The Rhesus Chart (16 page)

I glance at my watch again. Elapsed time: twenty-eight minutes since I made the call.
Good.
“Andy? We’d better blow.”

“Ten-four, good buddy.” And on that ironic note, we leave the hornets’ nest I’ve just kicked over.

 • • • 

ELAPSED TIME: ONE HOUR AND FORTY-SIX MINUTES.

(I am keeping a written note of this in a little black book app on my current work smartphone, a bulky Android device from a dubious South Korean chaebol that oozes more raw processing power than the Laundry’s entire supercomputing dinosaur pen at the time I was recruited. The phablet lives in a pocket of my ScotteVest fleece, a garment consisting almost entirely of pockets held together with cable ducts that is marketed at geeks who have mistaken utility for elegance. In my case, I wear it because the other pockets are full of useful stuff, ranging from a couple of Hands of Glory (reprocessed from pigeon feet) to a battered digital camera (featuring some very dangerous firmware) and enough USB cables and rechargeable batteries to improvise a suicide belt if I’m feeling desperate. What the well-dressed agent is wearing about London today: a bulging fleece, faded Google tee shirt, combat pants, and Dutch army-surplus paratroop boots, with added occult firepower.)

In medical academia-land I am a lot more conspicuous than I was the day before, even accompanied by Andy (in his regular office weeds). I’m too old to pass for a student, too louche to be staff. However, in addition to warding off the zombies on the night shift, a raised Laundry warrant card can make eyes glaze over at twenty meters: non-compliance is not an issue I have to deal with. I march up to the reception desk in the Prion Research Unit and the secretary boggles in my general direction until I say, “I’m here to see Dr. Wills,” at which point he points along a corridor I recognize and I head down it at a brisk march.

Dr. Wills is waiting for me, tapping her fingers; she does a double take at Andy. “He’s with me,” I announce. “Andy, this is Dr. Wills. Andy is here to liaise with my backup team.”

Andy nods agreeably. “Where have we gotten to?” he asks.

“Bodies—” Dr. Wills sniffs. I get the feeling that she’s looking for someone to blame for this, and I’m top of her list. Bringer of bad news, and so on. “There was another last night. She’s downstairs, awaiting transfer to the mortuary in Poplar.”

“Oh dear.” Dead bodies, one of my favorite things. (Not.) “You’ve had a chance to look at her?”

“Yes.” Her fingers whiten around the pen she’s twirling. “I thought you might want to see what I found.”

“Okay, let’s go—what?”

“Sit
down
, Mr. Howard. We haven’t confirmed this is K syndrome yet, rather than a new,
highly
contagious,
rapidly
progressive, and
extremely
fatal prion disease, so until we’ve done that, nobody’s going anywhere near the cadaver without full protective gear. In the meantime, I’ve got her records.” She eyeballs Andy. “Yes? You have something to contribute?”

“The other cases,” Andy says diffidently. “They all worked for the same agency. Have you gotten anywhere with their actual work assignments? Other information that might help us narrow them down more accurately?”

“Yes.” She shoves her monitor round towards us. “Move around here so you can both see this comfortably.” Then she goes into full-on professorial mode. I’m used to it from living with Mo, but it’s still impressive. “We have thirteen cases so far, all with underlying similarities. At autopsy, the first eleven brains were found to have the characteristic spongiform lesions of K syndrome or CJD. The two most recent cases were not subjected to post-mortem dissection but we used an MRI scanner to non-invasively obtain soft tissue images and they’re consistent with the earlier ones. They test negative for nvCJD and other known prion diseases—classic CJD included. There is no family history. They were all flagged as dead on arrival, which implies extremely rapid progression, but ended up in different hospitals because most of them died at home. Upon doing some further research I determined that six of them had reported symptoms in the three days leading up to sudden death—ataxia, tremors, muscle weakness, one case that was misdiagnosed as migraine due to visual disturbances and nausea.

“You asked about geographical distribution. Here’s where it gets odd. The agency they work for handles janitorial and cleaning arrangements for some of the large corporate offices in and around Canary Wharf. I can’t confirm that they all covered the same building yet, but it’s a striking lead—enough to raise suspicions in its own right. There were a couple of outliers. One is—was—a medical phlebotomist at UCH, which has got us extremely spooked, to be perfectly honest. And one worked for a wholesale meat supplier at Smithfield Market.”

