Passage Graves (13 page)

Chapter 31

TUESDAY 11:54 p.m.

Cambridge University, England

“No autopsy has been done,” Thatcher said, rolling the gurney under the lights within the basement of one of Cambridge’s zoological laboratories. She turned on the overhead lamp, pulled rubber gloves over her hands, and looked down at Brenton Hyden’s body.

Although dead for nearly two weeks, the corpse was unexplainably un-decayed. “I don’t even feel any bloating, marbling, or slippage within the epidermis,” she said running her hands over the skin. “There’s slight rigor mortis in the joints, but even so, he looks like a subject whose ETD is only six to ten hours.”

Thatcher hovered over the star-shaped bullet wound in Brenton’s chest. The slug had penetrated his heart and stopped somewhere in
his mid-back. She twisted the body onto its side. “It’s still there!”

The projectile bulged from the skin between the right shoulder blade and the spine, a gleaming sharp metal nugget
lodged sideways in the tissue. She removed it from Brenton’s back and held it up into the light for David to see. “Semi-jacket hollow point. An older design, .357 Magnum caliber—”

“Desert Eagle?”
he asked. He watched from the doorway, looking more and more pale.

“Could be. Why?”
She sealed the bullet inside a plastic bag and tucked the bag into her pocket. “My lab can tell us exactly.”

David swallowed and looked away.

She found a faint white spiral scar on Brenton’s palm. “Is this what you were talking about?”

David wouldn’t
look at the body. “The night I identified him it was glowing.”

The faded mark was almost invisible. She could barely see the outline of the circles. She bit her lip, wondering if David could have been mistaken. Identifying the body of his father must have been a rough go, even if their relationship was crap. Maybe he’d
just been in shock?

As if reading her mind, David continued. “Lang saw it, too. He asked me if I knew what it meant
—the spiral.” He shook his head. “I told him I didn’t know.”

“The wound could’ve been i
nfected with bacteria that radiate light.” She had to reach deep into her imagination to come up with a plausible scenario for glowing skin. She tried not to sound too skeptical. “
P. luminescens
glows blue as it oxidizes.”

“It was white.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.” David looked faint. F
or an archeologist, he was sure weak-stomached around cadavers.

Thatcher tapped her temples, thinking aloud. “During the Civil War, soldiers in the States were documented as having glowing wounds. But they were found under extreme conditions,
hypothermic and in muddy swamp lands, basically human Petri dishes swarming with bacterial and fungal infections.”

“I
t was 2 a.m. at Stonehenge in pouring icy rain.” David nodded. “Everyone was hypothermic.”

She brushed a strand of hair from her face. It still didn’t add up. “You said the body was discovered a few days after death?
P. luminescens
can’t survive within a dead host.”

“Lang estimate
d the time of death. Brenton’s clothes were almost completely disintegrated. It made sense.” He frowned. “Is it too late to isolate whatever was in his skin? Couldn’t some remnant of dead bacteria still be inside him?”

Thatcher rubbed her eyes, tired. “If the organism was symbiotic an
d not isolated to the wound.”

He leaned back into the doorway and closed his eyes. “Cut him open, then.”

Thatcher studied his face with uncertainty. “Your remorse is touching.”

He
kept his eyes clenched shut. How could he be so detached and disconnected? David was as tight-lipped and bereft of sympathy as Hummer. Hummer wore a mask of stoicism, however. He had built a wall layer by layer around his heart. David, on the other hand, had no mask. It almost seemed as if he had no soul.

“What are we waiting for?”
he asked, staring at the floor.

With a sigh, she reached for the scalpel and began the Y-incision. “In the rare instances that
P. luminescens
attaches itself to mammals, the bacteria harvest their larvae within the trachea, gut wall, and intestines.” She finished the incision and opened the ribcage. “Theoretically, if the same scenario happened to your father, the pathogen would’ve entered by mouth, passed through the lungs, and cultivated within the bowels.”

David took a seat in a chair at the far corner of the room facing away from the autopsy.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

He looked over at her. The blood had drained from his face. “I’m fine.” He swallowed hard.

“You’re an archeologist. Aren’t corpses second nature to you?”

“There’s a reason I only study rock formations.”

She bit her lip and nodded. “I’ll stop narrating, then.”

David tipped his head in appreciation.

Thatcher removed a tiny portion of the intestines. Placing the tissue sample on a glass slide, she flipped on one of the university’s microscopes. The instrument’s bulb burned dull yellow. It would take the outdated equipment a minute to warm up. She moved back over the body and examined the chest cavity. The tissue was a hemorrhagic clutter of scrambled cells and burst vessels loosely stabilizing tortured organs. It was an oddly familiar pattern. The peripheral wall was covered with Microlesions—a damning indicator of subsonic noise. She cut through the length of the left lung and opened the sponge-like organ.

“He inhaled sand,” she spoke aloud. “A lot of sand.”

David looked up, confused. “He was buried alive?”

She fingered the tissue and held up some of the crimson particles into the light. “Red sand. There’s nothing like it in this part of the world.”

They stared at each other blankly.

Realizing the microscope light had warmed enough to view the intestine cross section, Thatcher left the body and twisted the focus knob. Thousands of miniscule luminescent bacteria danced around the air bubbles and hemorrhagic tissue. She looked up from the eyepiece,
shaken.

“
P. Luminescens
?” David asked, standing up.

“I’ve never seen anything like it.
But whatever it is, it’s still alive.”

Chapter 32

WEDNESDAY 4:03 a.m.

