Zombies: More Recent Dead

Resurgam Lisa Mannetti

It had happened before and Auden Strothers knew it. So now on an uncharacteristically snowy March night he was in Yale’s Cushing Whitney medical library looking for answers that stubbornly evaded him.

This morning at approximately 2:00 a.m. the cadaver (nicknamed Molly until today) he shared with three other fledgling doctors suddenly sat up, hemostats clinging to her open mid-section like long silver leeches, widened her jaws and took a chunk out of Sheri Trent’s right shoulder.

Sheri hissed—as much from surprise as pain, Auden guessed—and clamped her left hand against the wound. Auden’s own breathing became rapid behind his paper mask, and he found himself staring at the blood that seeped between the fingers of his teammate’s pale yellowish latex glove. Sheri’s gaze followed his and, for a second (a second too goddamn long, Auden thought), she watched the blood that dripped from her glove and pattered on to the naked woman’s waxy thighs.

“Christ, I’m bitten. She bit me!”

At the same time Auden’s mind declared: You’ve gone crazy! I told you a thousand times to stay the hell away from Gronsky’s stupid meth lab . . . his right hand which held the scalpel that had been so recently and delicately buried inside Molly’s exposed liver came up and plunged the knife straight into the corpse’s nearest eye.

There was a soft, drawn-out pffft—as if he’d let the air out of a mostly deflated party balloon—and Molly collapsed backward against the steel table. God, they’d only recently unwrapped the woman’s head and face (the better to preserve her, my dear) and now he’d absolutely ruined her eye and their other teammates—not to mention Professor Sriskandarajah—were going to have a fit—

“Help me, Strothers—what should I do?” Sheri pivoted her wrist and peeled her cupped hand back from the wound a few times tentatively, wielding the lunate and scaphoid bones at the bottom of her palm like a hinge.

The bite was a ragged open mouth at the juncture where the fleshy part of her upper arm began. He blinked under the glare of the brilliant overheads and automatically recited as if his professor called on him to evaluate the case and answer up quickly: “Size 4-0 absorbable suture . . . ”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she said. “I’m bleeding!”

Ordinarily on a Thursday night, even this late, there’d be five or six students bent over the semi-flayed bodies on the metal slabs, but the spring holidays were coming and they were the only ones in the dissecting room. Trent was as much a grind as he was.

She couldn’t go to the university clinic or the emergency room or the local doc in the box—that much was clear—because how could she explain who had bitten her? The medicos would want to know whose teeth sank into her flesh, would want to set police officers on the trail of the perpetrator. She could use a mirror and stitch herself—awkward, of course, utilizing just the one, left hand—but not impossible.

Sheri started toward him, moving out from her side of the table.

But all Auden Strothers could think about was how the first day his hands probed and dived inside Molly, the skin beneath his gloves had gone numb from contact with the eight gallons of formaldehyde that had been pumped into her—that had been unsettling and nasty—and now Sherri Trent expected him to risk . . . infection.

He shot out from the aisle created by the tables, intent on hustling his skinny ass through the nearest door at the rear of the lab.

Still holding her hand against the wound, Sheri closed in on him. Even then Auden realized she might want no more than a brief comforting touch, a friend and colleague’s hand laid gently on her good shoulder, but the combination of the crystal he’d snorted two hours earlier and the spectacle of the uprising cadaver rocketed his mind to panic. He meant only to fend her off with out thrust elbows (less chance of contagion, he gibbered inwardly). Instead, he got his back into it and, with his arms extended and his palms upraised, gave her chest a hard shove: Sheri crashed against Team 22’s table which lay perpendicular to their own.

Maybe someone on that team planned to come back after a break but fell asleep over a textbook in the lounge, or a Red Bull in the cafeteria; or maybe Sheri Trent had unzipped the black body bag halfway to get a look at her competitors’ handiwork. Arms flailing, her hands skittered wetly under the rectangular skin flaps tessellating the corpse’s chest and pushed them back like doors on a bulkhead. Auden caught a brief glimpse of both the layer of bright yellow fat and the reddish striated muscle that reminded him of very old skirt steak.

“Strothers!” She sounded shocked and disappointed more than physically hurt.

A few drops of Sheri’s blood—no more than a scattering, really—flicked onto the cadaver’s pallid torso and blatted against the heavy plastic. The noise seemed preternaturally loud to Auden. He saw the corpse’s feet twitch inside the bag.

