Dean laid his hand on her forehead, and tried to smile. “You’ll see the sun, don’t you worry. This time next month, you’ll be sitting on your rooftop in your bikini, and I’ll come around to make sure.”

  Frank said, “Hi, Dean.”

  Dean turned around and blinked at him. “Oh—hi, Frank. Glad you could make it. Mind you, I think we need more priests than doctors.” He took Frank’s arm and steered him away from the young woman’s bed. “They’re dying, Frank. All of them. They haven’t announced it on the TV yet, but this disease is one hundred percent fatal, whatever it is, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.”

  “Nothing from the labs yet?”

  “So far, they’re totally baffled. Every victim’s blood shows signs of this metallo-enzyme, but they’re beginning to think it’s a symptom, rather than a cause.”

  “Where’s George?”

  “Up on Eleventh, helping with autopsies.”

  “How many negative outcomes so far?”

  “Up until 11:45 we’d admitted seven hundred seventeen patients, which is over ten times our capacity. At a rough guess, I’d say that we’ve already lost more than half. They seem to succumb much more rapidly, too. It’s like a forest fire. Like—the more people that catch it, the faster they die. Round about now, I’d say that most patients are dead within four to five hours of admission.”

  Frank looked around. He didn’t know what to say. Some people were still retching and sicking up blood, but most of them were lying pale-faced and shivering, as if they knew what was going to happen to them, but were too weak even to cry.

  “You’re bleeding,” said Dean.

  Frank peered at his elbow. “Nothing serious. Some girl attacked me with a piece of glass. It’s like hell out there, believe me. They must be fifty deep, trying to force their way in here.”

  Dean led the way through to his office. One woman was sitting against the wall and three women were lying on the floor, all of them trembling and muttering. Dean’s desk was strewn with blood-stained, crumpled papers. “There’s no point in us taking any more in,” he said, dragging out his chair and sitting down. “We can’t do anything for them, except hold their hands while they die.”

  “Maybe it’ll burn itself out like the Spanish influenza did in 1918.”

  “The Spanish influenza died out because there was nobody left alive to catch it. I don’t know. I don’t have any idea what this is, Frank. I can’t understand how it spreads and I can’t work out why it makes people want to drink human blood.”

  “Maybe the TV people aren’t so far wrong. Maybe it is vampires.”

  “Oh, sure. Nosferatu’s Syndrome. Look—you’d better let me put a dressing on that cut.”

  Frank took off his coat and rolled up his blood-soaked shirt-sleeve. Dean swabbed the cut with alcohol and examined it closely. “You were lucky. A quarter-inch to the left and she would have opened up your radial artery.” He applied a nonadhesive dressing and bound it with tape. One of the women on the floor coughed and said, “Tatal nostru . . .”

  “Has anybody found out what that means?” asked Frank.

  Dean shook his head. “We’ve been overwhelmed, Frank. We’re still overwhelmed.”

  “But they’re all saying it. Everybody who catches this disease. I mean, don’t you think that needs looking into?”

  “You’re absolutely right, it does. But not by me, and not tonight.”

  Frank left Dean in his office and took a tour around the ER and all the surrounding wards. In the new-admissions bay, patients were retching and crying out in despair, or furiously babbling to themselves, while exhausted nurses went from one bed to another, trying to keep them as quiet and as comfortable as they could. Until they knew what was causing this epidemic, there was nothing else they could do. Frank stepped carefully over blood-drenched bodies that were packed together in the corridors. Some of them were moaning or praying but most of them were very close to death and were silently staring at the ceiling. Emergency technicians patrolled the corridors, checking the patients who were lying on the floor, shaking them if necessary to see if they were still breathing. Every now and then, one of the technicians would stand up and beckon for the porters, and yet another body would be lifted up and wheeled away to the morgue, draped like a store-window dummy in a bloodstained sheet.

