They weren’t delivering; they were picking up.
Panic gripped Patrick.
Had Number 19 already gone? Was he even now six feet under, or fallen in fine ashes over the roofs and gardens of Thornhill, where the crematorium lay?
He turned from the windows and hurried to the end of the corridor, where a flight of stairs led him up to a fire door. When he opened it, he wasn’t sure which way to go, so chose left and chose well – after two more doors he recognized the dissection room, even though it was from a new direction. And from this end of the corridor – where no students were supposed to be – no entry code was needed.
Patrick switched on the dissection room lights with a sense of déjà vu. Except this time he already guessed he would not be alone for long.
The room looked desolate without its corpses. He saw the white bags lined up along the far wall, where Meg had said they would be, and did a quick count. There were twenty-one left. Twenty-one out of thirty. The odds were still in his favour.
The gurneys holding the cadavers stretched nearly the length of the back wall. He hurried straight to the last one on the right, closest to the refrigerators, without even picking out a pair of gloves. The tab of each black zip was located halfway down the side of its white bag. The first Patrick opened exposed Dolly’s eternal nail polish, and the next revealed a woman too. The third was Rufus – the curled red hair down his freckled forearm giving him away even before Patrick registered the ‘4’ stamped on the dutiful tag on his wrist.
Patrick unzipped a gash of less than six inches in the fourth bag, and recognized Number 19’s hip as if it were his own. The faint tan-line under the orange hue of embalming, the dark hair that stopped at the top of the thigh in a remarkably straight line. Here was the jagged edge that Scott had made; here was the mark on the ball joint where Dilip had dug too deep. The dull metal tag was redundant. Patrick unzipped the entire side of the body bag and threw it off the cadaver. Mick had packed Number 19 away in roughly the right shape: the legs at the bottom, the head at the top, the torso and arms in between. The organs and skin and fat were in neat bags where Number 19’s stomach used to be, and his spine was draped across his chest like an ambassadorial sash.
Patrick pulled the mouth open and peered inside, surprised by how much sharper the teeth felt without the protection of latex gloves—
The realization hit him as hard as the car had, and he almost shouted with the thrill of discovery.
The scars on Spicer’s finger were bite marks!
Patrick stared down at the teeth, instinctively knowing it made sense, but trying to understand why.
Had Number 19 bitten Spicer? If the fading marks on Spicer’s fingertip matched these teeth in this head, then it meant Spicer had interacted with the living, breathing Samuel Galen.
And not in a good way.
The teeth would be proof. And all Patrick knew for sure was that he needed to keep that proof from Spicer at all costs.
Patrick seized the gurney at one end as if to push it from the room. Then he stopped. Even if he made it out of the building without running into Mick at one exit or Spicer at the other, how far was he going to get pushing a corpse through the city on a trolley?
There was only one solution.
Patrick skidded over to the white trays full of the odd assortment of tools and cutlery, and picked out what he needed.
Then he started to saw off Samuel Galen’s head.
47
IT WAS REPULSIVE. There was none of the clinical finesse Patrick had come to expect. Instead, the head lolled from side to side with every stroke, as if begging him not to continue the outrage; frayed flesh spattered from the metal teeth and settled on the waxy cloth of the body bag; the thick neck muscles and the gristle of the larynx made him sick with the brutality of it all.
And all the time, the single remaining eye looked nowhere, and Patrick did not look at it.
Patrick wiped the sweat from his forehead and tried not to think about anything but the job he needed to do.
Not Samuel Galen smiling in the winter sunshine; not Lexi.
Definitely not his father.
He kept close to the shoulders, to preserve as much of the throat as possible. Luckily the spine was gone, and within five minutes the head was held on by no more than a few minor strands at the back of the neck.
Four small, familiar beeps made Patrick spin to look at the dissection-room door.
Someone was entering the code that would allow them on to the anatomy wing.
Spicer.
His time was up.
Patrick dropped the saw, seized the head and pulled. The gurney slid towards him and he put a foot on it and pulled again, as hard as he could – his fingernails digging into the raw flesh under the stripped chin. He tugged and yanked. Then he staggered a little as the frayed tendons snapped with a twang.
And the head was his.
Footsteps approached down the echoing corridor. Patrick tugged the body bag back over what was left of the cadaver. No time to zip it up. No time to run. The lights were on and he was exposed, his only way out blocked.
He pulled open the white sliding door of the nearest refrigerator – the one filled with large yellow plastic receptacles that Scott called the ‘skin bins’.
Patrick slid the refrigerator door almost closed behind him, clambered awkwardly into the nearest bin and let the lid drop over his head.
The stench was unbelievable – even for someone who had spent almost six months in the close company of death. The bins had been emptied of the bulk of their contents, but had not yet been washed out, and the sides were slick and gobby with fatty deposits, while the bottom held a half-inch of stinking bodily juices that seeped through Patrick’s trainers and thick socks, and rose coldly between his toes. He retched and then swallowed the vomit, desperate not to add to the contents of the bin.
He lifted the lid a little so he could breathe. The head in his lap squinted upwards, its mouth open as if even it were trying to suck cleaner air into its absent lungs.
Patrick could hear Spicer moving about, going down the line of bodies, he presumed.
He heard the moment when Spicer found the headless corpse of Number 19. It was marked by a word he’d never heard before, but which he assumed was an expletive just by the venom with which it was said.
The narrow strip of light that marked the edge of the fridge door darkened suddenly, and Patrick let the lid settle quietly again.
The heavy door slid open.
‘Patrick?’
The light went on, making the yellow plastic seem a poor defence. Patrick felt like an embryo in a jar.
He held his breath and looked fearfully up at the lid. He waited for Spicer to lift it, and thought of how he would find both of them – him and Number 19 – staring back at him, mouths agape.
But Spicer didn’t lift the lid. He didn’t lift any lids.
The light went out and the door closed, and Patrick heard the door of the second fridge open instead.
‘Patrick?’
‘Sssh,’ Patrick whispered at the head. Or himself. One of them, anyway.
The head was quiet and Patrick was grateful, and felt an unexpected surge of protectiveness. The head was his responsibility now. No longer attached to its body, or cocooned in its waxy white bag, Number 19 was relying on him.
RELYING on me.
Relying ON me.
Relying on ME.
Instead of feeling that pressure, Patrick felt proud and fierce, and curled his arms more tightly around the head.