He knew that he was right, but all the same he continued staring at the phone. Regardless of the friendship he imagined he had violated, he still had to talk to Slaughter, to smooth things, to fix them so he wasn't cut off from the story. Even so, he debated for ten minutes before picking up the phone again. He dialed Slaughter's number once more and waited while the phone kept ringing. This time Slaughter's voice was angry. "Yes, God damn it, Rettig, what's the matter? Get on out here." Dun-lap didn't answer. "Tell me what you want!" the angry voice demanded. Dunlap set the phone back on its cradle. There was no way he could make a man who sounded like that sympathetic. He would wait until the morning. So he smoked his final cigarette and looked down at his notes, and then he did a thing that he had never done before, had never even dared because he was so bothered by it. Unsettled by his dream, the image fixed in his mind, turning, glaring at him, he was forced (he didn't will it, but was passive, worked on, compelled) to sketch it. He was staring at it, swallowed by its eyes. He kept on staring, couldn't shift his head away. He felt a darkness in his mind begin to open, and he didn't weaken all at once. It took him several minutes, and he fought it, he would later give himself that credit, fought as hard as he could manage, but resolve diminished into pointlessness, and he was reaching for the bourbon.
THREE
The medical examiner gave himself the first shot in the lip, frowning at the mirror while he spread the injured portions and then slipped the needle in. It stung, and he was too quick on the plunger so that he felt the liquid spurting through his tissue. All he could be grateful for was that he held his breath and didn't spill the liquid up across his lip and hence he couldn't taste it. Human antirabies serum manufactured from the blood of persons who'd been vaccinated against rabies virus. That would help his system to produce the necessary antibodies and in tandem with a second kind of treatment, it was his best chance to survive contagion. He winced as he drew the needle out. Next he set it down, undid his pants and dropped them, pulling down his underwear and reaching for a second needle that he inserted into one buttock. This injection too was antirabies serum, and he wouldn't need another needle until just about this time tomorrow. Even so, that didn't give him comfort because, if he winced to draw this needle out, tomorrow's shot would be the start of worse things. It would not be antirabies serum; it would be the second kind of treatment: rabies vaccine. Anyone who'd been injected with it cringed when they remembered it. First developed by an Englishman named Semple who had done his research in India in 1911, it was rabies virus taken from the brains of rabbits, mice, or rats, and then killed by incubation in carbolic acid. The dead cells helped the body's immune system. Although harmless in themselves, they encouraged the body to reject the not-yet-rampant live cells that were like them. But the trouble was that not just one injection of the vaccine was sufficient. Fourteen were the minimum, and twenty-one were even better. Each injection was given daily to the muscles of the abdomen. A clockwise pattern was required because the shots were so excruciating that the muscles became extremely sensitive. And maybe you could bear the first five or the second, but the last few were an agony, and this was not a thing the medical examiner was looking forward to.
He didn't have a choice, though. He had indirectly been exposed, and if indeed he had it, the disease would surely kill him without treatment. There were only two examples in which persons had lived through the virus, and there was doubt that they had really had it since their symptoms had been like encephalitis. With the treatment, he still took the chance that he would die from the disease, that it would be too strong for his precautions, but the likelihood was small, and anyway, as he kept thinking, he didn't have a choice. Even rare reactions to the vaccine, like a fever or paralysis, were nothing when compared with certain death. But all the same, the start of treatment didn't calm his fears. The dog had gone through pre-exposure vaccination. It had died, regardless.
The start of treatment didn't calm his sorrow either. He was thinking of the boy lying on the table in the autopsy room, of how he should have had the foresight not to give him the sedative. Those parents. How could he absolve himself? He could still hear the mother shrieking. Well, he meant to find out everything he could about this thing. When he was finished, he would know this virus more than any other he had ever worked on. He had once been famous as an expert in pathology. So now he would discover just how much an expert he could be. That's right. You think you know so much. Get moving. Now's the time to prove it.
