Second Sight

by George D. Shuman

  “His head’s on fire. Maybe he’s delirious with the fever?”

  “Took a hell of a hit on the head,” McCullough acknowledged.

  Emmet leaned low and put his ear to the boy’s lips. “He must have been laying here all day. Wouldn’t have taken more than forty minutes to climb from the army base to the top of the rocks.”

  McCullough grunted, shivering himself, for the cold was getting to him.

  The boy’s voice was soft, the words monosyllabic: “Can’t on, can’t on, can’t on…”

  “You want me to send Billy down to tell his commanding officer?”

  McCullough shook his head. “Let em keep looking. He needs an emergency room more than the army right now. Let’s get some hands under him, boys,” he said. “Put the board right there, Jimmy. Billy, help him push it up snug.”

  The men got their hands under the boy’s knees, back, and neck and lifted him on a three count to the wooden stretcher. McCullough saw a green leather notebook lying where the boy had been and discreetly picked it up while the others were strapping him down.

  “Lions slaughtered the Yanks in Detroit,” Emmet offered.

  “What was the score?” McCullough turned his back to his men as he opened the book and thumbed through the pages. There were dates and paragraph entries, neatly handwritten in ink toward the beginning of the book, but turning to scribble toward the middle where the writing ended. It was a log or journal of some kind, he thought, folding it closed and tucking it into his back pocket.

  “Forty-nine to fourteen. The Lions had five hundred and eighty yards of offense.”

  “Jiminy Christmas.” McCullough shook his head, looking up once more at the towering rock pinnacle above him. There was no way the boy could have missed recognizing the danger of walking out on it. He would have to have believed the fall would kill him if he jumped. So was this suicide?

  “Hoernschemeyer ran ninety-six yards for a touchdown. I would have loved to have seen that one.”

  “Yeah, and I’d love to see New York put up ten thousand dollars for a decent running back.” McCullough spat out a grain of tobacco caught on his tongue.

  “What about Pittsburgh and Chicago?”

  “Steelers twenty-eight, Cardinals seventeen.” Emmet peeled off his outer jacket and tossed it to McCullough. “Here, Jack. You must be freezing. I’ve been walking all the time you was waiting here.”

  McCullough nodded gratefully and put it on. When they started down the muddy hillside—planting boots sideways to keep from slipping in the mud—McCullough patted his back pocket to reassure himself the book was secure there.

  McCullough remembered the day the army first arrived to look over the adjacent property on Mount Tamathy. The asylum’s administrator had asked him to meet an entourage of officers and guide them through a service road to the wooded property west of the asylum. He’d said they were looking at it as a possible site to place an air command monitoring station. He had also make it clear that the army wanted to bring as little attention as possible to their visit.

  It was early on a Sunday and McCullough had met the large black sedan at the main gate and escorted it to the edge of the asylum property before he left the army men to wander in the woods.

  He could still remember the glitter of medals and gold epaulettes on the uniformed passengers front and back, but it was the man with the white homburg hat and white meerschaum pipe who startled him most. Dr. Edward “Buzz” Case, easily recognizable from newspaper stories and television appearances, might have been the last person he expected to see in the remote Catskill Mountains.

  Case had been headline news around the country since the end of World War II, renowned for his work on the Manhattan Project, which produced the first atomic bomb. Case’s connection to the army was well established prior to 1950, but publicly he was parting ways from the military, devoting himself full-time to the new field of nuclear medicine. Some said he was atoning for the millions of lives lost at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Case himself suggested he was close to developing a “radioactive” magic bullet that would cure cancer, and there was much ado about his moving to California to be near radiological research at the Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley.

  Then, without a whisper or a warning, he disappeared off the face of the planet. Reporters who had been following him and the esteemed biologist and physician Jonas Salk—the man who would conquer polio—across the country were left bewildered as to what happened to their photogenic genius.

  When he didn’t reappear at the five-year anniversary celebration of the surrender of Japan in Washington, D.C., the press began to ask questions. When they realized that Case’s own family was stonewalling them, they began to speculate on everything from a Soviet kidnapping to alien abduction.

  Jack McCullough had never mentioned seeing Dr. Case that day to anyone else, but was sure that he knew what the rest of the world did not. That Dr. Edward Case was living in Area 17 and that his work had nothing at all to do with cancer research or even the new strategic air command initiative. Case could only have been recruited to develop a secret weapon to combat the new superpower, the Soviet Union.

  The Cold War was a time like no other. People in neighborhoods in the 1950s lived under the prospect of imminent annihilation. All across America the mournful sirens wailed to test their systems and evacuations to fallout shelters. Children were taught to crawl under their desks and avoid the flying glass from windows. Shelters were constructed in every basement and backyard. TV and radio broadcasts were regularly interrupted by earsplitting warning signals.

  And rumors abounded: The Russians had a machine that could affect the thoughts of entire populations. The Russians were testing a death ray in the city of Novosibirsk. The Russians were using high-voltage electricity to control the world’s weather.

  Whatever was really going on behind the Iron Curtain, no one could say, but it was clear the United States was in an arms race with the Soviet Reds and the world had already seen proof—in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—that mankind was becoming capable of anything.