  The stench was so strong that Frank had to press his hand over his face. Even though he had been practicing gastric medicine for eleven years, he had never become inured to the smell of decomposing flesh—unlike George, who could happily cut open a slippery gray-green corpse without even wearing a face mask, and whistle Annie Laurie while he did it. Frank was always convinced that the smell of death lingered on his hands and in his hair, even after three or even four successive showers. The women in his life had often caught him sniffing his fingers, but he had never told them why he did it. He hadn’t wanted them to think that when he made love to them, his hands might still smell like dead men and women.

  He gagged, but his stomach was empty, and so he didn’t bring up anything but acid-tasting bile. The back of his throat felt as if somebody had forced a carpenter’s rasp down it, and his skin prickled. He was so shivery that he began to wonder if he had a temperature. He could feel sweat sliding down his back and into his waistband.

  A man on the floor painfully lifted up his head and stared at him. The man had a beard of dried blood and his eyes were unfocused. “De strigoica, de strigoi,” he said, hoarsely. “Si de case cu moroi.”

  “What?” said Frank, hunkering down beside him. “What are you trying to say?”

  “De deochetori . . . si de deochetoare . . .” the man wheezed, but then his head fell back and he lay staring at the dying woman next to him, and gasping for breath.

  Frank stood up. He still couldn’t work out what language these people were speaking, but he was convinced that it had to be a critical clue. What condition causes people to speak in tongues that nobody has taught them, and nobody understands? Only demonic possession, as far as he knew, and he certainly didn’t believe in that.

  God, he was thirsty. He pushed aside a gaggle of abandoned wheelchairs until he reached the Coke machine. He took out three quarters, but before he inserted the first one into the slot he thought: I don’t want a Coke. The very thought of swallowing Coke made him feel hotter, and his skin more irritable. I need something else. Something that will really refresh me.

  A porter went past, pushing the body of a young blonde woman on a gurney. He was short and podgy, with dark circles under his eyes, and his face was waxy with tiredness. His overall was spattered in so much blood that he looked like a butcher.

  “How’s it going?” Frank asked him.

  The porter stopped, and wiped his nose with his blood-streaked forearm. “We can’t help them, can we? All we can do is watch them kick the bucket and then wheel them off to the morgue.”

  “Here,” said Frank. He took hold of the front of the gurney, and helped the porter to steer it along the corridor. If he couldn’t do anything to help the dead, he might as lend a hand to the living.

  He pushed open the heavy swing doors of the morgue. It was chilly and gloomy inside, and one of the fluorescent lights was blinking on and off. All of the chiller compartments must have been filled by now, because bodies were being wrapped up in sheets with only their faces showing, and then laid out in lines on the floor, as tidily as possible. There was only one morgue attendant on duty—a tall brunette woman with small oval glasses and a Roman nose. She looked as exhausted as the porter, and she had a large red cold-sore on her upper lip.

  “Brought you another one,” said Frank. “Where do you want her?”

  “Any place here is fine,” said the morgue attendant, pointing to a row of women’s bodies on the right-hand side of the room. “I’m trying to keep the men and the women separate.”

  “In case of what?” asked the porter. “Post-extinction hanky-panky?”

  “Out of respect,” said the morgue attendant. “Or maybe that’s something they don’t teach you in porter school.”

  The porter left, banging the gurney loudly against the swing doors. The morgue attendant bent over the woman that he and Frank had just brought in, and checked the label attached to her big toe. “Jane Kryzmanski, 1143 West Thirty-eighth Street. Aged twenty-four. God, what a waste.”

  Frank looked around at the blood-stained bodies. “I don’t think I ever felt so helpless in my life.”

  “You’re a doctor?”

  Frank nodded. “Frank Winter, gastroenterology.”

  “Good to know you, doctor. Helen Bryers. We don’t have any idea what’s causing this yet, do we?”

  “No. Whatever it is, it seems to be very difficult to isolate.”

  “It’s a bad dream,” said Helen Bryers. “I keep thinking I’m going to wake up, and none of this will have happened.”

  You and me both, thought Frank. But then maybe he was dreaming her, and she didn’t even exist. “How many cadavers do we have here now?” he asked her.

