Plague of the Manitou Read online

  ‘I’m up to my ears here, Bernie.’

  ‘I know that. But it won’t take you more than five or ten minutes. And you should see him for yourself. He’s deceased, but to look at him, you’d think that he still has the Devil breathing down his neck.’

  TWO

  Bernie Fishman was waiting for her when she stepped out of the elevator on the second floor, the emergency department. Not only did he sound like a baritone, he also looked like a baritone, with a round face and double chin and a bald suntanned crown with a halo of wild black hair around it. His chest was deep, but his legs were short, and he walked very nimbly, as if he were strutting across the stage at La Scala.

  ‘Anna,’ he greeted her. ‘How are you, beautiful lady? I haven’t seen you for ever.’

  ‘You saw me last Wednesday, Bernie, at the Stroke Network fund-raiser. You bought me a glass of Prosecco.’

  ‘Yes, feh! But it was much too crowded. We couldn’t talk together tête-à-tête.’

  ‘Bernie, your tête is at least six inches lower than my tête. We can never talk tête-à-tête.’

  ‘God, you’re so cruel to me.’

  They walked along the corridor to the emergency surgery theaters. Bernie pushed open the door of Recovery Room Three and said, ‘Here’s our boy.’

  In the center of the room stood a gurney covered with a pale-green sheet. The door swung shut behind them, and when it did the room was utterly silent, smelling faintly of disinfectant and cinnamon, like stale incense. Bernie went over to the cupboards on the left-hand side and handed Anna a mask.

  ‘The patient’s name is John Patrick Bridges. He admitted himself to the ER at ten oh-five complaining of a blinding headache and nausea. He was sitting in the waiting room when without warning he started to shout and scream. He dropped on to the floor in a fit, frothing at the mouth, and then he started to hemorrhage.’

  ‘I saw him when they wheeled him past my lab,’ said Anna. ‘I just couldn’t believe those convulsions.’

  ‘Well, right. Even after he was anesthetized, we had to strap him to the operating table to immobilize him, and that took three of us.’

  ‘What about the bleeding?’

  ‘We tried to stop it, but it was coming from everywhere, like every blood vessel in his esophagus and his stomach had burst. He was losing blood faster than we could pump it into him, and in the end he was over three liters down and there was nothing we could do to save him. We’re going to carry out a full autopsy, of course, but I thought you’d be interested because he was showing symptoms of some infection. In particular, his body temperature was way up – his last anal reading before he passed away was forty point three degrees.’

  ‘Jesus. He was practically broiling himself alive.’

  Bernie circled around the gurney, took hold of the sheet and started to lift it. ‘Are you ready for this?’ he asked her.

  Anna shrugged. ‘I won’t know until I’ve seen it.’

  Bernie drew the sheet down as far as the man’s bare chest. It was obvious why he had told Anna that the man looked as if the Devil was still on his tail. His brown eyes were bulging and his whole face was contorted, with his mouth dragged so far downward that it gave him the appearance of a medieval gargoyle.

  Anna approached the gurney and looked at the man more closely. He was brown-haired, about thirty-five years old, with designer stubble from which all of the blood had not yet been cleaned.

  From the look of his upper body, he appeared to be reasonably fit, and he had a natural tan which was beginning to fade, as if he had been on vacation for the early part of the summer, but since then had been spending his days indoors.

  She pulled the sheet down further. The man had a slight paunch, which may have been the result of alcoholism, but it wasn’t the grossly swollen stomach that results from ascites, when fluid is retained in the abdomen because of a terminally damaged liver.

  ‘We gave him a preliminary once-over, after death,’ said Bernie. ‘There’s no external trauma, not even bruising.’

  ‘OK,’ said Anna. Even when she was examining the rest of his body, she couldn’t stop herself from repeatedly glancing back at his face. ‘I never saw anyone look like that, immediately post-death,’ she said. ‘All our muscles relax when we die, before rigor sets in. How can his face have possibly stayed so rigid?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Bernie. ‘That’s one of the reasons I wanted you to come take a look at him. Is there any disease which causes your facial muscles to lock up like that?’

