The Darkness Drops

by Peter Clement

  Together they stared at the black handle protruding from his chest as it pulsed at an ever slowing beat. It looked puny in that huge body, not something lethal, but a spreading circle of crimson over his shirt told otherwise.

  The man remained standing, still holding the over-sized knife on high, ready to strike. Surprise curled to rage, and he locked his gaze on Yuri, lunging toward him. After a single step, the black fire faded from his eyes, his snarl fell slack, and he crashed to the floor.

  His severed cardiac muscles had lapsed into mayhem, their individual strands quivering at random around the knife blade, the organ’s contractions no more coordinated than a bag of squirming worms. The circulation collapsed, and a seizure locked his massive frame in a shuddering stretch as if he were straining to break free from unseen chains. His mouth twisted to a spittled grimace. His arms struck at the air a few times. His legs jerked. Then he lay still, the crotch of his pants darkening as death delivered the final indignity.

  Yuri stood over him, his brain on fire.

  Time to act, to think, not feel.

  He quickly peeled off the rest of the dry suit and tossed it down the open trap door. Next went his blood-soaked shirt and pants.

  He raced through the house, throwing open closet doors, rummaging through old clothes, until he found a pair of brown cargo pants and a yellow sweater. Both were several sizes too big, but they’d have to do.

  Pulling them on, he ran back to the kitchen and unlaced the man’s boots. Way too big as well, but overtop the neoprene diving shoes, they’d be good enough.

  Tying them on, he looked over at the gas canister and glanced at the wood stove.

  Outside the snowstorm and mist had reduced visibility to less than fifty feet in any direction.

  He knew what to do.

  Grabbing the man by his stocking feet, he dragged him to the edge of the trap door.

  And stared into the darkness.

  Had the late Graham Greene meant it when he said there was something down there to see.

  Or had that just been more of his bizarre double-talk?

  Yuri sat on the edge of the opening, dangled his feet into the murk, and lowered himself in.

  He dropped onto an earthen floor in a dank crawl space no more than four feet high. The dampness felt like slime against his face, and the stink of feces grew so strong that he stayed put, breathing through his mouth as he accommodated to the stench.

  After a few seconds he braced himself, slowed his respirations, and inched forward, feeling his way a few feet at a time, then pausing to let his eyes adjust.

  Slowly the light through the trap door penetrated the gloom, and he could make out the shadowy contours of the uneven floor for a ten-foot diameter. Beyond that circle, everything remained black as ink.

  He closed his eyes, tricking the pupils into opening wider. After a few minutes, he could make out shadows that were another twenty feet away.

  Two in fact.

  Both had the right length and taper.

  Pale round shapes were at the bulkier ends.

  As he crawled toward the nearest form, the hard earth beneath his hands became a soft, sticky mud. Reaching out, his fingers found the concave sockets of a pair of eyes set in a clammy face as cold as modeling clay. When he pinched the flesh between his fingers, it stayed raised in a ridge.

  Turgidity was the term. It meant dead for hours.

  His hands followed the bridge of a nose--straight, fine-lined--found the Cupid’s bow of the mouth--full lips. But female? The skin over the cheeks and jaw felt smooth, offering no hint of the bristle that would have kept growing if it were a man.

  One way to be sure.

  He palpated his way over the chin and onto the neck, intending to check the size of the thyroid cartilage, or Adam’s apple, a structure more diminutive in females, and of course the breasts.

  His finger tips slipped into a wet gash across the throat, entering between the small bulbous bellies of severed muscles and slippery strands of sliced vessels. They fell away at his touch, leaving his knuckles to brush against the corrugated surface of a cut trachea.

  Cloaked in the steely detachment that physicians use to lock down their feelings, he turned his attention to the other body, and a mere touch of the face discovered the tell-tale prickles of a male who hadn’t shaved recently.

  Grabbing the ankles, he yanked the dead man into enough light to see his features.