  “Three hundred sixty-nine, including this young lady. There’s over a hundred out back, in the storeroom. We’re going to have to ship them out soon, before they become a major health hazard. I’m waiting to hear about refrigerated trucks.”

  Frank walked between the bodies. Each of them was a personal tragedy, but right now they were nothing but numbers, and the numbers kept on piling up.

  Helen Bryers said, “Could you do something for me, doctor? I hate to ask you, but I haven’t had time to go to the bathroom in over four hours.”

  “You want me to babysit?”

  “Both of my colleagues went off-duty and they still haven’t come back and I’m not supposed to leave the morgue unattended.”

  “Just in case one of your charges tries to make a run for it, right?”

  She took off her glasses and tried to smile. “It’s the rule, ever since that unpleasantness last year.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “We had some very distressing incidents . . . casual cleaning staff taking advantage of deceased patients. Intimate advantage.”

  Frank suddenly became aware that he was staring at Helen Byers’ neck, and at the pale blue line of her carotid artery. He could imagine the warm blood pulsing through her system, pumped by her heart, and the thought was strangely soothing. Drinking blood . . . it must be like lowering your body into a warm, deep bath.

  He blinked. “Oh—you mean that unpleasantness?” he said, abruptly realizing what she was talking about. “Yes, I heard about it. I guess some guys are so lacking in charisma, the only women who are going to fall for them are dead.”

  “Then it’s all right if I—?”

  “Sure, go ahead. Take your time. You look like you could use a break.”

  Helen Byers took her purse and left Frank alone in the morgue. He supposed that he should have refused her request, and returned to the ER to help Dean, or gone upstairs to assist George. But somehow it all seemed so hopeless. No matter what they did, they didn’t know how to stop all these people from dying, and maybe they were better off dead. Most people were.

  He caught sight of himself in a glass-fronted cabinet, and stared at his reflection as if he didn’t recognize himself. Most people were better off dead? Why on earth had he thought that? He was supposed to be a doctor. He was supposed to do everything in his power to keep people alive. He rubbed his arm. His skin felt uncomfortably hot, as if he were suffering from sunburn, and his thirst was so fierce that he found it difficult to swallow.

  He looked down at the body of a middle-aged woman in a gray-and-white summer dress, stained brown with blood. She was quite handsome, with a well-cut bob, and she had obviously had some cosmetic surgery done around her eyes. Not much use where she was going, thought Frank . . . she should have saved her money. Her eyes were wide open, but all the color seemed to have drained out of them. Whatever she was staring at, it wasn’t in this world.

  As he turned away from her, he heard a noise in the storage room at the back of the morgue. A clatter, and then a sharp bang, like a stool falling over.

  “Anybody there?” he called out. He didn’t think it was likely. Helen Byers had told him that she was on her own, and the ER technicians knew what they were doing: They wouldn’t have sent anybody to the morgue if they weren’t one hundred percent sure that life was extinct.

  But then he heard another sound, like a window-bar rattling; and he was sure that he could feel a sudden draft of warm air. The sirens sounded louder, too.

  He made his way toward the storeroom, stepping over a row of seven or eight dead men as if he were log-rolling across a river.

  “Hey—is anybody there?” he repeated. Maybe somebody had been brought into the morgue before he was ready for it. He accidentally stepped on a dead man’s hand, and said, “Sorry, feller!” before he could stop himself. The man had white hair and a bulbous nose. He must have been a doorman, because he was still wearing his maroon uniform with gold-braided epaulets. He looked as if he were sleeping, rather than dead.

  Frank heard another noise. He stepped cautiously into the storeroom but it was very dark, and he could see hardly anything, except for the window at the very far end, which must have faced the hospital air shaft, because it admitted only a faint, gray light from the night outside. He strained his eyes and he thought that he could a dark figure moving in front of the window, but he couldn’t be sure.

  “Hey!” he shouted, even though his throat was so sore. “Who are you? What the hell are you doing in the morgue?”