  McCullough didn’t know what happened to the boy, but he was sure it had something to do with what went on behind the gates of Area 17. He was equally certain that the army would not have wanted civilians finding their soldier alive and talking.

  He thought about the journal in his pocket. None of his men had seen it, he was certain. It was probably personal and should be returned to the boy’s family. But something else told him that whether harmless or not, it would be a mistake to mention it to the military. That to mention it would only bring trouble to the finder.

  2

  NAZARETH HOSPITAL

  PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA 2008

  There was too much time to think in this place, to relive past mistakes and reflect on the truth of age-old maxims. Too much time to consider what grim news the machines surrounding you might be collecting.

  It didn’t matter that she was blind. Nothing could alter the clinical milieu of the place. Forget about counting to ten, inhaling and slowly exhaling, focusing on “happy thoughts” rather than the needles in your arm or the array of wires that found their way to your arms and head.

  Sherry Moore had always considered the possibility of an early death. She’d suffered major head trauma as a child. Cerebrally blind since the age of five, a condition of the brain not the eyes, she suffered retrograde amnesia, unable to recall events before the accident in 1976. She also could visualize the last memories of dead people. If that didn’t tell you something was wrong with the wiring in her head, then nothing would.

  Now she had been exposed to deadly radioactive cesium 137.

  It had started two weeks before in the Four Corners region of New Mexico. A maintenance worker curious about the rotting smell in a rest area Dumpster found the decaying body of a young female. The unidentified girl, five or six years old, had what appeared to be burn marks on her hands and face and was taken to Albuquerque’s Presbyterian Hospital, where she was
autopsied by a forensic pathologist. The pathologist found no evidence of sexual assault, and toxicology screens ruled out common poisons or pathogens. In fact, but for profuse bleeding of the gums, she looked perfectly normal.

  Then in the dark of the night a tractor-trailer ran over a woman lying on Route 491 near Newcomb, New Mexico. The driver said that by the time he saw the outline of her body in his headlights it was too late to bring the fifteen-ton rig to a stop. An elderly physician in Shiprock—who sometimes filled in as coroner—conducted an autopsy of the sunburnt-looking body and concluded the woman had died of cardiovascular collapse brought on by an overdose of methamphetamines. It really wouldn’t have mattered if the truck had stopped or not, he told the sheriff. The woman was already dead when the tires rolled over her.

  He ruled her death an accident.

  Eagle Junction’s weekly newspaper announced that the thirty-eight-year-old woman, Victoria Spencer, was the daughter of Carl and June Spencer of Sheep Springs, New Mexico. Although she lived across the Colorado border in Ouray, police in the Four Corners area of the state knew Victoria—who sported tattoos of barbed wire around her throat and wrists—well. Victoria was the property of the Mongols, a California-based motorcycle gang that sold drugs at truck stops in New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona.

  New Mexico’s various state and county law enforcement officers would all have agreed that Victoria was destined for a life of crime. Everyone in the Spencer family had been in prison at one time or another. From drugs to assault to fencing stolen property, sheriff’s deputies and state police officers had been visiting the Spencer scrap-metal yard near Sheep Springs for as long as they had been in business.

  Except that when the sheriff of Sheep Springs went to the the Spencers’ to notify them of their daughter’s death this time, there was no answer at the trailer door. In fact, the only sign of life on the two acres of junk cars and rusting appliances was an emaciated Rottweiler that the sheriff had removed to an animal shelter.

  Meanwhile, in the days that followed, two emergency medical technicians who had transported the child’s body to Albuquerque were admitted to Presbyterian Hospital with severe abdominal pains. Then the elderly physician who performed the autopsy on Victoria Spencer in Shiprock came down with violent flulike symptoms.

  Three days later the pathologist who performed the child’s autopsy in Albuquerque began to bleed internally, and four days later both medical examiners were dead.

  Albuquerque’s director of environmental health was notified about the incidents and blood was sent to the CDC in Atlanta for testing.

  No one needed to mention the obvious. Not around Albuquerque. New Mexico had just had a serious outbreak of the hemorrhagic virus called hantavirus in 1993, right there in the same Four Corners area. Now it was critical to find out what the Spencer woman and the child in the Dumpster had in common. If they actually had become infected with hantavirus, state officials needed to know where they had been when they inhaled the spores of the deadly disease.

  The director of health and human services for New Mexico ordered DNA tests for both victims. Then he issued bulletins to every hospital and physician in the state, cautioning them to be vigilant for new cases of hantavirus. No one was going to contract the virus merely by treating flu cases, but extra precautions were required in handling clothing, hair, and bodily fluids.

  A colleague of the New Mexico health director in nearby Oklahoma who had been reading about the two new cases in New Mexico called with a most unusual suggestion. He knew of a blind woman in Philadelphia who was able to envisage the final few seconds of memory in corpses. In other words, he told the director, someone like her might be able to tell you where his victims were before they died.

  The director of environmental health was still chuckling over his colleague’s odd suggestion when the Albuquerque hospital’s administrator called to tell him that the Sheep Springs sheriff who went to the Spencer ranch to locate the parents was now in her critical care unit hemorrhaging from the bowels.

