Death Takes a Holiday (Cities of the Dead) Read online

dehydration, skin lesions and blood loss from the mouth, nose, ears, penis and rectum – well, that’s all the holes. He was unconscious and pupils unresponsive. Breathing was slow, heavy perspiration. They gave him an IV solution and pushed him into a room to wait for you and your team to arrive.”

  “He showed the first symptoms about twenty-four hours ago. It’s a fast-acting bug, whatever it is,” Bright said.

  “That it is; nothing I’m familiar with off the top off my head,” Ze’ev said. “Seems to go at the body’s fluids, from the looks of this, almost as if it’s trying to squeeze everything liquid out, almost as if it's trying to turn the victim into an instant mummy.”

  There was a clatter from somewhere outside the room, muffled by distance and walls but still discernible as metal banging into metal. Ze’ev rolled his eyes. The banging continued for a few more seconds and then stopped. Ze’ev looked at his watch.

  “I’ll give them a few minutes to pick everything up before we head down and start the autopsy, this way we can all pretend nothing weird just happened,” Ze’ev said.

  Bright followed Ze’ev down the hall and into the autopsy room and stopped in her tracks. The drawer with Hristo Gruev’s body in it was pulled open and an empty gurney lay on its side nearby, the body of a medical intern lying next to it, pooling blood onto the floor. Ze’ev rushed through the room to the fallen man, but all Bright could do was stare.

  “Jason! Jason, are you okay? Can you hear me?” Ze’ev bent over the intern’s body and checked for a pulse. “He’s alive.”

  Bright regained her composure and walked the rest of the way into the room. “He’s bleeding from the arm,” she said as she came alongside Ze’ev and kneeled down.

  Ze’ev scrunched up the intern’s shirt sleeve and both looked in consternation at what appeared to be a bite wound on the intern’s forearm, a deep, lacerating cut which had removed a chunk of flesh.

  “Is that a bite wound?” Bright asked.

  Ze’ev half-nodded. “Looks like, but not a normal one, this is a bite for eating, not to inflict pain.”

  “Get bandages, I’ll apply pressure,” Bright said, motioning for Ze’ev to move aside. “Is he hurt anywhere else?”

  “Banged his head pretty good hitting the floor,” Ze’ev said, standing up and hurrying to the other side of the room. He picked up the phone, “I need a first responder unit to the morgue stat, we’ve got an injured staff that needs immediate emergency treatment.”

  Ze’ev returned and placed a bandage on the wound, securing it with tape and biting off the ends.

  “What would have bitten him?”

  Ze’ev half-stood and banged his head into the open tray door. “Jesus!” he said, his eyes rimming with tears as he shoved the tray back into the wall. He paused for a moment and focused on the intense point of pain on the crown of his head, willing it to fade away. He took a long, deep breath and opened his eyes. Ze’ev turned to Bright and shrugged. “Who, you mean, and why?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “No ‘what’ bit him. That’s a human mouth bite on his arm. Believe me, I’ve seen hundreds of them, maybe thousands. Usually they’re just bruises with indentations, maybe once in a while you’ll get a body in here with punctures from somebody’s mouth, but that’s rare. This wound, this bite, you never get that from a person. Dogs, yeah, sometimes. People, never,” Ze’ev said. “Which means you have to ask, ‘who bit him?’”

  “And why?”

  “Exactly,” Ze’ev said, turning to the intern and patting through his clothing for any obvious signs of other trauma.

  Bright looked around the room and immediately noticed a puddle of blood on the floor near the equipment table, and a small rotary saw lying on the floor. She walked over to it and saw a spray of blood across the counter and onto the wall. The various tools were in disarray, a smear of blood across them as if they had been desperately snatched for.

  “He doesn’t have any cut wounds on him, does he?” Bright asked.

  “No, why?” Ze’ev said.

  “There’s a rotary saw and some knives and such over here that have blood on them.”

  Ze’ev gave her a curious look. “Those tools should all be clean and ready for the autopsy.”

  He got up and walked across the room and looked down at the equipment. Ze’ev gave Bright a look of mild bewilderment and almost shrugged. “Let me see if I can’t get a hold of Marcus. He should have been here helping Jason, anyway. Maybe he knows what’s going on.”