The last thought he had before he fled the room stripping off his gloves and cramming them into his lab coat pocket was that Team 22’s cadaver had been tagged with a blue cloth—which meant the family, if there was any family, didn’t want the remains. Instead, when the first year medical students were finished with it, the body would go into a common grave.

Auden sat at one of the heavy wooden reading tables in Cushing Whitney, one hand resting on the opened pages of the nineteenth century facsimile text before him, absently mulling over which disease or condition might hold the key he so desperately needed now. Cholera? Tuberculosis—known as consumption for hundreds of years prior to the twentieth century? Glanders? Leprosy? No, none of them had the right feel; he had no sense of that click he experienced that was part frisson, part lightning-shot inspiration that told him he was dead on. But there had to be something that would help him understand the seemingly spontaneous resurrection of the dead, because he was certain it wasn’t a new phenomenon.

He looked past the shaded table lamp, his gaze wandering from the tall arched windows that framed pelting snow, the elegant mahogany paneling, the balcony with its tiered ranks of books, to the canopy-shaped ceiling two stories overhead.

After he’d fled the lab last night leaving Sheri Trent bleeding he’d gone back to his tiny apartment in North Haven, snorted two thick lines of meth, then decided what he really needed was sleep. He rummaged the medicine cabinet and came up with three Percocet—the remains of a battle with an aching molar last summer.

He stayed away from the lab all day, but he’d come to the medical library after darkfall to try and puzzle his way through what precisely had happened to the cadaver inked with identification number C 390160 and what might happen to Sheri Trent.

He’d pored over incunabula, drawings, and historic pamphlets; he’d downloaded digital images and manuscripts. After three frustrating hours and two more lines of meth he snuffled quietly and surreptitiously in the maze of stacks, it occurred to him to hunt through the library’s journal resources.

Journals, he knew, could often be highly personal documents . . .

Auden scavenged both printed and online materials for a long time; the library would be closing soon, but he wasn’t overly worried—even if Yale had increased security since that kid at NYU suicided the previous November when he clambered up and over Plexiglas shields and plummeted ten stories to the floor of the atrium.

All the grinds had ways and means to access the lab or the library after hours and to hide out from patrolling guards.

It was getting on for 1:00 a.m.—nearly twenty-four hours since the Sheri Trent disaster—and he was about to give up. He toked vapor from a black, electronic cigarette, and the thought crossed his mind that it was ironic that the library addition had been built in the classic Y-shape of an autopsy incision.

Auden fingered the thin leaves of the journal (not an original, but a bound reproduction, he thought) written by a nineteenth century medical student named John Sykes. Glancing at the neatly lettered pages, it occurred to him that the whole thing might be a fabrication . . . dissection humor concocted to amuse fraternity brothers during long winter nights. On the other hand, as he thumbed and scanned and read—not passively, but with verve—his own excitement grew.

Maybe the nicotine jolted the precise synapses he needed to make the mental connections, or maybe it was the result of his hours-long research, or pure dumb luck on a snowy March night; maybe Sykes’ journal was nothing more than a series of monstrous notations by a man hoping to write a harrowing novel someday.

Whatever it was, it didn’t matter; because Auden Strothers realized he’d just found exactly what he needed.

Until tonight I thought I was inured to providing the college with medical specimens. . . . I’d even overcome the resentment I felt about being a “scholarship boy.” The sons of Dunham, Wister, Parkerton—those giants of commerce and industry—aren’t expected to grub in dirt or hacksaw through metal and marble to produce cadavers the future doctors desperately need to perfect skills they’ll use when they treat their patients. Strictly speaking it’s not illegal; the law looks the other way in hopes that one of us, or our counterparts here or across the pond, or in Europe will save his life down the line. Books are nothing to bodies.

Each time we go out, we meet by pre-arrangement in front of the lecture hall and shuffle our feet in nervous anticipation and blow on our hands to ward off the chill while Dr. Perry stands on the steps of the lecture hall and gives a little pep talk—part lecture, part plea, part innuendo. “Men,” he says, “our duty—unpleasant as it may be—is of the utmost importance. Never forget that for an instant.”

Twice the professor slipped up during his standard speech; once last autumn he accidentally inserted the phrase “of gravest importance,” and a second time, around the Christmas holidays when brandy-toddies and rum-shrub were abundant, he made reference to “the task that lies ahead.” Only a second year student we call “Cruncher” laughed out loud—he was overly familiar with digging down over the head and yanking out a corpse cranium-first.

