The Complete Strain Trilogy: The Strain, The Fall, The Night Eternal. Guillermo Toro del
dictating doctors. “We’ve got eight going from your airplane.”
Bodies lay upon eight guttered tables of cold stainless steel. The airline fatalities were in various stages of autopsy, two of them fully “canoed”: that is, their chests had already been eviscerated, the removed organs laid out on an open plastic bag on their shins, a pathologist paring away samples on a cutting board like a cannibal preparing a platter of human sashimi. The wounded necks had been dissected and the tongues pulled through, the faces folded halfway down like latex masks, exposing the skullcaps, which had been opened with the circular saw. One brain was in the process of being severed from its attachment to the spinal cord, whereupon it would be placed in a formalin solution to harden, the last step of an autopsy. A morgue attendant was standing by with wadding, and a large curved needle threaded with heavy waxed twine, to refill the emptied skull.
A long-handled pair of hardware-store pruning shears was being passed from one table to the next, where another attendant stood on a metal footstool over an open-chested body and began cracking ribs one at a time, so that the entire rib cage and sternum could be lifted out whole. The smell was an absorbing stew of Parmesan cheese, methane, and rotten eggs.
“After you called, I began checking their necks,” said Bennett. “All the bodies so far present the same laceration you spoke of. But no scar. An open wound, as precise and clean as any I’ve ever seen.”
He showed them to an undissected female body laid out on a table. A six-inch metal block beneath her neck made her head fall back, arching her chest, extending her neck. Eph probed the skin over the woman’s throat with his gloved fingers.
He noticed the faint line—as thin as a paper cut—and gently parted the wound. He was shocked by its neatness as well as its apparent depth. Eph released her skin, and the breach closed lazily, like a sleepy eyelid or a timid smile.
“What could have caused this?” he asked.
“Nothing in nature, not that I know of,” said Bennett. “Notice the scalpel-like precision. Almost calibrated, you might say, both in aim and length. And yet—the edges are rounded, which is to say, almost organic in appearance.”
“How deep?” asked Nora.
“A clean breach, straight in, puncturing the wall of the common carotid, but stopping there. Not going out the other side, not rupturing the artery.”
“In every case?” gasped Nora.
“Every one I’ve looked at so far. Every body bears the laceration, though if you hadn’t alerted me, I have to admit I might not have noticed it. Especially with everything else going on with these bodies.”
“What else?”
“We’ll get there in a moment. Each laceration is on the neck, either front or side. Excluding one female who had hers on the chest, high above her heart. And one male we had to search, and eventually found the breach on the upper inside thigh, over the femoral artery. Each wound perforated skin and muscle, ending exactly inside a major artery.”
“A needle?” ventured Eph.
“But finer than that. I … I need to do more research into it, we’re just at the beginning here. And there’s plenty of other freaky shit going down. You’re aware of this, I assume?” Bennett led them to the door of a walk-in refrigerator. Inside, it was wider than a two-car garage. There were fifty or so gurneys, most containing a crash bag unzipped down to the corpse’s chest. A handful were fully unzipped, those bodies nude—having already been weighed, measured, and photographed—and ready for the autopsy table. There were also eight or so corpses unrelated to Flight 753, lying on bare gurneys without crash bags, bearing standard yellow toe tags.
Refrigeration slows decomposition, in the same way it preserves fruits and vegetables and delays cold cuts from spoiling. But the airplane bodies hadn’t spoiled at all. Thirty-six hours out, and they looked nearly as fresh as when Eph had first boarded the plane. As opposed to the yellow-tagged corpses, which were bloating, effluvium oozing from every orifice like a black purge, flesh going dark green and leatherlike from evaporation.
“These are some pretty good-looking dead people,” said Bennett.
Eph felt a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature in the cooler. He and Nora both waded in, three rows deep. The bodies looked—not healthy, for they were shrunken and bloodlessly wan—but not long dead. They bore the characteristic mask of the deceased, but it was as though they had just passed over, not thirty minutes ago.
They followed Bennett back out into the autopsy room, to the same female corpse—a woman in her early forties with no distinguishing marks other than a decade-old Cesarean scar below the bikini line—being prepped for incision. But instead of a scalpel, Bennett reached for a tool never used inside a morgue. A stethoscope.
“I noticed this earlier,” he said, offering the scope to Eph. Eph put in the ear plugs, and Bennett called for everyone else in the room to stop, for silence. A pathology assistant rushed around turning off the running water.
Bennett laid the acoustic end of the stethoscope against the corpse’s chest, just below her sternum. Eph listened with trepidation, afraid of what he was to hear. But he heard nothing. He looked at Bennett again, who showed no expression, waiting. Eph closed his eyes and focused.
Faint. Very faint. A squirming sound, almost like that of something wriggling in mud. A slow sound, so maddeningly slight he couldn’t be altogether certain he wasn’t imagining it.
He gave the scope to Nora to have a listen.
“Maggots?” she said, straightening.
Bennett shook his head. “In fact there is no infestation at all, accounting in part for the lack of decay. But there are some other intriguing abnormalities …”
Bennett waved everyone else to return to their work, selecting, from a side tray, a big number 6 blade scalpel. But instead of starting in on the chest with the usual Y-shaped incision, he took a large-mouthed stock jar from the enameled counter and placed it beneath the corpse’s left hand. He drew the scalpel blade abruptly across the underside of the wrist, slicing it open like the rind of an orange.
A pale, opalescent liquid sprayed at first, some of it spurting out onto his gloves and his hip on the initial cut, then sluicing steadily out of the arm, singing into the bottom of the jar. Flowing fast, but then, lacking any circulatory pressure from its stilled heart, losing force after about three ounces or so. Bennett lowered the arm to draw out more.
Eph’s shock at the callousness of the cut was quickly overcome by his amazement at the sight of the flow. This couldn’t be blood. Blood settles and congeals after death. It doesn’t drain out like engine oil.
Nor does it turn white. Bennett returned the arm to the corpse’s side and held up the jar for Eph to see.
Lieutenant—the corpses—they’re …
“At first I thought maybe the proteins were separating, the way oil sits on top of water,” Bennett said. “But it’s not quite that either.”
The issue was pasty white, almost as though sour milk had been introduced into the bloodstream.
Lieutenant … oh, Jesus—
Eph could not believe what he was seeing.
Nora said, “They’re all like this?”
Bennett nodded. “Exsanguinated. They have no blood.”
Eph eyed the white matter in the jar, and his taste for whole milk turned his stomach.
Bennett said, “I’ve got some other things. Core temperature is elevated. Somehow these bodies are still generating heat. Additionally, we’ve found dark spots on some organs. Not necrosis, but almost more like … like bruising.”
Bennett set the jar of opalescent fluid back down on the counter and called over a pathology assistant. She brought with her an opaque plastic