  Ze’ev picked the phone off the hook on the wall, punched in a code, and spoke. Overhead, the speakers let out the muffled, softened sound of Ze’ev’s voice calling for Marcus Glass to come to the morgue examining room. Behind them there was a slight groan and the shuffling of fabric against concrete, the gentle sound of the double-doors swinging to a close. Ze’ev turned.

  “What the fu—yee-oww!” Ze’ev said, his voice changing from deep confusion to clear pain.

  Bright spun around and stared for a moment at the sight of Hristo Gruev biting deeply into Ze’ev’s neck, Gruev’s hands clasped tightly around Ze’ev’s right arm and shoulder, blood coursing down Ze’ev shirt and gurgling up across Gruev’s bared teeth and lips. Ze’ev smacked Gruev with his left palm several times, his hand making dull slaps on Gruev’s forehead but doing nothing to phase Gruev. Bright took a pair of steps sideways and tried to make sense of what she was looking at: Gruev should be dead.

  Yul Ze’ev let out a second yell now. It was an animalistic plea for help from the heavens, a sound uttered by uncountable numbers of prey as they realized the bite they were suffering would be fatal, the grasp of the claws un-releasable; that life was rapidly coming to a close should some divine intervention not materialize. Bright recognized the sound on some primal level, and she moved forward quickly and grabbed Gruev’s right arm at the biceps and elbow, trying to bend it up and away from its grip on Ze’ev.

  But Gruev did not budge. Beneath her fingertips she could feel the thick deadness of Gruev’s arm, as if she were grabbing modeling clay. His body temperature should have been that of the morgue’s storage tray’s refrigeration, but instead he was almost room temperature, a trace warmth that should not have been inside of a dead body. She could hear him breathing as he resisted her attempt to move his arm, a slow, almost-silent in-and-out of air that would've been lost in the sound of the room's ventilation were she not so close. She flicked her eyes to Gruev’s face and watched as he slowly moved his head from side to side, trying to bite off a piece of Ze’ev neck. Gruev’s eyes were slits, his brows furrowed with intense concentration.

  The air was filled with sudden noise and commotion, and a half-second later she was pulled away from Gruev and Ze’ev while a pair of paramedics wrenched Gruev off of Ze’ev, each medical technician taking one of Gruev’s arms at the shoulder and breaking him off of the pathologist. Ze’ev collapsed, his arms around his neck, blood seeping through his fingers.

  Bright turned and watched the paramedics as they struggled with Gruev, a lump of Ze’ev’s neck in his mouth. Gruev wriggled to break free of the paramedics while he continued chewing, his naked body streaked with rivulets of blood. Although he was supposed to be dead, Gruev was winning the wrestling match with the two paramedics, slowly breaking their grips on him.

  “Call security,” the paramedic on the left said to her, his voice tinged with annoyance more than fear.

  Bright rushed over the phone on the wall, picked up the handset and scanned it for a listing of punch codes, found it and entered the numbers.

  “Security.”

  “Hello, I’m Dr. Lucinda Bright from-,” she paused a moment, composed herself. “I need security to the morgue operating room as quickly as possible. We’ve got a patient who’s attacked two staff members and is currently engaging two emergency medical technicians. Please hurry as both staff have suffered serious wounds and are in need of emergency medical treatment.”

  Taking Gruev down had required the use of two Ta
sers, and even then Gruev had only been stunned long enough for the security guards to fix a pair of handcuffs on him before he had started to try to get up off the floor. Unable to rise, Gruev had spun slowly on the floor, his legs pushing him lazily, aimlessly, relentlessly.

  Ze’ev and the intern had both been taken to the emergency department for treatment and each was unconscious. Marcus Glass was dead, his body had been found down the hallway from the morgue, his throat torn out and right thumb bitten off. Hristo Gruev, pronounced dead only eleven hours earlier, was now strapped to a bed in a room with a two-way mirror, a pair of armed sheriff's officers outside the door to the room, an Internet camera focused on him and monitors of every sort imaginable plugged into his should-be lifeless body.

  But there he was on the other side of the glass wall, moaning incoherently and straining against the bed's leather straps, a fact that totally baffled Bright and Special Agent Hoffman. He turned away from the glass and shook his head slightly, perturbed.

  “We’re sure he was 100 percent dead?” Hoffman asked.

  “Well, I wasn’t the attending, but according to his chart, he died,” Bright said. “There was no heart rate on the cardiac monitor. No active breaths. They did an apnea test and the CO2 was greater than 120 without any breaths. The only thing confusing throughout all of this is that Gruev's body temp never