  The blank, black stare that only fully dilated and fixed pupils can produce belonged to his regular contact, the one who’d usually ushered him into Canada. His throat had also been cut, but the bloodless white flesh didn’t exhibit turgidity. This wound was fresh, probably inflicted after he’d taken Yuri’s phone call. And he’d bled out here, judging by the blood-soaked ground.

  Yuri reached out and gently pressed the lids closed. All his years in medicine had never accustomed him to the bleak finality in the eyes of a corpse.

  Crawling back to the first body, he grabbed the small feet, his hands easily encircling the tiny ankles, and pulled her into the circle of light.

  Tania appeared surprised in death, brow raised, her eyes deviated to one side, as if she’d exsanguinated trying to catch sight of her killer. The drooping gash on her once pretty neck formed a gaping maw, the open ends of arteries and veins trailing out of it like partially ingested food.

  Normally Yuri could keep his emotions on ice. Having survived a lifetime doing the quick-step between borders and rules, he did what had to be done on instinct and never second-guessed himself. Don’t look back, neither regret nor grieve, always move forward--the survivor’s credo--it maintained his quick reaction times. Killing a man who needed killing didn’t bother him. The dead Russian and Tania--nothing more could be done for them. Even though they'd become his friends of a sort in their shared, weird dance under Boris’s controlling fist, he put their fate out of mind.

  But his fury flowed free today, arming him for what lay ahead.

  Because Graham Greene certainly hadn’t been a cop.

  And he didn’t work for Boris.

  That left the Chinese. And in rolling up Boris’s network, including anyone peripheral to it who might figure out their secret, they’d obviously put Anna on their butcher’s hit-list.

  Which meant she’d still be a target once they dispatched the next killer to take up the hunt.

  And the next.

  And the next . . .

  Chapter 18

  That same morning, Friday, January 23, 2009, 2:59 A.M. IPT.

  Hanger 12, Hickam Air Force Base, Oahu, Hawaii

  Four thousand corpses.

  They’d been laid out side by side, head to toe, twenty rows of two hundred each, and covered the entire floor, an area the size of two end-to-end football fields. The critical mass of so many human remains packed so densely together, their lives sucked out of them so recently, left a vacuum hovering over them. It drew light and sound from the air in that cavernous space, the effect creating a silent gloom unlike anything that Terry had ever experienced.

  There hadn’t been body bags enough for them all. White sheets stained reddish brown protected most of them from view, but where the shrouds had slipped to reveal raw flesh, it glistened scarlet and black, like glazed meat on display.

  The worst were the faces. A mosaic of rage, anger, and fury stared up at him as he stood in their midst, the twisted features locked in the unique agony of a last moment. Some might have been screaming, others crying, and a few seemed mute with horror, but it was impossible to read their final expressions for sure. Yet they were as articulate as any painting or sculpture and, being of real flesh, four thousand times more scathing in their reproach.

  “Let’s get to work,” he said. His voice crackled in his own ear as it transmitted to the headsets of the dozen pathologists who stood behind him.

  His team all wore air-cooled HAZMAT suits, the hospital models with self-contained breathing packs. Jim McAllister had liberated the outfits from Hono
lulu General. “Thank God,” Terry had said when he saw them. The military issue would have been suffocating in that makeshift morgue.

  “You’re welcome,” McAllister had said back to him, taking a mock bow, “but please, feel free to call me Jim.”

  Everyone groaned.

  Terry led the way. “Remember kiddies,” he said, “any pathologist worth his or her salt would pay to be here. That means you all buy the beer.”

  Carrying equipment kits and a supply of containers for organ transport, the rest of the team fanned out through the columns of the dead, heading for those whose sheets had been flagged with red markers. The late Dr. Paul Wilson’s communiques with Pearl had allowed body details to match dog tag numbers with those listed as having SHAKES.

  Jim followed Terry to the stretcher of a young man whose dead gaze appeared set in wide-eyed terror, the lids having been burnt off his face and the corneas boiled to an opaque white.