  He groped for the light switch, and found it. The fluorescent tubes flickered, and for a split second the storeroom was dazzlingly lit. But then all of the tubes popped at once, and Frank was left half-blinded, with swimming afterimages left in his eyes.

  In that split second, though, he had seen something horrifying. The storeroom window was open, and a girl in a bloodstained nightgown was climbing out of it. She was turned toward him, so that he could see how white her face was, and the dried blood around her mouth. Her hair was long and black and wild, and it was flying upward, as if it were being blown by a furious wind.

  A young man was rising up from the floor to follow her, his green-and-white baseball shirt blotted with blood. He was being helped up by a dark, attenuated figure, which Frank couldn’t make any sense of. It was less like a person than a sloping shadow, with an elongated head that rose toward the ceiling, and high, diagonal shoulders. It was leaning at an impossible angle, in the way that only a shadow could.

  Yet just before the lights went out, it had snapped its head around, and Frank had glimpsed two black, blurry eyes, and a stretched-open mouth that was more of a grating than a mouth. In the darkness, he heard an explosive, hate-filled hiss that sounded like air brakes, and then a high, piercing shriek—a shriek so terrible that he felt as if his brain was being blinded, as well as his eyes.

  10

  BLOODSHOT

  Laticia helped me to drag Ted Busch back up to my apartment. The heels of Ted’s sneakers knocked on every stair, all the way up, and bump-bump-bumped along the landing. I was amazed that nobody came out of their rooms to see what the hell we were doing.

  We heaved him on to the couch and he lay there with his face all scarlet and blistered and his legs and arms at peculiar angles like a marionette with all of his strings cut. Laticia said, “If I trusted the cops, I’d call for the cops, if I thought they’d come.”

  “Laticia, he tried to cut my throat.”

  “Well, you need to wash that blood off of your face and put a BandAid on it at least. Let me do that for you. And if you get scared tonight, with this dead individual lying here, you can always come and share my bed.”

  “Laticia, you were sent from heaven, FedEx.”

  “A hundred and twenty-five for all night, mind. Gratuities extra.”

  After Laticia had gone back to her apartment, I stood looking down at Ted Busch’s body and I felt genuinely sorry for him, and guilty as hell.

  “Those Jeu Noir cards were dead right about you, buddy,” I told him. “They warned you about Imminent Death, didn’t they? But you didn’t take any notice. Okay, Death was a whole lot Imminenter than either of us thought. But the cards warned you about water, too, didn’t they, with the Water Woman? You should never have tried to cut my throat in the bathroom. Well—you should never have tried to cut my throat at all. Nemo me impune lacessit. He who steals my clownfish gets a kick in their puny ass.”

  I opened another can of Guinness. It was my last one, but I needed it. I didn’t know what to do next. Singing Rock had given me two letters, “s” and “t.” At least I thought that he had given me two letters, but I could have been allowing my fevered imagination to run away with me. I had no way of checking if he had really meant “s” and “t.” And what was even more confusing, I had no idea how many more letters he was going to give me, or if I’d understand what the word meant when I eventually got them all.

  I was pretty damn sure, though, that the blood lust that was affecting so many people in Manhattan was the same blood lust that had led Ted to attack me and try to cut my throat. I was also pretty damn sure that it wasn’t caused by any kind of disease, or virus, not in the way that the authorities were talking about it. It was some kind of mass possession, like The Exorcist times 8,008,278. This wasn’t just one girl talking like Louis Armstrong and throwing the occasional Jesuit out of the window. This was a tidal wave of possession, a spiritual tsunami, and it was swamping the city and everybody in it.

  And it was genuinely terrifying, on a grand scale. It was September eleventh squared. If so many people had died in a single day, how much longer could the rest of us survive?

  I made up my mind. No matter how much Bertie protested, I would have to talk to Amelia. She was the only person who would believe that Singing Rock was trying to help me from the Happy Hunting Ground, and she was the only person who might be able to persuade the city authorities that I wasn’t a fraud or a certifiable lunatic.