spending hours playing World of Warcraft and fucking his mattress like it was a woman like Eva La Rue.
And it looked like he'd be able to get back to Warcraft fairly quickly that Sunday morning. There were only three autopsies to do, and it wasn't like the cause of death in any of them was a great mystery. It was all by-the- numbers stuff.
Lyle decided to start with the simplest case, the guy who'd been buried in the December avalanche. He figured the body had probably defrosted enough to cut into by now.
The first thing Lyle noticed once he got Matthew Cahill's body on the table was that the corpse's skin didn't feel as cold or as rubbery as he expected, which meant something was wrong with the temperature-control mechanism in the cooler.
Not good.
The last thing Lyle wanted to walk into on his next shift was a cooler full of putrefying corpses. After he finished gutting Matthew Cahill, he'd alert maintenance to get the thermostat fixed right away.
Lyle took his scalpel and made a deep cut through the flesh at Matt's shoulder and was about to rip his way to the sternum and on down to the pelvis, so he could peel it all back, saw off the ribs, and remove the internal organs underneath.
He didn't get that far.
He'd barely moved his knife half an inch when he stopped what he was doing and stared in slack-jawed disbelief at what was underneath his blade.
Blood.
It seeped out of the wound like the juice from a ripe pomegranate.
Lyle watched in shock as the blood became a tiny rivulet, ran down the side of Matt's body, and dripped onto the steel table.
He stuck his gloved finger in the fluid and brought it up close to his eye just to be sure.
Yeah, it was blood.
But that was impossible.
The human body is mostly water. Within two hours under the ice it becomes a Popsicle with skin. On a molecular level, the crystallization shatters the cells, irreparably destroying organs and making resuscitation inconceivable.
The longest a person had ever survived being frozen was almost ninety minutes.
The longest any animal had been known to survive, in laboratory conditions, was three hours.
Matthew Cahill had been frozen for three months.
If the freezing didn't kill him, the oxygen deprivation alone would certainly have left him not only merely dead, but really, most sincerely dead.
And yet…
He was bleeding.
And for that to happen, there had to be circulation, and for that to happen, there had to be a beating heart, and for that to happen, the central nervous system had to be firing neurons.
And for that to happen, there had to be life.
Lyle didn't have a stethoscope. There was no need for one in a morgue.
That left him only one immediate option for confirming what the blood was telling him, short of continuing his Y incision and cracking the body open to see what the hell was going on.
Swallowing hard, his hand shaking, he set the knife down on the instrument tray and leaned over the body, slowly and hesitantly placing his ear on Matthew Cahill's icy chest.
The skin was cold. But not deathly cold.
At first, all Lyle heard was his own blood pounding in his head. But then he took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and concentrated.
There it was.
Faint and muffled, but insistent…
It was like laying his head on a grave and hearing, through the six feet of dirt beneath him, someone pounding on the lid of their coffin.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
And as he heard it, he could see the blood continuing to seep from the wound that he'd cut in Matt's flesh.
There was no denying the evidence, as unbelievable as it was.
The dead man was alive.
Lyle ran to a phone and called 911.
CHAPTER FOUR
November 18, 2010
The B. Barer and Sons Sawmill was built in the mid-1800s along a curve in the Chewelah River when the waterway was the best method for transporting logs from the northern forests to the mill and keeping them fresh until they could be cut.
Those forests had long since been stripped, graded, and reforested with tract homes, and the heavily polluted river was no longer used as a timber highway, but scores of logs were still stored in the man-made bay, less out of necessity than as a nostalgic nod to B. Barer and Sons' history.
So Matt figured that practice would end soon. Big changes were being made at the mill by the current generation of Barers in their effort to keep the business from collapsing, and nostalgia wasn't something they could afford anymore.
In desperation, the Barers had finally brought in an outside consultant, whose previous experience had been in the soft drink industry, to modernize their operations and find ways to save money. Roger Silbert was hated by the hard-core loggers, some of whom were fourth-generation workers in the yard, because he knew nothing about wood and had probably never held a saw in his life.
For decades, the mill ran on six circle rigs in four separate buildings. The logs were loaded on a sliding carriage and fed into a circular saw, where they were shaved and squared off into cants, which were turned after each cut by men with cant hooks, then re-fed down the line to the blade to be cut again and again, the lumber off- loaded and stacked with each pass.
It was a manpower-intensive operation that during peak periods required three eight-hour shifts and a hundred men throughout the plant to get the job done.
Matt had worked at the lumberyard since he was a teenager, and had done every job there was to do, before becoming a sawyer, the man running one of the circle rigs, an old Frick mill.
But for the last few days, he'd been running and testing a brand-new mill, a Wood-Mizer 3500, which Roger Silbert had urged the Barers to try out.
With the WM3500, the logs were loaded by a computerized, hydraulic system onto a stationary bed and were cut by a thin-kerf, laser-guided, vertical-blade band saw that passed over the cant on a gliding head.
Matt operated the system robotically from a chair at the head of the mill rig equipped with joysticks at the end of each armrest.
The log was turned hydraulically, and every piece of lumber that Matt cut from the cant was swept away by metal prongs behind the saw head as it slid back into starting position after each forward pass of the blade.
The freshly cut lumber was pushed down the line by a series of incline conveyors, roller decks, and pneumatic kickers and then off-loaded with hydraulic arms into neat stacks.
The WM3500 was a pleasure for Matt to operate. He was attuned to it in a way that he never was with the circle rig. It was all highly computerized, and yet cutting with it felt like an extension of himself and as natural as chopping wood each morning.
But he was ashamed of himself for liking it. He didn't have to be a professional hatchet man from Zippy Cola