She pauses and clears her throat. “Then there was the other thing.”

“The other”—Andy takes the bait—“thing?”

“All of them had recent needle-stick signs. But none of them have any of the usual indications of drug abuse, or recently gave blood samples. You’ll want to check their police records, but they don’t look like addicts: they had recent injections around the median cubital, but no regular tracks or collapsed veins.”

What I
don’t
say is, “Holy phlebotomists, Batman!” (Because that would be in excruciatingly bad taste, given that a baker’s dozen families are mourning their dead right now.) But I’m shaken, and when I get shaken, my irreverent sense of humor comes out to play, and so I think it in the privacy of my own skull. Then I say the second thing that comes into my mind. “Is there any chance this could be some new street drug?”

“What kind?” Dr. Wills looks at me as if I’m a particularly slow-on-the-uptake student. “One shot and you’re a downer? Mr. Howard, with all due respect, addicts don’t
start
by injecting the hard stuff. They usually have a prior history, and work their way up to the overdose over a period of years. What we’re looking at here is a cluster of relatively well-adjusted members of society, all of them working, albeit in low-paid jobs, all in decent health—well, the oldest was fifty-nine and had osteoarthritis that was going to cause trouble if she didn’t get on the waiting list for a tin hip—but taken as a group, they’re almost the exact opposite of the picture we’d get if this cluster was due to contaminated street drugs.”

Andy scribbles something on his notepad—the old-fashioned paper variety. “So. I assume you think the needle-signs are significant?” She nods emphatically. “Therefore we’re now looking for where they got them. That implies it’s blood-born? And one of the victims was a medical phlebotomist?”

“Yes, from right here at this hospital. She phoned in sick one evening last month—she was on out-of-hours cover—and according to her husband she took to her sick bed. Self-diagnosed whatever it was as the flu: shivering, incoherent, not running an obvious fever . . . he went to work the next day, came back that evening to find her dead. That gives us a window from initial symptoms to mortality of around 36-48 hours, which is a bit worrying.”

Worrying?
From what I know of K syndrome it’s unheard of for it to progress that fast. So I find myself reluctantly asking a question I’ve been dreading. “Can I have a look at the body that came in last night?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t see what you could achieve, Mr. Howard—”

I glance at Andy. He nods, imperceptibly: best if she hears this from someone else. “Mr. Howard is a necromancer, Dr. Wills.”

“A
what
?”

I sigh. “Ritual magician. Specialty”—
I’m the new trainee Eater of Souls
—“raising the dead as zombies, among other things. Actually I almost certainly
can’t
raise a body that’s been subjected to a post-mortem dissection, but I might be able to learn something from it.” It’s the lose-my-lunch approach to finding out what somebody died of. Some people aspire to necromancy; others have necromancy thrust upon them; me, I just didn’t scream and run away fast enough when necromancy came and kicked down my office door. I’m slow that way. I rub the sore patch on my upper right arm and frown. “I need to be in physical proximity to the body before I can tell.”

“That’s—you’ll pardon me for saying this, Mr. Howard—somewhat problematic. As I said, until we can definitely rule out a highly contagious, rapidly lethal prion infection—yes, I agree it’s unlikely, but you never know—we’re keeping them in sealed biohazard storage. So you can’t—”

“I don’t need to touch it. I just have to get within a couple of meters. Even on the other side of a closed door. Can you manage that?”

“Oh, that’s different. Let me make a call.” She picks up her desk phone without waiting for a reply.

I’m used to seeing her odd combination of relief and queasy disgust from other people. Coughing to necromantic tendencies isn’t quite as bad as admitting you’re sexually attracted to six year olds, but it’s not far removed (at least among people who are aware that it’s not just a bad cliché). It’s the equivalent of admitting at a swingers’ party that you’ve got leprosy
and
AIDS, but they’re both under control, honest. People get seven shades of funny around death and corpses, in my experience: death is one of the three big loci for taboos, along with sex and food.

“All right, I can take you down to the mortuary. You can look, but you can’t touch—you’ll have to do whatever it is that you do through a freezer door.”

