Zombies: More Recent Dead (55 page)

I swallowed my coffee. “No, sir.”

The old man nodded, then unsheathed his knife.

“You were blessing her,” he said.

I watched the knife’s tip, tried to work out the right answer. He took my silence for confusion.

“The woman. You were blessing her.”

The pyre coals glowed below, a constellation of deaths.

“Her name was Xin Sun,” I said. “She was the nearest thing to family that I had.” I looked up from the knife and met his eyes, willing him to believe me. “I don’t know how to save a soul, but I would have liked to have saved hers.”

There was nothing about Xin’s soul that needed saving. I hoped she would have forgiven the lie. Joseph leaned on the rail and toyed with his knife, moonlight glinting on the blade. My palms were sweaty, my throat tight with unasked questions. I wasn’t used to wanting something like this. Wanting to walk in the wilderness, outside of walls. Wanting to ride the roads and forests, far from companies and criminals, free from Coroner and the machinery of obligation. I’d never believed that kind of life was possible, and now I was drunk on the fantasy.

“If you want me to teach you,” Joseph said at last, “I’m gonna have to cut out your feed.”

I touched the warm nub on my neck and bit back a smile.

Mark of the Devil.

Already, I could feel it. The sting of alcohol. Metal on skin, the knife’s edge like nightbreeze. Blood. One drop, and then a trickle. The cut, the last hum of the feed running my numbers.

And then a release, when it tells the world that I’m a dead man.

Lisa Mannetti

“You can’t buy human flesh and blood in this country, sir, not alive, you can’t,” says Wegg, shaking his head. “Then query, bone?”

—Our Mutual Friend,
Charles Dickens

For most of the nineteenth century, anatomy professors and students could secure bodies only on surreptitious nocturnal visits to a church cemetery or, more likely, a potters field.

—Dissection,
John Harley Warner and James M. Edmonson

It had happened before and Auden Strothers knew it. So now on an uncharacteristically snowy March night he was in Yale’s Cushing Whitney medical library looking for answers that stubbornly evaded him.

This morning at approximately 2:00 a.m. the cadaver (nicknamed Molly until today) he shared with three other fledgling doctors suddenly sat up, hemostats clinging to her open mid-section like long silver leeches, widened her jaws and took a chunk out of Sheri Trent’s right shoulder.

Sheri hissed—as much from surprise as pain, Auden guessed—and clamped her left hand against the wound. Auden’s own breathing became rapid behind his paper mask, and he found himself staring at the blood that seeped between the fingers of his teammate’s pale yellowish latex glove. Sheri’s gaze followed his and, for a second (a second too goddamn long, Auden thought), she watched the blood that dripped from her glove and pattered on to the naked woman’s waxy thighs.

“Christ, I’m bitten. She bit me!”

At the same time Auden’s mind declared:
You’ve gone crazy! I told you a thousand times to stay the hell away from Gronsky’s stupid meth lab . . .
his right hand which held the scalpel that had been so recently and delicately buried inside Molly’s exposed liver came up and plunged the knife straight into the corpse’s nearest eye.

There was a soft, drawn-out
pffft
—as if he’d let the air out of a mostly deflated party balloon—and Molly collapsed backward against the steel table.
God, they’d only recently unwrapped the woman’s head and face (the better to preserve her, my dear) and now he’d absolutely ruined her eye and their other teammates—not to mention Professor Sriskandarajah—were going to have a fit—

“Help me, Strothers—what should I do?” Sheri pivoted her wrist and peeled her cupped hand back from the wound a few times tentatively, wielding the lunate and scaphoid bones at the bottom of her palm like a hinge.

The bite was a ragged open mouth at the juncture where the fleshy part of her upper arm began. He blinked under the glare of the brilliant overheads and automatically recited as if his professor called on him to evaluate the case and answer up quickly: “Size 4-0 absorbable suture . . . ”

“What the
fuck
is wrong with you?” she said. “I’m bleeding!”

Ordinarily on a Thursday night, even this late, there’d be five or six students bent over the semi-flayed bodies on the metal slabs, but the spring holidays were coming and they were the only ones in the dissecting room. Trent was as much a grind as he was.

