“How is that possible?”
“Normally I would say an aggressive Tape Worm or flesh eating bacteria, but after examination of the internal organs I can rule those out.”
Markov crossed his arms, thinking deeply. Unexplained weight loss, shriveled stomach…
“How does this case compare to the patient that was brought in last night?”
Doctor Ellis came around the table and his expression turned to concern.
“I would need to get in contact with the patient’s doctor,” he explained. “I only examine the dead.”
“What about the five dead nurses?” Markov asked. “What was their official cause of death?”
“Two of the nurses died from lacerations severing their jugular. The wounds match the profile of a scalpel and the user’s skill was certainly adept. They didn’t make unnecessary incisions; only the ones that would kill. Two died from a broken neck and the final one died of asphyxiation or blunt head trauma. It’s hard to say which did the job as they appeared to occur at approximately the same time. The killer used one hand, a right hand to be exact, and it must have been a powerful person. From the report from the doctors who found her, she was thrown headfirst into a monitor.”
“I’ve seen security tape of this guy and he’s not very big. How could he have crushed her windpipe?”
“What I know, Detective, is the windpipe was completely crushed. The size of the hand was about average for an adult male, but the power used was unlike anything I’ve seen in thirty years as a medical examiner.”
Doctor Ellis let a smirk cross his face. Markov stopped and wondered what kind of person it takes to examine the dead for a living. He took some kind of weird pleasure in solving mysteries. He didn’t flinch at the sight of a dead body. He spoke of death as if part of a routine to be repeated day in and day out. He would have made a good detective. Markov might have made a good medical examiner if he could deal with the smells. Being able to make it through medical school might have helped as well.
“What about the other DB from the grocery store?”
“He was strangled, much like our young nurse,” Doctor Ellis said while nodding to a body at the far end of the room, covered in a white cloth. “The windpipe was crushed.”
Markov crossed his arms and thought hard. The manner of deaths was all over the map. None of these murders were premeditated, they were spur of the moment. He used whatever means he had available, usually his hands.
“We’re not done with this fellow yet,” Doctor Ellis cautioned, pointing to Dr. Hannover’s corpse.
“What do you mean?”
“This man was a Pathologist. He studied sections of brain surgically removed from patients. In order to be thorough, I need to examine his brain.”
Great, Markov thought. Just what I always wanted.
He envied Detective Hall. At least she got to sleep through the nasty parts of this investigation. Markov couldn’t help but remember back to his high school anatomy class. They cut open cat skulls to examine their brains. He never understood why. It wasn’t as though they were going to be able to discern anything groundbreaking from looking at a piece of grey matter the size of a walnut. Markov couldn’t fathom what the doctor hoped to gain by opening up the Pathologist’s skull.
Doctor Ellis readied his saw, testing the blade with a quick jolt of power. Markov took a couple of steps back in an attempt to avoid the splash zone. He didn’t make the same mistakes twice. The saw spun with a high-pitched whirl. The Doctor bore down on the man’s skull and curled around his hairline. The saw stopped spinning before the job was done and Dr. Ellis adjusted the head on a plinth so he could cut the back side.
When he was finished, the doctor set the saw down on the table, his expression inscrutable. Carefully, he removed the skull cap and rested it on a flat steel tray beside the autopsy table. The corpse’s head still rested up at an angle. Dr. Ellis turned on his headlamp and examined the brain up close.
“From the outside, everything appears normal,” Dr. Ellis said. “I’ll need to look a bit deeper.”
Detective Markov was hardly listening to the doctor anymore. He was more focused on keeping himself from vomiting all over the white tile. Something told him he wouldn’t have been the first one to do so.
Dr. Ellis picked up a scalpel and used it to slice down the center crease of the brain. As he did so, the pink matter pulsated in rhythm with his cuts. The doctor’s hand stopped and he took a closer look, his expression turning frightened. He put his ear down to the cadaver’s chest cavity and looked up toward the head.