But tonight’s task was supposed to be simpler. After all, the ground is still frozen hard in New England, so we were going to nearby Blue Haven to raid a “receiving vault,” where they stack up the dead until the spring thaw permits gravediggers to shovel deeply into the thin stony soil.

There were just four of us and—quelle luxe—Dr. Perry brought along his own Miller landau for us to ride in and collect the bodies we’d carry back, instead of sending us off to the dark, wide-scattered cemeteries in groups of two and three.

I was glad for once that more of my fellow resurrection men had not shown up. It’s only now that I’m writing these pages that I wonder if they knew what was afoot or if their intuition—or some yet unknown, unmapped sense, or even angel guardians—warned them.

We were seated inside the coach; Perry was upfront alongside his driver. Cruncher sat facing me. “Here, Sykes. You look like you could use a bolt.” He extended a flask, and more for the sake of politeness than anything else, I took a swig.

“Have another and pass it around.” He nodded toward Freddie O’Rourke and Tom Winterbourne who were both first year students and had only been on one or two other midnight raids. “There’s wild work ahead, laddies.”

Winterbourne looked uncomfortable and shifted in his seat.

“I’ve got armlets, you bet,” O’Rourke said, “and they’re vulcanized, to boot.”

Cruncher tilted his head back against the upholstery and laughed. “You’re going to need more than a couple of rubber sleeves to grope amongst this lot,” he said. “And more than those flimsy cotton butcher aprons Perry’s toted along.”

The carriage lights were swaying as the horses jigged along and Cruncher studied my face. “Sykes doesn’t know.”

“Sykes doesn’t know what,” I said.

“Liked it better when to work off your scholarship, you only had to wait tables or sweep out the lab or set out the gear for the rich boys, Sykes?”

“You’re drunk, Cruncher.” I turned away. It had been bad when I had to don black tie and serve meals, or clean up blood and vomit in the lab, or lay out everything from yachting togs to surgical notes for the sons of senators and kingmakers. I had actually begged the professor for some job, any job where—away from the tonier crowd—I thought it would be easier for me to maintain my dignity, my sense of self.

“Fourth year students—even those with straight A’s who have to unbury the dead—think they know everything.”

“I know you’re an ass, and for the moment, that’s enough for me,” I said under my breath.

He passed the flask to O’Rourke who drank and handed it to Winterbourne.

“Maybe you imagine you’ll be in practice some day,” Cruncher said. “ ‘Mrs. Smythe, it seems poor little Teddy has contracted influenza,’ ” he said in a stricken voice; then paused. “Only you won’t be treating the swells on Park Avenue like the rest of your class, you’ll be seeing a bunch of immigrants and rotters and drunks and ignorant women who haven’t gotten their monthlies and are shocked to learn they’re expecting another ‘blessed event’ for the seventh time.”

I didn’t say a word; there wasn’t any point to arguing with Cruncher. He wasn’t on scholarship, but it was clear he drank too much and there were rumors he was well-acquainted with opium dens in the city. He wasn’t like the swells, but his family had money. He must have wanted to get his medical degree or please a demanding father: why else would he be out after midnight scrabbling in cemeteries?

“No answer, eh, Sykes? Well, here’s one for you. Show ’im, Tommy.”

Winterbourne reached inside his coat and pulled out a folded sheet of paper and handed it to me.

There wasn’t enough light to read it carefully, but it didn’t matter because I knew the page from the communicable diseases text book very well:

I felt my face blanch and I suddenly felt light-headed.

“Ho, Winterbourne, hand over the flask. Feeling a trifle peaked, Sykes?”

I was livid all right—with rage. But I made myself sound calm: “The joke’s over. How much are you paying them for this little stunt, Crunch—?”

“The name’s Van Dyson, Sykes, and you damn well know it—”

Now he was turning red; he wasn’t as drunk as I thought, this time he’d caught my sarcasm.

“—and it’s no joke.”

In the flicker-glow of the carriage lantern his dark eyes met mine. For a second, I thought they were lit with greed—but it was a peculiar kind of avarice: it had nothing to do with money. He was after something and he wanted it badly, but I suddenly knew it wasn’t anything as unimportant as recompense or stipends—we really did come from different worlds. But I wouldn’t back down. “And I’m no fool,” I said. “The nearest outbreak’s in Provincetown—eighty miles from here.”

