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
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.
“At first I thought maybe the proteins were separating, the way oil sits on top of water,” Bennett said. “But it’s not quite that either.”
The issue was pasty white, almost as though sour milk had been introduced into the bloodstream.
Eph could not believe what he was seeing.
Nora said, “They’re all like this?”
Bennett nodded. “Exsanguinated. They have no blood.”
Eph eyed the white matter in the jar, and his taste for whole milk turned his stomach.
Bennett said, “I’ve got some other things. Core temperature is elevated. Somehow these bodies are still generating heat. Additionally, we’ve found dark spots on some organs. Not necrosis, but almost more like…like bruising.”
Bennett set the jar of opalescent fluid back down on the counter and called over a pathology assistant. She brought with her an opaque plastic tub of the same sort that take-out soup comes in. She peeled off the top and Bennett reached inside, removing an organ, setting it on a cutting board like a small, fresh-from-the-butcher roast. It was an undissected human heart. He pointed a gloved finger at where it would have joined the arteries. “See the valves? Almost as if they have grown open. Now, they couldn’t have operated like this in life. Not closing and opening and pumping blood. So this can’t have been congenital.”
Eph was aghast. This abnormality was a fatal defect. As every anatomist knows, people look just as different on the inside as they do on the outside. But no human being could conceivably have survived to adulthood with this heart.
Nora asked, “Do you have medical records for the patient? Anything we can check this against?”
“Nothing yet. Probably not until morning. But it’s made me slow this process down.
Bennett walked them down to a fully anatomized body, that of a midweight adult male. His neck had been dissected back to the throat, exposing the larynx and trachea, so that the vocal folds, or vocal cords, were visible just above the larynx.
Bennett said, “See the vestibular folds?”
They were also known as “false vocal cords”: thick mucous membranes whose only function is to sit above and protect the true vocal folds. They are a true anatomical oddity in that they can regenerate themselves completely, even after surgical removal.
Eph and Nora leaned in closer. Both saw the outgrowth from the vestibular folds, a pinkish, fleshy protuberance — not disruptive or malformed like a tumorous mass, but branching from and within the inner throat, below the tongue. A novel, seemingly spontaneous augmentation of the soft lower mandible.
They scrubbed up outside, more diligently than usual. Both were deeply shaken by what they had seen inside the morgue.
Eph spoke first. “I’m wondering when things are going to start making sense again.” He dried his hands completely, feeling the open air against his gloveless hands. Then he felt his own neck, over the throat, approximately where the incisions were all located. “A straight, deep puncture wound in the neck. And a virus that slows antemortem decomposition on the one hand, yet apparently causes spontaneous antemortem tissue growth on the other?”
Nora said, “This is something new.”
