Robin Cook - Coma

The anatomy hall had been dark. The inside of the freezer was lit by a single hundred-watt bulb from the rear of the compartment, casting horrid shadows on the ceiling and floor. Susan tried not to look directly at the grotesque bodies. She shivered from the cold and frantically tried to think. There were only a few moments. Her pulse was racing. She knew that D’Ambrosio would be coming into the freezer within minutes. She had to have a plan but she didn’t have much time.

Smiling, D’Ambrosio stepped back and kicked the locked door of the anatomy hall, but it held firm. He kicked out a pane of frosted glass, pulled out a few of the splintered pieces, and reached in, opening the door. He looked around the room, not comprehending what it was.

As a precaution against his prey bolting, he closed the door and moved a nearby table in front of it. The room was large, some sixty feet by one hundred feet, with five rows of seven shrouded tables each. D’Ambrosio went up to the nearest table and whipped off the plastic drape.

D’Ambrosio gasped, not even feeling the pain from his broken rib. He was staring at a cadaver. The head was dissected free of skin, the teeth and the eyes were bared. The hair had been undermined and folded back like a pelt The front of the chest was gone, as was the front of the abdomen. The organs, which had been removed, were piled back into the opened body haphazardly.

D’Ambrosio walked back to the door and thought about turning on the lights. Then he decided against it because of the large windows and the fear of alerting the security police. Not that he didn’t feel confident about handling a couple of inexperienced guards, but he wanted to get Susan without any interference.

Systematically D’Ambrosio removed all the shrouds from all the cadavers in the room. He tried not to look at the dissected bodies. He just wanted to make sure that Susan was not among them.

D’Ambrosio looked around the room. On the right side of the hall several skeletons hung on chains, turning slowly in the air stirred by the opening and closing of the door. Behind the skeletons was a huge cabinet containing numerous specimen jars. At the end of the room were three desks and two doors. One of the doors looked like a freezer door, the other a closet. The closet was empty. Then D’Ambrosio noted the stainless steel pin hanging from the latch on the freezer door. The light smile returned, and he transferred the gun to his left hand. He opened the freezer door and again fell back in horror. The hanging bodies appeared like an army of ghouls.

D’Ambrosio was shaken by the appearance of the bodies and his eyes darted from one to another. Reluctantly he stepped over the threshold of the freezer, feeling the sudden chill.

“I know you’re in here, cunt. Why not come out so we can have another talk?” D’Ambrosio’s voice trailed off. The close quarters in the freezer and the appearance of the stiffs made Mm nervous, more nervous than he ever remembered being.

He looked down between the first two rows of frozen corpses. Warily he took two steps to the right and looked down the middle row. He could see the bare light bulb in the rear of the compartment. Glancing back at the door, he took several more steps to the right so he could look down the last corridor.

Susan’s fingers were losing their grip around the overhead track in the back of the second row of corpses. She did not know D’Ambrosio’s position, not until he called the second time.

“Come on, sweetheart. Don’t make me search this place.”

Susan was sure that D’Ambrosio was at the head of the last row. She knew it was now or never. With all the force she could muster, she pushed with her legs against the back of the wizened female cadaver in front of her. By holding onto the track above, Susan had lifted her legs up and coiled them against the old woman’s back. Her own back was pressed against the rock-hard chest of the last cadaver in the row, a two-hundred-pound black male.

Almost imperceptibly at first, the entire second row of frozen corpses began to move forward. Once the initial inertia was overcome, Susan was able to lunge with her feet, imparting a terrific thrust. Like a row of dominoes the entire group of bodies slid forward on their ball bearings.

D’Ambrosio’s ears picked up the sound of the movement He held himself still for a fraction of a second, trying to locate the weird sound. With the swiftness of a cat, he whirled and retreated toward the door. Not fast enough. As he stepped past the third row, he saw the movement. Instinctively he raised his gun and fired. But his attacker was already dead.

Coming at D’Ambrosio with surprising speed was a ghostly white male whose lips were frozen in a horrid half-smile. Two hundred pounds of frozen human meat slammed into the hit man, sending him crashing into the side of the freezer. In rapid succession the other corpses tumbled after the first, several falling from their hooks, creating a huddle of corpses, a tangle of frozen extremities.

Susan let go of the track, dropping to the floor. Then she ran for the open door. D’Ambrosio was trying to pull the bodies off himself. But he was in pain and had little leverage. The reek of embalming fluid was choking him. As Susan passed he tried to grab her. He struggled to free his gun and aim but it caught in the gnarled hand of a corpse.

“Fuck!” shouted D’Ambrosio as he used all of his might against oppressive weight of dead flesh.

But Susan was through the door.

D’Ambrosio was upright now. Pushing the toppled bodies right and left, he flung himself at the closing door. But outside it Susan was pushing with all her might, and the momentum of the insulated door carried it home. The latch clicked. Susan fumbled with the stainless steel pin. Inside, D’Ambrosio was grabbing for the latch release. Susan beat him by a fraction of a second as the pin dropped home.

Susan backed up, her heart pounding. She heard a muffled cry. Then there was a thud. D’Ambrosio was shooting into the door. But it was twelve inches thick. There were several more ineffectual thuds.

Susan turned and ran. She finally understood the reality of the danger she had been in. Trembling uncontrollably, she fought back tears. She had to find help, real help.

Thursday, February 26, 2:11 A.M.

Beacon Hill was definitely asleep. As the cab turned off Charles Street onto Mount Vernon and drove up into the residential area, there were no people, no cars, not even any dogs. The lights in the windows were few; only the gas lamps suggested that the area was populated, not deserted. Susan paid the cab driver, then looked up and down the street to see if anyone was following her.

After escaping from D’Ambrosio in the freezer, Susan was terrified and decided not to return to her room. She had no idea if D’Ambrosio was working alone or with an accomplice, but she was in no mood to find out. She had run out of the Anatomy Building, crossed in front of the Administration Building and had reached Huntington Avenue by passing the School of Public Health. At that hour it had taken fifteen minutes to find a cab.

Bellows. Susan thought that he was the only person she could turn to at two A.M. who would understand her present plight. But she was worried about being followed, and she did not want to involve Bellows in any danger. So as she entered the foyer of Bellows’s building she determined to wait five minutes before ringing his apartment, to be certain she had not been followed.

The foyer was not heated and Susan ran in place for a few minutes to keep warm. Becoming rational again after the experience with D’Ambrosio, she tried to understand why D’Ambrosio had returned so quickly. As far as she knew, no one had followed her when she went back to the Memorial to get the charts and explore the ORs. No one even knew that she was there.