah Levine was the picture of calm. He was more than half a foot shorter than Shane, and thin, but he was strong and quick. The only similarity between the two men was the dark blue security uniform each of them wore.
“Fourth floor, Shane. Stairs wouldn’t be much faster, and we’d be winded, then. Got to conserve energy in a crisis.”
“You’d be winded,” Shane retorted, a wry grin on his face. “Crisis, my ass. We don’t even know what we’re dealing with yet.”
“My point,” Noah replied.
Their conversation ended abruptly when the elevator dinged and the doors slid open on the fourth floor.Without a word, the two guards hustled out into the corridor and sprinted toward the ICU. Shane held a hand on the billy club attached to his belt as he ran.
The scene in the corridor ahead of them was not one of chaos, but of aftermath. Nurses and orderlies darted into the ICU, though some milled about in the hall, attempting to get a look at what was going on inside. No one seemed frightened, however, which meant that whatever had happened, it was probably already over.
Shane was disappointed.
Noah took the lead slightly, and Shane let him. Though he loved his job, loved being associated with the hospital, he relished the few times when they were actually called in to do more than intimidate some poor sap who wanted to visit a patient outside visiting hours.
His huge rubber soles squeaked on the linoleum as he slowed down. An aging, withered nurse stood in the hall outside the ICU, her eyes wide with voracious fascination as she tried to get a better view. The arrival of the security guards seemed to excite her even more.
Noah pushed past those lingering around the door and into the ICU. Staff members pressed themselves against the walls like spectators at a marathon. Shane followed without enthusiasm, his gaze drifting toward the old nurse; she reminded him of a vulture, circling for prey.
“In there!” she told him.
No shit, lady. I’m not blind, he wanted to say. Instead he offered a thin smile and followed his partner.
The ICU was a shambles. Most of the units had curtains drawn around them, though Shane could clearly see figures moving within, likely doctors and nurses checking on all the patients. One of the units had been thoroughly trashed, monitors shattered, a crash cart overturned, tubes and things scattered on the floor. Even as Shane glanced at it, the light in that unit was turned out.
The cleanup would have to wait until after the police had a look at it, he knew.
In the main traffic area, things were even uglier.A doctor with thinning hair and round glasses with one lens cracked was having stitches sewn into his lip while another doctor checked his left arm and wrist for bone damage.
The worst was the nurse, though. A cute little thing Shane had noticed plenty of times around the hospital, she lay unconscious on a gurney while Nelson Ramos, a doctor Shane knew, plucked small shards of glass from her face.
“What the hell ...” he began.
But Noah had already questioned the doc with the stitches in his mouth. The man had been a real sourpuss, but Shane could not blame him. Those stitches had to hurt like a son of a bitch. The nurse tied off the stitches, and the doc turned to them, his brow furrowing with anger.
“What the hell you standing here for?” he asked, his voice muffled by the swelling of his lower lip and his effort not to move it too much.
“Dr. Pulaski,” Noah replied, “if you could just—”
“Geoffrey Haupt, seventy-six. He’s a cancer patient. He just took off a couple of minutes ago, but he can’t get far. He’s dying. Hell, we thought he was already dead.”
With his right hand, Shane reached up to cover his mouth to hide the grin that spread across his face. All this trouble over some poor old guy about to die from cancer; it was pretty absurd. On the other hand, it was not the first story he’d heard about people at death’s door going on a short walkabout before finally heaving their last. The doc was right about one thing, though: Haupt wouldn’t get far.
“I’ll go after him, Noah,” he offered. “If he’s not on this floor, he must have taken the stairs. Probably collapsed on the stairwell somewhere.”
With a sigh, Shane strode out into the corridor again. Nurses and orderlies cleared out of his way. He glanced around at them, searching for eyes that held answers instead of questions. Every single one of the onlookers had an identical, mystified expression on their faces; all save one.
The vulture, the older nurse who had seemed almost too interested when they arrived, stood against the wall across the corridor. The corners of Shane’s mouth twitched up in a rough approximation of a smile.
“Which way?” he asked.
As though she had never imagined such a piece of information might be important, the woman blinked several times, then slowly pointed along the hall toward the exit door at the far end.
“He went f
or the stairs?” Shane asked.
She nodded. “But ... he was dead,” the woman rasped. He studied her eyes and began to wonder if whatever she had witnessed here had put her into a state of shock.