She couldn’t go to the university clinic or the emergency room or the local doc in the box—that much was clear—because how could she explain who had bitten her? The medicos would want to know whose teeth sank into her flesh, would want to set police officers on the trail of the perpetrator. She could use a mirror and stitch herself—awkward, of course, utilizing just the one, left hand—but not impossible.

Sheri started toward him, moving out from her side of the table.

But all Auden Strothers could think about was how the first day his hands probed and dived inside Molly, the skin beneath his gloves had gone numb from contact with the eight gallons of formaldehyde that had been pumped into her—that had been unsettling and nasty—and now Sherri Trent expected him to risk . . .
infection.

He shot out from the aisle created by the tables, intent on hustling his skinny ass through the nearest door at the rear of the lab.

Still holding her hand against the wound, Sheri closed in on him. Even then Auden realized she might want no more than a brief comforting touch, a friend and colleague’s hand laid gently on her good shoulder, but the combination of the crystal he’d snorted two hours earlier and the spectacle of the uprising cadaver rocketed his mind to panic. He meant only to fend her off with out thrust elbows (less chance of contagion, he gibbered inwardly). Instead, he got his back into it and, with his arms extended and his palms upraised, gave her chest a hard shove: Sheri crashed against Team 22’s table which lay perpendicular to their own.

Maybe someone on that team planned to come back after a break but fell asleep over a textbook in the lounge, or a Red Bull in the cafeteria; or maybe Sheri Trent had unzipped the black body bag halfway to get a look at her competitors’ handiwork. Arms flailing, her hands skittered wetly under the rectangular skin flaps tessellating the corpse’s chest and pushed them back like doors on a bulkhead. Auden caught a brief glimpse of both the layer of bright yellow fat and the reddish striated muscle that reminded him of very old skirt steak.

“Strothers!” She sounded shocked and disappointed more than physically hurt.

A few drops of Sheri’s blood—no more than a scattering, really—flicked onto the cadaver’s pallid torso and blatted against the heavy plastic. The noise seemed preternaturally loud to Auden. He saw the corpse’s feet twitch inside the bag.

The last thought he had before he fled the room stripping off his gloves and cramming them into his lab coat pocket was that Team 22’s cadaver had been tagged with a blue cloth—which meant the family, if there was any family, didn’t want the remains. Instead, when the first year medical students were finished with it, the body would go into a common grave.

Auden sat at one of the heavy wooden reading tables in Cushing Whitney, one hand resting on the opened pages of the nineteenth century facsimile text before him, absently mulling over which disease or condition might hold the key he so desperately needed now. Cholera? Tuberculosis—known as consumption for hundreds of years prior to the twentieth century? Glanders? Leprosy? No, none of them had the right feel; he had no sense of that click he experienced that was part frisson, part lightning-shot inspiration that told him he was dead on. But there had to be something that would help him understand the seemingly spontaneous resurrection of the dead, because he was certain it wasn’t a new phenomenon.

He looked past the shaded table lamp, his gaze wandering from the tall arched windows that framed pelting snow, the elegant mahogany paneling, the balcony with its tiered ranks of books, to the canopy-shaped ceiling two stories overhead.

After he’d fled the lab last night leaving Sheri Trent bleeding he’d gone back to his tiny apartment in North Haven, snorted two thick lines of meth, then decided what he really needed was sleep. He rummaged the medicine cabinet and came up with three Percocet—the remains of a battle with an aching molar last summer.

He stayed away from the lab all day, but he’d come to the medical library after darkfall to try and puzzle his way through what precisely had happened to the cadaver inked with identification number C 390160 and what might happen to Sheri Trent.

He’d pored over incunabula, drawings, and historic pamphlets; he’d downloaded digital images and manuscripts. After three frustrating hours and two more lines of meth he snuffled quietly and surreptitiously in the maze of stacks, it occurred to him to hunt through the library’s journal resources.

Journals, he knew, could often be highly personal documents . . .

Auden scavenged both printed and online materials for a long time; the library would be closing soon, but he wasn’t overly worried—even if Yale had increased security since that kid at NYU suicided the previous November when he clambered up and over Plexiglas shields and plummeted ten stories to the floor of the atrium.