  The hardened pathologist methodically snapped a curved scalpel blade to a steel handle and, in two deft strokes, sliced a bone-deep incision through charred skin around the back of the head, temple to temple. He then peeled the scalp off the skull, pulling it forward until he could let it flop down over the victim’s face.

  Some of his colleagues returned from their assigned dead to watch, this being the test case that would guide their approach. No one could predict what condition their subjects’ brains would be in, the searing temperatures having possibly boiled them to a soup.

  “There appear to be no overlying fractures, so the cranial vault may have offered protection from trauma,” Jim said, his deep voice speaking his thoughts for the benefit of the onlookers, a habit so ingrained among veteran teachers that they couldn’t cut and not talk.

  He elevated the head with towels, placed a shallow Tupperware container under the occiput to capture any spillage, and pulled a bone saw out of his bag with the authority of a hit man unholstering a magnum. The high whine of its motor dropped a note as he forced the spinning blade through the boy’s temple, then circumnavigated the exposed skull. Finishing the cut, he used a broad-blade instrument that resembled a putty knife to pry off the top of the cranium.

  His audience pressed in with anticipation.

  Out poured a puree of gray and white matter, followed by the occasional plop of more particulate pieces.

  “The entire outer cortex, centers for vision, speech, motor control, and sensation, the key areas we wanted to examine, have melted,” he said, his monotone betraying no emotion, but the timbre of his voice had turned as husky as a saxophone, his usual response to a letdown.

  A less subtle chorus of disappointment from the others came through Terry’s headphones. “Okay, stay loose. It’s what we’ve got to work with,” he said, silencing them. “Keep a sterile field in the skull’s vault. We can still get a lot of information off the fluid. Now let’s drain it into containers, and see what’s underneath.”

  Using giant basting syringes with orange rubber bulbs on the end, everyone crowded around and helped siphon off the liquid mixture, storing it in labeled bottles. As the level of sludge went down, the central structure of the midbrain emerged from the debris like a partially destroyed tower.

  This time the headphones broadcast guarded excitement.

  “The substantia nigra should be intact.”

  “The medulla as well.”

  “And the cerebellum.”

  Dance central, residents at the hospital called those areas, referring to the zones that controlled most aspects of a smooth, coordinated movement. It would be here that disorders in gait might originate.

  “Listen up,” Terry cut in. “We have to work fast and be out by dawn, before the paper pushers arrive and start doing everything by the book.” The military remained a creature that clamped down on information when an unknown menace snarled at the door. If forced to go through channels, he could waste days trying to obtain clearances from next of kin and coroners for performing even limited autopsies. In Terry’s mind, he’d already received the permission that counted. Ten thousand eyes, black windows to five thousand souls at the hour of their death, all watching as he rose from the deck of the USS Reagan, had bestowed it on him--to find out who and what had murdered them. “Remember, I want double sets of samples. Our best chance for identifying a bug may lie in traces of what it left behind. Fragments of DNA, toxins, remnants of proteins, pieces of its coat, even bits of cell structure.”

  Everyone was already walking back to their assigned cases, obviously well aware of what they had to do. The whine of a dozen bone saws filled the room, and the radio chatter among the pathologists picked up as they went to work on their cases. It wasn’t the stuff of fighter pilots in a dog fight, but as Terry listened, he felt that at last, he was engaging the enemy. “Jim, I'm going to the hospital.”

  “It’s about time you quit hovering, Ryder. Say ‘hi’ to her for me.”

  That same moment, Military Base 682, Research Division, Code name Dragon, North Guangdong Province

  Cigarette smoke choked the air.

  It irritated Wey Chen’s throat. Yet she said nothing, and continued to squint at the monitors. ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, CNN, PBS--the live feed of morning newscasts from the US national networks filled the console wall. She flipped the sound signal from channel to channel, surfing the audio for the slightest hint that any of the talking heads from NIH, CDC, or WHO had a clue as to what had befallen America and the rest of the world. She recognized most of them, having made contact with the key players over the last few years as China’s international role in the fight against emergent diseases had soared. They all wore their most mediagenic smiles and parroted authoritative proclamations that amounted to wishful thinking, not science.

