The Devil’s Noose: A Pandemic Medical Thriller by Michael Angel

Author:Michael Angel [Angel, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Banty Hen Publishing
Published: 2019-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The young man lay on the table with his throat sliced and pinned open down to the suprasternal notch in the collarbone. Lacking power tools or the physical strength to use a rib cutter, Preble skipped the classic Y-shaped incision used in most autopsies. Instead, he’d relied on a shallower set of cuts to get the job done.

Lelache and Austen had returned from the infirmary and stood waiting at the foot of the table for Preble to update them. Austen still wore her hardsuit, while Lelache and Preble remained inside their lighter hazmat outfits. While more flexible, the hazmat suit was also more slippery, so Preble took care to move slowly and deliberately in the autopsy room.

Austen looked sadly at the body. Between the blond peach fuzz on his chin and strangely innocent blue eyes, the autopsy’s subject looked barely out of his teens. He’d been bagged so quickly and abruptly that Preble had been forced to cut through a faded blue work shirt to view the skin underneath.

What moved Austen to a certain pensive mood was the work tag that had remained clipped to the shirt’s left front pocket. The tag contained two rows of letters. The top one was written in Cyrillic, but she could understand the bottom row. It read: KOSTIA USENOV, DBA.

Poor Kostia had been the infirmary’s database administrator. More likely than not, he’d been the one who had input all the data Austen had seen so far. It was a bleak reminder of how virulent the organism here really was.

“I had to use scanners and endoscopes instead of opening up his chest,” Preble explained. “The bloodwork and scanning results are going to take a bit more time. But I’ve come across a couple of interesting things.”

“Let’s hear it,” Austen said.

Preble placed a slide under a microscope and projected the enhanced image on a nearby wall screen. What looked like brittle strands of green or blue yarn turned into flaking chunks of cable under magnification.

“We initially thought there might be a dozen subtypes of bacteria making up this biofilm. As of now, I’m up to forty. These are a few that I took from the cadaver’s throat and teased out of the mass for preservation.”

“Preservation? What do you mean?”

“For safety, I’ve encased each of these strands in a bio-friendly form of acrylic. Still, note the ‘flaky’ nature of the strands. By the time the organism reaches this stage, it’s in serious decline. I believe the composition of the modern atmosphere limits it. But before that limit kicks in…take a look at the base of my incision.”

Austen and Lelache took turns peering into the hole cut above the collarbone. Austin switched on her suit lights. Deep down, where the layers of tracheal cartilage branched into the lungs, lay a blob of blue-green. A solid lump of bioslime, though this appeared darker and inert.

“If it grew this profusely,” Austen declared, “then it could have cut off gas exchange. Smothered its victims. That would tally with the signs of pulmonary edema we’ve been seeing.

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