Eph said, “There should be flies.” The work lights set up around the hangar showed that the air above the corpses was clear but for a lazy moth or two. “Why aren’t there any flies?”
After death, the bacteria along the digestive tract that, in life, cohabitated symbiotically with the healthy human host, begins to fend for itself. It starts feeding on the intestines, eventually eating its way through the abdominal cavity and consuming the organs. Flies can detect the putrid off-gassing from a decomposing carcass as far as one mile away.
Two hundred and six meals were set out here. The hangar should have been buzzing with pests.
Eph started across the tarp toward where a pair of HAZMAT officers was sealing another crash bag. “Hold on,” he said to them. They straightened and stepped back as Eph knelt and unzipped the seam, exposing the corpse inside.
It was the young girl who had died holding her mother’s hand. Eph had memorized her body’s location on the floor without realizing it. You always remember the children.
Her blond hair lay flat, a smiling sun pendant hanging from a black cord rested against the pit of her throat. Her white dress made her look almost bridelike.
The officers moved on to seal and take the next bag. Nora came up behind Eph, watching him. With his gloved hands, he grasped the girl gently by the sides of her head, rotating it on her neck.
Rigor mortis fully sets in about twelve hours after death, holding for twelve to twenty-four more hours—they were in that middle range now—until the fixed calcium bonds inside the muscles break down again and the body returns to flexibility.
“Still flexible,” said Eph. “No rigor.”
He grasped her shoulder and hip and rolled the girl over onto her front. He unbuttoned the back of her dress, revealing the flesh of her lower back, the small bulbous nodes of her spine. Her skin was pallid and lightly freckled.
After the heart stops, blood pools inside the circulatory system. The capillary walls, being just one cell thick, soon succumb to the pressure, bursting and spilling blood into the surrounding tissues. This blood settles in the lowest, “dependent” side of the body, and coagulates quickly. Lividity is said to become fixed after about sixteen hours.
They were beyond that time limit now.
From expiring in a seated position, and then being laid out flat, the pooled, thickened blood should have rendered the skin along her lower back a deep, dark purple.
Eph looked out over the rows of bags. “Why aren’t these bodies decomposing as they should?”
Eph eased the girl back flat again, then thumbed open her right eye with a practiced hand. Her cornea was clouded, as it should have been, and the sclera, the opaque white protective layer, was suitably dry. He examined the fingertips of her right hand—the one that had been tucked into her mother’s—and found them slightly wrinkled, due to evaporation, as they should have been.
He sat back, annoyed by the mixed signals he was receiving, then inserted his two gloved thumbs between her dry lips. The gasplike noise that escaped from her parted jaw was the simple venting of gas. The immediate interior of the mouth was unremarkable, but he wriggled one gloved finger inside to depress her tongue, checking for more dryness.
The soft palate and tongue were completely white, as though carved in ivory. Like anatomical netsuke. The tongue was rigid and oddly erect. Eph manipulated it to the side and revealed the rest of the mouth, equally drained.
Fatigue was starting to set in. Eph held the firm tongue between his thumb and index finger, using a small flashlight to peer down her white throat. It looked vaguely gynecological to him. Porn netsuke?
Then the tongue moved. He jerked back, pulling out his finger. “Jesus Christ!” The girl’s face remained a placid mask of death, lips still slightly parted.
Nora, next to him, stared. “What was it?”
Eph was wiping his gloved finger on his trousers. “Simple reflex action,” he said, standing. He looked down at the girl’s face until he couldn’t look anymore, then drew the zipper up along the bag, sealing her inside.
Nora said, “What could it be? Something that slows tissue decay somehow? These people are dead…”
“In every way except decomposition.” Eph shook his head uneasily. “We can’t hold up the transport. Bottom line is, we need these bodies at the morgue. Cut them open. Figure out this thing from the inside.”
Nora, he noticed, was gazing off in the direction of the ornate cabinet, laid out on the hangar floor away from the rest of the unloaded luggage. “Nothing’s right about this,” she said.
Eph was looking the other way, at the great aircraft overhead. He wanted to get back aboard. They must have missed something. The answer had to be in there.
But before he could do this, he saw Jim Kent escorting the director of the CDC inside the hangar. Dr. Everett Barnes was sixty-one years old, and still very much the southern country doctor he had started out as. The Public Health Service that the CDC was a part of had been born of the navy, and though the PHS had long since branched off on its own, many top CDC officials still favored military-style uniforms, including Director Barnes. So you had the contradiction of a folksy, down-home, white-goateed gentleman dressing like a retired admiral in a trim khaki field uniform complete with chest candy. Looking very much like a combat-decorated Colonel Sanders.
After the preliminaries, and a cursory examination of one of the airplane dead, Director Barnes asked about the survivors.
Eph told him, “None of them has any memory of what happened. They are no help at all.”
“Symptoms?”
“Headaches, some severe. Muscle pain, ringing in the ears. Disorientation. Dry mouth. Problems with balance.”
Director Barnes said, “Generally, not much worse than anyone else getting off a transatlantic flight.”
“It’s uncanny, Everett,” said Eph. “Nora and I were the first ones on the plane. These passengers—all of them—were flat-lined. Not breathing. Four minutes without oxygen is the threshold for permanent brain damage. These people, they might have been out for more than an hour.”
“Evidently not,” said the director. “And they couldn’t tell you
“They had more questions for me than I had for them.”
“Any commonality among the four?”
“I’m pursuing that now. I was going to ask for your help in confining them until our work is done.”
“Help?”
“We need these four patients to cooperate.”
“We have their cooperation.”
“For now. I just… we can’t take any chances.”
The director smoothed down his trim white beard as he spoke. “I’m sure that, with a little tactical use of bedside manner, we can leverage their appreciation for having been spared this tragic fate, and keep them compliant.” His smile revealed an upper row of heavily enameled dentures.
“What about enforcing the Health Powers Act—”
“Ephraim, you know there is a world of difference between isolating a few passengers for voluntary preventive treatment, and confining them in quarantine. There are larger issues—media issues, to be frank—to consider.”
“Everett, I’m going to have to respectfully disagree—”
The director’s small hand came down gently on Eph’s shoulder. He exaggerated his drawl a bit, maybe in order to soften the blow. “Let me save us both some time here, Ephraim. Looking at this objectively now, this tragic incident is, thankfully—one might say, blessedly—contained. We’ve had no other deaths or illnesses on any other airplanes or in any other airports around the globe, in what is approaching eighteen hours since that plane landed. These are positives, and we must stress them. Send a message to the public at large, reinforcing their confidence in our system of air travel. I am certain, Ephraim, that engaging these fortunate survivors, appealing to their sense of honor and duty, will be enough to compel them to cooperate.” The director removed his hand, smiling at Eph like a military man humoring his pacifist son. “Besides,” continued Barnes, “this has all the hallmarks of a goddamn gas
