Dead Harvest

  He was a boy of maybe twelve, with straw-colored hair and a smattering of freckles across his face. His feet were bare, his pajamas in tatters, and there was so much fucking blood, it was impossible to tell what color they were. His hands were nicked and scraped, his face mostly spared – it was clear he'd tried to protest, to protect himself. His chest was a tattered mess – bone protruding, soft tissue visible beneath. I zipped him up and slid him back.

  The father was a mess as well. Well over six feet and not a slight man at that, he looked as though he'd been tossed about like a rag doll. He had at least a dozen fractures that I could see, arms kinked at improbable angles, legs a twisted wreck. His chest, too, was riddled with holes – knife wounds, like the boy – some flecked with chips of bone from the force of entry.

  The mother, though – she was something else entirely. With her chestnut hair and her elegant features, she was beautiful once, no doubt, but now her body was a maze of tiny cuts – thousands of them, each no longer than an inch, marking her skin like some unholy etching. And there was something else, too. A familiar scent, mingled with the metallic bite of blood.

  Alcohol.

  Jesus – these cuts, they weren't intended to kill. They were meant to hurt like hell. To make this woman scream. I wondered how long it took before the neighbors took notice and called the cops. From the look of Kate's mom here, it could have been hours. And Kate just kept on cutting, waiting patiently for her audience to arrive before she slit her mother's throat.

  I was suddenly glad Kate MacNeil would be cuffed and unconscious when I came to collect her. She wasn't to be trifled with, it seemed, and borrowed body or not, the pain's the same.

  I slid the drawer closed, eyeing the gooseflesh on my arms as I did. It was cold in here, I realized, noting the tension in my muscles, the ache in my joints. I left the autopsy suite, snatching a lab coat from a line of hooks in the anteroom beyond. Pressing through a set of swinging double doors, I found myself in a hallway ablaze in fluorescent light. The hall was empty, its walls scarred with the scuff-marks of countless carelessly piloted stretchers, and I crept quietly down it, mindful of the doors on either side.

  At the end of the hall was a locker room. A set of utility shelves stood along one wall, stacked high with clean scrubs, all neatly folded and arranged according to size. I took a set and slid them on, admiring myself in the mirror. I was a little pale, a little thin, but already my face showed signs of color, and for a dead guy, I cut a dashing figure in the powder blue scrubs. You could hardly even call it theft – in a couple hours I'd leave this body behind, and both it and the clothes I'd pilfered would wind up right back here.

  I put the lab coat back on and headed for the door. An elderly woman pushed a mop bucket past me in the hall, but she paid me no mind. Between the lab coat and the few days' stubble that graced my cheeks, I looked like I'd just pulled a double shift.

  I pushed through a set of glass doors and stepped out into the pre-dawn half-light. It was cold – bitterly so – as though the first kiss of spring I'd felt in Oxford was still some weeks away from warming the dead gray of New York's steel and concrete. From where I stood, First Avenue was pretty quiet – just the odd commuter among a dozen or so delivery trucks rumbling northward from the East Village. Bellevue lay a few blocks to the south. I pulled my lab coat tight around me and set off walking, my bare feet aching as the chill of the sidewalk leeched upward through my soles.

3.

It'd been sixty-five years since I last laid eyes on Bellevue. Sixty-five years, four months, and seventeen days. Since then, it had changed plenty, with its modern glass atrium jutting skyward and glinting in the morning sun, I almost didn't recognize it. But the cold, impassive stone face I remembered all too well stared outward from behind the glass, and my own new face twisted into a smile of grim remembrance. Try though we might, we never can quite deny who we once were.

  The hospital itself was a massive structure, occupying twenty-five floors and two city blocks. In the nearly three centuries of its existence, its halls had spread and shifted and wound among themselves like vines on a trellis. The result was a tangled labyrinth of wrong turns and dead-end corridors, peppered with the occasional brightly colored map in what I can only assume was a fit of architectural sarcasm.

  Of course, it would help if I knew what I was looking for; all I had to go on was what I read in the paper. Killing spree, coma – the girl could be anywhere. Prison and psych wards make for tricky collections – they've got armed security, locked rooms, the whole nine – but in most hospitals, they're also overflowing. My hope was they were keeping Kate somewhere a little less secure. I played the odds and headed for the ICU.