The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal (16 page)

Ansel, for his part, was intensely relieved to be back home. Both Ben and Haily tried to pile on top of him, but he had to hold them off due to the lingering pain in his neck. The tightness—his muscles felt like ropes being torturously twisted—was centralized in his throat, but extended past the hinges of his jaw up to his ears. When you twist a rope, it shortens, and that was how his muscles felt. He stretched his neck, hoping for some chiropractic relief—

SNAP … CRACKLE … POP …

—which nearly doubled him over. The pain wasn’t worth the effort.

Later, Ann-Marie walked in on him in the kitchen as he was replacing her economy-size bottle of ibuprofen in the high cabinet over the stove. He popped six at once, the daily recommended dosage—and was barely able to get them down.

Her fearful eyes drained of all cheer. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” he said, though he was in too much discomfort to shake his head. But best not to worry her. “Just stiffness from the plane. The way my head hung, probably.”

She remained in the doorway, pulling at her fingers. “Maybe you shouldn’t have left the hospital.”

“And how would you have been able to get by?” he shot back, being shorter with her than he’d planned.

SNAP, CRACKLE, AND POP—

“But what if … what if you have to go back in? What if, this time, they want you to stay?”

It was exhausting, having to dismiss her fears at the expense of his own. “I can’t miss any work as it is. You know we’re right on the edge with our finances.”

They were a one-income household in an America of two-income households. And Ansel couldn’t take a second job, because then who would do the grocery shopping?

She said, “You know I … I couldn’t get along without you.” They never discussed her illness. At least, never in terms of it
being
an illness. “I need you.
We
need you.”

Ansel’s shoulder nod was more like a bow, dipping at his waist instead of his neck. “My God, when I think about all those people.” He pictured his seatmates from the long flight. The family with three grown children two rows in front of him. The older couple sitting across the aisle, sleeping most of the way, white-haired heads sharing the same travel pillow. The bleached-blonde flight attendant who dripped diet soda on his lap. “Why me, you know? Is there some reason I survived?”

“There
is
a reason,” she said, her hands flat against her chest. “Me.”

Later, Ansel took the dogs back out to their backyard shed. The yard was the main reason they’d bought this house: plenty of play room for the kids and the dogs. Ansel had Pap and Gertie before he’d ever met Ann-Marie, and she had fallen in love with them at least as much as she had him. They loved her back, no conditions. As did Ansel, and as did the kids—although Benjy, the older one, was starting to question her eccentricities here and there. Especially when they caused a conflict with an eight-year-old’s schedule of baseball practices and play dates. Already Ansel could sense Ann-Marie pulling back from him a bit. But Pap and Gertie would never challenge her, so long as she kept overfeeding them. He feared for the kids as they grew up, feared that they might outgrow their mother at too early an age, and never truly understand why she might appear to favor the dogs over them.

Inside the old garden shed, a metal fence pole was driven into the center floorboards, with two chains attached to it. Gertie had run off earlier that year, coming back with switch marks all over her back and legs, somebody having taken a whipping stick to her. So they chained up the dogs at night now, for their own protection. Ansel slowly—keeping his neck and head aligned, minimizing discomfort—set down
their food and water, then ran his hand over the tufts of their enormous heads as they ate, just making them real, appreciating them for what they were at the end of this lucky day. He went out and closed the door after chaining them to the pole, and stood looking at his house from the back, trying to imagine this world without him in it. Ansel had seen his children weep today, and he had wept with them. His family needed him more than anything.

A sudden, piercing pain in his neck shook him. He grabbed for the corner of the dog shed in order to keep from falling over, and for several moments stood frozen like that, doubled over to one side, shivering and riding out this flaring, knifing pain. It passed finally, leaving him with a seashell-like roaring in one ear. He probed his neck gently with his fingers, too tender to touch. He tried to stretch it, to improve his mobility, tipping his head back as far as he could toward the night sky. Airplane lights up there, stars.

I survived
, he thought.
The worst is over. This soon will pass.

