Beyond the Pale (9 page)

Incident
. Grace was rapidly getting sick of that word. This hadn’t been just an
incident. Incidents
were things to be written up, filed away, and forgotten. But this had been
real
. She had seen inside the man’s chest. There had been no living, beating human heart there. Instead there had been only a metallic lump—she had touched it with her own hand. Yet somehow that thing had worked to pump blood through the man’s body. They had detected the pulse. If the story did make the tabloids, then the headlines would be exactly and terribly right. The man had a heart of iron.

She had run a hand through her hair, her words scathing. “What do you want me to do when the police ask me why their suspect died, Morty? Lie to them?”

Morty had said nothing, and had fidgeted with the collar of his shirt instead. It was clear from his expression this was exactly what he wanted.

She had stared at him in genuine amazement. “Do you actually enjoy being a worm, Morty?”

He had assumed a self-important air. “Whether I enjoy it or not isn’t important. It’s my job.”

Grace had taken that opportunity to accidentally step on his toes. While he clutched his foot she had made her escape. And she had told Officer Erwin everything, just as it had happened. It seemed impossible, even absurd, but she knew what she had seen. While some people could deny the truth
in order to protect their small minds from anything that might expand them beyond the comfortable and ordinary, Grace was not one of those people.

Nor, she suspected, was Officer Erwin. He asked her several more questions, and while he raised his eyebrows more than once at her answers, he did not express any doubt that she was telling the truth. He shut his notepad and slipped the pen into a pocket.

“Thanks for your help, Dr. Beckett.” He fell silent and gazed into space. Finally he turned his eyes back toward her, his words quiet. “We think we have it all figured out. But we don’t, do we? We’re not even close.”

A shiver coursed up Grace’s spine. She had no answer for that.

Erwin stood. “I’m going to talk to the nurses who assisted you, Dr. Beckett. If you don’t mind, that is.”

Grace thought of Morty Underwood’s puffy, anxious face. “Be my guest.” She lifted the mug. “And thanks for the coffee.”

“I bet it’s cold by now.”

“I don’t mind.”

Officer Erwin grinned, then moved away across the ED’s admitting area. Grace sipped the cold coffee, and though she wouldn’t have thought it possible then, she found herself smiling. Then her smile faltered, the small hairs of her neck prickled, and she looked up.

After a moment she saw him. He stood some distance down one of the hallways that led from Admitting, watching her. Dark suit, dark hair. He leaned against a wall in a casual, elegant posture. How long had he been there? For a moment his deep-set eyes locked on hers. His gaze was searching, as if he wanted something of her.

Curious—or was it compelled?—Grace started to rise from her chair. Just then a gurney rattled by and blocked her view. A moment later the gurney passed through a doorway. Grace looked back down the hall. It was empty. The dark-haired man was gone. She sank back into her chair and clutched the coffee mug. Maybe the man hadn’t been watching her after all, maybe he had been waiting for someone else.

Maybe, but she doubted it.

Leon Arlington liked his job.

In fact, he liked it a lot. Leon always had been a night person, so he didn’t mind the late hours. And with its thick cement walls, the place was nice and quiet, which made it good for thinking. Leon liked thinking, too. He thought about lots of things while he worked down in the cool silence of the morgue. Things like, how long it would take to walk to the moon, if you really could walk there? And what was the best kind of tree? And if he could drink just one drink for the rest of his life, would it be water or Mello Yello? Hoo boy, that was a good one. He still hadn’t figured that out yet.

But the biggest reason Leon liked his job was simple: Dead folk gave him no trouble. No trouble at all. He had worked plenty of other jobs where he had had to deal with living people. They were always wanting something different from what he gave them, or telling him how to do things he already knew, or acting like he was stupid just because he was slow and quiet and didn’t easily get mad. Too often in this world people mistook fast for smart, loud for important, and angry for righteous. But Leon knew the difference. Besides, the customers here didn’t care what pace he did things at.

