Dead Harvest (2 page)

  I kicked free of the body bag. The chill of the morgue drawer stung my naked skin. My heart raced – the useless panic response of a fledgling meat-suit. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, and the flutter slowed.

  Hands against the back wall, I pushed, and the morgue drawer slid open. The room beyond was dimly lit, but after the absolute black of the drawer, I squinted still. I stumbled to a large utility sink, clumsy as a newborn foal. Bile rose in my throat, and I retched. It happens every time. A reflex, I suppose – just the body's way of trying to get rid of me. I try not to take it personally.

  The water ran cool from the tap. I drank from cupped hands. Whiskey and pills and sick swirled toward the drain. The water calmed my stomach, and the act of drinking was an anchor, fixing me in place. The body no longer fought my movements, no longer coursed with fear. I stretched my limbs, testing each in turn. Not a bad fit, really. Possession can be a tricky thing, particularly with the dead. You've got to find one in decent working order, for one – if you don't get to them quick enough, they tend to run a little rough. And they've all got their quirks. The guy I left in Oxford, for example: bum hip, lousy stomach, and apparently scared shitless of bugs. You get something
that
ingrained, there's no stopping it, and considering he'd been on his floor a couple days before I found him, I was lucky he didn't have a fucking heart attack. I had to shower for an hour before his skin stopped crawling. Still, it beats taking the living – no thoughts, no memories, no baggage. Their constant yammering is enough to make you want to take a header off a bridge and bail on the way down.

  I glanced at my wrist, a useless gesture. The watch I was looking for was a continent away, adorning the arm of a corpse. I looked around. The clock on the wall read 5am. If I were a betting man, I'd have said this place'd be deserted for least another hour. Of course, I'm
not
a betting man – in my line of work, I've seen my share of wagers, and believe me, the house always wins. Still, it couldn't hurt to poke around a bit.

  I peered through the gloom at the bank of morgue drawers behind me. They gleamed faintly in the pale glow of the exit signs. Numbers, no names. I padded naked toward the door at the far end of the room. Beside the door hung a clipboard – a list of names, arranged by drawer. Three of them MacNeil.

  I crossed the room and slid one out. As I unzipped the bag, the copper tang of blood prickled in my sinuses, and I went a little woozy. Great – New Guy had a thing about blood.
That
was gonna be a treat.

  He was a boy of maybe twelve, with straw-colored hair and a smattering of freckles across his face. His feet were bare, his pajamas in tatters, and there was so much fucking blood, it was impossible to tell what color they were. His hands were nicked and scraped, his face mostly spared – it was clear he'd tried to protest, to protect himself. His chest was a tattered mess – bone protruding, soft tissue visible beneath. I zipped him up and slid him back.

  The father was a mess as well. Well over six feet and not a slight man at that, he looked as though he'd been tossed about like a rag doll. He had at least a dozen fractures that I could see, arms kinked at improbable angles, legs a twisted wreck. His chest, too, was riddled with holes – knife wounds, like the boy – some flecked with chips of bone from the force of entry.

  The mother, though – she was something else entirely. With her chestnut hair and her elegant features, she was beautiful once, no doubt, but now her body was a maze of tiny cuts – thousands of them, each no longer than an inch, marking her skin like some unholy etching. And there was something else, too. A familiar scent, mingled with the metallic bite of blood.

  Alcohol.

  Jesus – these cuts, they weren't intended to kill. They were meant to hurt like hell. To make this woman scream. I wondered how long it took before the neighbors took notice and called the cops. From the look of Kate's mom here, it could have been hours. And Kate just kept on cutting, waiting patiently for her audience to arrive before she slit her mother's throat.

  I was suddenly glad Kate MacNeil would be cuffed and unconscious when I came to collect her. She wasn't to be trifled with, it seemed, and borrowed body or not, the pain's the same.

  I slid the drawer closed, eyeing the gooseflesh on my arms as I did. It was cold in here, I realized, noting the tension in my muscles, the ache in my joints. I left the autopsy suite, snatching a lab coat from a line of hooks in the anteroom beyond. Pressing through a set of swinging double doors, I found myself in a hallway ablaze in fluorescent light. The hall was empty, its walls scarred with the scuff-marks of countless carelessly piloted stretchers, and I crept quietly down it, mindful of the doors on either side.

