Guillermo del Toro - The Strain. Book I of The Strain Trilogy

Nora nodded. “It’s just that…you’re one of us, Jim. We want to make sure everything checks out.”

“But — why in isolation?”

“Why not?” Eph forced a smile. “We’re here already. And look — you’ve got an entire wing of the hospital to yourself. Best bargain in New York City.”

Jim’s smile showed that he wasn’t convinced. “All right,” he said finally. “But can I at least have my phone so I can feel like I’m contributing?”

Eph said, “I think we can arrange that. After a few tests.”

“And — please tell Sylvia I’m all right. She’s going to be panicked.”

“Right,” said Eph. “We’ll call her as soon as we get out of here.”

They left shaken, pausing before exiting the isolation unit. Nora said, “We have to tell him.”

“Tell him what?” said Eph, a little too sharply. “We have to find out what we’re dealing with first.”

Outside the unit, a woman with wiry hair pulled back under a wide headband stood up from the plastic chair she had pulled in from the lobby. Jim shared an apartment in the East Eighties with his girlfriend, Sylvia, a horoscope writer for the New York Post . She brought five cats to the relationship, and he brought one finch, making for a very tense household. “Can I go in?” said Sylvia.

“Sorry, Sylvia. Rules of the isolation wing — only medical personnel. But Jim said to tell you that he’s feeling fine.”

Sylvia gripped Eph’s arm. “What do you say?”

Eph said, tactfully, “He looks very healthy. We want to run some tests, just in case.”

“They said he passed out, he was a bit woozy. Why the isolation ward?”

“You know how we work, Sylvia. Rule out all the bad stuff. Go step by step.”

Sylvia looked to Nora for female reassurance.

Nora nodded and said, “We’ll get him back to you as soon as we can.”

Downstairs, in the hospital basement, Eph and Nora found an administrator waiting for them at the door to the morgue. “Dr. Goodweather, this is completely irregular. This door is never to be locked, and the hospital insists on being informed of what is going on—”

“I’m sorry, Ms. Graham,” said Eph, reading her name off her hospital ID, “but this is official CDC business.” He hated pulling rank like a bureaucrat, but occasionally being a government employee had its advantages. He took out the key he had appropriated and unlocked the door, entering with Nora. “Thank you for your cooperation,” he said, locking it again behind him.

The lights came on automatically. Redfern’s body lay underneath a sheet on a steel table. Eph selected a pair of gloves from the box near the light switch and opened up a cart of autopsy instruments.

“Eph,” said Nora, pulling on gloves herself. “We don’t even have a death certificate yet. You can’t just cut him open.”

“We don’t have time for formalities. Not with Jim up there. And besides — I don’t even know how we’re going to explain his death in the first place. Any way you look at it, I murdered this man. My own patient.”

“In self-defense.”

“I know that. You know that. But I certainly don’t have the time to waste explaining that to the police.”

He took the large scalpel and drew it down Redfern’s chest, making the Y incision from the left and right collarbones down on two diagonals to the top of the sternum, then straight down the center line of the trunk, over the abdomen to the pubis bone. He then peeled back the skin and underlying muscles, exposing the rib cage and the abdominal apron. He didn’t have time to perform a full medical autopsy. But he did need to confirm some things that had shown up on Redfern’s incomplete MRI.

He used a soft rubber hose to wash away the white, bloodlike leakage and viewed the major organs beneath the rib cage. The chest cavity was a mess, cluttered with gross black masses fed by spindly feeders, veinlike offshoots attached to the pilot’s shriveled organs.

“Good God,” said Nora.

Eph studied the growths through the ribs. “It’s taken him over. Look at the heart.”

It was misshapen, shrunken. The arterial structure had been altered also, the circulatory system grown more simplified, the arteries themselves covered over with a dark, cancerous blight.

Nora said, “Impossible. We’re only thirty-six hours out from the plane landing.”

Eph flayed Redfern’s neck then, exposing his throat. The new construct was rooted in the midneck, grown out of the vestibular folds. The protuberance that apparently acted as a stinger lay in its retracted state. It connected straight into the trachea, in fact fusing with it, much like a cancerous growth. Eph elected not to anatomize further just yet, hoping instead to remove the muscle or organ or whatever it was in its entirety at a later time, to study it whole and determine its function.

Eph’s phone rang then. He turned so that Nora could pull it from his pocket with her clean gloves. “It’s the chief medical examiner’s office,” she said, reading the display. She answered it for him, and after listening for a few moments, told the caller, “We’ll be right there.”

Director Barnes arrived at the OCME at Thirtieth and First at the same time as Eph and Nora. He stepped from his car, unmistakable in his goatee and navy-style uniform. The intersection was jammed with police cars and TV news crews set up outside the turquoise front of the morgue building.

Their credentials got them inside, all the way to Dr. Julius Mirnstein, the chief medical examiner for New York. Mirnstein was bald but for tufts of brown hair on the sides and back of his head, long faced, dour by nature, wearing the requisite white doctor’s coat over gray slacks.

“We think we were broken into overnight — we don’t know.” Dr. Mirnstein looked at an overturned computer monitor and pencils spilled from a cup. “We can’t get any of the overnight staff on the phone.” He double-checked that with an assistant who had a telephone to her ear, and who shook her head in confirmation. “Follow me.”

Down in the basement morgue, everything appeared to be in order, from the clean autopsy tables to the countertops, scales, and measuring devices. No vandalism here. Dr. Mirnstein led the way to the walk-in refrigerator and waited for Eph, Nora, and Director Barnes to join him.

The body cooler was empty. The stretchers were all still there, and a few discarded sheets, as well as some articles of clothing. A handful of dead bodies remained along the left wall. All the airplane casualties were gone.

“Where are they?” said Eph.

“That’s just it,” said Dr. Mirnstein. “We don’t know.”

Director Barnes stared at him for a moment. “Are you telling me that you believe someone broke in here overnight and stole forty-odd corpses?”

“Your guess is as good as mine, Dr. Barnes. I was hoping your people could enlighten me.”

“Well,” said Barnes, “they didn’t just walk away.”

Nora said, “What about Brooklyn? Queens?”

Dr. Mirnstein said, “I have not heard from Queens yet. But Brooklyn is reporting the same thing.”

“The same thing?” said Nora. “The airline passengers’ corpses are gone ?”

“Precisely,” said Dr. Mirnstein. “I called you here in the hopes that perhaps your agency had claimed these cadavers without our knowledge.”

Barnes looked at Eph and Nora. They shook their heads.

Barnes said, “Christ. I have to get on the phone with the FAA.”

Eph and Nora caught him before he did, away from Dr. Mirnstein. “We need to talk,” said Eph.

The director looked from face to face. “How is Jim Kent?”