The Totem 1979 (26 page)

“Don’t worry.”

The sergeant and his companion now had disappeared beyond the firelight. Those who stayed beside the fire heard the footsteps brushing through the mountain grass. The distance was sufficient that in a moment the weak sound didn’t carry, and the three men stood there staring at the darkness, and they waited.

“They should reach the forest soon.”

‘Just give them time.”

“The sauce is burning.”

One man stooped and grabbed a glove to pull the pan out from the fire’s edge.

“They should turn on their flashlights.”

“Just give them time, I said. They’ll want to save the batteries. They’ll need them for a lot of hours yet.”

But there were no lights near the forest.

“Okay, I’m convinced. They’re taking too long. They’ve had too much time to reach the forest.”

At once they heard barking.

“What’s that?”

“They’re in trouble. Let’s go help them.”

“Wait. We’re still not sure yet.”

“What the hell’s the matter with you? They’re in trouble.”

The man who had stooped to move the sauce was clutching his rifle. “I’m not going to wait here while they need me.” He moved toward the forest. Then he turned and looked at them. “You’re coming?”

They hesitated.

“To hell with you.”

He continued moving forward.

“Use your flashlight.”

He was just beyond the firelight as the last two men heard the howling. Not just barking as before, but howling.

“No!” somebody shouted from the darkness out there. “No, stay back!”

The howling intensified. Then they heard the rifle shot.

“No! Stay back! My God, no! Run!”

They started backing toward the fire, staring toward the darkness. There were sounds of movement in the darkness to their right and left. They lurched farther back, staring, aiming. As the snarling figures hurtled toward them, one man fired, but he was overpowered, and the other man kept stumbling back. He felt cold water in his boots and realized that he’d stepped into the lake. He was shooting, tugging at his rifle’s bolt and shooting yet again, his eyes unsteady from his panic, peering at the swirling howling figures on the lakeshore, but the water held them back as he kept shooting. He dropped one and then another, and he worked the bolt and pulled the trigger, and the pin snapped down on empty. All his other bullets were inside his knapsack by the fire. The figures twisted, snarling, on the shore. He couldn’t see them clearly, only made out silhouettes against the fire behind them, heard his partners screaming off there in the darkness as he drew his handgun, eager now to save his bullets for their final rush at him. The water. Sure. They don’t like coming in the water. Otherwise they would have charged me. In a rush, he waded farther out, and suddenly, attentive only to what faced him on the lakeshore, he ignored what might be rising behind him, lost his balance as the muck beneath him sloped much deeper, and he fell back, completely swallowed by the water.

Chapter Nine.

Everything was speeding up. The medical examiner didn’t have the time to think things through, to make sure that he did things properly. When Owens left to take the dog down to the clinic, for example, he himself had stayed behind to calm the owner. All the while he stood there talking with the man, at last walking with him toward the house, the medical examiner wanted to rush through the streets to get to Owens and to watch him do the tests. At the same time, he was thinking that he ought to get in touch with Slaughter, to tell him what was going on. But what was going on? He didn’t know yet. There was nothing positive. For all he could predict, the tests would indicate some other problem, and he didn’t want to trouble Slaughter, didn’t want to bother him without a reason. So he’d gone inside the house and stayed there briefly until he’d reassured the owner. Then he hurried from the house (“Don’t go out in the backyard. You could be infected by the doghouse or the chain.”) and frantically realized that he’d left his car at the hospital. He ran through the backyard of the house next door. The man in tennis clothes came out to tell him, “Hey, if I’d wanted people cutting through here, I’d have put in a sidewalk.” But the medical examiner didn’t answer. He simply clambered up the fence and jumped down on the other side, racing through the long grass toward the trees and then the dry creek. He no longer cared about the snakes or other things that might be hiding there. He thought only about his car, about the tests that Owens soon would be performing.

He scrambled from the dry creek, through the trees and bushes toward the fence that he had toppled, jumping across the ants’ nest, running to reach his car. But as he stood there, breathing hard, fumbling in his pocket for his keys, he suddenly remembered the objects in the trunk of his car: the plastic bags, the dead cat, and the blood-soaked dirt. How much danger did they pose? He couldn’t take the chance. They might be so contaminated that they’d spread the disease. Until he had time to examine them, he needed to make sure that they were safely stored in medical-waste containers.

