Edward Lee - Ghouls

“Mind if I smoke?” Kurt asked.

“No, but your lungs do.”

“Don’t I know it,” he muttered. He popped a cigarette into his mouth and lit up.

“Want to quit?”

“I can’t. Believe me, I’ve tried.”

Greene pointed across the room, hand dripping. “Look in that white bucket there. The one on the end, third shelf.”

I asked for this, he thought. His fingers touched the lid, but didn’t move.

“Go on,” Greene urged. “Open the bucket. Look inside.”

Kurt raised the lid and looked in. Settled at the bottom of the bucket were two blob-shaped objects which resembled giant moldering leeches. They were brown-black and glistening, specked minutely with white.

Greene smiled, still tending to his slices. “They’re metasticized lungs.”

“Jesus.”

“Your lungs will look like that if you don’t quit smoking. Cancer’s a hard way to go. It’s like slowly rotting to death from the inside out.”

Greene washed his hands in the big sink, thumping a pink-filled soap dispenser like an inverted service bell. His lab coat bore a craggy reddish stain the shape of North America, and beneath the open coat, a clinging orange T-shirt elucidated washboard abdominals. Kurt dropped his cigarette onto the floor drain and stepped on it. Dizzily, he followed Greene into the office.

“Ah, my favorite fruit,” Greene said, and picked a Chunky up off the desk. He passed Kurt a nine by twelve manila envelope. “Here’s your lab report.”

Kurt scanned the pages, deciphering almost none of it. Hieroglyphics, he thought; most of the words were ten letters long. “We weren’t briefed by the county about any of this,” he told Greene. “In other words, we don’t even know what this is.”

“Stands to reason. This didn’t make the papers.” The pathologist spoke between bites of his Chunky. “It concerns those two high school girls—”

“The ones whose car was found on our town line.”

“Right,” Greene said. He dropped the silver candy wrapper into a pedal-operated garbage can; the lid snapped shut like a flytrap.

“But those girls haven’t turned up yet,” Kurt clarified.

“No, they haven’t. And they won’t, not alive, anyway.”

The a/c hum was beginning to irritate Kurt, along with Greene’s elusiveness. “Then what the hell did you do this lab report on?” he asked.

“Organs.”

The answer brought only silence from Kurt, a dense and pleading silence that demanded elaboration. At last Greene perched up on his desk and explained, “That’s why the county is certain the two girls are dead. What they didn’t release to the press was that, though no bodies were found, two piles of organs were discovered near the car. A couple of county techs brought the stuff in yesterday for me to identify. That’s what this lab report’s about.”

“Organs,” Kurt said vacantly.

“Stomachs, uteri, livers, some mesentery—most of the lower G.I. tract.”

“I don’t understand,” Kurt said. He was distracted, confused. The humming seemed to grow louder, pressing his eardrums like a quick pressure drop.

“They were eviscerated.”

Kurt wanted to leave. This was too much for one week. This was madness. Bard was right in his cynicism. Things just got worse and worse. The world was a slaughterhouse, a black playground for every psychopath on two legs.

“The two girls were eviscerated,” Greene said again. “Tox screen read negative for drugs. They were a little lit, though; .02 blood-alcohol content—there was beer in the car. Couldn’t find any semen in the mess. Lots of pubes, but they were all white/female, according to the core index. One of the detectives told me there was blood all over the place—”

Kurt thought of the blood in Fitzwater’s trailer. All over the place. All over—

“—all over the ground, the car, the glass. Everywhere. Doors locked, driver’s window smashed in. Purses, wallets, and money still inside; no one touched any of it. State criminalistics told me they’re having all kinds of problems with prints. Tomorrow they’re transporting the car’s hood and fenders to University of Maryland for an SEM scan. Can you imagine that, needing an SEM to get prints off of polished metal?”

Kurt didn’t know what an SEM was, and he didn’t care. There hadn’t been one good print since any of this had started. “What else do you know that I don’t?”

“Go read the county II report. They’ll release it to you, they have to. It’s your jurisdiction. They said it looked like the girls had been dragged away—some tracks and blood lines led into the woods.”

“Which way did the tracks lead?” Kurt asked.

“Across the boundary, into Tylersville.”

Greene crossed his arms, as if impatient. Like this his massive shoulders and back seemed on the verge of splitting his lab coat apart at the stitches. His hazel eyes reflected nothing even remotely receptive; Kurt guessed the base nature of his job had left him with the emotions of a cement statue. Must be itching to get back to his brains. Jesus, what a job. “Thanks for your time,” Kurt ended. “We’ll get back to you.”

“Oopie doop. Catch’ya later,” and Greene went back to the autopsy room.

Before he even crossed the threshold, Kurt stopped. He’d reached into his jacket pocket for his keys but pulled out a scrap of paper instead. On it, he recognized the scrawl of his own hand—TTX—from his eavesdrop on Willard and Nancy.

When Kurt slipped back in, Greene had already opened the top of the cadaver bag and was plugging the saw into a table-mounted outlet.

“One last thing, Dr. Greene,” Kurt said, keeping his eyes well away from the nefarious metal table and what lay on it. “You ever hear of something called TTX?”

The pathologist’s response was instant. “Sure. It stands for tetrodotoxin.”

“What is it?”

“One of the deadliest solid poisons known to man, about three hundred times more toxic than cyanide. They use it for research mainly to isolate desired cellular components by blocking undesired ones. It comes from the Japanese fugufish. Very, very nasty material… Where’d you dig that one up?”

“Just something I overheard,” Kurt said. He was trying to think. Poison. What would they want… “How does this stuff affect humans?”

“It blocks nerve-synaptic transmissions, eventually producing complete paralysis of the involuntary muscle groups. Even a minuscule amount will kill an average-sized man in about thirty minutes or so.”

“Is it easy to get?”

“No, TTX is highly controlled. Not the kind of thing you’d find in a Gilbert chemistry set, if that’s what you want to know.”

“But if a person really wanted to get some, even illegally, where would he be able to get it?”

Greene didn’t flinch at the roundhouse of questions; if anything, he enjoyed this. “Unless you wanted to go fishing in Japan, you’d have to go to the manufacturer, and most drug companies have security about like that of the White House. I don’t know about distributors. The easiest place, I guess, would be a neurotoxicology lab.”

“Are there any around here?”

“Sure, plenty. Private sector and government. I used to work as a lab tech at N.I.H. in Bethesda; I know for a fact they’ve got a neurotox unit there.”

N.I.H., Kurt thought. National Institutes of Health. Didn’t Glen say Nancy Willard worked there once? “How long ago did you work at this place?”

“Five, six years ago. Summer work while I was in school.”

“Did you know a woman named Nancy Willard?”

Greene’s eyes thinned behind his thick glasses. He held the orbital saw pistol-like toward the ceiling and revved it twice for the hell of it. The sound made Kurt’s scalp shrivel.