 • • • 

ANDY AND I FOLLOW DR. WILLS OUT OF HER OFFICE AND INTO
the maze that is UCLH.
*
It takes us about twenty minutes to wend our way between buildings, up floors, over connecting walkways, and down elevators until we reach the mortuary. Dr. Wills signs us in: not, I am sorry to say, without Andy and me having to make use of our warrant cards. It’s a relatively small unit: this isn’t a hospice. Bodies of people who died in hospital are generally only stored here until they can be sent to the district mortuary for post-mortem examination and subsequent transfer to the undertakers. There’s a lobby area, then a room, one wall of which is given over to refrigerated storage, and another room with a pair of dissection tables. Dr. Wills has a brief conversation with the mortuary attendant, who lets us into the storage room and leads us to one of the drawers. “This is the one,” Dr. Wills informs us. “Her name was Sara. Sara Siad. She was fifty-nine.” Her hand lingers on the drawer handle, then she lets it drop. “I can’t let you get any closer, I’m afraid. She’s double-bagged and not to be opened without contagious diseases precautions.”

I take a deep breath. “Are her organs all present?”

“Yes.” She frowns. “What are you going to—”

I breathe out, close my outer eyes, and, simultaneously, open the inner one—the one I first became aware of during a traumatic turn of events at Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey, where a gang of evil muppets tried to sacrifice me in order to bind the Eater of Souls, using my body as a container. (They hadn’t realized that the said Eater of Souls was already incarnated in the shape of Angleton and working for the Laundry, thank you very much.) The trouble with botched summoning rituals is that you can never be sure what’ll happen if there’s a dangling pointer or a memory leak. In this case, they succeeded in summoning me back into my own body and binding me there, but not without side effects. In particular, I have inherited some of the aforementioned Eater of Souls’ abilities. Which is a very mixed blessing, to say the least.

In the red-tinged darkness behind my eyelids, something stirs.

I look around. I can sense bodies around me, breathing, hearts pumping, minds churning. Two stand in close proximity. One of them is warded by a standard-issue self-protection device—that’ll be Andy—the unwarded one is Dr. Wills. The third, on the far side of a partition wall, must be the mortuary attendant. Far more interesting to me are the other bodies, stacked floor to ceiling in a neat grid against one wall. They’re not sleeping. They’re
empty
, indeed, more than empty: they’re filled with a peculiar kind of vacuum that seems to tug at my attention. There are no feeders of the night nearby, for which I am deeply grateful; nor am I about to call them. None of these bodies are suddenly going to fill with un-life and start banging at the doors, desperate to fill their ravening maws with the taint of humanity. There are no souls present save those of the living. All is as it should be.

But.
But.

I turn my attention to the body Dr. Wills identified, and peer at it, and realize that there’s something wrong here. I’m not sure what there is about it that feels abnormal at first, so I compare it with the husks in the drawers to either side of it.
Ah. That.
The adjacent bodies . . . they’d make good hosts. But this one might as well be made of ash and cardboard. It’s not that it’s unappetizing to that part of me that partakes of the Eater’s nature, so much as that it’s inedible: the necromantic equivalent of shit, fully digested matter containing no residual nutrients. Something or someone got here first.

I open my eyes. “This bod—sorry, Sara Siad’s body. Was this one of the ones you examined by MRI?”

Dr. Wills nods. “We’re not risking a dissection on possible prion sources these days, but we have an older scanner that we use for teaching and lab work on non-living samples.”

“Right.”

“What did you notice?” Andy asks.

“She’s been eaten.” I shiver, and not from the cold of the refrigeration system. “Her brain is so thoroughly chewed-up that you couldn’t make a zombie out of her: if I summoned a feeder here and now I couldn’t convince it to take up occupation. It’s as if she’s already been consumed. I’d guess the brain stem is mostly intact, but the cerebral cortex is like old lace.”

Dr. Wills’s expression is peculiarly intent. “K syndrome never gets that far,” she says. “The patients usually die first. Whatever happened—you’re right about her brain structure—happened very fast, and very thoroughly.”

“Well then. We have needle-stick injuries. And we have something that eats neural networks. Presumably a relative of the feeders in the night, but different: more voracious, faster. If they haven’t been injecting some crazy new street drug—”