  “Given the rather minor nature and vagueness of early symptoms, many of those presenting to ERs will simply turn out to be suffering from anxiety.”

  Read: We sure hope this isn’t serious because we’ve no idea how to deal with it.

  “There isn’t a single shred of hard scientific data that the phenomenon called SHAKES is a result of bioterror.”

  Read: We’re all thinking it, but can’t prove a thing.

  “Even the seriously ill are only suspect cases, not ones verified by clinical investigations.”

  Read: When in doubt, order some tests. Lots and lots of tests.

  No threat of discovery here.

  She glanced at the Eastern Standard Time display.

  8:06 A.M.

  By now they would have broadcast all their overnight scoops or leads. So far so good.

  She shifted her attention to the part of the console that carried local newscasts from major US cities, including Manhattan. Images of long line ups at emergency wards and all night clinics were intercut with blunt exchanges between the people who were waiting in those lines. “And what are your symptoms?” a reporter would ask, shoving a microphone at the crowd.

  That unleashed the predictable push to be on camera.

  “There’s a numbness in my legs.”

  “I got that too, from standing here so long.”

  “It’s not funny, jerk.”

  “I ain’t laughin’. My feet trip over one another when I dance.”

  “So? You never were a Fred Astaire.”

  Other interviews with passersby brought more sanguine replies.

  “I ain’t seeing no doctor. Can’t afford it.”

  “What’s the big deal, man? Me and my friends get worse shakes every time we party.”

  Off to one side, the staid, leisurely paced BBC International beamed its more moderated take on the day’s events. Wey Chen kept an especially apprehensive eye on that programming. If any nation could figure it out, the Brits would be the ones.

  She clicked off the entire console at the press of a button.

  “Well, Dr. Chen, do we have any problems?” The guttural voice of her supervisor did its usual justice to the round tones of formal Mandarin. He provided a sharp contrast to the twang
of Cantonese mutterings that rose up from his minions in the darkness behind him.

  She sensed more than saw those men. Mirrored off the shiny wall of black TV screens, the glint of their polished brass, the soft gleam off their peaked caps, even the meandering trails of white haze that rose from the glowing tips of their cigarettes--it all seemed part of a single steaming organism. And she could smell their sweat.

  She kept her eyes locked forward, as always, forbidden to see their faces. An attempt to do so would have meant any number of summary punishments, none of which she dared risk. “No, Sir. So far, everything is going well. I think they’re overwhelmed and dumbfounded, just as we planned.” Her very correct Mandarin matched her supervisor’s in pronunciation, but sounded more musical.

  A murmur of approval, its dissonance grating, drifted up from the minions.

  “But it’s early going,” she cautioned, “and the one man I fear the most is not yet speaking out. Dr. Terry Ryder must be watched. You began this business on his doorstep, and he won’t stop until he’s gotten to the bottom of it.”

  The chatter behind her fell silent.

  She clicked the mouse of her computer and activated the power-point program. Half of the darkened screens came to life with a single photo of Dr. Anna Katasova, and, on the other half, up popped a shot of Dr. Yuri Raskin. They both wore smiles.

  “Then there are still those two,” Wey Chen added. “They must be silenced before the FBI finds them.”

  Thirty minutes later, Friday, January 23, 2009, 3:36 A.M. IPT.

  Southbound on the H-1, Oahu, Hawaii

  Terry Ryder sped up the Pali Highway exit ramp and turned south toward the hospital. Boulevards and side roads were as deserted as the freeway. Everything around him--trees, grass, pavement--took on an orange glow streaked with gray, the effect of light from the street lamps filtered through smoke-laced mist. Most windows were dark, some had been boarded up, and others shone yellowish pale, back lit through paper against which the shadows of those inside prowled to and fro.