All the grinds had ways and means to access the lab or the library after hours and to hide out from patrolling guards.

It was getting on for 1:00 a.m.—nearly twenty-four hours since the Sheri Trent disaster—and he was about to give up. He toked vapor from a black, electronic cigarette, and the thought crossed his mind that it was ironic that the library addition had been built in the classic Y-shape of an autopsy incision.

Auden fingered the thin leaves of the journal (not an original, but a bound reproduction, he thought) written by a nineteenth century medical student named John Sykes. Glancing at the neatly lettered pages, it occurred to him that the whole thing might be a fabrication . . . dissection humor concocted to amuse fraternity brothers during long winter nights. On the other hand, as he thumbed and scanned and read—not passively, but with verve—his own excitement grew.

Maybe the nicotine jolted the precise synapses he needed to make the mental connections, or maybe it was the result of his hours-long research, or pure dumb luck on a snowy March night; maybe Sykes’ journal
was
nothing more than a series of monstrous notations by a man hoping to write a harrowing novel someday.

Whatever it was, it didn’t matter; because Auden Strothers realized he’d just found exactly what he needed.

February 26th, 1873

Until tonight I thought I was inured to providing the college with medical specimens. . . . I’d even overcome the resentment I felt about being a “scholarship boy.” The sons of Dunham, Wister, Parkerton—those giants of commerce and industry—aren’t expected to grub in dirt or hacksaw through metal and marble to produce cadavers the future doctors desperately need to perfect skills they’ll use when they treat their patients. Strictly speaking it’s not illegal; the law looks the other way in hopes that one of us, or our counterparts here or across the pond, or in Europe will save his life down the line. Books are nothing to bodies.

Each time we go out, we meet by pre-arrangement in front of the lecture hall and shuffle our feet in nervous anticipation and blow on our hands to ward off the chill while Dr. Perry stands on the steps of the lecture hall and gives a little pep talk—part lecture, part plea, part innuendo. “Men,” he says, “our duty—unpleasant as it may be—is of the utmost importance. Never forget that for an instant.”

Twice the professor slipped up during his standard speech; once last autumn he accidentally inserted the phrase “of gravest importance,” and a second time, around the Christmas holidays when brandy-toddies and rum-shrub were abundant, he made reference to “the task that lies ahead.” Only a second year student we call “Cruncher” laughed out loud—he was overly familiar with digging down over the head and yanking out a corpse cranium-first.

But tonight’s task was supposed to be simpler. After all, the ground is still frozen hard in New England, so we were going to nearby Blue Haven to raid a “receiving vault,” where they stack up the dead until the spring thaw permits gravediggers to shovel deeply into the thin stony soil.

There were just four of us and—
quelle luxe
—Dr. Perry brought along his own Miller landau for us to ride in and collect the bodies we’d carry back, instead of sending us off to the dark, wide-scattered cemeteries in groups of two and three.

I was glad for once that more of my fellow resurrection men had not shown up. It’s only now that I’m writing these pages that I wonder if they knew what was afoot or if their intuition—or some yet unknown, unmapped sense, or even angel guardians—warned them.

We were seated inside the coach; Perry was upfront alongside his driver. Cruncher sat facing me. “Here, Sykes. You look like you could use a bolt.” He extended a flask, and more for the sake of politeness than anything else, I took a swig.

“Have another and pass it around.” He nodded toward Freddie O’Rourke and Tom Winterbourne who were both first year students and had only been on one or two other midnight raids. “There’s wild work ahead, laddies.”

Winterbourne looked uncomfortable and shifted in his seat.

“I’ve got armlets, you bet,” O’Rourke said, “and they’re vulcanized, to boot.”

Cruncher tilted his head back against the upholstery and laughed. “You’re going to need more than a couple of rubber sleeves to grope amongst this lot,” he said. “And more than those flimsy cotton butcher aprons Perry’s toted along.”

The carriage lights were swaying as the horses jigged along and Cruncher studied my face. “Sykes doesn’t know.”

“Sykes doesn’t know what,” I said.

“Liked it better when to work off your scholarship, you only had to wait tables or sweep out the lab or set out the gear for the rich boys, Sykes?”