So he pulled his pants up, buckled them, and thinking of the tests he would perform, he turned and started from his office. Owens would be here soon with the dog's brain to compare what he had found with what the medical examiner would find inside the boy downstairs. Meanwhile, he himself would use the simple test for Negri bodies. He would also use a more elaborate test in which a brain smear was treated with fluorescent antirabies serum and examined underneath an ultraviolet microscope. To watch the symptoms of the virus, he'd inject a half dozen newborn mice with portions of the boy's brain. He would also want a picture of the virus using the electron microscope. Whatever this thing was, he meant to have a look at it, and when he opened that body, he would understand why the paralysis occurred so quickly, why it worsened with sedation.
As he walked along the corridor, he saw the nurses staring at him. Word had gotten around, all right, and fast as only people in a hospital could spread it. They were looking at a man whose error had been fatal to a patient. Then he told himself to get control. They maybe were just frightened by a thing they didn't understand. Or maybe they were startled by the grim way he was walking. Well, he didn't plan to ask them, and if they knew what was good for them, they'd stay away from him.
He reached the door down to the basement. He thought of Slaughter who would need injections, and the mother and the man who had been bitten, and the man who owned the dog. There were too many details he had not attended to. What was more, he needed sleep. And food, he hadn't eaten since this morning. Well, he would do this and take care of everything. With Owens here to help him, he could find the time to call those people, get them down here for their shots. But he knew what he really wanted-to learn what had killed this boy.
The medical examiner reached the bottom of the steps and went through to the corridor. He came to the far end of the hallway and entered the morgue. In the anteroom, he washed his hands and put on a lab coat, a cap, a mask, and rubber gloves. Just to be exact and avoid contaminating his samples, he even stepped inside protective coverings for his shoes, and then with nothing further to detain him, he pushed through the door and he was in the autopsy room.
Green tile on the walls reflected the glare of fluorescent lights in the ceiling. A counter with steel sinks and trays of instruments was flanked by three tables, each with gutters and a drain for blood. The tables were arranged sideways as he faced them, one behind the other, and the third was where his eyes were focused, on that tiny lump beneath the sheet. He walked with slow determination toward it, breathing through the clinging vapor that collected on the inside of his face mask. Then he paused and gently pulled the sheet back, staring at the naked body on the table. So small, so battered, all those bruises from the fury it had been through. There was caked blood on the lips which swollen, slightly parted, showed some damage to the front teeth. But these details weren't important. Even with them, the boy was striking. Blond, angelic, innocent. This was the first time that the medical examiner had worked on someone he'd observed in life, the first time he had done this to a patient. But then that was just the point. He never had a patient. That was why he'd become a medical examiner-to keep these feelings of regret away from him, to shun these awful obligations to the memory of the living. Well, he'd brought this on himself. He had become responsible, and he paused to eliminate emotion before reaching for the scalpel that he would use to peel the hair away. He took a breath and didn't want to do this, but he leaned close to select his point of contact while the eyes flickered suddenly below him and then stared at him,
but they were purged of any innocence, as old and stark as any eyes he'd seen, and they kept staring. When the boy's hand came up, the room appeared to swivel, and his own hand to his mouth beneath his face mask, the medical examiner stumbled backward, screaming.
