“You have a plastic bite mask?” asked Dez as she forced Diviny’s head down for the twentieth time.
“Philadelphia collar’s better,” said Don and he pulled one out of an equipment case. The device was a two-piece foam plastic cervical collar that fit together with Velcro and had an opening to allow access to the throat. It effectively kept Diviny from opening his jaws wide enough to bite, and nicely immobilized his head. They reinforced this by winding another turn of duct tape around his forehead, securing it to the backboard. Dez grabbed the tape from Joan and put a final loop around Diviny’s chest and shoulders.
Then Dez and JT sat back, drained and sweating. Don and Joan wavered with indecision.
“Is he safe?” JT asked.
Diviny moaned and snarled and thrashed.
“Can you give him something?” asked JT as he wiped sweat from his eyes. “Don’t you have some kind of chemical restraint? Valium or something?”
“We use Midazolam—Versed—these days,” Joan said, fishing in the trauma kit. She produced a hypodermic, removed the safety cap, shot a little into the air to remove bubbles. But she hesitated. “With him thrashing like that I could get this wrong, and I sure as hell don’t want to nail myself with an accidental needle stick.”
“Go intranasally,” suggested Don. “Doesn’t kick in as fast, but it’s a lot safer.”
Joan handed him the equipment and Don fitted a port into one of Diviny’s nostrils and attached the syringe to that. Once in place he pushed the plunger and the filter converted the liquid stream into a mist.
“Let’s get his vitals,” Don said, “and then get him the hell out of here.”
Joan clipped an oximetry monitor to the tip of Diviny’s right index finger while Don wrapped a pressure cuff around Diviny’s arm and began pumping the rubber bulb.
Joan keyed the portable radio and called the hospital. When an ER doctor came online she said, “We have a police officer down with trauma to the throat. Other officers think that it’s from a human bite. They applied an Izzy and the patient has been administered intranasal Midazolam. Taking vitals now. Patient’s skin is cold.” She took a digital thermometer and placed the tip in Diviny’s ear. “Whoa … temperature is eighty-eight point four. Pupils nonreactive. Not getting any pulse with the oximeter.” She dug her fingers into Diviny’s wrist, made an irritated face, tried again in a different spot. Tried again. Into the radio she said, “Doctor, I still can’t find a pulse. He’s in serious shock and—”
“BP is nonpalp. Zero over zero,” said Don as he began pumping the pressure cuff again. And again. “Damn cuff’s broken.”
“Forget this shit and let’s go!” urged Dez.
Don ignored her. He looped his stethoscope from around his neck and pressed the chestpiece against Diviny’s ribs. His face went from confused to blank. “No respiration. We need to intubate him.”
Diviny snapped and bared his teeth.
“Can’t intubate a biter,” Joan said.
“We’re losing him,” Don yelled, “he’s crashing…”
His words trailed off. Diviny wasn’t crashing. He continued to snarl and writhe and fight against the restraints.
“This doesn’t make sense,” he said.
“What doesn’t?” asked Dez.
Dez could hear the doctor yelling for information and clarification, and Joan picked up the mike. “We are unable to get reliable vitals at this time.”
She listened for a moment and then disconnected.
“He wants us to start an EKG as soon as we get him into the ambulance. And take a blood glucose reading. He’s prepping a room.”
The four of them stared at each other for a moment, and then looked down at Diviny.
“I don’t understand this,” said Joan in a distant voice. “He has no blood pressure, no pulse. He’s not breathing…”
“What are you saying?” asked Dez.
Joan almost said it, but didn’t. What she said was, “We can’t get any vitals from this patient.”
“It’s not the equipment,” added Don quietly. “We just … can’t get any vitals. He’s … he’s…” He shook his head.
Neither of them said the word.
Dez looked at JT, who was sweating as badly as if he stood next to an open fire.
“Let’s get him to the hospital,” Dez said quietly. “And I mean right fucking now.”
Without another word they hoisted the gurney into the back of the ambulance. Joan climbed in back but she sat on a metal fold-down stool as far away from Diviny as she could. JT climbed in with her and Don got behind the wheel. Dez ran to her unit, fired it up, and led the way through the maze of haphazardly parked vehicles. Another Bordentown unit was parked down by the road and the officer was erecting sawhorse barriers. Beyond his unit were a dozen cars and vans. The press had arrived, and once the true nature of this got out there would soon be more reporters than cops. Rubberneckers were walking along the highway and cutting through the woods, their cars parked on the shoulders of Doll Factory Road for half a mile in either direction.
