For the next three hours I assisted my colleagues in tagging, photographing, and packaging what was left of the passengers of Air TransSouth 228. Complete corpses, limbs, and torsos went into large body bags, fragments into small ones. The bags were then hauled uphill and placed on racks in refrigerated trailers.
The temperature was warm, and I perspired inside my suit and gloves. Flies swarmed, attracted by the rotting flesh. Several times I had to fight nausea as I scraped up entrails or brain tissue. Eventually, my nose and mind numbed. I didn't notice when the sky went red and the lights clicked on.
Then I came to the girl. She lay face up, legs bent backward in the middle of her shins. Her features had been gnawed, and the exposed bone glowed crimson in the sunset.
I straightened, wrapped my arms around my middle, and drew several steadying breaths. In, out. In, out.
Dear God. Wasn't a thirty-thousand-foot plunge enough? Must creatures degrade what remained?
These children had danced, played tennis, ridden the roller coaster, checked their e-mail. They represented the dreams of their parents. But no longer. Now they would be framed photos resting on closed caskets.
I felt a hand on my shoulder.
“Time for a break, Tempe.”
Earl Bliss's eyes peered at me from the slit between his mask and cap.
“I'm fine.”
“Take a break. That's an order.”
“O.K.”
“At least an hour.” Halfway to the NTSB command center I stopped, dreading the chaos I knew I'd find. I needed serenity. Life. Birds singing, squirrels chasing, and air that was free of the smell of death. I reversed direction and walked toward the woods.
Skirting the edge of the debris field, I spotted a break in the trees and remembered that Larke and the lieutenant governor had appeared at that point, coming from their helicopter. Up close, I could see the route they had probably taken. Perhaps a trail or streambed at one time, it was now a meandering, treeless passage littered with rocks and bordered by scrub. Stripping off mask and gloves, I headed into the forest.
As I moved deeper into the trees the organized hubbub around the wreckage receded, and forest sounds took over. Thirty yards in, I climbed onto a fallen sourwood, drew my feet to my bum, and gazed up at the sky. Yellow and rose now streaked the red as nightfall crawled toward the horizon. It would soon be dark. I couldn't stay long.
I let my brain cells pick their topic.
The girl with the ravaged face.
No. New category.
The cells chose living people.
Katy. My daughter was over twenty now, moving off on a life of her own. It was what I wanted, of course, but the severing of ties was hard. The child Katy had passed through my life and disappeared. I was now meeting the young woman Katy, and liking her very much.
But where is she? the cells asked.
Next.
Pete. We were better friends separated than we'd ever been married. On occasion, he actually talked to me and listened to me. Should I ask for a divorce and move on, or roll with the status quo?
The cells had no answer.
Andrew Ryan. I'd been thinking of him a lot lately. Ryan was a homicide detective with the provincial police in Montreal. Though we'd known each other for nearly a decade, it was only last year that I'd agreed to date him.
The cells had no suggestion.
Nomenclature aside, Ryan and I had never pulled it off. Before our first official social outing, he had gone undercover, and I hadn't seen him in months. At times like this, I missed him intensely.
I heard rustling in the underbrush and held my breath to listen. The woods were quiet. Seconds later I heard it again, this time on my other side. The movement sounded too large for a rabbit or squirrel.
The brain cells sounded a low-level alarm.
Thinking perhaps Earl had followed me, I stood up and looked around. I was alone.
For a full minute nothing moved, then the rhododendron to my right jiggled, and I heard a low growl. I whirled but saw only leaves and bushes. Eyes probing into the shrubbery, I slipped off the log and planted my feet.
Moments later there was another growl, followed by a highpitched keening.
The cells called in the limbic guys, and adrenaline shot to every part of my body.
Slowly, I squatted and reached for a rock. Hearing movement behind me, I pivoted in that direction.
My eyes met other eyes, black and gleaming. Lips curled back over teeth pale and slick in the deepening twilight. Between the teeth, something horrifyingly familiar.
A foot.
