Bad Moon Rising by Jonathan Maberry

Author:Jonathan Maberry
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Horror, Vampire
ISBN: 0786018178
Publisher: Pinnacle
Published: 2008-04-30T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 27

The image on Weinstock’s TV showed an unreal world of flat grays and whites and blacks. The stainless steel gleamed without twinkling; the shadows were precise and unchanging geometric shapes; the dim security lights were surrounded by frozen clouds of light. Only the inexorable count of the digital clock at the lower right-hand corner of the screen argued the reality of the passage of time. The stillness of the scene was ordinary at first, just a reflection of an event as detached from the present as something recorded on a cave wall twenty-five thousand years ago.

Dr. Weinstock raised one hand, finger extended, and pointed. His whole arm trembled. In a whisper he said, “There.”

The detectives looked at him briefly and then back at the video image and saw nothing. At first. Then there was a brief moment of vibration; then a muffled thud from somewhere offscreen, then a long silence broken by a second thump.

Nothing happened for nearly a full minute. Then there was another movement. It began as a tremble, a hesitant shift of the left-hand door that led from the autopsy suite to the adjoining cold room. The door shifted as if pressed, but it did not open, as if the pushing hand were uncertain, or confused. It began to open, dropped closed, began again to open. Closed again. Then abruptly it banged open hard and fast, reeling away from a powerful blow. The swinging door flew to the end of its closer, jolted to a halt, and then began to fall back toward the frame, but now something was blocking the way, and the closing door bounced off the hard shoulder of something that moved in a slow and plodding way.

LaMastra gasped out loud, leaning sharply forward.

“Oh my…God!” breathed Ferro.

In the doorway, blocking the close of the door, stood a man. He was naked and tall. Fair hair stuck out in all directions, tacky with fluids. He stood there, swaying slightly, staring with eyes that seemed to be dazed from sleep. His skin was milk white, turned to a luminescent blue by the videotape. The door hid half of his body, but the center of his torso was clearly visible, and both detectives could see the long lines of lightly stitched incisions. One stretched from shoulder to shoulder all the way across the chest in a lazy line that sagged toward the middle of the breastbone, where it met the longer cut that dropped all the way down past chest and stomach to the groin. The horrible Y-shaped ventral incision was held together only with temporary stitches, and in the gaps dark and unsavory shapes of organs and muscles bunched and shifted in their plastic bag with each step. The throat was the worst thing, though. The flesh there was a mass of torn strips of skin, ripped and shredded, held in place only by thin lengths of surgical tape.

With slow and uncertain steps, the figure moved into the autopsy suite, staggering a bit as it walked, as if uncertain how to use its legs.

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