The process took twenty minutes. Only then was he able to hurry to his car and speed away. He swerved up the driveway toward the back of the veterinary clinic. The sun had set now. In the darkness, except that the rear doors were closed and Owens’ van was parked before them, this was much like when he’d come here Friday morning, seeing old Doc Markle dead and staring at the mangled steer, when everything had started for him. He skidded to a stop beside the van and jumped out. He gripped the door beside the two big double-doors, and Owens hadn’t locked it. As he rushed inside, he squinted from the blazing lights and was mindful once again of Friday morning. Had it started only yesterday? He saw the dog up on the table, a protective plastic sheet beneath it, Owens there beside it in his lab coat and his face mask.

Owens turned to him, his voice muffled by the face mask. “The dog was dead before I got here.”

“Is that common?”

“Sometimes the paralysis can set in very quickly.”

The medical examiner understood what Owens was referring to. An animal with rabies would go through several stages. First it acted normally until the virus worked along the nerves. Then the brain became infected, and the victim was excited, furious. At last the virus spread back through the total nervous system, and the animal was lethally paralyzed.

“But I saw it in the active stage. Several hours later, and it’s dead? Paralysis shouldn’t be that quick.”

“Maybe. I agree with you. This could be something else,” Owens said. “You’ll find a coat and face mask in that locker over there.”

The medical examiner went across to get them, also finding a pair of rubber gloves. He put them on, and he was conscious of the buzzing lights up in the ceiling as he walked back to the table.

“First, let’s get this collar off.” Owens fumbled to unsnap it, staring at the battery attachment. “What I’d like to do to that guy.” He set it aside. “You ought to meet some people who come in here, wanting us to make their dog mute, cut its voice box out, its vocal cords. Hell, I’d like to cut on them. At least they wouldn’t talk so much then. And they wonder why a dog without a voice will bite somebody when it’s got no other way to warn him off.” Owens’ face was red above his mask. He shook his head. “Well, let’s get to it.”

“How can I help?”

“I need that scalpel.”

Four quick strokes, and Owens peeled the scalp off. They stared at the blood-smeared skull.

Then the drill. Owens flicked the switch. The bit was whirring, grinding through the bone. Four holes, widely spaced to form the corners of a square. And then the saw. Owens used it neatly, its motor buzzing as he cut from one hole to another, swiftly, gently, not too deeply. Then the job was done, and he was prying at the skull bone.

“Well, the brain is swollen and discolored. You can see that slight pink color. Indications. On the other hand, distemper sometimes looks like that. I need to take the brain out and dissect it.”

The medical examiner again handed him the scalpel, then forceps, and Owens placed the brain in a glass dish on the table.

“Ammon’s horn,” the medical examiner said.

“That’s right.” Owens cut past the hippocampal region. Then he had it. “You can do the slides.”

“Which way do you want them? Pressed or done in sections?”

“The sections take too long. Just do impressions. What we’re looking for will show up just as well.”

So the medical examiner, instead of placing tissue from that portion of the brain into fixing fluid and embedding it within paraffin, a process that took several hours, simply pressed a bit of tissue on the slide and smeared it evenly, then looked around to find a microscope.

“Over by that cabinet.”

The microscope had ajar of Seller’s stain beside it. The medical examiner put stain across the specimen to make sure that what he was looking for would stand out in contrast. He arranged the slide and peered down through the lenses.

“Can you see them?” Owens asked.

The medical examiner kept peering.

“What’s the matter? You should see them.”

But the medical examiner just turned to him and shook his head. “I think you’d better look.”

“You mean you didn’t see them, and we have to do the other tests?”

“I mean that you should have a look.”

Now Owens frowned as he peered down through the lenses.

What the medical examiner had looked for was some evidence of Negri bodies. Negri was a scientist in Italy who first identified them in the early 1900s. They were tiny, round, and sometimes oval bodies in the protoplasm of the nerve cells in that portion of the brain called Ammon’s horn. No one knew exactly what they were. In current theories, they were either rabies virus particles, or else degenerative matter from the cells affected by the virus. Maybe both. But seeing them was certain proof that rabies was at work here. And the medical examiner had seen them. On the other hand, he maybe hadn’t.