Whistling a tuneless song, Leon adjusted the plastic sheet that covered a cadaver lying in an open body drawer. He had to make certain there were no gaps in the wrapping. The morticians hated it when the corpses dried out. Leon wasn’t sure why. Maybe it made it harder to paint the makeup on them for the funeral. That was something else to think about. He paused to regard the old woman in the stainless-steel drawer. With her blue-gray skin and white hair it looked almost like she was frozen in a piece of ice rather than wrapped in clear plastic. It made him think of a story he had read as a child, a story about the queen of Snow. Only the queen had been cruel, and she had imprisoned a little kid in her palace of ice.

Leon slid the drawer shut and shivered. That was the one
real problem with this job—it was too damn cold down here sometimes. The chill radiated from the bank of drawers and soaked into the floor and walls, where it lingered like permafrost. The cold had never bothered Leon in the past, but this last year he had noticed it creeping deeper into his joints and bones, like something hungry and alive. Maybe one of these days he would have to get a different job. Something warmer.

He rubbed his lean hands together for heat and turned to see to his next customer. The naked corpse lay on its back on a stainless-steel table—white male, late twenties, in good physical shape. Leon picked up a clipboard and checked his notes. That’s right. This was the John Doe the police had shot before bringing in. They had cracked this one’s chest open, but the wound was neatly closed up now. Leon recognized the precise stitches that bound together the two raw edges of flesh. Even when they were dead, she always took care in what she did to them. This had been Grace Beckett’s patient.

Leon grabbed a pen and made notes concerning the corpse’s condition: height, weight, appearance, the locations of the two bullet entry wounds. He turned the body over, then noticed a small tattoo on the underside of the John Doe’s forearm. He bent closer. No, it wasn’t a tattoo, but a brand. The puckered scar tissue formed a symbol:

It wasn’t anything Leon recognized, although it did make him think of some sort of religious sign. If it
was
from a religion, then it had to be a crazy one to brand its disciples like cattle. Leon shook his head at the sorry state of the world, then turned the corpse back over and scribbled some more on his clipboard. A moment later he halted and frowned.

“Now, I thought I already shut your peepers.”

The cadaver only gazed upward with unseeing eyes. Leon snapped on a fresh pair of latex gloves and closed the corpse’s eyelids. Staring was one impertinence he did not tolerate of dead people. He made a few last notes, then prepared the
cadaver for storage. Leon had it down to a system these days. Toe tag, plastic bag, then into the deep freeze.

“You were a healthy boy, now weren’t you?” he grunted as he wrangled the heavy corpse from table to drawer. Sometimes the bodies seemed to fight him in this, as if they did not want to be shut away in the dark, as if they wanted to hold on to the lighted world for a little while longer. Mostly, though, it was just rigor mortis and the slippery plastic that made it so hard. At last Leon succeeded. He leaned on the open drawer to catch his breath. Maybe he really was getting too old for this job. He supposed he could go work at his cousin Benny’s upholstery shop. It sure would be warmer, and he wouldn’t have to talk to customers if he didn’t want to, not if he stuck to the shop’s back room. Besides, Benny owed him a favor. He resolved to call his cousin in the morning, then started to slide the drawer shut.

The cadaver stared up at him through the clear plastic sheet.

Leon halted. “What the hell …?” he whispered. He was sure he had closed them this time. But the corpse’s dull eyes were wide-open. Leon shuddered, the damn chill again. He leaned over the drawer and bent down for a closer look, to be sure he wasn’t mistaken. His breath fogged on the plastic as he gazed into the dead man’s eyes.

A hand punched through the clear sheet, reached up from the drawer, and closed around Leon’s throat. Leon tried to struggle, tried to scream, but the grip on his throat was far too tight: He could not break it. Even as his mind fought to understand what was happening, his lungs started to burn for want of air. Bright pinpricks exploded in his brain like fireworks. Somehow he managed to look down at the cadaver. His gaze locked with that of the dead man in the drawer, and in those dull eyes he saw … evil. It was a malevolence so vast, so deep, that suddenly he knew it was ancient beyond all reckoning. In that second, Leon Arlington understood everything. A darkness was coming. His very last thought was of how cold he felt, how awfully cold. Then, with terrible strength, the dead fingers tightened around his throat.