“Ever been in a pest house, Sykes? No, I didn’t think so.” He groped for the flask and drank, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. “The one in Provincetown is fourteen by fourteen feet. Plenty of room for the stricken and the nurse—if they can get one.” He smirked.

“And your point is?”

“With less than a third of the population vaccinated, why do you think they build pest houses smaller than gazebos?”

“Well, I hardly—”

“You hardly what? You hardly know anything but what you’ve read in books or heard from fringe academics like Professor Perry.” He leaned forward. “Let me tell you something. People are so afraid of the pox—so afraid of being isolated like lepers and sent to pest houses to rot and die alone—that their fear helps spread the disease.”

“The bodies of the dead are supposed to be burned,” O’Rourke said. “Jesus and Saint Mary.” He crossed himself quickly.

“People have been put to death for burning bodies—except during plague times—but Brunetti of Padua is going to unveil a cremation chamber at the Vienna world exposition this summer, Sykes,” Cruncher said. “Not that you’ve seen the piece in the New York Times, I’m sure—considering the cost of the subscription these days.”

“Being poor doesn’t make people stupid, Van Dyson,” I said.

“No, but it can send them to a pest house.”

“Are you saying the rich don’t get reported?”

Cruncher threw back his head and laughed. “Not only do they fail to be reported when they’re alive and raging with smallpox and shedding scabs like noxious red confetti, when they’re dead their doctors put down the cause to ‘heart disease’ or ‘paralysis of the diaphragm’ or ‘puerperal—that is, childbed—fever.’ ” He nodded toward Winterbourne and O’Rourke. “Dirty, ugly way to die—but not as ugly or dirty as smallpox.”

“Of course,” Winterbourne said.

“Nor does the ego-bloated mayor of Provincetown want his wife burned like a Salem witch or buried in a common grave or consigned for eternity to Pox Acres—which during the winter is merely a hole in the ground in the pest house cellar and, during the rest of the year, some raggedy ground a few hundred yards north. No, the mayor wants to visit his wife’s tombstone after church on Sunday mornings wearing his top hat, and ready to shake the hands of the recently bereaved.”

“She died from small pox,” I said.

“Yes,” Cruncher said. “And as long as you brought up Provincetown, Sykes, you might as well know that only eight names out of twenty-seven of people who had small pox were reported in the newspaper—”

“Enough, Cruncher—”

“—and according to the 1870 census, the average income of those eight was $547.50; but the average income of the other nineteen was $2,300.”

“Christ, I said shut up!”

“All of the headstones in pox cemeteries face east. Isn’t that curious?”

I started to lunge for him, but O’Rourke threw his arm between us and Winterbourne hissed. “Stop it both of you, right now, we’re here.”

The landau slowed and out the window I saw the curved stony embrasure of the receiving vault.

Dr. Perry’s driver had hitched a small cart-like wagon—long enough to accommodate bodies—to the landau, and now he rolled back the canvas tarp and pulled out tools while the rest of us stood just outside the metal door. Winterbourne twirled a hooded lantern and its single ray sparkled against the gravel drive and played over gleaming saw blades and pry bars.

“Many medical men eschew protection,” Perry began while Winterbourne held the light and the driver worked at picking the lock. “In my day, surgeons operated in blood-stiffened frock coats—the stiffer the coat, the more it conveyed the expertise of the practitioner. Some still believe there’s no object in being clean, that cleanliness is out of place and they consider it finicky and affected—that pus is as inseparable from surgery as blood. An executioner might as well manicure his nails before chopping off a head,” he said. “But we’ve got gloves and armlets and heavy rubber aprons,” he glanced at Cruncher. “And we’re going to be very careful. We’re only going to take the bodies toward the back of the vault—no one’s going to miss them, because no one is going to check very closely. Not with a dozen pox victims stashed in the crypt, too.” He paused. The lock clattered onto the gravel and Perry’s driver stooped to retrieve it and loop it in the staple of the hasp. “All right, we’re in,” Perry said.

The Blue Haven receiving vault was built into the side of a steep hill. Its façade was typically ornamental: heavy bronze doors fancied with grille-work and set in bricks that rose above the rounded snow-covered hill like crenellated castle walls.