FOUR
Marge had stayed on duty at the police station until everything was finished at the mansion. There was nothing she could do up there to help, but she could free a man from night shift on the radio while he went up to lend a hand, and Slaughter needed every officer in town. So she had gotten the news in bits and pieces from the radio, and when she'd found out what at last had happened, she had done her best to keep from crying. Slaughter didn't need the people he depended on to break down when he most required them. Marge couldn't help it, though, and she had sat there, wiping at her tears, relaying messages. She knew the mother and the father. She had gone to school with older sisters in the mother's family. She had known this woman since the woman was a baby. Why, the woman lived just two blocks down from Marge's house, and Marge had often gone to visit, to see the boy, to bring him presents. Now the boy was dead, and partly out of sympathy for what the parents must be feeling, partly out of sorrow for the boy, she wept. But she did her job, and when the man she had relieved came back to resume his shift, she tried to hide that she'd been crying. All the same, the man had noticed, and he sat with her a while until he felt that she could drive. "You need a little sleep is all," he told her, but they both knew that it wouldn't be that easy. There were many people now who wouldn't get much sleep tonight, and she had thanked him, walking to her car. He'd asked if he should walk outside with her, but she had thought about the radio, with no one to attend to it, and she had told him that he really didn't have to. Anyhow, from five years of work with Slaughter, she had learned the value of control, and she was certain she'd be fine.
So she had gone out to her car and driven from the parking lot. Almost midnight on a Saturday. She normally would have expected lots of movement in the streets, especially outside the bars, young trail hands come in for a weekend's fun, but she was not surprised when she saw little action. A few cars and pickup trucks, a couple of men who stood outside a bar and sipped from beer cans. But in contrast with a normal weekend, this was more like a quiet Tuesday, and she wondered if the word had spread, or if ranchers, losing stock, had stayed home watching for some trouble with the cattle. But no matter what the reason, things were quiet, and that bothered her. As she drove through the outskirts, she saw lots of houselights on, and that was hardly normal either. She wished that she'd had the chance to talk to Slaughter, but he'd been so busy, and she didn't want to stay at home alone, so she drove past her house, went two more blocks, and if there were lights on, she meant to go in and console the mother and the father There were lights on for sure, the whole house both in front and back. She saw the plumber's truck, the car before it. Both the mother and the father must be home then, and she parked her car, wondering if she would be intruding. Well, she'd come this far, and after all it was her duty, so she got out, locked her car, and started up the sidewalk. She could hear the crickets screeching. She was peering toward the lights in all the windows, wondering if anybody else had come to visit, when she heard the voices. Loud: two men it seemed, and they were shouting. Then they were screaming. Marge was paralyzed. The cool night air was still, the crickets silent now, as someone ran out onto the porch as if for help, a man she once had met from two doors down, and he was staring at her. "Jesus, she's gone crazy."
"What?"
Abruptly Marge heard the snarling. Instinct almost made her run away, but she moved slowly forward as the window in the dining room came bursting toward the porch, two figures struggling through the broken edges, falling, writhing on the porch. The mother and the father, the mother snarling, the father screaming, and the mother was on top where she was scratching, biting.
Marge ran up the steps. "You've got to help me! Get her off him!"
"But she's crazy!" the neighbor said.
Marge would later recollect how she had thought of Slaughter at that moment, wondering how the chief would try to handle this. She wanted him to say that she had done the right thing when an instant could make all the difference. She pushed at the man behind her, shouting "Go get help!" as she looked all around for something to subdue the mother. She wasn't about to grab the mother and get bitten like the father screaming there, but when she saw the thing she needed in one corner of the porch, she couldn't bring herself to grab it. Warren evidently had been playing with it the day before he died. She didn't want to touch it, but the father's screaming was too much. She reached for it. Slipping on the broken glass, she lurched toward the mother, raised the baseball bat high above her head, and thinking about Slaughter, started swinging.
FIVE
Slaughter waited in his locked house until Rettig and Hammel arrived. He shouted out the window that they'd better look around before they left the cruiser. So they flashed their searchlights, but there wasn't anything. He went outside to meet them, staring past them, scanning all around them and then pointing. "This way."
"Well, what is it?"
"Don't you think I wish I knew?"
They stiffened. They were dressed in jeans and sport shirts, a gunbelt strapped around each waist. They saw that Slaughter had his own gun out, and they were drawing theirs as they walked toward the fence where he was pointing.
"Shine your flashlights."
The beams arced out across the field.
"But I don't understand this," Rettig said.