As soon as they reached the blacktop Dez hit lights and sirens and kicked the pedal all the way down. The cruiser shot out onto the road and went screaming away from that place of death and mystery. The ambulance, carrying its own mysteries, followed.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
HARTNUP’S TRANSITION ESTATE
Chief Goss stared down at the madness that lay sprawled in shades of red and green before him. Two officers here. Another down the slope. Not his officers, but that didn’t matter. The towns in this part of the county always shared work; their cases always overlapped. They were all a family.
Three dead.
One completely out of his mind.
The clearing was still. No one moved. Shock danced in every set of eyes; it beat wildly in their chests.
He stared at the bodies. Mike Schneider, Jeff Strauss. Not only dead but torn apart. What the hell was Andy doing to them? Eating them?
Goss felt the contents of his stomach turn to greasy sludge. He wanted to throw up. He wanted to go the hell home. He turned to Sheldon.
“Shel,” he said softly, “what happened here?”
Sheldon shook his head. Then he took a breath, licked his lips, and explained things exactly as he’d seen them. Goss was shaking his head throughout. Not to suggest that Sheldon was lying, but because it was all so weird. So wrong.
“Any sign of Doc Hartnup?”
He carefully lowered his bulk to one knee a few inches from Strauss. Goss knew him better than Schneider. Their kids were in the same grade, they played on the same Little League team. Strauss’s son was the shortstop, his own Mikey was the catcher.
This was going to have to be a closed casket. The whole lower half of Strauss’s face was gone. Pieces of it were stuck to the dead man’s uniform, to the grass, to his hair. The rest was …
He couldn’t allow himself to frame the thought.
“Ah, Jeff … damn it to hell.”
Goss had never been beside the body of a fallen friend. Everyone he knew had died in bed or in the hospital, and accident victims were usually strangers. He wondered if he should close Strauss’s eyelids. That’s what they always did in movies. Close the eyelids. Kind of like closing a door, or pulling up a sheet. It meant something, he supposed. A show of respect. A gesture to restore some little bit of dignity.
Would it matter to the forensics guys?
He thought about that, lips pursed, heart heavy.
“Yeah,” he murmured to himself, “it’s only right.”
He reached his hand out, his fingers trembling with adrenalin and shock. And revulsion. It was hard to look at that torn face. Goss felt the greasy sludge in his stomach bubble and churn.
His fingertips brushed the half-closed lids.
Suddenly Jeff Strauss’s lipless mouth lunged forward and those naked teeth clamped down around Chief Goss’s fingers.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
PENNSYLVANIA ARMY NATIONAL GUARD
COMPANY D, 1-103RD ARMOR
108 WASHINGTON AVE.
CONNELLSVILLE, PENNSYLVANIA
Sergeant Teddy Polk stood in the rain, waving his men forward and pushing them up into the back of the troop truck. A line of troop transport trucks stood idling in the downpour.
One of the soldiers, a corporal named Nick Wyckoff, from Pine Deep, the same small town as Polk, nodded at the convoy. “What’s the op? Sandbagging streams and shit?”
Polk shook his head. “Nobody’s saying nothing, Nickie.”
Wyckoff nodded and reached for the strap to pull himself up into the truck, but Polk tapped his shoulder and Wyckoff bent close. “Couple weird things about this, man.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
Polk spoke as quietly as he could given the roar of the rain. “We were told to handpick single men. No one with family in the area, no one with kids. Married guys are to be used for flood control and emergency evac only. None of them roll with us.”
“What’s the—”
“No, wait,” said Polk, “it gets weirder.… I saw them loading some crates into a couple of the trucks.”
“Crates of what?”
Polk licked his lips. “Hazmat suits.”
“Oh … shit, man,” murmured Wyckoff.
“Yeah.”
A few minutes later the trucks were rolling through the gate.
Major General Simeon Zetter stood at the window in his office, hands clasped behind his back, face impassive, eyes fixed on the line of vehicles heading into the storm. He was alone in his office. All of his senior officers had gone with the convoy. This wasn’t an operation that could be trusted to lieutenants.
The rain troubled him. It was like a thick gray veil and even from where his office was set it was hard to see the line of trucks. With these winds his Apaches and Black Hawks were grounded. That was bad. If there was ever something that was a perfect operation for the air cav, this was it.