  ‘Well, there’s Lyme disease, isn’t there? That can cause psychosis as well as rigidity, which could account for him looking so scared.’

  ‘Yes, but in Lyme disease the joints usually stiffen up, don’t they, almost like arthritis, so it’s unlikely that he would have been able to kick his legs and wave his arms around the way he was.’

  Anna stood looking at the man’s face for a long time. She had never come across anybody with such a frightened expression on their face, dead or alive. Most victims of violent killings that she had seen had nothing more on their faces than mild surprise, and people who died naturally usually looked politely bored, as if somebody were telling them a long and tedious anecdote but they didn’t have the heart to interrupt them.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t think it’s Lyme disease. But I’d like to take a few blood samples, if that’s OK, and maybe some urine and stool samples, too. What do we know about him?’

  ‘According to the ID we found in his wallet, he works for the city as a grants administrator. Well, he did. The police are informing his nearest and dearest even as we speak.’

  ‘Was he married? Single? In some kind of relationship? Where did he live?’

  ‘He had a gold ring on the third finger of his left hand, if that means anything. These days, who knows? He lived in Maplewood, which is a pretty respectable neighborhood, but then again, who can tell?’

  At that moment, the door to the recovery room opened and a gingery-haired young secretary poked her head around it. ‘Doctor Fishman? There’s a call for you. It’s Mrs Fishman. Something about your pool filter?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Bernie. ‘Sorry, Anna – I really have to take this. My pool guy, he’s such a schlepper.’ He bustled out and left Anna alone with the late John Patrick Bridges.

  Anna pulled out her cellphone and took six or seven photographs of his face from all angles, and then pulled the sheet down to his ankles and took some more pictures of his naked body.

  She checked her watch. As fascinating as this was, she needed to get back to her laboratory. She drew the sheet back up to cover the body, but as she was about to lower it over his face a soft voice whispered, ‘Save me.’

  Anna froze. She felt as if somebody were running an ice-cold fingertip all the way down her spine. She looked closely at the body’s face, and she could swear that those bulging brown eyes were staring at her now, instead of the ceiling. The mouth was still dragged downward and there was no sign that his facial muscles had relaxed, and yet she was sure she could see something more than terror in his expression.

  He looked as if he were appealing to her to save him from whatever it was that was frightening him so much. I’m really, really scared. Save me.

  Anna slowly stood up straight, although she folded the sheet back so that it didn’t drop over the body’s face.

  ‘Save me,’ the voice repeated. She couldn’t see the body’s lips move, but there was no doubt in her mind now that his eyes had turned toward her. ‘Get it out of me. Save me.’

  She didn’t know whether to answer or not. John Patrick Bridges was dead, or at least he was supposed to be dead. If he had lost as much blood as Bernie Fishman had said he had, then he must be dead. If a human being lost only two-and-a-quarter liters of blood out of a total of five liters, without an immediate transfusion they would die.

  As unnerved as she was, Anna thought: If by some miracle this man is still alive, then he’s going to need emergency treatment
, and fast.

  Keeping her eyes fixed on his, she reached out and placed her index finger and third finger against the carotid artery in his neck. Nothing. He had already lost most of his body heat, and there was no pulse at all.

  Next, she lifted his arm and felt his wrist. Again, there was nothing.

  ‘You’re dead,’ she said, out loud. The recovery room was so silent that her own voice made her look around, as if the words had been spoken by a ventriloquist who was standing close behind her.

  At that moment, Bernie Fishman pushed his way in through the door, shaking his head. ‘What a klutz! He burned out the goddamned pump, and now it’s going to cost me six hundred bucks to replace it!’ He stopped, and saw the expression on Anna’s face, and said, ‘What? What’s happened? You look like you just saw a dybbuk!’

  Anna hesitated for a moment. It was more than likely that she’d imagined John Patrick Bridges speaking to her. She was very tired and very stressed, after all. She had slept only two-and-a-half hours last night before coming back to the hospital early to carry out more tests on the Meramac School virus.