“I don’t get it,” Owens said. “Something’s wrong here. These things shouldn’t look like that.”

The medical examiner understood. He watched as Owens peered down through the microscope again. Because the things he’d seen were neither round nor oval. They were oblong with an indentation on one side.

“They look like goddamned peanuts,” Owens said. “What’s going on here?”

‘This could be some related virus.”

“What? You tell me what.”

“I just don’t know.”

“You bet you don’t, and I don’t either. Rabies is something I’d recognize, and you can bet there’s nothing in the books about these things we’re looking at.”

“We’ll have to do the antibody test.”

“It takes a couple of hours, and the mouse test takes at least a week. I want to know what this thing is.”

“We have to guess for now it’s rabies. Or a virus that has all its symptoms.”

“Which is fine if no one were exposed to it,” Owens said. “But what about that owner? And yourself? If this is rabies, you’ll have to take the serum shots, but we don’t know if they’d do any good.”

They studied one another, and the medical examiner reached up to touch his mask, the swollen lip beneath it. He’d forgotten. Or more truthfully, he’d tried to keep from thinking of those shots. “I’ll take them anyway.”

“But what if they don’t work well with the virus? What if there’s a bad reaction?”

“Hell, if I’ve already got it, I’ll be dead soon anyway. What difference does it make?”

The medical examiner suddenly remembered something that the owner had first told him, that he’d let slip by in the excitement, something that the rabies serum shots reminded him about.

“He said his dog had been inoculated.”

“What?”

“The owner. He mentioned that the dog had received its shots.”

“What’s his name?”

The medical examiner told him.

“Okay, there isn’t any other animal clinic, so his file will have to be here. Try some other slides. Make sure we didn’t do them wrong. I’ll come back in a minute.” Owens hurried toward the door that led down to the offices in front.

The medical examiner obeyed the instructions he’d been given. His legs were shaking as he stumbled toward the microscope. He peered at all the slides, and each one was the same, and he was really scared now.

Owens pushed the door open so forcefully that the medical examiner flinched.

“He was right.” Owens had a file in one hand, raising it. “That dog is five years old. It had its puppy shots, its boosters every year.”

“Well, could the boosters be the cause of this? Contamination in the vaccine?”

“I don’t know, but sure as hell I’m going to learn.”

“Even if the vaccine were prepared correctly, could it have been so strong that it caused the virus?”

“In the case of rabies, maybe. With a weak dog. One chance in a hundred thousand. But I don’t know how the vaccine would produce the thing we’re looking at.”

“One chance might be all this thing might need.”

They frowned at each other.

“Look, I’ve got to make a call.” The medical examiner grabbed the phone and dialed. Marge was answering. “I’ve got to talk to Slaughter.”

“He’s been looking everywhere for you,” she said. “He’s at the Baynard mansion.”

“What?”

Then she told him the rest, and he felt sicker.

“I’m on my way.”

He hung up, turning to Owens. “Run the antibody test, the fluoroscope. I’ll get back as soon as I can manage.”

“But what’s wrong?”

There wasn’t time to explain. The medical examiner tugged off his gloves and face mask. Urgent, he yanked at the door to meet the darkness.

Chapter Ten.

It kept howling.

‘Jesus. Lord, I wish that thing would stop.”

The policemen stood in the glare of the headlights, a net spread out before them. Rettig had come back a little while ago. He’d looked everywhere to find a net, the sporting-goods stores, the zoo down in the park as Slaughter had suggested, but he hadn’t seen one. He’d been frantic since the stores had all been closed, and he’d been forced to call the owners, but they hadn’t been home. Then as he had given up and started back to Slaughter, he had slammed his brakes on, staring at the restaurant across the street. It hadn’t done well, and the business had been sold. A seafood place in cattle country. Why had anyone put money in it? But the decorations still were in there, and he saw the heavy sea nets hanging in the window. He had run across. The doors were locked. He didn’t know the owners. He finally pulled out his gun and smashed the back-door window.