The sound of snapping bones echoed off the hard tiles.

Grace drained the last of the coffee, then stared at the bottom of her empty mug. Despite the sense of disconnection she had felt earlier that day, she thought maybe she could return to her apartment after all. Maybe she could curl up with a blanket on her futon and fall asleep to the drone of late-night TV, and when she woke in the morning, things wouldn’t seem so strange, so alien, and so like she didn’t belong.

Grace rose and headed for the break room to rinse out the coffee mug. Along the way she nodded to Officer Erwin. He stood at one of the nurses’ stations and talked with the intern who had assisted Grace earlier. Erwin nodded in reply. Nearby, Morty Underwood looked on with a sour expression and fumbled as he tried to unwrap a roll of antacid tablets. Grace did not resist the small wave of satisfaction she felt as she continued past.

She was halfway across the admitting area when the elevator let out a chime. Afterward, she was never quite certain what made her pause and turn to stare as the elevator doors slid open. Maybe it was that, in the back of her mind, the chime sounded almost like a death knell. She watched transfixed as the doors rolled to either side, like an opening eye turned on its side. A figure stood inside the elevator, silhouetted by fluorescent light. Grace blinked against the sterile glare. The sounds of the ED receded into the distance, yet her pulse throbbed in her ears, mixed with the thrum of a hundred other heartbeats, as if the very air had become a stethoscope transmitting the life and sudden fear of all those around her. The figure stepped out of the elevator.

It was him. The man she had pronounced dead three hours ago. He was naked, his skin mushroom pale. Black blood oozed between the stitches that bound the wound in his chest. His eyes stared forward with dead intensity. Then, with mindless deliberation, the man with the iron heart walked forward, his bare feet slapping against the tile floor.

Sound rushed back into the ED. Screams sliced the air in
all directions as people scrambled to get out of the dead man’s way. One EMT was too slow. The dead man thrust out a hand, and the EMT was hurled to one side. He slid a dozen feet along the floor before he struck a bank of chairs. He twitched but did not get up. Morty Underwood stood only a few feet from the crumpled form of the EMT, but the Chief Resident did not even glance at the fallen man. Fear twisted his mealy face. He tossed aside a handful of papers in a multicolored flurry and turned to flee the admitting area. The dead man walked on, headed for the main entrance of the ED. Grace backed up against a wall. She knew she should run, but it was a dull knowledge, and could not connect with the nerves and muscles of her limbs. The coffee mug slipped from numb fingers and shattered against the floor with a sound like breaking bones.

A dark blue blur moved past her. Erwin. The police officer approached the dead man, one hand held out before him while the other reached for the gun at his hip.

“Just stop right there—” Erwin began.

He never got any further. The corpse shot out a hand, contacted Erwin’s forehead, and thrust the officer backward with brutal force. Erwin’s skull struck the wall an arm’s length away from Grace. There was a sharp noise, like a firecracker exploding. Then, as if all his bones had turned to jelly, Erwin slid to the floor. His head left a trail of gore on the green paint.

The walking corpse did not pause. Staring forward with hideous calm, he continued toward the automatic doors and passed within five steps of Grace. A paralyzing odor rose from his body: the foul reek of congealed blood and the sweet taint of decay.

It was the smell of death.

The admitting area was virtually empty now. Most had fled, although a few people peered out of side corridors in dread fascination. The EMT had crawled away. Only Grace and the fallen officer did not move. Then, along with the damp
flop-flop
of the dead man’s feet, another sound drifted on the stifling air: a metallic creak accompanied by a fearful muttering. Grace cast her gaze over the room in search of the sound’s source.