“Impossible,” Dr. Ellis said.
“What?”
“Shh, shh,” The doctor shushed. “Listen.”
Markov stepped closer to the body, cupping his knees with his hands and bending in to get a better look. The Pathologist appeared to be visually wasting away. His body could have been evaporating in a time-lapse video by the way his fat and muscle tissue shrunk before Markov’s eyes. Doctor Ellis turned his face toward the chest cavity and slowly backed away. The dead man’s body contracted, his heart pulsed briefly. It was the only organ Dr. Ellis hadn’t touched apart from a cursory examination. Now it seemed to vibrate unnaturally.
“Is that supposed to happen?” Markov asked.
“This can’t be.”
A gurgling sound filled the room as what little blood remained in the body tried to flow but found only an empty cavity to fill. The space between organs filled with vermilion fluid and a haunting sucking sound. The gurgling abated and soon silence filled in the room. For a few moments Doctor Ellis and Detective Markov stared at one another in awe. An organic sound broke the silence. Normally, it would hardly have been noticeable. However, this sound seemed to ring out into both of their expecting ears, paralyzing the men in place. One single heartbeat followed by silence.
Doctor Ellis straightened up as best he could and examined the heart, what fear he had diminished by his curiosity. The heart appeared to have returned to its previous state. When it gave its single solid pump, blood flowed through and rippled in the cavity like a broken water feature. Markov looked from the heart to the dead man’s expressionless face. He wondered if the body could be clinging to life. The cadaver’s eyelids quivered and then opened halfway.
Markov let out a sound he would later be ashamed to recount. He was fine with scary movies and haunted houses, and even reveled in the possibility of a zombie apocalypse. But, nothing prepared him for actually seeing something out of one of those horror movies. It wasn’t something a person expected to see in their lifetime. Doctor Ellis looked from Markov to the pathologist’s head.
“Remarkable,” he said.
“Yeah, let’s call it that,” Markov replied quickly. “What the hell’s going on, Doc?”
“I can think of only one explanation.”
Doctor Ellis backed away from the table and turned off the voice recorder, taking off his gloves and throwing them in a nearby trash can.
“Doctor Hannover’s body is in fact dead,” he began, “But, I have read accounts of parasites which, when their living host dies, attempt to revive them by the excretion of certain hormones.”
“Like an adrenaline shot?”
“Precisely,” Doctor Ellis responded with a smile.
Markov hadn’t expected to be right. For as long as he could remember, when it came to science, he was decidedly wrong at everything. He smiled a moment, and then had a fleeting thought.
“Why did you turn off the recorder?”
Doctor Ellis removed his face shield and gloves. He rubbed his wrinkled forehead and sighed. Markov could tell he wasn’t going to like what he was about to hear. He’d been the bearer of bad news countless times, informing families their loved ones were murdered, that their loved one murdered somebody, and countless variations in between. One thing was always the same. The look. Doctor Ellis cupped his hands over the bridge of his nose and wiped the sweat out from under his baggy eyes.
“What is
it?” Markov asked. “Give it to me straight.”
“The accounts I’ve read about have never occurred in the United States. If this is a parasite, Doctor Hannover is likely to have contracted it from a sample he was working on. We don’t know if it’s contagious, yet. Until we do, neither of us can leave this room.”
12
1830 Hours – Day 2 – St. Mary’s Hospital
Detective Hall drifted in and out of consciousness, eyes blinded by rays of the lowering sun as she creaked her eyelids open. She caught bits and pieces of a conversation between two nurses. Strange, she thought, since there was no one else in the room. Could they have been just outside the door?
“I heard the morgue’s been contaminated with a super-virus,” the first voice said.
“No way,” the second voice replied. “I heard Doctor Ellis went crazy and took a guy hostage. You’ve seen him, it was only a matter of time.”
