by Chris Capps
"Sherriff," Jessica said, a long worried crease resting heavy on her brow, "Why didn't you tell someone? We could have sent her in for an autopsy, maybe figured out what happened to her before the shooting."
"I know what I did wrong," Rind said, "Trust me. Only it turns out nobody from town was responsible. At least I don't think so. I'd be surprised, actually, after what I saw the night I got dragged off. Let me ask you something."
There was a knock at the window. One of the EMTs was standing on the driver's side. He leaned down, pressing his hands over his eyes, trying to look through the tinted glass of the Sherriff's patrol car.
"They found something," Jessica said, turning in her seat to get out. Somehow, despite still wanting to know the details of the Sherriff's ordeal the night he was captured and dragged into the woods, she felt relieved. There was something here that unnerved her, something that threatened to destroy every notion of peace she still had. She pulled the handle to the door, letting the ambient noise of emergency workers fill her ears, "We'll need to finish this discussion later."
The Sherriff grabbed her elbow, leaning in. The smoke from his nostrils was trailing in long curling slopes, clinging up his face unnoticed. There was a look of genuine fear there, crossing those aged angular features. Jessica remembered a time when she had seen only mild, cynical comfort in this man that now clung to her elbow, desperate and menacing all at once. Something had changed in him. Nothing about him was a machine any longer. That image, the one she now realized had only ever been a carefully cultivated illusion, was shattered forever. Deep within him it had snapped.
"Did you ever wonder what the Devil really looked like?" he asked, his eyes now dry as bone, "I don't know. But I know the sound he makes when he's walking behind you, leaning in, clicking and rattling in your ears. And I know he's not called the devil by his followers. He's called the Icarin."
***
Dr. Rosario stood uncertainly at the sink, gloved hands resting in the sterile wadding that he employed to hold his freshly autoclaved instruments. While it was unlikely that this particular patient would suffer an infection, having died the night before, he couldn't risk contamination on any front when faced by the mystery that lay shrouded on the cold steel table.
"I'm sorry you have to be here for this, officer," Rosario said solemnly through the sheet between where he stood with the body and the rest of the morgue where Frankie sat, silhouetted and projecting his shadow on the pale yellowed canvas between them, "If it's any consolation, I do appreciate the company. This isn't my favorite part of the job."
"I can see why," Frankie said through the sheet. He was seated in a wooden chair, barely looking up from the book he had been reading for the past half-hour as Rosario emotionally prepared for the task ahead, "Dead bodies give me the heebie jeebies."
"The heebie jeebies," Rosario said, pressing the big red button on his reel to reel tape recorder, "That's one word for it. Frankie, I'm going to be recording this operation, so don't say anything you don't want to be immortalized."
"Don't worry about it," Frankie said. Rosario watched the spinning tapes for a second, before pulling the arm on the microphone down over the body and staring at his own wristwatch.
"It's 10:38 in the morning on Tuesday, November 16, 1982. Dr. Samuel Rosario conducting autopsy of female subject, estimated age... early-to-mid twenties. Time of death, later last night at a little past 10:30 or so. Suspected cause of death, blunt trauma to the head, self inflicted. Please see police report for further details on the events surrounding this death. Subject was pronounced dead at the scene with bleeding from the right ear. Exterior photographs were taken of the body this morning at... nine-ish."
Rosario stared long at the sheet covering the body on his table, tying the surgical mask behind his head. Beyond the sheet Frankie cleared his throat,
"Doctor, don't we know what killed her?"
"Yes," Rosario said, "At least I'm pretty sure I know. This examination is as much to confirm her cause of death as it is to chronicle the anomalous nature of her body. It's something that's been bugging me personally since I confirmed that Chance Cooper and Rob Howell had been somehow duplicated alongside their helicopter. How does it happen? Is there some mechanism that allows them to split like an amoeba? Or is it something more complicated?" Frankie fell silent, so Dr. Rosario reached for the edges of the sheet and slowly lifted it up, off of her.