Inside, the ceiling was arched and the bricks were skim-coated with flaking whitewash, but moss grew on the damp walls and the air was dank. Even in this cold weather, you could detect the subtle scent of decay. Perry tied his handkerchief over his mouth and nose, and the others followed his lead. I was too embarrassed to fumble mine out—it was dotted with tiny holes and its edges were badly frayed.

“Let’s be quick, gents. Get the lids pried off and hustle the bodies out to the cart. My man will get the coffins nailed shut again.”

Either there’d been a hell of a lot of typical deaths that winter in Blue Haven or small pox was more rampant than anyone who lived in the area had been led to believe: There must have been a hundred caskets. Someone (probably the sexton from St. Bartholomew’s parish and his crew of gravediggers) had started off packing the coffins onto the heavy wooden shelves that lined three walls, then given up and crammed them in upright like matchsticks. Indeed, one shelf on the western side of the crypt had collapsed under the weight, and the coffins lay helter-skelter, tipped onto their sides and crowding the narrow space between them and their vertical neighbors.

“Standing room only, eh, Sykes?” Cruncher said.

I inserted my crowbar under the wooden lid of a cheap toe-pincher model and put my weight into it.

“C’mon, you’re not seriously mad at me, are you?”

The body fell out and smacked headfirst into the back of another coffin. It sounded like a frozen side of beef being hit with a cook’s rolling pin. Cruncher steadied the upright casket, so it wouldn’t domino the rest.

“I’ll help you carry her out to the wagon,” Cruncher said, taking the corpse by the shoulders.

I picked up her feet. She was face down and her long brown hair swung against Cruncher’s knees. “She must have been young,” I said.

Her skirt hung wire-straight and stiff. It creaked like a sail in an ice storm, and a pair of glass beads she’d been decorated with rattled against the brick floor. Her leather shoes chilled my hands even through my gloves.

“Yes, too young to pin up her hair,” Cruncher agreed, looking over his shoulder to navigate the maze of coffins and move us toward one of the lanterns resting on a casket near the door.

The moon was barely visible behind heavy cloud cover. Still there was enough light to see the wagon and swing the dead girl into the pile of corpses.

“Christ, I could feel the crystals of ice melting in her hair where my hands touched,” Cruncher said. “Here, warm up. Have some brandy.”

When I weighed the flask in my hand and hesitated, he said: “Finish it and don’t worry. I’ve got a bottle stashed under the seat in Perry’s hearse.”

That made me laugh and I snorted and coughed, spraying brandy onto the bodies.

“Hey, don’t waste it on the stiffs—they’ve already been baptized.”

That made me laugh harder and bending over, cough more. Cruncher pounded my back.

“All right now, Sykes?”

“Yes,” I said, straightening up and giggle-coughing into my fist.

“Good,” he said, and gave my shoulder a light squeeze that had, I thought, all the camaraderie in the world behind it.

“We might as well get a good haul,” Perry was saying to Winterbourne and O’Rourke as I re-entered the crypt. “We’ve got the wagon and I know of another medical institution that will pay good money for any left-overs. If there are any . . . ”

“Sure, Professor,” Winterbourne said. “As many as you like. Me and Freddie are as strong as oxes.”

“Freddie and I,” Perry automatically corrected. “And it’s not oxes,” he paused, catching sight of me. “Never mind. Oh, Sykes, perhaps you could start opening a few crates on the east side of the vault? Where’s Van Dyson got to?”

“Right here, Professor,” Cruncher said from behind a coffin near the door. He caught my eye and mimed refilling his flask.

“Excellent. Hard as hell to keep track of things with all these caskets lying chockablock about. Well, I was just saying to young Winterbourne and O’Malley here—”

“O’Rourke, sir.” Winterbourne took a step sideways and tromped on Freddie’s foot.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing, sir,” O’Rourke said.

“Good. Please don’t interrupt. First year students have that habit and it’s a bad one. Never learn a damn thing that way. What was I saying?”

“About the haul, Professor,” Cruncher said.

“Yes. You partner up with Sykes and get to work on the caskets on my left here. It’s better to take a few from each area—less likely the gravediggers will notice. They won’t, anyhow—morons, the lot of them.”

We snaked toward the eastern wall.

From across the vault, Perry was saying “Now, even if we pick up too many for our own students, we can always render bodies down to bone. There are medical schools in sore need of skeletons. I can show you how to articulate a specimen. It’s quite an art,”

“Yes, Professor,” O’Rourke said.

“Like to learn that skill, O’Malley?”