Karen wondered how any actual nursing was accomplished with the creativity of the gossip that was floating around. On the other hand, she thought, the station was rife with a multitude of rumors at any point in time so it was hardly unique to the hospital. She couldn’t make out the nurse’s voices anymore. She tilted her head to the open shades, taking in a glimpse of the sun.
Her ears felt hot and they began to ring in a chorus of whispers. There were hundreds of voices that she couldn’t distinguish. Once again, they combined as one, increasing in volume until they overtook her every thought. For a moment she thought she heard a series of clicks and the guttural sound of her stomach gurgling.
Images flooded her mind and she remembered the lab. Karen gasped at the pain. It was a giant’s hands crushing her skull in on itself, the shards of her broken cranium piercing the fleshy matter inside. She wondered how long she’d last before her brain turned to mush. Detective Hall focused on one voice as it repeated the same three words in a deliberate cadence.
Let me in, it pleaded.
Images burst into her mind, more quickly than before. The last time it happened, she saw hundreds, perhaps thousands of people, going about their daily routines. It felt like she was intruding on their personal lives, inserting herself into intimate moments and viewing stolen glances. This time was different.
Detective Hall saw a field of purple foliage and dramatic sheer rock faces jutted up from the ground all around her, rising into the sky like so many broken monoliths. It was a desolate place, devoid of life. A harsh wind blew across the landscape, covering the purple brush with gritty black sand. The images came together in the same way thousands of frames came together to make a movie.
The perspective changed and she was looking to the sky, where unfamiliar constellations hung behind two and a half red moons. The smallest of the moons appeared to be broken roughly in half. Tiny lights danced on the surface, leading Karen to wonder what was happening up there.
Let me in, the voice implored.
Karen pressed her palms against her temples, jamming her fingernails into her skin, drawing blood. She said, “No!” over and over until the door to the room opened and the images and the voice fading into nothingness. Her hearing slowly returned and she heard human voices over the ringing. When she opened her eyes, a tan, blonde nurse was rushing toward her.
“It’s okay,” The nurse said, “Breathe, just breathe.”
•
Neil Meriwether pulled his baseball cap down low over his eyes as he passed two uniformed police officers. He now wore a black wool coat with the collar upturned against the bay breeze. The homeless man he’d acquired it from lay dead in the alley behind him. Neil remembered his father telling him not to waste anything as a child. The homeless man’s jeans were a little loose on him, but they served to satisfy Neil’s need to please his father’s memory.
As he walked out of the alley, he looked back at the nearly naked man lying in the street. Neil felt something he hadn’t felt in days: guilt. He couldn’t remember why he’d killed him. Neil was walking through the alley when the man said hello. They talked for a moment and Neil had asked where he found the jacket. After that, it was a blur of half-remembered images, out of order and faded.
The homeless man’s long, graying hair was tangled in a wet mess in a puddle. Bits of damp cardboard lay strewn about him, his shelter crushed under his weight. What got to Neil the most is that no one would notice him for days. Not until the flies and the smell came into play. A voice broke Neil’s concentration and his remorse faded. He turned around and quickly left the scene.
Neil slowed his brisk pace when he reached the corner of 4th and Mission St. His stomach gurgled and he collapsed against the tall glass windows of a ‘50s diner. Some of the patrons inside the restaurant pointed. A few snickered. The inside of the diner was mostly white, with bright red booths and stools of the same color at the bar. Several patrons watched him with scathing eyes, while a few simply ignored him.
One of the workers came outside with a broomstick, holding it out in front of her. She had dark hair pulled back underneath a hairnet and warm caramel skin. Neil noticed a bit of fear in her eyes. She probably dealt with a lot of homeless people but Neil didn’t blame her for being wary.
Neil wasn’t homeless, though. He had a home before all of this. He had a wife still, technically. The divorce hadn’t gone through yet because he refused to sign the papers. He was a regular guy. The fact that no one else saw him that way made his anger bubble up from his insides. Neil didn’t know how much of this he could take. If he became any angrier, the voices would return and he wouldn’t have any say in the matter.