That night he had a horrifying dream. His children were being chased through the house by some rampaging beast, but when Ansel ran to save them, he found he had monster claws for hands. He woke up with his half of the bed soaked in sweat, and climbed out quickly—only to be gripped by another seizure of pain.

SNAP

His ears, jaw, and throat were fused together by the same taut ache, leaving him unable to swallow.

CRACKLE

The pain of that basic esophageal retraction was nearly crippling.

And then there was the thirst. Like nothing he had ever felt—an urge that would not stop.

When he could move again, he walked across the hall and into the dark kitchen. He opened the fridge and poured himself a tall glass of lemonade, then another, and another … and soon he was drinking straight from the pitcher. But nothing would quench the thirst. Why was he sweating so much?

The stains on his nightshirt had a heavy odor—vaguely musky—and the sweat had an amber tint. So hot in here …

As he placed the pitcher back in the fridge, he spotted a plate with marinating meat. He saw the sinuous strands of blood mixing lazily with oil and vinegar, and his mouth watered. Not at the prospect of
grilling it, but at the idea of biting it—of sinking his teeth into it and tearing it and draining it. At the idea of drinking the blood.

POP

He wandered into the main hallway and took a peek at the kids. Benjy was balled up under Scooby-Doo sheets; Haily was snoring softly with her arm dangling off the side of her mattress, reaching for picture books that had fallen there. Seeing them allowed him to relax his shoulders and catch his breath a bit. He stepped out into the backyard to cool off, the night air chilling the dried sweat on his skin. Being home, he felt, being with his family, could cure him of anything. They would help him.

They would provide.

Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, Manhattan

T
HERE WAS NO BLOOD
on the medical examiner who met Eph and Nora. That alone was a strange sight. Normally it ran down their waterproof gowns and stained their plastic sleeves up to the elbows. But not today. The M.E. might as well have been a Beverly Hills gynecologist.

He introduced himself as Gossett Bennett, a brown-skinned man with browner eyes, a purposeful face behind a plastic shield. “We’re just getting under way here,” he said, waving at the tables. The autopsy room was a noisy place. Whereas an operating room is sterile and silent, the morgue is its direct opposite: a bustling space hectic with whining saws, running water, and dictating doctors. “We’ve got eight going from your airplane.”

Bodies lay upon eight guttered tables of cold stainless steel. The airline fatalities were in various stages of autopsy, two of them fully “canoed”: that is, their chests had already been eviscerated, the removed organs laid out on an open plastic bag on their shins, a pathologist paring away samples on a cutting board like a cannibal preparing a platter of human sashimi. The wounded necks had been dissected and the tongues pulled through, the faces folded halfway down like latex masks, exposing the skullcaps, which had been opened with the circular saw. One brain was in the process of being severed from its attachment to the spinal cord, whereupon it would be placed in a formalin
solution to harden, the last step of an autopsy. A morgue attendant was standing by with wadding, and a large curved needle threaded with heavy waxed twine, to refill the emptied skull.

A long-handled pair of hardware-store pruning shears was being passed from one table to the next, where another attendant stood on a metal footstool over an open-chested body and began cracking ribs one at a time, so that the entire rib cage and sternum could be lifted out whole. The smell was an absorbing stew of Parmesan cheese, methane, and rotten eggs.

“After you called, I began checking their necks,” said Bennett. “All the bodies so far present the same laceration you spoke of. But no scar. An open wound, as precise and clean as any I’ve ever seen.”

He showed them to an undissected female body laid out on a table. A six-inch metal block beneath her neck made her head fall back, arching her chest, extending her neck. Eph probed the skin over the woman’s throat with his gloved fingers.

He noticed the faint line—as thin as a paper cut—and gently parted the wound. He was shocked by its neatness as well as its apparent depth. Eph released her skin, and the breach closed lazily, like a sleepy eyelid or a timid smile.

“What could have caused this?” he asked.

“Nothing in nature, not that I know of,” said Bennett. “Notice the scalpel-like precision. Almost calibrated, you might say, both in aim and length. And yet—the edges are rounded, which is to say, almost organic in appearance.”

