“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.