  ‘It’s nothing.’ But then she said, ‘Look at his eyes, Bernie.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The deceased. Look at his eyes.’

  Bernie went across and peered at the body intently. ‘I don’t get it,’ he said. ‘What about his eyes?’

  ‘Before, he was looking straight up at the ceiling. Now he’s looking over here, toward me.’

  ‘He’s dead, Anna. Maybe his muscle links are starting to tighten. Watch!’ Bernie waved his hand in front of the body’s face, but John Patrick Bridges didn’t blink. ‘He’s dead, Anna. He’s nifter. He’s gone off to join el coro invisible.’

  Anna hesitated for a long moment, and then she said, ‘Bernie, he spoke to me.’

  Long silence. Above his surgical mask, Bernie’s eyes roamed around the room as if he had heard a blowfly buzzing around and was trying to see where it was.

  ‘He spoke to you.’

  ‘I’m sure I didn’t imagine it. It was only a whisper, but I’m sure he said, “Save me,” and then he said, “Get it out of me.” And then he said, “Save me,” again.’

  ‘He’s dead, Anna. He’s kaput. You’ve been working too hard, that’s all.’

  ‘Bernie—’

  ‘He’s dead, Anna. Dead men don’t speak. Sometimes they belch, for sure. Sometimes they break wind. But speak – never. They never so much as whisper.’

  ‘Yes, well, I guess you’re probably right. I should get back to my lab. Jim Waso is screaming for results.’

  Bernie covered the body’s face with the sheet, and then he went over to open the recovery room door. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ll buy you a coffee before you go back. You look like you could use a break.’

  They sat in the hospital commissary by the window. Outside, there was a small brick-paved courtyard with bay trees in tubs, and if they craned their necks up to the sixth floor they could see a pentangle of bright blue sky, with streaky clouds in it. Anna realized that she hadn’t been out in daylight for almost a week now. She had gone to work in the dark and gone home in the dark. David had been away at a business convention in Chicago for the past three days, so there had been no incentive for her to finish early in the evenings, and she hadn’t been eating properly, only take-out salads at lunchtime and pizzas at night.

  She didn’t really feel like another coffee, but Bernie always cheered her up and she recognized that he was right: she did need a few minutes to relax and sort out her thoughts. She was constantly telling Epiphany not to get too stressed, and yet she always pushed herself right to the very limit. She could never get it out of her mind that whenever she was taking time off, relaxing, some mutant virus might be silently spreading across the city and scores of people might get sick, or die. In the course of her career she had probably saved tens of thousands of lives. Her most significant success had been to find a treatment for a highly aggressive virus which had caused over two hundred fatalities last spring in Indiana and parts of Illinois. The media had called it Scalping Disease because one of its effects had been to make the sufferers’ hair fall out and leave their heads raw, as if they had been scalped. After two months of painstaking research, Anna had isolated the virus and formulated a highly effective vaccine.

  In spite of everything that she had achieved up to date, she still didn’t believe that gave her any excuse to slacken. Even while she lay in bed asleep, viruses were changing and adapting and learning how to become more resistant to antivirals and antibiotics – a dark, heartless, nearly invisible army that never slept.

  ‘You remember Bill Kober?’ said Bernie, pouring four wraps of sugar into his cappuccino and noisily stirring it. ‘Well, of course you remember him. Talented – inspired, even, almost a genius, but seriously wacky. Do you know what he did when he left here?’

  ‘He went to India, didn’t he?’

  ‘That’s right. He carried out tests on the neurotoxins given off by chemical plants and how they affected the health of the local population. He wrote a report about it for the Journal of Medical Toxicology, and talk about damning.’

  ‘So what about him?’

  ‘Well – the Indian government went ape-shit when Bill reported that hundreds of kids were being poisoned by industrial pollution. They canceled his visa and told him to take a hike. So believe it or not, he went to Haiti after that, to find out if zombies were really true.’