  The health director stopped smiling and had his assistant place a call to the Oklahoma Department of Health to obtain Sherry Moore’s phone number. Meanwhile, his staff arranged to locate and quarantine anyone who had come in contact with the two original victims’ bodies or clothing.

  What harm could there be, he thought, in bringing a psychic here and letting her do whatever she did?

  Sherry Moore was having dinner at the Deep Blue Bar and Grill in Wilmington when she received the call from an official of the New Mexico Department of Health and Human Services.

  She and Brian Metcalf, a navy SEAL whom she had been dating since they met during a rescue mission they collaborated on in Alaska’s Denali State Park last fall, were on a romantic weekend getaway at the Hotel du Pont in Delaware. Metcalf had just invited her to his parents’ home in Boston the weekend before, where she met the whole family at a Memorial Day reunion.

  This was brand-new territory for Sherry. She had never before had what she would have considered a serious relationship in her life. She had certainly never been asked to meet anyone’s parents before. And, yes, there were times she’d had strong feelings for a man, but the men she met in her unusual pursuits around the world always ended up living thousands of miles away or were themselves traveling professionals. Long-distance relationships were difficult under the best circumstances, but for people barely acquainted, the distance in time and miles took its toll. It never took long for conversations to get diluted for want of substance and then the calls came less often and inevitably ceased.

  She remembered how empty she’d felt following these experiences. She wanted something more permanent in life, something she could count on in the months and years ahead. She wasn’t delusional. She knew that life was uncertain. But why couldn’t two people enjoy a mutual dream? What could be better than a life shared with another person?

  She also knew marriage wasn’t a magic utopia. She knew people were having more difficulty than ever staying together. And maybe she was kidding herself, she thought. It seemed there was a new world order when it came to relationships. People were still getting married at a fantastic rate, but now two and three and four times, until they were old and living single and dating into old age.

  This thing with Brian Metcalf felt much different to her. It seemed important. Brian called daily and he traveled every weekend from wherever he was training. She knew he couldn’t keep up the pace forever. He was about to be deployed overseas, and in his line of work there weren’t always opportunities to make calls. But he was giving her every indication that he was committed to the relationship, and whatever her views on caution might have once been, she wanted to let down her guard. She wanted to believe in this. Brian was that kind of man, all that she had ever wished for. He was strong and he was honest and he had integrity. He was the image of the husband she had conjured her entire life and she was ready to hold up her end of a partnership.

  At least that was what Sherry had thought then.

  Brian wasn’t happy when she told him what they wanted her to do in New Mexico, but he didn’t get upset or in any way interfere.

  “Is this what you really want?” he’d asked, after she’d explained the CDC’s concern over the rare hantavirus. “What if you are exposed to something?”

  Sherry had to admit she felt a bit defensive at the time. As if the idea of someone trying to protect her from herself was more than she wanted. Lord knew Mr. Brigham, her neighbor and longtime confidant, tried and sometimes succeeded, but that was Brigham, and Brian Metcalf hadn’t entirely earned the right to tell her what to do. Of course, Sherry was also aware that she had a stubborn streak and that she didn’t respond well to the word no.

  “Brian, I’m not going to be doing anything their own doctors wouldn’t do. And I don’t have a death wish, believe me. Besides, this is what I do in life,” she’d told him. “I’ll be careful, but life is inherently dangerous. The flight to New Mexico is dangerous.”r />
  She sensed his uneasiness, but what could he possibly say? If anyone was living dangerously it was Brian, who had made a choice to have a career in the navy. And yet, behind all the blustering, she felt the slightest satisfaction that someone besides her neighbor was actually worrying about her when she was gone.

  Sherry took a 5:30 a.m. flight out of Philadelphia, landing in Albuquerque before 10 a.m.

  The state trooper who met her at the airport had just finished a night shift sitting on the lane that went into the Spencer ranch outside of Sheep Springs, to see if the dead woman’s parents would return. Police were still trying to notify the Spencers of their daughter’s death, but they were also growing more and more concerned that the Spencers had fallen victim to the virus themselves. Especially since a DNA test had determined the child found in the Dumpster in the Four Corners was Victoria Spencer’s daughter.

  There were no official birth records for the child. No medical records, no enrollment documents for any school. No one in Ouray, Colorado, where Victoria was last known to live, had ever seen her with a child, and for that matter, no one had seen Victoria for the past month. What if Victoria had given birth to a child on the farm and left her there years before and it was the Spencer farm that was the source of the deadly virus? What if the rest of the Spencer family were still inside that trailer?

  Trooper Marsh didn’t relish the idea of spending the night around the Spencers’ ranch, not even at the distance of the road leading into the property and inside the relative safety of her vehicle. Seven health care workers and law enforcement officials who had come into contact with Victoria or the child in the Dumpster had by now died or were in serious condition. If the disease had originated here, police could not ignore the very real possibility that the Spencers had disposed of their daughter’s and granddaughter’s bodies in remote places to keep whatever they had contracted away from the property.