“You bet.”

“Good lad, you never know if you’ll get through all four years and it’s good to have a trade—a lucrative trade—to fall back on . . . ”

“Did Perry make you learn how to articulate a skeleton?” Cruncher said in a low voice as we started to pry open the first lid.

“No. What about you?”

“No, but I watched—from a distance—but very closely, so I know how it’s done. I guess he figures ‘O’Malley’ doesn’t have much chance making it through the program.” He dropped a coffin nail in the pocket of his leather apron.

“Or if he does get a degree, Perry thinks he’s only going to treat shanty Irish, anyhow,” I said.

“God save the Queen,” Cruncher said, winking. “Dyson is strictly English. The Van in my name is from my mother’s family.” Cruncher tilted the flask and took a long swallow; then he passed the brandy across the coffin to me. I had a drink and handed it back.

“Ready?”

He nodded and we lifted the lid away,

“Aaugh!” I stepped back, pressing my sleeve against my nose and mouth. The stench rising out of the casket was unbelievable.

“Not quite frozen yet,” Cruncher said.

I felt myself beginning to retch.

“Here, sit down a minute.”

I sat on the cold floor and lowered my chin between my knees.

“Put some of this under your nose.”

He handed me a small round tin.

“It’s camphor ointment with a little peppermint and lavender.” He pulled aside his makeshift mask and I saw it gleaming above his upper lip. “Keeps the reek safely at bay.”

“She has the pox,” I said.

“No question there; her dancing days are done.”

I laughed weakly.

“And for godssake, take this handkerchief and tie it on.”

Maybe he saw me blush, or maybe it was because I didn’t immediately put my hand out for it when he took it from his pocket. “Go on, use it. I don’t give a good goddamn if you don’t have a handkerchief, Sykes. You’re smart. I like intelligent people.”

I smeared on a thick dollop of the waxy cream. He has magic pockets, I thought irrationally. What’s next? A white rabbit, a flock of parrots?

“That’s right, cover your mustache hole,” he said.

I took the handkerchief—heavy linen—and monogrammed JVD, and began to fold it.

“Thanks, Jerry.”

“Don’t let the monogram show, a gentleman never does.” Above the makeshift mask, his eyes were merry.

“I know,” I said, tying it on, then standing up again and looking down at the woman’s hideously scarred face. “Terrible. Even her eyelids.”

“Maybe her eyes, too. She might have died blind.” He leaned over and lifted the scabrous flap of flesh and I saw that the sclera of her right eye had gone red from hemorrhage. He whispered, “Let’s take her, Sykes . . . think of what we could learn dissecting her.”

I realized that avarice I’d seen in his eyes earlier was for knowledge, even forbidden knowledge. But it didn’t stop me from interjecting, “Are you mad?”

He held up his gloved hands and waggled his fingers. “Nothing to worry about, Sykes. Seriously.”

I put my face up to his until we met like a bridge over the body and were nearly nose-to-nose. “The scabs . . . she’ll contaminate all the other bodies . . . ”

“Chuck her to one side at the bottom of the wagon, once we’re in the lab we can spray ’er and any of the others in proximity with phenol—no one’s going to get sick.”

“The professor—”

“It’s dark, he’s old and tired, he won’t see a thing. And a little judiciously dispensed cash will keep O’Rourke and Winterbourne shut up if they do notice her; and we make sure we’re the ones to haul our specimen out of the cart.”

“But in the lab—the others are bound to notice tomorrow when it’s daylight . . . ”

“We’ll start tonight, we’ll hide her till we’re done. Sykes, this could be the making of our careers.”

He didn’t say, Especially yours. We both knew that medical school scholarship boys were lucky to eke out a living—and they had to compete with midwives and barber-surgeons and even dentists. “What about afterward, Van Dyson?”

I saw the corners of his eyes crinkle and tilt upward and knew he’d smiled behind his mask. “That’s pie, Sykes, pure pie. We cut her up, flense and boil her to get rid of the grease; then we can articulate the skeleton.”

“And?”

“Keep it for a souvenir in your office or sell it. But I’m betting that when we’re done dissecting, neither of us will have to concern ourselves with anything more than where we’re going to display our Copley Medals. Just think. We’ll be in the company of Franklin and Gauss and Ohm.”