On the other hand, that wasn’t his job. They were in a building filled with people who were supposed to worry about such things, but he was not one of them.
“Thanks,” he replied, smiling politely.
“He was,” she chided, a bit defensively. “I saw him go. His heart stopped.”
“Then it shouldn’t be too hard to catch up with him, huh?” Shane asked.
He jogged down the corridor, grateful that the disturbed woman had seen the man make his exit. The last thing he wanted to have to do was check all the rooms up here.
When he banged through the door to the stairs, the lights flickered on the landing. Shane had expected to see the old man right off, and frowned when he realized the place was empty. Out of reflex, he took a quick look up, but gave little credence to the idea that the patient might have gone that way. The guy was on his last legs. Taking off like that likely meant he either wanted to escape, or just wanted to be outside again, one last time. Both options would have led him down. Outside.
’Course, no way’s he gonna make it all the way down, Shane thought.
But at the third-floor landing, there was still no sign of the guy. As he started down toward the second floor, he hesitated slightly. It was possible he had chosen the wrong direction; that Mr. Haupt had gone up after all.
His left foot shifted and dropped down to the fourth step.
An alarm screamed up from below.
The emergency exit, Shane thought immediately.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” He groaned. Then he started to hustle, taking the steps two at a time and leaping the last four or five at each turn of the stairs.
No more than twenty seconds later he jumped down to the first-floor landing—the red bell above the door screamed furiously—and slammed through the emergency exit. The metal door clanged against the brick exterior of the hospital and Shane stalked out into the parking lot.
Phillips Memorial Hospital stood on a small hill in the Lions Gate section of Medford, which had been considered swank in the 1940s and still carried a certain air about it despite the faded quality of the Colonials and Victorians that lined the streets. The hospital, though equally faded, also enjoyed a certain reputation, mostly a holdover from earlier days, though with a somewhat well-deserved thanks to its staff.
One benefit it had over Boston-area hospitals was that it had been built in an age and in a neighborhood where few people were willing to encroach upon the sanctity of a place of healing.
Which meant that though Phillips Memorial was filled to brimming with patients and staff, the narrow spillover lot at the rear of the hospital was almost always hauntingly empty save for enormous blue Dumpsters and hazardous waste-disposal units, and the vehicles that routinely arrived to empty them.
A cold wind blew across the empty lot. An empty McDonald’s takeout bag whirled and eddied in a dust devil that swirled beneath a distant lamppost as though performing in the spotlight. The door swung shut behind Shane, muffling the alarm bell within. The light above the door had burned out, but the lamps scattered across the lot gave him enough illumination to see.
To see nothing.
But how could there be nothing?
The thumping bass of a car radio cranked all the way up to “deafen” reached him as he stood in the darkness just outside the door and glanced around the lot, utterly bewildered. The alarm bell still wailed inside—he could hear it as if at a distance, or as if it were his morning wake-up and he had buried his head beneath the pillow. Still, it was tangible testimony to the fact that someone had come out this door. It was certainly possible that it had been someone other than the fugitive from the ICU, but the odds against that were astronomical.
On the other hand, how far could a guy dying of cancer get minutes after the ICU staff had been convinced he was done for?
With a sigh, Shane unclipped the two-way radio from his belt. He stepped away from the door and glanced both ways along the length of the back of the hospital. Sanitation containers. That was all he could see. Grimly, and feeling more than a bit absurd, he realized that the old guy might be hiding behind one of them.
He flicked a button on his radio with his thumb. “Noah, you there?”
A moment later, the radio’s static was interrupted by his partner’s voice. “Here. What’ve you got? Alarm went off down there. Did the old guy really get that far?”
“Even farther, I think,” Shane replied. “I’m at the back door now and I don’t see a goddamn thing.”
“You don’t have visual?” Noah asked.
Shane rolled his eyes, then glared almost angrily at his radio. “You watch too much fucking cable,” he snapped. “No, I ‘don’t have visual,’ you moron. I just told you, I don’t see anything. If he came out this way, I think he’s gone. I’m going to look around a bit, and—”
“Walk the perimeter,” Noah instructed. “Report back if you find anything.”
With a snicker, Shane thumbed the button on the radio again. “Yeah. I’ll do that.”
