Jenny and Bryce looked at her expectantly.
“First,” the girl said, bending forward on her chair, “you've got to accept that all the people whore missing are really dead. And they are. Dead. No question about that.”
“But there is some question about that, honey,” he said.
“They're dead,” Lisa said softly, “I know it. So do you.” Her vivid green eyes were almost feverish. “It took them, and it ate them.”
Jenny recalled Lisa's response last night, at the substation, after Bryce had told them about hearing tortured screams on the phone, when it had been in control of the line. Lisa had said, Maybe it spun a web somewhere, down in a dark place, in a cellar or a cave, and maybe it tied all the missing people into its web, sealed them up in cocoons, alive. Maybe it's just saving them until it gets hungry again.
Last night, everyone had stared at the girl, wanting to laugh, but realizing there could be a crazy sort of truth to what she said. Not necessarily a web or cocoons or a giant spider. But something. None of them had wanted to admit it, but the possibility was there. The unknown. The unknown thing. The unknown thing that ate people.
And now Lisa returned to the same theme. “It ate them.”
“But how does that explain the jewelry?” Bryce asked.
“Well,” Lisa said, “after it ate the people, maybe it… maybe it just spit out all that jewelry… the same way you would spit out cherry pits.”
Dr. Sara Yamaguchi walked into the Hilltop Inn, paused to answer a question from one of the guards at the front door, and came across the lobby toward Jenny and Bryce. She was still dressed in her decontamination suit, but she was no longer wearing the helmet, the tank of compressed air, or the waste recycling unit. She was carrying some folded clothes and a thick sheaf of pale green papers.
Jenny and Bryce rose to meet her, and Jenny said, “Doctor, has the quarantine been lifted already?”
“Already? Seems like I've been trapped inside this suit for years.” Dr. Yamaguchi's voice was different from what it had sounded like through the squawk box. It was fragile and sweet. Her voice was even more diminutive than she was. “It feels good to breathe air again.”
“You've run bacteria cultures, haven't you?” Jenny asked.
“Started-to.”
“Well, then… doesn't it take twenty-four to forty-eight hours to get results?”
“Yes. But we've decided it's pointless to wait for the cultures. We're not going to grow any bacteria on them — neither benign bacteria nor otherwise.”
Neither benign bacteria nor otherwise. That peculiar statement intrigued Jenny, but before she could ask about it, the geneticist said:
“Besides, Meddy told us it was safe.”
“Meddy?”
“That's shorthand for Medanacomp,” Dr. Yamaguchi said. “Which is itself short for Medical Analysis and Computation Systems. Our computer. After Meddy assimilated all the data from the autopsies and tests, she gave us a probability figure for biological causation. Meddy says there's a zero point zero chance that a biological agent is involved here.”
“And you trust a computer's analysis enough to breathe air,” Bryce said, clearly surprised.
“In over eight hundred trial runs, Meddy's never been wrong.”
“But this isn't just a trial run,” Jenny said.
“Yes. But after what we found in the autopsies and in all pathology tests…” The geneticist shrugged and handed the sheaf of green papers to Jenny. “Here. It's all in the consults. General Copperfield thought you'd like to see them. If you have any questions, I'll explain. Meanwhile, all the men are up at the field lab, changing out of their decon suits, and I'm itching to do the same. And I do mean itching.” She smiled and scratched her neck. Her gloved fingers left faint red marks on her porcelain-smooth skin. “Is there someway I could wash?”
Jenny said, “We've got soap, towels, and a washbasin set up in one corner of the kitchen. It doesn't offer much privacy, but we're willing to sacrifice a little privacy rather than be alone.”
Dr. Yamaguchi nodded. “Understandable. How do I get to this washbasin?”
Lisa jumped up from her chair, casting aside the crossword puzzle. “I'll show you. And I'll make sure the guys whore working in the kitchen keep their backs turned and their eyes to themselves.”
The pale green papers were computer print-outs that had been cut into eleven-inch pages, numbered, and clipped together along the left-hand margin with plastic pressure binding.
With Bryce looking over her shoulder, Jenny leafed through the first section of the report, which was a computer transcription of Seth Goldstein's autopsy notes. Goldstein noted indications of possible suffocation, as well as even more evident signs of severe allergic reaction to an unidentified substance, but he could not fix a cause of death.
Then her attention came to rest on one of the first pathology tests. It was a light microscopy examination of unstained bacteria in a long series of hanging-drop preparations that had been contaminated by tissue and fluid samples from Gary Wechlas's body; darkfield illumination had been used to identify even the smallest microorganisms. They had been searching for bacteria that were still thriving in the cadaver. What they found was startling.
HANGING-DROP PREPARATIONS
AUTO SCAN — MEDANACOMP
EYE VERIFICATION — BETTENBY
FREQUENCY OF EYE VERIFICATION — 20&o OF
SAMPLES
SAMPLE1
ESCHERICHIA GENUS
FORMS PRESENT:
NO FORMS PRESENT NOTE: ABNORMAL DATA.
NOTE: IMPOSSIBLE VARIANT — NO ANIMATE E.
COLI IN BOWEL–CONTAMINATE SAMPLE.
CLOSTRIDIUM GENUS
FORMS PRESENT:
NO FORMS PRESENT NOTE: ABNORMAL DATA.
NOTE: ABNORMAL DATA
NOTE: IMPROBABLE VARIANT — NO ANIMATE C.
WELCHII IN BOWEL–CONTAMINATE SAMPLE.
PROTEUS GENUS
FORMS PRESENT:
NO FORMS PRESENT
NOTE: ABNORMAL DATA.
NOTE: IMPROBABLE VARIANT- NO ANIMATE P.
VULGARIS IN BOWEL–CONTAMINATE SAMPLE.
The print-out continued to list bacteria for which the computer and Dr. Bettenby had searched, all with the same results.
Jenny remembered what Dr. Yamapchi had said, the statement that she had wondered about and about which she had wanted to inquire: neither benign bacteria nor otherwise. And here was the data, every bit as abnormal as the computer said it was.
“Strange,” Jenny said.
Bryce said, “It doesn't mean a thing to me. Translation?”
“Well, you see, a cadaver is an excellent breeding ground for all sorts of bacteria — at least for the short run. This many hours after death, Gary Wechlas's corpse ought to be teeming with Clostridium welchii, which is associated with gas gangrene.”
“And it isn't?”
“They couldn't find even one lonely, living C. welchii in the water droplet that had been contaminated with bowel material. And that is precisely the sample that ought to be swimming with it. It should be teeming with Proteus vulgaris, too, which is a saprophytic bacterium.”
“Translation?” he asked patiently.
“Sorry. Saprophytic means it flourishes in dead or decaying matter.”