St. John the Baptist’s Cathedral

Bathwick, England

Ian sat hidden in a corner of the monastery library translating two columns of Aramaic text. Painstaking hours had been spent deciphering the fragment the Rabbi insisted was meant for him. But something was wrong. Dusty glossaries of ancient languages sat on the desk close at hand. His rudimentary understanding of the Chaldean language had helped him recognize many of the ancient terms: the Sons of Light, the Forces of Darkness, the Day of Disaster. He shook out his bleeding palm in frustration. It was the familiarity of these terms that disappointed him. So far, the
Beb’ne Hoshekh
was nothing more than a copy of a Dead Sea Scroll called The War Rule. Word for word, it matched the well-known published document Brenton and his associates found in a Qumran excavation decades earlier. There was nothing clandestine about these phrases. Nothing worth dying over. It was a duplicate of the same tactical treatise that existed in museums throughout the world.

For the Master, [the Rule of] the War: On that day the congregation of the gods and the congregation of men shall engage one another in great carnage. The Sons of Light and the Forces of Darkness shall fight together with the roar of a great multitude and the shout of gods and men; a day of disaster. It is a time of distress fo[r all] redeemed by God. On the day of their battle, they shall g[o forth for] carnage.

In three lots the Sons of Light shall stand firm so as to strike a blow at wickedness, and in three the army of Belial shall strengthen themselves so as to force the retreat of the forces of Light.

[And when the] banners of the infantry cause their hearts to melt, God will strengthen the he[arts of the Sons of Light].

“And in the final lot, [Belial and al]l the angels of his dominion, and all the men of his forces, [shall be destroyed forever]…

The bracketed words of his translation marked areas of
uncertainty. Places where the fragment was torn or the words too faded. Biblical scholars assumed the War Rule ended with Belial’s demise in the Final Battle. They knowledgably closed the passage with Belial “…shall be destroyed forever,” a conclusion that matched all other texts detailing Armageddon. However, the War Rule fragment had no ending. The original parchment was torn, just like this vellum, purposefully or not, and the completed prophecies of the Final Battle were lost.

Ian t
ossed down his pencil. There were no clues here. Nothing to help solve his father’s murder. It had been a complete waste of time. His body was bruised, his joints ached, and his wound was still bleeding.

There were only a few hours left until sunrise. The cathedral would soon be alive with activity. Monday morning brought with it Low Mass, the celebration of the Eucharist. The meeting was his responsibility, but his brain fe
lt like the oatmeal mush he could smell cooking in the kitchen. Frustration gave way to fatigue. He lowered his head to the table. His eyes were dry, his eyelids like heavy curtains. He let them close.

Chapter 33

WEDNESDAY 6:03 a.m.

Cambridge University

Cambridge, England

David sat on the steps outside Cambridge’s Zoological Laboratory building. His numb backside had melded with the cold cement, but he preferred the hard ground to sitting by the autopsy taking place in the building’s basement. He stared down at the stone sidewalk, his tired eyes making discombobulated shapes and figures out of the patchwork concrete slabs, a design of mismatched squares soon to be trodden by hundreds of students.

Dammit.

Students…

He’d completely forgotten about
his students. They would probably wait outside his classroom in Aberdeen for fifteen minutes before heading home with wide smiles on their faces. Except for Scott, who would camp outside David’s office, worried and anxious.

Behind
him, the door opened and shut. Thatcher took a seat on the step and looked out over the street with a heavy sigh. “Whatever infected your father’s tissue is preventing decomposition.”

“His hand was glowing the nig
ht I identified his body,” he insisted. For some reason, he felt like he had to prove everything to her.

“I believe you.” She took in a deep breath. “But I’d believe just about anything by now.”

“God came by right before you came out,” David said soberly. “He was carrying a tennis racquet and wanted to know if you were game.”

Thatcher cleared her throat. “I did, however, find something that connects B
renton to Maeshowe,” she said.

He sat up. “What’s that?”

“Acoustic trauma.”

David blinked, dumbfounded. “Like the people at Stenness?”

She nodded. “The level of subsonic noise his body sustained was lethal.”

He shook his head
, trying to digest the information. “So if there hadn’t been the whole bullet-through-the-heart thing?”

“Or the being-buried-alive thing
,” she said with a yawn. “Yeah, the acoustic trauma would’ve killed him.”

“Damn.”

“I know.”

They stared
out at the street for a while. The moisture from their breath was vaporous in the cold morning air.

“What do you want me to do with his body?” she asked.

“I guess it’s too late to donate it to science?” He was in a weird mood—probably from the lack of sleep. Thatcher didn’t look much better herself, her muddy suit, her hair pulled back in a messy ponytail with unruly strands in her face. Neither of them was capable of making important decisions.

“We can probably store him
here for the time being,” she offered. “There’s a morgue in the basement. I put him there already.”

After a brief silence, David felt her studying his face. He shifted uncomfortably, allowing the blood to return to his legs.

“I’m sorry about your father.” She bit her lip as if holding back a question.

David looked up
the street. “We weren’t close.”

“Still,
I’m sorry.”

Birds began to fly around campus, bobbing
and weaving through the tree tops. A few cars passed along the road, and the intersection lights nearby stopped flashing red and adjusted for the morning traffic. Soon the city would be crawling with caffeinated teachers and students.

Thatcher pull
ed her legs up to her chest. “I’ve got three days, and all we have is a two-week-old, non-decomposing corpse with sand-filled lungs, a bullet hole through his heart, lethal acoustic-damaged tissue, and a glow-in-the-dark tattoo.”

David
was surprised she had used the term ‘we’. He didn’t know what to say. He’d been a complete waste of her time. They both knew it.

She sighed. “Sod it all.”

He brightened with an epiphany. “We’ve got more than that.”

She looked at him curiously
.

“Brenton took all the credit for his research, but he never worked alone.”

“The Polaroid from his office…” she realized aloud.