There she lay, grey teeth still gritted, lips pulled back in a sneer of exertion and pain. The right side of her head still had coagulated blood encrusted along it, now black and red. Looking at the damaged portion of the skull, Rosario's pulse quickened. His legs began to twitch and shake nervously. He wanted nothing more than to flee the room. To Hell with his profession, to Hell with the mystery, to Hell with the whole town. It wasn't an unusual reaction for him at this stage of the autopsy.
Quickly he was at the sink again. He twisted the cold water knob, let it drum against the base, watched it spiral downward.
"I might be sick," Rosario said, "Frank, I need you to come out here. Please."
The shadow behind the curtain stood up, setting its book back down on the chair. Frankie walked out, a wash of concern generously applied to his youthful features. He stepped past the table toward Rosario and then turned, pulled by a morbid curiosity to look at the body on the table. Whistling, Frankie said,
"Woah, there she is."
"You're new to the force," Rosario said, "Which is probably why you were sent here. It's no secret that you pulled an undesirable shift coming here to watch over me. I know it. The truth is, I hate doing these."
"Hey calm down," the rookie said, "Just breathe. Relax."
"Breathing," Rosario said, reaching a shaky hand out to turn the water off, "Something we must do. My father when I was young said the true name of God was the sound we make when we breathe. Life itself is a prayer. Of course that's nonsense. I don't know where you lie, but my religious convictions have long since eroded away."
"Except the one?" Frankie said, still eyeing the corpse on the table. Rosario picked up a moist towel and padded his own forehead.
"Except the one," the doctor said, "Something about that thought nested in my mind and never left. It was the sole covenant, the one accepted thread of divinity I kept with me through eight years of medical school. Don't ask me to reconcile it with the rest of my scientific approach to life. I can't do that. All I know is some things rest in the mind, cannot be isolated. Or destroyed. I make no claim that they're the truth. Maybe they're something else. Maybe our love of truth isn't what drives us in the end. Maybe they're just thoughts."
"Living thoughts," Frankie said wryly.
Rosario smiled beneath his mask, glancing back over at the rookie cop,
"Thank you. I'd ask you not to mention this to anyone at the station."
"Course not," Frankie said. It was a lie, of course. The doctor was a nice guy, but this near phobia of the dead sounded like the sort of thing that needed sharing, "Let's just get this show on the road. If you need me I'll be behind that curtain reading."
Thirty minutes later Dr. Rosario would start his autopsy at the head of the deceased girl. There was no question that the blunt head trauma had ultimately caused her death. He sniffed beneath the mask and pulled the microphone in front of him with a single smear of blood on the tips of his latex covered fingers,
"I've never encountered a cause of death quite like the one presented in the police report and which I partially observed. I had wondered if slamming the head from a prone position against the concrete would sufficiently cause brain damage and death if the frontal or parietal areas of the skull were the only parts impacted. Doing so could certainly move the brain, causing a concussion and possibly long-term brain damage. But what I'm observing here is a fracture in the skull. It would appear the trauma was applied not to the front or back of the skull, but to the temporal fossa. Much thinner, much more prone to damage. The temporal fossa, at the side of the head,
appears to have fractured. I can feel movement through the skin that suggests it is most likely a recessed skull fracture at an area an inch above the right ear."
Rosario looked up from the soft area at the side of Molly's skull into her curled lips, peeled back over teeth, exposing gums. Fishing on his table for the magnifying glass, he reached his head down and examined the gums. They were thick, more spongy than they should have been, with the teeth protruding up like crooked cemetery stones. He lifted the sheet covering her right arm and turned it in his hand. Red welts. He had seen this before.
"Moeller's disease," the doctor said, "She was suffering from Moeller's disease."
"What was that?" Frankie said, once again obscured by the curtain and reading, "You doing okay, doc?"
"Scurvy," Rosario said, "Molly was suffering from a bad case of scurvy."