We had to shift a few bodies, but we wedged the pox victim on the bottom and against the slats that made up the wagon’s side boards. I started to push a corpse on top of her but Van Dyson caught my arm. “One more, Sykes,” he pleaded. “A male. It will make our research more complete. And after tonight, neither one of us will have to play at being resurrection men ever again.”

I nodded.

He was whistling as we walked back into the crypt for the last time. Cruncher really was an apt nickname, I thought—he wanted knowledge and, like his fictional counterpart, he was going to renounce grave robbing.

I heard the tower clock strike 2:00 a.m. We’d unloaded most of the corpses and dragged them to the lab. There was an oversized dumb waiter to hoist them to the second floor, but it took two men to pull its ropes—especially if there were two bodies on its platform.

“I must be getting old, lads. Can you handle the rest of these?”

“Sure, Professor.”

“No problem.”

“Certainly.”

“Absolutely. Good night, Dr. Perry,” I said.

“All right, I’ll take the landau and one of the horses, and my man can stay behind till you’re done, then drive the wagon back.”

“We can handle it, sir, no need for your man to hang about. Winterbourne can drive the wagon back.”

“Thanks, Van Dyson. Thank you all. It’s been a magnificent catch: An even dozen new specimens.”

“G’night, sir.”

Winterbourne had hooded the lantern again, and in the semi-dark, Jerry and I loaded the pox victims onto the dumb waiter.

“You go upstairs; shout down when the bodies are level with the floor, and I’ll tie off the ropes down here and I’ll send O’Rourke up.” His hands were clumsy with the thick gloves; he fumbled under his apron, then handed me a five-dollar gold piece. “But don’t let him hang around. Give him this. I’ll come up and we’ll move the bodies into the lab ourselves. All right?”

We shook hands briefly, then he pulled out the silver flask for the last time. “To Van Dyson and Sykes,” he said. “To our success.”

The anatomy lab was on situated on the second floor to take advantage of the sun that poured in through its skylight. Adjacent and behind a heavy, metal-clad door, was a kind of cold storage unit (also completely lined with metal) stacked with huge blocks of ice procured from the river, where we’d trundled most of the bodies we collected. But Winterbourne and O’Rourke had laid out three or four on vacant tables in the dissection room.

“Even a top-notch school like Yale has a dearth of specimens,” I said when we wrestled the male smallpox victim onto the last dissecting table.

“Well, these two won’t be occupying valuable space for long,” Jerry said. “Get some phenol, alcohol, whatever you can find.” He’d pulled down all the dark green shades and lit the room like Christmas—candles and lamps, even a crackling fire.

I went to the glassed cabinets. My hand was on the knob and I turned and said, “Let’s just spray them down and cover them up, I’m whipped.”

“Not on your life.” He was rifling a drawer in the dissection table he normally used and pulled out a syringe and a vial. “Seven-percent solution, cocaine. Nobody will be here before noon, they’ll all be in the lecture hall.”

I swallowed uneasily.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. How do you think I have the best grades in my class?”

Nightmares come to life. They really do. No one’s going to believe this—believe anything in these pages, but I’m going to leave them in my room after I flee. For all I know, they’ll be thrown away, but at least I’ll have written down what happened. Was it something in the disease itself that initiated the transition? I keep thinking about what Van Dyson said about the segregated pox cemeteries when I’d been about to punch him in Dr. Perry’s landau: All the headstones face east. And these victims were from the eastern wall of the crypt. It wasn’t folie a deux, it wasn’t the cocaine. It wasn’t.

We’d sprayed the bodies; perhaps unwittingly we tracked or transferred scabs, carried them on our trouser or shirt cuffs from one corpse to the next. I was chattering away a mile a minute, my mind seemed filled with an exultance that bordered on ecstasy: there was nothing Van Dyson or I couldn’t do. He smiled. “Really clears the brain, doesn’t it? Let’s inject one more hypo each, then get started.”

We undressed the body. He lowered the lamp over the male. “Excellent. He’s thawing. That will make things easier for us.” He handed me the scalpel. “You may have the honor of the first cut, Dr. Sykes.”

“I’ll start with the classic Y, so we can look at how the organs might have been affected.”

He nodded. “I’ve got a stack of slides ready next to the microscope.” He stood opposite me, leaned in.

I pushed down, concentrating on making a straight line, keeping the depth even, and drew the knife upwards toward the sternum.

The man suddenly gave out a groan and his body convulsed.

I stepped back, scalpel in hand.