  ‘You’re not trying to tell me that our nifter upstairs is a zombie?’

  Bernie said, ‘No, of course not. Absolutely the opposite. When Bill looked into all the so-called evidence of zombies, he found that the prevailing wisdom was that people could be put into a deathlike trance with a combination of tetrodotoxin – TTX – and datura.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve heard that.’

  ‘The thing is, Bill tested these drugs and found that this simply wouldn’t happen. As you know, TTX selectively affects the sodium channels in the nerve cell membranes and the two drugs between them can give the appearance of death. But either they kill you for real or else you gradually recover and return to your normal self – or nearly normal, anyhow, maybe a little jingly in the brainbox for a while. Let me put it this way – what you won’t do is to go shuffling around shopping malls looking for unsuspecting people to eat, and you won’t lie on a gurney after flatlining for fifteen minutes and say, “Save me.”’

  ‘All right,’ said Anna. ‘So you’re telling me that I simply imagined him talking to me, and that I need a rest?’

  ‘When was the last time you took a vacation?’

  ‘Two years ago. Yes, that’s right – we went to stay with David’s parents in Boise.’

  ‘You call that a vacation? Staying with anybody’s parents is a punishment. Staying with their parents in Boise – that’s much more than a punishment. That’s a penance. It would be more fun to flagellate yourself with razor-wire.’

  Anna took hold of Bernie’s hand across the Formica-topped table. ‘Bernie, if you weren’t twenty years older and six inches shorter than me, and if you weren’t married and I wasn’t already spoken for, I’d marry you tomorrow.’

  Bernie put on a mock-tragic face. ‘That’s just my luck. Born at the wrong fucking time, grew to the wrong fucking height. Todah elohim.’

  ‘I’ll send Epiphany up to take some samples. Thanks for the coffee, Bernie – and, you know, just thanks.’

  THREE

  It was past eight p.m. when she eventually made it home. She parked her silver Toyota Prius in the parking structure and walked across the pedestrian bridge to the Old Post Office building where she and David shared a loft. As she opened the door, she heard thunder overhead. She hoped that it would rain tonight, to relieve some of the oppressive August heat.

  The loft was spacious and modern, with high ceilings and shiny oak floors covered with red-and-black Navajo rugs. Facing each other in the center of the living area were two large white leather couches wi
th a glass-topped coffee table in between them, on which a ceramic statuette of a harlequin was dancing next to neatly stacked copies of Architectural Digest. On the walls hung three large nudes by Linda LeKinff and a bright, simplistic landscape in primary colors by Eric Bodtker.

  She was surprised and disappointed to find that David wasn’t back yet. His convention had wrapped up last night with a final presentation and a celebratory banquet, and he had expected to be home by mid-afternoon at the latest. She had called him three times from the hospital, but every time his cellphone had been switched off, so she’d presumed that he was still in the air. She called him again, now, but his cell was still switched off.

  ‘Where are you?’ she said to his message service. ‘If you’ve found yourself a go-go girl, at least have the decency to call and tell me.’

  She went through to the bedroom, kicked off her shoes and sat down on the bed to tug off her skintight jeans and unbutton her blouse. Wrapping herself in her peach silk robe, she went back through to the kitchen area, opened the fridge and poured herself a glass of Zinfandel. She opened the door of the freezer and stood there with her eyes half-closed, enjoying the chill and trying to decide if she wanted a mozzarella pizza or not. In the end, she decided to wait until David came home. She was too exhausted to feel really hungry.

  She sat cross-legged on one of a pair of white leather couches and switched on The Ellen DeGeneres Show with the sound turned right down. She couldn’t stop thinking about John Patrick Bridges, the dead John Patrick Bridges, whispering, ‘Save me.’

  Was it conceivable that a dead person’s brain could give off a last faint telepathic message? If a person had been panicking enough before they died, could there still be a residual electrical charge left in their cerebral cortex that another, living, person could pick up? It was an interesting concept. If it were possible, then maybe a murder victim could tell somebody who was psychically sensitive who had killed them.