  At the end of the hall was a locker room. A set of utility shelves stood along one wall, stacked high with clean scrubs, all neatly folded and arranged according to size. I took a set and slid them on, admiring myself in the mirror. I was a little pale, a little thin, but already my face showed signs of color, and for a dead guy, I cut a dashing figure in the powder blue scrubs. You could hardly even call it theft – in a couple hours I'd leave this body behind, and both it and the clothes I'd pilfered would wind up right back here.

  I put the lab coat back on and headed for the door. An elderly woman pushed a mop bucket past me in the hall, but she paid me no mind. Between the lab coat and the few days' stubble that graced my cheeks, I looked like I'd just pulled a double shift.

  I pushed through a set of glass doors and stepped out into the pre-dawn half-light. It was cold – bitterly so – as though the first kiss of spring I'd felt in Oxford was still some weeks away from warming the dead gray of New York's steel and concrete. From where I stood, First Avenue was pretty quiet – just the odd commuter among a dozen or so delivery trucks rumbling northward from the East Village. Bellevue lay a few blocks to the south. I pulled my lab coat tight around me and set off walking, my bare feet aching as the chill of the sidewalk leeched upward through my soles.

 
 

It'd been sixty-five years since I last laid eyes on Bellevue. Sixty-five years, four months, and seventeen days. Since then, it had changed plenty, with its modern glass atrium jutting skyward and glinting in the morning sun, I almost didn't recognize it. But the cold, impassive stone face I remembered all too well stared outward from behind the glass, and my own new face twisted into a smile of grim remembrance. Try though we might, we never can quite deny who we once were.

  The hospital itself was a massive structure, occupying twenty-five floors and two city blocks. In the nearly three centuries of its existence, its halls had spread and shifted and wound among themselves like vines on a trellis. The result was a tangled labyrinth of wrong turns and dead-end corridors, peppered with the occasional brightly colored map in what I can only assume was a fit of architectural sarcasm.

  Of course, it would help if I knew what I was looking for; all I had to go on was what I read in the paper. Killing spree, coma – the girl could be anywhere. Prison and psych wards make for tricky collections – they've got armed security, locked rooms, the whole nine – but in most hospitals, they're also overflowing. My hope was they were keeping Kate somewhere a little less secure. I played the odds and headed for the ICU.

  As the elevator doors opened, I knew I'd struck pay dirt. The ICU was a sleek, modern affair, all glass and light – the better to see you with, my dear. A few rooms in, a uniformed cop sat slouched beside an open door, his nose buried in a Scudder novel. I strode past him down the hall. He didn't spare me a second glance. Through the glass-paned walls, I caught a glimpse of the room's sole occupant. She looked so tiny and so frail as she lay still in her bed, surrounded by the blip and whir of medical equipment. But her wrist was cuffed to the bedrail, and her hair was flecked with blood – no doubt about it, she was my mark.

  I continued without pause down the hall, flashing the nurse at the station a smile as I passed. She flushed and returned the favor. In my line of work, I don't get looked at that way often. Almost a shame the assignment was so easy; it'd be a waste to ditch this skin-suit so soon.

  As I neared the end of the hall, I glanced back toward the nurses' station. The nurse was clacking away at a computer terminal, her back to me. I ducked into the nearest room. In the bed was an elderly gentleman – his eyes closed, his pallor gray. A tube snaked from his mouth to a machine beside the bed that accordioned up and down, pumping breath into his lungs.

  I approached the bed, my bare feet silent on the tiled floor. The only sounds in the room were the blip of his heart monitor and the grim, mechanical hiss of the respirator. I took the man's hand in mine. It was cold and dry. At the end of one finger was a small white clip, a wire running from it to the tangle of machinery beside him.

  I grabbed the wire and yanked free the clip, letting it fall to the floor as I strode out of the room. A shrill monotone pierced the air as the heart monitor flatlined. Alarms sounded at the nurses' station, and I was buffeted by medical personnel as they rushed past me down the hall.