He clipped it to his belt, then glanced around the lot, shaking his head. “Walk the fucking perimeter,” he whispered to himself. “Look, Ma, I’m in Platoon.”
By random choice, he turned left. Thirty feet along was an enormous blue Dumpster with BFD stenciled on the side in letters two feet high. Shane’s hand rested comfortably on the haft of his nightstick again, though only by instinct. He was curious about the missing patient, but also amused. It was going to make a hell of a story to tell.
As he passed the Dumpster, he glanced behind it.
The corpse lay sprawled in the sickly yellow lamplight, arms and legs jutting at impossible angles, almost covering one another. Blood had splashed the side of the Dumpster and the pavement all around, and the hospital johnny the patient had worn was drenched crimson and ripped to tatters, pieces of it hanging from the body.
“Holy shit,” Shane muttered breathlessly.
The guy had been a patient, and he knew it was probably safe to assume this was their runaway, but he needed to take a closer look. He narrowed his eyes and peered into the semidarkness at the face.
The two faces.
Or more accurately, the two halves of the man’s head. Shane blinked, holding his breath as he realized with mounting horror that the corpse before him was not sprawled out, or radically twisted. The dead man had been ripped in half from head to toe: torn right down the middle. His internal organs had spilled out, intestines landing in a wet coil, piled with the halves of the corpse.
Something moved in the dark mass of flesh and viscera, twitched beneath the raw, bloody flesh.
It poked its nose out and its eyes glowed yellow in the low light. A rat. And from the way the dead man’s guts began almost to undulate, Shane knew there were many more rats where that came from.
He turned quickly away, fell to his knees, and violently puked his dinner onto the pavement.
CHAPTER 3
The weather the day of Ralph Weiss’s funeral was blasphemous. Funerals, David had always believed, were meant to be accompanied by gray skies on the verge of weeping. But that Saturday morning was perhaps the most gloriously beautiful day the spring had proffered thus far. The sky was crystal blue and utterly cloudless. The sun shone down brightly, but softly, without the vigor and even brutality it would adopt when summer blazed in. The lawn at Oak Grove Cemetery was freshly mowed, and the flowers and trees, newly budding, laced the light breeze with sweet, warm scents that made David think of childhood.
As he did so often, that morning he felt like a man comprised of two beings, two David Bairstows. One was the child he had been: the young man lingering into adulthood with the certainty that growing up, becoming adult, was nothing but a myth told to children, no more real than the bogeyman. The other was the Da
vid of now: older, forcibly grown wiser by the specter of death and the knowledge of his own imperfections. His attitude toward Ralph Weiss, for one. His inability to make things work with Janine, for another.
The unfortunate truth was that people did, eventually, grow up. Though he knew the process had enriched him, had made him more fully human and more fully aware of the world outside that which his selfish childhood mind had created, he was never quite certain if he was relieved to be quit of that foolish child, or if what he felt was an endless, aching grief.
A snatch of song came into his head. An old one, from his own school days, it was a Bob Seger song. “Against the Wind.” “Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then ...”
It never ceased to amaze him, all the things he thought he understood as a child that took on entirely new meaning to him as an adult. That song was one of them.
Ralph Weiss’s funeral was heartbreakingly small. In addition to the man’s wife and grown children, as well as their little ones, there were a handful of friends from the man’s private life. Most of the teachers at St. Matthew’s had appeared for the mass and the burial, as had half a dozen nuns from the convent by St. Matthew’s and a small clutch of only the kindest-hearted and most dedicated students.
It was a sad counterpoint to the last funeral David had attended. The year before, a student named Steve Themeli had been knifed in an argument over drugs. Themeli had been a rough kid, a troublesome student, and raged at every teacher who gave him the low grades he deserved—he had been particularly upset about nearly failing Mr. Bairstow’s English class—but seemingly half the student body had turned out to pay their respects when he died.Themeli had been despised by the faculty, but the students had loved him.
It seemed wrong to David that so many would appear for the funeral of a drugged-out tough guy with an attitude the size of Texas, and so few for the old history teacher who had been a bit pompous, but had meant well.Wrong, and sad.
The priest had come from Weiss’s own parish, but his words at the church had cemented David’s suspicion that he had not known the dead man very well. Any one of Weiss’s colleagues could have delivered a more thoughtful eulogy, but of course it would have been most appropriate had Father Charles been asked to do it.
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