"Just keep your back protected. Keep looking all around you," Slaughter told him. "There was something out here. Hell, it came up on my porch."
Slaughter climbed over the fence and flashed his light while they jumped down beside him. Then he started walking with them through the field.
"Your porch?"
"That's right." Slaughter was embarrassed, determined not to admit that he'd run in panic. He felt safer with his men to help him, but he couldn't subdue the burning in his stomach, and he wished they wouldn't ask too many questions.
But they kept on. "Well, what is it?" Rettig asked again.
"I told you, I don't know. I never got a look at them."
"Your porch, though."
"I was talking to you on the phone when I heard it. When I looked, it wasn't there."
Then Slaughter saw what he was searching for and wished that he'd been wrong. With his flashlight aimed, he glimpsed the fallen objects in the field, and he was hurrying through the grass toward them. He stopped and stared. The horses were mangled like the steer that he had seen by old Doc Markle, like the other steer that he had seen by Bodine's pickup truck, except that these were worse, so mutilated that he almost didn't recognize them. He heard his men gasp.
"Some damned thing was out here all right. God, I'm sorry, Chief."
"These horses… They were all I…"
Slaughter stalked toward the gully. "I heard three of them up in those bushes, two more by the barn. I'd like to-"
"Wait a second, Chief." Rettig grabbed his shoulder.
Slaughter pulled his hand away. "These god-damned-"
"Wait a minute. We don't even know what we'll be up against. You say that there were five of them?"
"That's right. Like a bobcat."
"Five of them?"
"I know it doesn't make much sense, but-"
"I don't care about that. Sure, bobcats don't hunt in packs, but anything can happen. What I mean is, we need help to do this. We need better light."
"You want the sun to come up? Damn it, they'll be long gone when that happens."
"You can find a tracker."
"Who, for Christ sake? I already thought of that. These cowboys maybe think they're expert trackers, but I never saw one yet that knew enough to be able to trail a sick man to the outhouse. If we don't go now, we'll never find whatever did this."
"I'm sorry, Chief, but I'm not going."
Slaughter scowled at Rettig, then tur
ned to Hammel. "What about you?"
Hammel shrugged.
"You don't have a lot to say since we saw Clifford's body."
"Well, I figure I'll just watch and learn," Hammel said.
"Yeah, I bet you will."
Slaughter spun to face the gully. Even with his flashlight and the moon, he couldn't see much in the bushes, and his anger became fear again.
"Okay, you're right. It's stupid to go in there. Looking at these horses, I just-"
"Don't you worry. We'll be sure to get whatever did this," Rettig said. "But not right now."
Slaughter's anger changed to grief. He had to get away from here.
"But what about your horses?" Rettig asked.
"Leave them. Hell, what difference does it make?"
Slaughter heard his men walking behind him as he climbed the fence, and when he stepped down, from the house he heard the phone again. Whoever kept on calling, he was thinking, livid. He would make sure that they stopped it. He was running, cursing, toward the house, but when he burst in, grabbing for the phone, he heard a voice this time, and as he listened, he mentally started running again. It seemed as if the last few days he'd never stopped.
SIX
He charged along the corridor, the nurses staring at him. Rettig and Hammel were on guard back at his house, and he was thinking of his mangled horses, hoping that the two men would be safe as he pushed through the door marked morgue and rushed across the anteroom to push against the second door. The morgue looked like a shambles. There was blood and broken glass and scattered instruments. The medical examiner was leaning against a table. He had blood across his gown, his face mask hanging around his neck. His face was pale in contrast with the blood. He looked as if he'd been sick, although he might have seemed that way because the neon lights reflecting off the green tiles tinted everything a sickly pallor. The medical examiner was shaking, and the man beside him, wearing street clothes, didn't look much better. Owens. Slaughter recognized him as a veterinary whom he had come across from time to time and had last seen on Friday morning when they'd looked at old Doc Markle on the floor beside the mangled steer.
The Totem Page 24