“Move along,” she said firmly, “We don’t want any trouble.”
Neil swatted the broomstick away and said with a rumbling voice unlike his own, “I need food. Anything.”
“Don’t make me call the cops.”
Neil’s face pressed up against the window, smudging his greasy face in a streak along it. Inside, the man at the cash register was looking at him, his ear pressed against a phone. Neil couldn’t stay there. He wasn’t going to get what he needed from them. He turned and shuffled past the woman. A brisk bay breeze made him return his hands to his wool coat.
“Don’t let me catch you around here again, or we’re going to have a problem!” The woman warned.
Neil stopped. His heart began to race. He felt the blood pumping to his extremities and power return to his fists. He felt ‘The Other.’ That’s what he’d been calling it. It was the inexorable feeling that he was losing control of his own willpower. Neil looked to his hand, which was balled in a shaking fist and which still held specs of blood from his encounter with the homeless man not five minutes before. It shook with a power previously unknown to him. The voices started building in his mind once more until they reached a beautiful crescendo of white noise. He let them in.
•
Neil walked away from the diner with his hands inside his wool coat, a slight smirk on his face and humming his favorite song: AC/DC’s “Shoot to Thrill.” He casually glanced over his shoulder and his smiled faded. A woman in an apron lay on the sidewalk dead, her slender neck snapped. Patrons from the diner hovered over her body, pointing fingers toward him and muttering between them. They called him murderer and killer.
Neil ran. He wondered how he kept getting himself into these messes. Just like with the homeless man, his brain glazed over for a short period of time. For whatever reason, his actions didn’t bother him this time. His emotions didn’t allow him to feel remorse for anything. They died because they had to die. He didn’t question it. He accepted that he had to change; that the Neil of the past was weak and unwilling to help himself.
He turned a corner and ran into a stretch of road with several businesses that were being remodeled. It was less packed than the main street, so he followed it down hoping to find a way off the road. Half a block down, Neil found an open driveway leading up to an above ground parking lot inside one of the buildings. He never liked those places. There was usually a guy waiting to
park your car, but there was no way to tell if they actually worked there. They seemed like a bunch of rotten thieves. He might have been a killer, but he was no thief.
Neil didn’t have much choice, so he took the ramp and was surprised to see it deserted except for a beat up Ford Taurus that had to have been from the ‘90s. Its fading red paint reminded him of his dad’s old Ford when he was growing up. His dad’s Red F-150 lasted longer than his marriage to Neil’s mother. To be fair, Neil’s mother was still serving time for vehicular manslaughter and possession of cocaine. A divorce was just icing on the cake.
He walked up to the Taurus and checked the interior. Besides a few used McDonald’s bags it was empty. Neil remembered the last time his was in a similar structure and had almost gotten robbed. It gave him an idea. Neil took off his wool coat and bunched it up against the window of the red Taurus. He clenched his fist and thrust his elbow into the window, shattering the glass. Afterward, his elbow throbbed and he looked at his quivering hand. He hadn’t meant to do that. That time there were no voices but he felt their influence. Neil thought he must be losing his mind. Maybe there were no voices at all. Maybe he belonged in an institution somewhere.
13
1845 Hours – Day 2 - St. Mary’s Hospital
Detective Hall lay in her hospital bed, the back tilted up so she could drink cool water from a flimsy plastic cup. The tan blonde nurse stood at her bedside making notes on a clipboard, concentrating on what she was doing. She was what Karen imagined the typical California girl to look like. Maybe she’d been a cheerleader in high school and dated a jock. She hated California girls.
A tall handsome doctor waved for her attention and began asking her questions. For a moment she was lost in his eyes. He had asked her a question and she completely blanked. Her cheeks flushed. This was her nightmare.
“What’s the last thing you remember before you fainted?” he repeated.
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