“How deep?” asked Nora.

“A clean breach, straight in, puncturing the wall of the common carotid, but stopping there. Not going out the other side, not rupturing the artery.”

“In every case?” gasped Nora.

“Every one I’ve looked at so far. Every body bears the laceration, though if you hadn’t alerted me, I have to admit I might not have noticed it. Especially with everything else going on with these bodies.”

“What else?”

“We’ll get there in a moment. Each laceration is on the neck, either front or side. Excluding one female who had hers on the chest, high above her heart. And one male we had to search, and eventually found the breach on the upper inside thigh, over the femoral artery.
Each wound perforated skin and muscle, ending exactly inside a major artery.”

“A needle?” ventured Eph.

“But finer than that. I … I need to do more research into it, we’re just at the beginning here. And there’s plenty of other freaky shit going down. You’re aware of this, I assume?” Bennett led them to the door of a walk-in refrigerator. Inside, it was wider than a two-car garage. There were fifty or so gurneys, most containing a crash bag unzipped down to the corpse’s chest. A handful were fully unzipped, those bodies nude—having already been weighed, measured, and photographed—and ready for the autopsy table. There were also eight or so corpses unrelated to Flight 753, lying on bare gurneys without crash bags, bearing standard yellow toe tags.

Refrigeration slows decomposition, in the same way it preserves fruits and vegetables and delays cold cuts from spoiling. But the airplane bodies hadn’t spoiled at all. Thirty-six hours out, and they looked nearly as fresh as when Eph had first boarded the plane. As opposed to the yellow-tagged corpses, which were bloating, effluvium oozing from every orifice like a black purge, flesh going dark green and leatherlike from evaporation.

“These are some pretty good-looking dead people,” said Bennett.

Eph felt a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature in the cooler. He and Nora both waded in, three rows deep. The bodies looked—not healthy, for they were shrunken and bloodlessly wan—but not long dead. They bore the characteristic mask of the deceased, but it was as though they had just passed over, not thirty minutes ago.

They followed Bennett back out into the autopsy room, to the same female corpse—a woman in her early forties with no distinguishing marks other than a decade-old Cesarean scar below the bikini line—being prepped for incision. But instead of a scalpel, Bennett reached for a tool never used inside a morgue. A stethoscope.

“I noticed this earlier,” he said, offering the scope to Eph. Eph put in the ear plugs, and Bennett called for everyone else in the room to stop, for silence. A pathology assistant rushed around turning off the running water.

Bennett laid the acoustic end of the stethoscope against the corpse’s chest, just below her sternum. Eph listened with trepidation, afraid of what he was to hear. But he heard nothing. He looked at Bennett again,
who showed no expression, waiting. Eph closed his eyes and focused.

Faint. Very faint. A squirming sound, almost like that of something wriggling in mud. A slow sound, so maddeningly slight he couldn’t be altogether certain he wasn’t imagining it.

He gave the scope to Nora to have a listen.

“Maggots?” she said, straightening.

Bennett shook his head. “In fact there is no infestation at all, accounting in part for the lack of decay. But there
are
some other intriguing abnormalities …”

Bennett waved everyone else to return to their work, selecting, from a side tray, a big number 6 blade scalpel. But instead of starting in on the chest with the usual Y-shaped incision, he took a large-mouthed stock jar from the enameled counter and placed it beneath the corpse’s left hand. He drew the scalpel blade abruptly across the underside of the wrist, slicing it open like the rind of an orange.

A pale, opalescent liquid sprayed at first, some of it spurting out onto his gloves and his hip on the initial cut, then sluicing steadily out of the arm, singing into the bottom of the jar. Flowing fast, but then, lacking any circulatory pressure from its stilled heart, losing force after about three ounces or so. Bennett lowered the arm to draw out more.

Eph’s shock at the callousness of the cut was quickly overcome by his amazement at the sight of the flow. This couldn’t be blood. Blood settles and congeals after death. It doesn’t drain out like engine oil.

Nor does it turn white. Bennett returned the arm to the corpse’s side and held up the jar for Eph to see.