  As diversions go, they don't get any easier than that. Time was I'd have had to almost kill the guy to get that kind of rise out of everybody. Now all you have to do is unhook a wire. I only hoped Kate's guard would be as easily distracted.

  I snatched a chart at random from the nurses' station and set out for Kate's room. I strode with purpose toward the door, thinking doctorly thoughts. You'd be surprised how often that sort of thing works.

  This time, no such luck. The cop stood as I approached, sidestepping in front of me as I tried to shoulder past.

  "Where the hell you think you're going?"

  "I'm here to see the patient," I replied, brandishing the chart by way of evidence.

  He scowled. "You ain't her usual doctor."

  "I'm from Neurology. They called me in for a consult."

  The cop looked me up and down, eyes lingering on my bare feet. His hand crept toward the gun on his belt. "I'm gonna need to see some ID."

  I lunged forward, slamming him against the doorjamb. His hand found the gun. Steel scraped leather as it slid free of its holster. I pressed my hand to his chest and reached inside. His eyes went wide as I clenched tight his soul.

  "David," I said. "She knows. She knows what you did to him." Somewhere, an eternity from the swirling blackness where we stood, a gun clattered to the floor.

  I withdrew my grasp, and David crumpled. He was shaking, whimpering. Tears streaked his pallid face.

  "No," David whispered.

  "You know it's true, or
I
would not."

  "No," he repeated. "No no no no no!" He scurried backward along the wall, his gun and his assignment forgotten. He scrambled to his feet and took off at a dead run, not looking back.

  Inside, the room was quiet. Just the steady blip of the heart monitor, the soft tap of the IV drip, and the gentle sigh of Kate's breathing. She was younger than I expected – she couldn't have been more than seventeen. And Kate was beautiful. Her auburn hair spilled across the pillow like a thousand adolescent fantasies, and though her eyes fluttered in dream, her face carried no hint of worry or concern.

  I'd gladly give a limb to have dreams like hers, I thought. But then, these limbs weren't mine to give.

  I approached the bed, caressing her cheek a moment before resting my hand on her breastbone. "Sorry," I said. "It's nothing personal."

  I reached inside. My head was suddenly filled with light – blinding, beautiful. I clenched shut my eyes against it, but it wasn't any use. Still it streamed in, the purest white. Not devoid of color – full of it. And with it her song. So beautiful. So sweet. I staggered backward, blind and helpless. My hand pulled free, and the light and song were gone. I collapsed to the floor, tears streaming down my borrowed cheeks, whether from the beauty of what I'd seen or the sudden horrible absence of it, I didn't know.

  I looked around. I'd so lost myself in that light, that sound, I was unsure of where I was. The lines and angles of the hospital room seemed suddenly harsher, somehow. Colder. My heart thudded in my chest. I climbed trembling to my feet, my body drenched in a cold, acrid sweat. I knew that scent. I'd smelled it a thousand times in the moment before I tore soul from flesh.

  It was fear.

  It was fear, and it was mine.

  I approached the bed again. With shaking hands, I reached toward her. I hesitated, my fingers scant inches from her breastbone. I wasn't sure if I could do it. I knew I couldn't not. I closed my eyes, steeling myself for what was to come.

  That's when she started screaming.

  My eyes flew open. Kate was staring back at me, her eyes wide with fear. She thrashed against her restraints, cuffed wrists clanging violently against the bedrail. Her screams echoed through the tiny room, blotting out all thought.

  "My God, is she all right?"

  A nurse, in the doorway. I forced myself to focus. "She's seizing!" I replied. "Give her something to calm her down."

  The nurse hurried to Kate's bedside, snatching a needle from the cart beside the bed. "Pushing four of Ativan." Kate's thrashing slowed, and her cries died down to little more than a whimper. Her eyes met mine. Terrified, pleading. Then the spark within them guttered and died, and her lids came crashing down. Kate MacNeil was once again asleep.

  I, unfortunately, had no such luxury. My mind was reeling. Adrenaline coursed through my veins, urging me to flee. I knew I had a job to do. But that light, that song – in all my years, I'd never seen anything like that. Something wasn't right here.

  "Her wrists," I said, embarrassed by the sudden quaver in my voice. "They've been abraded by the cuffs. I'd like to have a look at them. Do you have a key?"