The next hour passed without word as Rosario cut a large Y and began removing organs to be weighed and examined. It wasn't what he saw as much as what he didn't see that interested him most. If the mayor's speech were to be believed, he would have considered her insides to be comprised of a series of magical humors, no longer adhering to the scientific methods Rosario had committed his life to chronicling. And yet there they all were, lungs, heart, liver, stomach - all made of precisely what they were supposed to be. When he finally reached the stomach, however, his growing sense of confidence waned.
"Stomach contents," Rosario said into the tape recorder, "Appear to be-"
It struck him, the truth of it all, like a hot bolt of lightning. Of course. It suddenly all made sense. Like dominoes, the facts fell into place in his mind and he backed away from the body. The scalpel in his hand clattered to the floor, seeming to stop in time as he came to the true meaning of this exercise.
"Doctor?" Frankie said from behind the curtain. If he had been looking, Rosario would have seen the silhouetted shadow drop the book and stand quickly, "Doctor are you alright?"
"Of course," Rosario said reaching over with blood soaked latex glove and turning the sink on. He removed his gloves, letting them drop down to be bathed in water, and he started washing his talc and sweat covered hands vigorously.
"Doctor," Frankie said appearing from behind the curtain. He looked down and saw the scalpel resting on the ground, droplets of blood pooling thick around it. The doctor was at the sink vigorously pumping pink soap onto his open palm. Frankie's eyes avoided the corpse on the table, rushing instead to Rosario and putting a hand on his shoulder, "Hey, you alright?"
The doctor turned, his hands still covered in the frothing soap. He grabbed Frankie's hand, pulling it off of him. He glared at the rookie cop, breathing heavily and taking a step backward,
"I'm done with my autopsy. I need to speak with the Sherriff immediately."
"What did you find?" Frankie asked, still by instinct refusing to look back at Molly. He knew what an autopsied body looked like. He didn't have any particular desire to see one again. And yet somehow, when he saw Rosario nod his head back at the corpse and speak, all instinct left him. Both of their eyes traced back to the open corpse on the metal table as Dr. Rosario spoke,
"What would you eat in the middle of nothing? What if you had no crops, no game to hunt, nothing but a shapeless factory spitting out copy after copy, day after day. What if that factory -whatever it may be- had noticed you, learned to create your every detail, your every memory? What if you were just out there in the wild with nothing but...?”
Frankie's mouth slowly, soundlessly opened. He stared long at the open body, the long segments of flesh that had been pulled aside, the organs resting on the nearby table. He stared at Molly's eyes, themselves watching oblivion and her lips peeled back across grey teeth in a forever grimace. He finished the doctor's thought with a single word,
"Yourself."
***
Chance Cooper had once been told that in the early stages of sleep, images were more chaotic than the mind could comprehend. Places, emotions, words, and faces would appear without context as neurons went through a process as old and mysterious as life.
That wasn't the sort of dream Chance was having.
This one was made up of memories, twisted ten degrees by the hands of his subconscious. This one was a final dream. The last before awakening. He was in the helicopter looking in the distance at a column of smoke.
"That's smoke," his co-pilot Rob said pointing, "I think it's a signal. We need to see where it's coming from."
"No," Cooper said from the third person, knowing what was down there as he watched himself nod and push slightly down on the chopper's collective to bring it to a halt over the smoke, "She's down there."
The helicopter drifted low over a cleared patch of earth. Cooper looked out his window and saw in a valley at the edge of the lake a pile of dead cattle spanning nearly an acre. They rolled over one another, spinning and crying with distorted pain, as if their cries were coming to him across a great distance. And then he realized he could hear the screams of these poor beasts only through his headset, broadcast to him by means unknown in the distorted logic of his dream. He lowered the helicopter to an island, where white dust formed in a massive H next to a modest campfire.
"Hey Chance," Rob said, hand clutching his chest with a pained expression on his face, "I think it's bone dust. They must have drawn this H for us in their bones."