The corpse lurched upright and before I could react, its hands were around Van Dyson’s throat and its mouth . . . dear God, its mouth . . . was buried in the flesh of Van Dyson’s cheek. Van Dyson screamed. The thing broke his neck as easily as you’d snap a wishbone. His head hung at peculiar cant, his tongue rolled out between his slack lips and his eyes dulled. The corpse gnawed mouth, nose, the tender skin beneath the chin, grunting. Blood poured down its throat and chest.

I shrieked.

It raised its eyes to look at me and what I saw in them was malice beyond any evil I could ever have imagined. Then it grinned.

Behind me, the female was stirring.

Half-flensed bodies began to tremble on their tables beneath the sheets.

I lunged at the male creature with my scalpel upraised and plunged it into his ear.

The blade snapped off and he fell in a heap onto the wooden boards.

Be quick now, Sykes, aim true, I told myself. There are knives by the drawer-full here.

I stabbed eyes, ears, heads. I dismembered as many of the bodies as I could, boiled the parts in a huge black kettle I hung inside the fireplace. I could scarcely keep myself from vomiting a hundred times. It wasn’t doctoring, it was butchery.

Then I heard a rattle from behind the metal-clad door. As their bodies thawed—just enough—the time of the others we’d collected had come.

It was already near daylight.

I looked around helplessly at the carnage of the dissection room, then toward the knocking from behind the heavy metal door.

I’d never get all of them rendered quickly enough.

Besides, I mourned inwardly, it was Van Dyson who knew how to articulate them, how to give a corpse a purpose even when its flesh was gone. They’d be harmless when the meat of their brains was gone, I thought; and fire would have to see to the rest.

I raked the logs from the fire, turned over the kerosene lamps.

I heard the wild scream of the rising flames mingling with the guttural cries of the resurrected ones from behind the metal-clad door, and I fled.

Auden Strothers crept stealthily into the darkened anatomy lab. Not a soul in sight—just whatever’s left of their wrecked bodies.

There was no time to worry about what might have happened to Sheri Trent, he reminded himself. Their cadaver—C 390160—lay under its blue sheet, its punctured eye hanging slightly askew on its cheekbone. Impossible to think they ever nicknamed the foul thing Molly. The autopsy students were always roving from table to table, watching a group prepare a slice of pancreas for histology, observing one of the professors work on a delicate area like the tongue and larynx . . . and people got their hands in—even if the cadaver technically belonged to another team.

He carefully unzipped the body bag embracing Team 22’s cadaver—the one that Sheri Trent had spattered with her own blood after she’d been bitten. Trent must’ve gotten her shit together when she saw the thing twitch—it too, had a deflated eye.

But, there were all those daily casual exchanges from table to table . . . and he counted two more blue sheets tagging corpses in the room . . . and the common graves where, Strothers had no doubt, the “disease” spread quietly underground and from place to place to place.

He snorted three lines of meth and joked inwardly that dismembering the bodies he was sure were infected, was essentially hackwork.

In his mind’s eye he saw the dead woman sit up and lunge, yellowed teeth bared. He saw the bloody pocket of the wound in Sheri’s arm. He cut and flensed, retching over his shoulder. Strothers picked up a surgical power saw, intent on wresting the femur from the pelvis. “For Christ’s sake,” he said aloud. He was trained to work carefully, what he was about to do was a waste. Besides, he hated the whine of the saw. If he proceeded cautiously—with precision—the bones could be articulated, he reminded himself, and used in schools and labs and hospitals.

There was a kitchen off the lounge where he could boil up the remains. Hell, if it came to it, he could cart them home in plastic garbage bags and fire up his own stove.

It was going very well, he was whistling when the lab door suddenly burst open.

He started; sure for a brief second that a mindless, shambling corpse that had once been Sheri Trent had come to gnaw his flesh.

“Security!” A female officer with blond hair advanced on him.

More cops piled into the room.

Strothers followed their gaze from the flensed bodies to the baggie spilling white powder cheerily across an empty chrome table.

“You’re under arrest!”

“You don’t understand—they’re infected!” he shouted.

He felt his arms jerked backwards, cold metal handcuffs bit into his wrists.

Outside, through the windows, Strothers could see the flashing red lights of town and state police cars.

He watched the crimson glow play over the pale skin and ruined muscles of the cadavers, giving them an unearthly vibrancy—a warmth, he was certain, that would soon return them to life.