“It’s not the cone we’re—I’m—focused on.” Mendenhall found a laser pen on Claiborne’s desk. She drew the bead of light across both diagonals, slashing the brainstems. Then she aimed it at the scans of the frontal lobes, Verdasco’s lung, Dozier’s liver, the vague clouds in each.
“These show incipient hemorrhaging in peripheral organs. Major organs.” She let Mullich see, just see.
“You think that,” Mullich pointed toward the video, “happened to them?” He held his hand toward the bodies.
“Not exactly.” Mendenhall led him to Verdasco. Claiborne stepped aside, one eyebrow raised as he looked at her. Silva pressed Verdasco’s chin, extending the throat.
“The body reacts in known ways, according to preset nerve patterns. We develop these as we go through life. Kisses, caresses, slaps, pinpricks, falls, dives into water that violently strain our necks. Innocent, little things we never really register. Things that begin in utero.
“These bodies didn’t roil like that gel block. The nerve patterns just reacted as if they did, as if they would. As if they were shot through. The most vital and liquid organs anticipated hydrostatic shock, began to hemorrhage along the far nerve endings. The end of a whip. But without the whip.”
She lunged toward Mullich, her fingers flashing straight to his eyes. He drew back. Silva gasped.
“Like that,” said Mendenhall, keeping her hand raised, her fingers spiked before his eyes. “Actually, exactly that.”
She lowered her hand. “Your body registered that all over the place. You closed your eyes, obviously. But feel. Look.” She motioned toward Mullich’s hands which had balled into fists.
“And your heart,” she said as Mullich looked at his fists, opened them. “Well, maybe not your heart.” She motioned toward Silva.
“But hers, yes. And your toes, I bet.”
Mullich had gone slightly tiptoe. He lowered himself.
“That’s her theory,” said Claiborne. “We’re testing the tissue samples. We have lances from all areas of hemorrhage.”
“I’m right until they prove me wrong,” said Mendenhall.
She sensed Claiborne’s amusement.
“At least that’s how it should be,” she told Mullich. “But stupid me. I reversed everything, right from the start. I made that call. So they get to be right until they prove themselves wrong.”
19.
She hadn’t realized the dead were leaving. She didn’t know until she stood in the lower bay with Silva and Mullich, until after she had followed them past the turn to the morgue. After the turn her steps numbed, turned to dreams. Silva and Mullich were in full cover, including caps. Mendenhall suddenly felt naked. She pulled up her mask, tried to disguise her ignorance. Silva didn’t seem to notice as she stood near the sealed slider, hands crossed.
Mullich did, watched Mendenhall adjust her mask, tighten her gloves.
The bodies were being turned over to Disease Control. Claiborne had shooed her and Mullich away, away with Silva. He remained with the bodies in the lab.
Mendenhall took her place in line by the exit, pretending.
Something clanged on the other side. Silva pressed the buzzer.
They heard the turning of the outside crank-handle. The steel slider lifted with a gasp, and the DC techs entered immediately, dressed in full gear, spacemen in Mendenhall’s dream. She couldn’t see their faces. There were four, one pointing orders, three heading back toward the lab to fetch the bodies from Claiborne. The suits slowed their movements. The leader handed Mendenhall a cap, which she put on immediately. She could tell by the straightness of his arm that there was nothing to say, no room for anything but the literal.
He could have been expecting her, forewarned.
The waiting truck, with its door rolled up and its ramp down, was white inside, a lab almost, with beds bunked along its side walls. Looming behind the truck, just beyond the entry light, a camouflaged jeep idled, its occupants hidden behind tinted windows.
The DC people returned to the bay with the bodies on gurneys.
The bodies were sealed in white bags. Mendenhall tried to identify them, found that she could. Dozier was the longest, Fleming the widest, Verdasco the thinnest. She recalled his cheekbones, how they reflected his hip points, paled the color of his skin.
Soon after they were up the ramp, the slider closed and she was alone again with Mullich, Silva, and three empty gurneys.
20.
When they returned to the lab they shed their masks and gloves. Mullich and Silva removed their caps. Mendenhall kept hers in place, wondering how her hair looked. Mullich appeared fresh from the barber. Silva’s black hair cascaded into form and then shone even more as she pulled it into a ponytail.
Who were these people? She calculated the hours of her current shift. She was due a shower.
High on the far wall of the lab hung four large screens showing the four bodies in 3-D grids, blueprints. Claiborne stood working the desktop that controlled the screens. Like his main desk, that table was also a standing one. She wished she had his posture. His shift was just as long as hers.
For a moment, the only real movement was the roiling display left on Mullich’s screen. When Mendenhall focused there, she saw that it had been changed. She moved to it, felt Mullich and Silva turn with her.
On screen, the gel-block ballistic experiment had been replaced by another loop. This one showed the very old and famous clip of the circus strongman taking a cannonball to his stomach. Over and over, in slow motion, the cannon fired point-blank into the man’s belly, the huge iron ball trampolining harmlessly away while the strongman stood his ground. Claiborne had muted the sound, but Mendenhall heard it anyway, the prolonged and hollowed groan. Mullich and Silva were kind enough not to chuckle, but Mendenhall felt their smiles behind her.
“Okay, fine,” she said. “But it shows the same thing, just from the polar opposite. And I bet the guy died from it. Eventually.” She paused the video at the point of impact, the ball buried in the man’s stomach, just missing his lower ribs. “It’s the fat that saves him.
And those big legs. But look, in this second he’s a bag of jelly with eyes and a mouth.” She pointed to the grotesque flap of his arms, the impossible angles of his elbows, the lifeless hands. “And there in the extremities you see the most damage being done.”
She felt the sting of tears, a mix of frustration and fatigue. She set the loop into motion again and sympathized with the strongman.
“Screw them,” she said. “Right, big fella? Screw them.”
She headed to the surgeons’ lounge to take a nap. She would wake up and this nightmare would be over. Thorpe’s quarantines would expire into mere advisory and high caution, controlled exits.
All the beds and chairs and couches in the surgeons’ lounge were taken. On one bed two nurses had doubled up, both snoring.
She considered waking them, claiming the space. But her heart rate was up.
Before she could leave the lounge, she felt a message ping. Two surgeons looked up from their magazines, one a cigar, the other a men’s health. At first Mendenhall thought to take it outside. But it was the magazines, their sheen. And the surgeons, with their legs crossed, their eyes going from the shallow pages to her, the disheveled ER fool who might mess with a personal communication to the outside. Her aunt started with the dog again.
My friend loves Cortez.
Give him.
That cold?
Mendenhall clenched against a sad shiver, a hurt that dropped along her left side. The surgeon with the cigar magazine appeared to notice, recrossed his legs, and pushed his pages flat and away.