After Marcus and Gitsh finished rinsing themselves in the chlorine spray, Margaret opened the final gas-tight door and stepped into the autopsy room. At eight feet wide by twenty feet long, this was the largest area in the MargoMobile.
Gitsh pushed the trolley all the way to the room’s far end, where it locked in place at the front of an epoxy-coated sink. The two-foot-wide trolley left three feet of space on either side, plenty of room to work. He turned a knob at the foot of the trolley, raising the end one inch. The shallow angle ensured that any fluids would run down the ridges on the trolley’s sides and spill into the sink, which drained into the waste-treatment system.
“Okay, guys, let’s get connected,” Margaret said. Four curled yellow hoses hung from the ceiling. She reached up, pulled one down and handed it to Marcus. He connected the hose to the back of her helmet. She felt a quick hiss as pressurized air slid into her suit, making it puff up a little bit more. In her HUD the internal air-supply timer faded to a thin, ghostly illumination while the circular logo that marked an external oxygen supply glowed to life. The wireless communication icon also faded as the network connection light lit up.
“Let’s get him out of the bag,” Margaret said.
After connecting their own helmets, Gitsham and Marcus unzipped the outer body bag and pulled it off. Marcus put it in a red disposal chute marked with a bright orange biohazard logo. They repeated the process for the second bag and put the child’s body on the table.
Margaret couldn’t suppress a shudder. His Milwaukee Bucks shirt had slid up around his armpits. Dawsey’s kick had smashed at least eight of the boy’s ribs, caving them inward like so much broken pottery. The child’s spine was snapped on the right side of the eighth thoracic vertebra, bending him at nearly a ninety-degree angle to his right. A mask of pure rage had frozen on the boy’s face, a wide-eyed, teeth-bared snarl that broadcast absolute hate even in death. She had seen faces like that too many times. The faces of the infected.
“Gitsh, get a sample in the microscope right away—I want to see the level of decomposition—then prepare the injections. Marcus, bring me the swab-test prototype.”
“Yes ma’am,” Marcus said.
“Recorder on,” Margaret said. A green light flashed in the upper right-hand corner of her HUD, signaling that everything she said and saw was being recorded in the control room.
“I’m online, Margaret,” Clarence said, his voice in her earpiece. “I have the other bodies in the second trailer. Amos is checking out the baby, but he looks fine. Did you run the test prototype yet?”
“Hold tight, I’m doing it now.” She held out her hand and Marcus gave her a small white electronic device the size of two packs of cigarettes joined end to end. He then opened a thin foil packet and pulled out a four-inch plastic stick, the last half inch coated with damp fabric. She slid the fabric end along the boy’s gum line and against the inside of his cheek.
The triangles harvested sugars common in the human body and used them to make cellulose, a material found only in plants. The cellulose formed a construction material that allowed the triangles to grow into hatchlings. Her theory was that some of the cellulose would leak into the bloodstream and eventually permeate bodily fluids, including saliva.
The prototype had few controls. The primary feature was a row of three square lights near the top: orange, green and red. She slid the plastic swab into a matching slot in the handheld device, and the orange light flashed, indicating a test in progress. The next indicator would be the green light, showing no trace of cellulose, or the red if the material was present in concentrations greater than one might find in a random grass stain.
The light flashed red.
“It works,” Margaret said. “Clarence, the test works.”
“Fantastic,” he said. “I’ll let Murray know immediately. He can rush the testers into production. Great job, Margaret. That finally gives us what we need.”
“Thank you,” Margaret said. She had grown rather fond of Clarence’s voice in her ear as she worked. He stayed in the computer control room, managing any requests she had, listening in to her and Amos theorizing as they cut up infected bodies.
Gitsh tapped her on the shoulder. “The sample’s up on the screen, Margo.”
She turned to look at the large flat-panel monitor mounted on the wall. She hadn’t designed the trailer, but the monitor was her idea. Looking into microscopes was kind of annoying—routing them to a big plasma screen let everyone see what was going on.
The screen showed what she expected—the red, pink and white of highly magnified flesh and blood vessels, along with the gray of decomposing matter and the black of cells that were already long since destroyed by the apoptosis chain reaction. Only about 25 percent decomposed: the best sample she’d had yet. Even so, she didn’t have long.
“Okay, boys,” Margaret said, turning back to the table. “We need to work quickly.”
Anthony used scissors to cut away the boy’s yellow pajama bottoms and the T-shirt, leaving his bent body naked on the table.
“Caucasian male, approximately six years old,” Margaret said. “Severed spinal column, massive blunt-force trauma.”
Even before cutting into him, she could see that the boy’s internal organs were smashed to hell.
“One triangle on the stomach,” Margaret said. “Heavily damaged, lowest priority. One on the front upper-right thigh. Intact. Highest priority. Turn him over, please.”
The assistants flipped the little corpse. Now his broken body angled to Margaret’s left instead of to her right.
“One on the lower back, just above the eighth thoracic. Completely destroyed. Lowest priority. No other triangles visible on the body. Flip him back and let’s give him the injection series. Maximum dosage. I’ll take the right thigh.”
They gently put the corpse on its broken back again. Marcus laid out six large syringes, each with a long needle sheathed in hard plastic. Margaret carefully unsheathed the first syringe and went to work in the area around the triangle.
As soon as the triangles died, they caused a chain reaction of apoptosis. Apoptosis is a normal part of human health: sometimes cells outlive their usefulness and become a drag on the body, so they self-destruct. The triangles did something to that chemical code, however, turned it into a cascading event that dissolved all the tissue of an adult male in less than two days.
Margaret had tackled that problem in working to save Perry’s life. She’d performed immediate surgery on him to remove any trace of the dead triangles rotting inside his body. That hadn’t stopped the apoptosis, but it slowed it, giving her enough time to find a solution.
Apoptosis is driven by proteins called caspases, also known as the “executioner” proteins. Caspases exist in every cell in an inactive form, but when cells are damaged or old, the caspases activate and kill the cell. In a normal person, other proteins known as inhibitor of apoptosis proteins, or IAPs, shut down the process as soon as the intended cell dies. The triangles corrupted this normal process by neutralizing the IAPs’ suppressive abilities, allowing the caspases to spread the deadly chain reaction to surrounding cells, which then released their caspases, which then destroyed more cells, and so on.