Bad Moon Rising. Джонатан Мэйберри

delight he pushed the door open and vanished into the night.

      (4)

      Terry Wolfe’s face was bruised meat, his body debris. He was ruined, smashed, nearly gone. The vitals on the machines sagged, and the brain activity was just above the level where families begin to discuss pulling the plug.

      Yet there are some levels of the brain, some chambers of the sleep center that have thicker doors, stouter walls, fewer entries. The deepest dreams live there, playing out in shadowed corridors and in cellars where no light has ever shone. There are cobwebs and spiders down there; there are blind rats in those catacombs, and colorless things that wriggle in the relentless dark. No machine can record those dreams, no meter will ping or beep when something scampers through those places.

      When the doctors and nurses came into his room to look at the patterns on his charts their faces fell into sadness, their eyes showed the defeat each of them felt. Everyone loved Terry, everyone respected him. He was Pine Deep, but it was pretty clear that Terry Wolfe had left them, had caught the night train out of town, and now all they could do—the sum effect of their years of training, their collective experience, the weight of their science—was to watch and wait for him to die. Because Terry had left.

      Yet, he hadn’t. Nor had the beast.

      Over and over again, through lightless passageways and darkened dungeon rooms, into one blind alley after another, in the doorless maze of his own inner oubliette, Terry Wolfe ran screaming and the beast, always hungry, followed after.

      Chapter 12

      (1)

      Weinstock glanced at Crow and then turned a hard look on the caretaker. “There’s some risk of contagion here. Please, stand back.”

      “Contagion?” the man said, eyes flaring wide as he did indeed step back. “From what? I thought this fella was murdered.”

      Weinstock’s eyes were hard as flint, but even so they had a shifty flicker to them. Crow wore Wayfarers against the glare of the Sunday morning sun and he kept his face blank. Weinstock wore a heavy topcoat; Crow was in a bomber jacket and jeans. He held the clipboard with the exhumation papers on them, signed by Weinstock himself right over the signature of Nels Cowan’s wife. Her hand had trembled when she’d signed it and it made her handwriting look like that of a five-year-old. There were two small circles on the page where her tears had fallen and puckered the paper.

      Weinstock licked his lips. “Not all of the blood work on Officer Cowan was completed at the time of interment. Our tests detected traces of a highly dangerous virus.”

      “Virus?” The caretaker’s name was Holliston and his seamed face was a study in skepticism. He rested his shoulder against the bucket of the front-end loader and folded his arms. “Nels Cowan didn’t die of no virus, he was killed by that Boyd fellow.”

      “I didn’t say he did, Mr. Holliston,” Weinstock said frostily. “I said traces of a virus were detected in his blood. Tests have suggested that the alleged killer may have been infected, and that during the struggle he was wounded. There may have been an inadvertent exchange of blood during the struggle. It is vitally important to establish if this is the case. Among other things, I am the liaison between the town of Pine Deep and the local office of the CDC.”

      “What’s that?”

      “The Centers for Disease Control. So, it’s important that I conduct this test under the proper conditions.” He pulled a surgical mask out of his bag and slipped it on, and then began squirming his hands into latex gloves. Holliston yielded and walked a few dozen yards away.

      Crow waited until Holliston was far enough away and then said, “We are so going to go to jail for this shit.”

      “Joanie Cowan signed the paper and I’m the county coroner. It’s all more or less legal.”

      “More or less is not a comfortable phrase.”

      “It’s what we have.”

      “Any of that CDC stuff on the level?”

      Weinstock shrugged. “More or less.”

      “Swell.”

      They looked around. For a Sunday morning the cemetery was remarkably empty; church probably hadn’t let out yet.

      “You ready?” Weinstock asked, and Crow slipped his hand inside his jacket and pulled his Beretta nine half out of the shoulder rig. “If there’s anything in that coffin except a dead guy I’m going to empty this thing in it.”

      “Just don’t shoot me.”

      “Don’t get in the line of fire.”

      “Fair enough.”

      On the drive home from the hospital they’d cooked up the plan, going on the basis that if something was still happening in Pine Deep they needed to know sooner rather than later, so by the next morning they were ready. Weinstock printed out the exhumation papers and cooked up the infection story—he’d deal with chain of evidence later—and then called Joanie Cowan at seven-thirty on that Sunday morning, waking her out of a deep sleep in order to break her heart all over again. Overwhelmed by Weinstock’s medical double-talk, she had disintegrated into tears and signed the papers, and the two of them slunk away like thieves.

      “This is so wrong,” Crow said as they approached the coffin, which sat on the bucket of a big front-end loader. He brushed away clods of cold dirt and started twisting the wingnuts that held the lid on. His hands shook so bad his fingers slipped on the cold metal.

      Weinstock stopped him and handed him a mask. “He’s been dead for two weeks…this is going to be bad. You don’t want to breathe it. Remember…smell is particulate.”

      “Oh man. I really could have gotten through the day without knowing that.”

      “Welcome to the field of medicine.”

      “This isn’t medicine, brother,” Crow said, adjusting the rubber band that secured the mask. “This is black magic.”

      They worked together to make a fast job of it. Even without opening the lid it smelled bad. Like rotting meat and raw sewage poured over molasses. Crow gagged.

      Weinstock glanced around. The caretaker was ten rows down busy with the task of cutting the turf to dig a fresh grave. The doctor looked across the casket to Crow. “You ready?”

      “Not really. You?”

      Weinstock tried to laugh and bungled it.

      Crow said, “We’re burning daylight, Saul. Let’s do this or go home.”

      “Shit.” Weinstock steeled himself and gripped one corner of the lid as Crow told hold of the other. “God help us if we’re wrong about this.”

      But Crow shook his head. “God help us if we’re right.”

      The lid resisted for a moment, but then it yielded to their combined strength and opened; they pulled it up and daylight splashed down on the silk-lined interior.

      They stood there looking into the coffin for over a minute, saying nothing, lost in their own thoughts, each of their faces set into heavy frowns.

      “Well,” Crow said. “Now we know.”

      “Yeah,” Weinstock said hoarsely.

      “What does it mean?”

      The doctor shook his head. “As God is my witness, Crow, I honestly don’t know.”

      Nels Cowan had been buried in his Pine Deep police uniform. His hands, bloated with decomposition, lay folded on his stomach with the brim of his uniform hat set between the thick, white fingers. The flesh of Cowan’s face was purplish, distended with gas.

      “There’s no chance this is not him” Crow ventured.

      “It’s him.” Even so he took a sample of skin tissue just in case