Chance looked slowly from Rob to the small island around him as the helicopter's drone was drowned out by the sound of wind. In the solipsist universe of the dream, he looked back at Rob, who was holding a fistful of white chalk, letting it slowly drift from his hand to be carried on the wind. And then Rob said it again, but in Chance's mind he hadn't spoken for hours,
"Chance, I think this is bone dust. I think they drew this for us."
There was a thick blanket of delicate green and blue grass all around them, waving in the wind slowly back and forth, swaying pendulously as the strands pushed up from the ground.
The grass was so soft, so full. He watched it long as the helicopter blades slowed above him. And then he felt something beneath his shoe. He pulled back his foot and saw it slowly pushing up, pushing his foot, pointing at him. It was a finger, slowly coming up out of the soil. And then, more fingers. Fingers became a hand, and the hand pushed up, swaying from side to side in the grass. It was dancing.
Thousands of fingers poked up between the blades of grass, pushing his feet. No matter where he stepped, he was standing on top of them. The island was alive with fingers and hands poking up from the grass.
"I think we've been here before," Rob said as his heart attack pulled him to his knees. Rob clenched his eyes and gritted his teeth. His open palm flat on the soil was embraced, fingers growing up between his own from the ground, "And I think we'll be here again."
And then, in the strange distorted perception of dream he was in the helicopter with Rob again. He knew he had to bring the old man back to the hospital in town. Their helicopter was slowly lifting up off the ground, away from the island, now existing without horizon and expanding in every cardinal direction without end.
"Chance Cooper!" he heard that Sherriff calling to him, "Don't leave! Not before you kill me!"
The pleas became a single long sustained scream, coupled with the sizzling of flesh and the smell of burning meat. And so it was with some surprise that Chance awoke to see the Sherriff staring down at him, unburned. Rind wasn't making direct eye contact. He was talking to someone else nearby,
"...of that opium tea to make him sleep for days."
The dream had broken.
Chance Cooper leaned up, daring to look around at the faces staring at him in complete shock. Immediately he was aware of three things: he was in the police station, it was day, and he was desperately thirsty.
"Welcome back to the land of the living," Jessica said smirking and slapping him on the back, "You've been asleep since last night."
"What time is it?" Cooper asked, his hand pushing his slightly numbed mouth around
as he remembered how to speak again, "And what happened?"
"It's just past five," Jessica said, "And you were found with Melissa Novak near the site of a burned out helicopter and a burned down cabin near the power station. She told us everything. Apparently you were trying to break into the house they had been staying at. What were you doing? Looking for supplies? Why?"
"Skipping town," Chance said, "Heard the mayor's address."
"Deputy Myers, Sherriff," Dr. Rosario said gripping Chance's forehead, and shining a small pen light into his pupil, "Please. Even if he does give you information, it's not going to do you any good if he's not in his right mind. Give me a few minutes to make sure he wakes up. That tea could still be muddling him up."
"The tea," Chance said as the light switched to his other pupil, "I remember they gave me some tea and I fell asleep. Obviously I was drugged."
"He seems to remember it all well enough to me," Jessica said, gently pushing the doctor back a step. Chance looked around. He was sitting on a table topped with cushions from the nearby sofa. Gradually he recognized the room as the police interrogation office - the nice one. This was the one with posters of cats on the walls and family friendly public service notices. Dr. Rosario was here, as was Jessica and the Sherriff. And sitting in a chair on the other side of the room was his old friend, the man who had guided him home hundreds of times with a constant vigil over his radio transmissions.
Willard Nayfack. He was standing next to a coffee machine, slowly pouring a dab of honey into his coffee with his tongue resting against the side of his open mouth. The Sherriff pointed at Willard and motioned with his head toward the door.
"In a minute," Rind said, "You can talk to your friend after we're done."
"Sherriff, please," Willard said backing toward the door, "I'm not going to interrupt."
"Lift your upper lip, please," Rosario said to Chance, examining his gums with the flashlight.
