From a Buick 8

  He put his hand up to his face but couldn't actually touch his skin because of the plastic breathing cup he was wearing over his mouth and nose--the kind dentists put on before going prospecting. Sandy didn't know how it was on germs, but the mask did nothing to stop the smell. It was that cabbagey aroma, and it choked the air of the storage closet as soon as Curt opened the stomach of the bat-thing.

  "We'll get used to it," Curt said, his own breathing cup bobbing up and down on his face. His and Sandy's were blue; the Sergeant's was a rather cute shade of candy-pink. Curtis Wilcox was a smart guy, right about a lot of things, but he was wrong about the smell. They didn't get used to it. No one ever did.

  Sandy couldn't fault Trooper Wilcox's preparation, however; it seemed perfect. Curt had swung home at the end of his shift and picked up his dissection kit. To this he had added a good microscope (borrowed from a friend at the university), several packets of surgical gloves, and a pair of extremely bright Tensor lamps. He told his wife he intended to examine a fox someone had shot behind the barracks.

  "You be careful," she said. "They can have rabies."

  Curt promised her he'd glove up, and it was a promise he meant to keep. Meant for all three of them to keep. Because the bat-thing might have something a lot worse than rabies, something which remained virulent long after its original host was dead. If Tony Schoondist and Sandy Dearborn had needed a reminder of this (they probably didn't), they got it when Curt first closed the door at the foot of the stairs and then bolted it.

  "I'm in charge as long as that door's locked," he said. His voice was flat and absolutely sure of itself. It was mostly Tony he was speaking to, because Tony was twice his age, and if anyone was his partner in this, it was the SC. Sandy was just along for the ride, and knew it. "Is that understood and agreed? Because if it isn't, we can stop right n--"

  "It's understood," Tony said. "In here you're the general. Sandy and I are just a couple of buck privates. I have no problem with that. Just for Chrissake let's get it over with."

  Curt opened his kit, which was almost the size of an Army footlocker. The interior was packed with stainless steel instruments wrapped in chamois. On top of them were the dental masks, each in its own sealed plastic bag.

  "You really think these are necessary?" Sandy asked.

  Curt shrugged. "Better safe than sorry. Not that those things are worth much. We should probably be wearing respirators."

  "I sort of wish we had Bibi Roth here," Tony said.

  Curt made no verbal reply to that, but the flash of his eyes suggested that was the last thing in the world he wanted. The Buick belonged to the Troop. And anything that came out of it belonged to the Troop.

  Curt opened the door of the storage closet and went in, pulling the chain that turned on the little room's green-shaded hanging lamp. Tony followed. There was a table not much bigger than a grade-schooler's desk under the light. Small as the closet was, there was barely room for two, let alone three. That was fine with Sandy; he never stepped over the threshold at all that night.

  Shelves heaped with old files crowded in on three sides. Curt put his microscope on the little desk and plugged its light-source into the closet's one outlet. Sandy, meanwhile, was setting up Huddie Royer's videocam on its sticks. In the video of that peculiar postmortem, one can sometimes see a hand reach into the picture, holding out whatever instrument Curt has called for. It's Sandy Dearborn's hand. And one can hear the sound of vomiting at the end of the tape, loud and clear. That is also Sandy Dearborn.

  "Let's see the leaves first," Curt said, snapping on a pair of the surgical gloves.

  Tony had a bunch of them in a small evidence bag. He handed it over. Curt opened it and took out the remains of the leaves with a small pair of tongs. There was no way to get just one; by now they were all semi-transparent and stuck together like clumps of Saran Wrap. They were seeping little trickles of fluid, and the men could smell their aroma--that uneasy mix of cabbage and peppermint--immediately. It was not nice, but it was a long way from unbearable. Unbearable was at that point still ten minutes in the future.

  Sandy used the zoom in order to get a good image of Curt separating a fragment of the mass from the whole, using the pincers deftly. He'd treated himself to a lot of practice over the last few weeks, and here was the payoff.

  He transferred the fragment directly to the stage of the microscope, not attempting to make a slide. Phil Candleton's leaves were just the Coming Attractions reel. Curtis wanted to get to the feature presentation as soon as possible.

  He bent over the twin eyepieces for a good long time nevertheless, then beckoned Tony for a look.

  "What're the black things that look like threads?" Tony asked after several seconds of study. His voice was slightly muffled by his pink mask.

  "I don't know," Curt said. "Sandy, give me that gadget that looks like a Viewmaster. It has a couple of cords wrapped around it and PROPERTY H.U. BIOLOGY DEPARTMENT Dymotaped on the side."

  Sandy passed it to him over the top of the videocam, which was pretty much blocking the doorway. Curt plugged one of the cords into the wall and the other into the base of the microscope. He checked something, nodded, and pushed a button on the side of the Viewmaster thing three times, presumably taking pictures of the leaf fragments on the microscope's stage.

  "Those black things aren't moving," Tony said. He was still peering into the microscope.

  "No."

  Tony finally raised his head. His eyes had a dazed, slightly awed look. "Is it ... could it be like, I don't know, DNA?"

  Curt's mask bobbed slightly on his face as he smiled. This is a great scope, Sarge, but we couldn't see DNA with it. Now, if you wanted to go up to Horlicks with me after midnight and pull a bag-job, they've got this really beautiful electron microscope in the Evelyn Silver Physics Building, never been driven except by a little old lady on her way to church and her weekly--"

  "What's the white stuff?" Tony asked. The stuff the black threads are floating in?"

  "Nutrient, maybe."

  "But you don't know."

  "Of course I don't know."

  "The black threads, the white goo, why the leaves are melting, what that smell is. We don't know dick about any of those things."

  "No."

  Tony gave him a level look. "We're crazy to be fucking with this, aren't we?"

  "No," Curt said. "Curiosity killed the cat, satisfaction made him fat. You want to come in and take a peek, Sandy?"

  "You took photos, right?"

  "I did if this thing worked the way it's s'posed to."

  "Then I'll take a pass."

  "Okay, let's move on to the main event," Curt said. "Maybe we'll actually find something."

  The gobbet of leaves went back into the evidence bag and the evidence bag went back into a file cabinet in the corner. That battered green cabinet would become quite the repository of the weird and strange over the next two decades.

  In another corner of the closet was an orange Eskimo cooler. Inside, under two of those blue chemical ice packets people sometimes take on camping trips, was a green garbage bag. Tony lifted it out and then waited while Curt finished getting ready. It didn't take long. The only real delay was finding an extension cord so they could plug in both of the Tensor lamps without disturbing the microscope or the attached still camera. Sandy went to get a cord from the cabinet of odds and ends at the far end of the hall. While he was doing that, Curt placed his borrowed microscope on a nearby shelf. (of course, in those close quarters, everything was nearby) and set up an easel on the desktop. On this he mounted a square of tan corkboard. Beneath it he placed a small metal trough of the sort found on the more elaborate barbecue setups, where they are used to catch drippings. Off to one side he put a jar-top filled with Push-pins.

  Sandy came back with the extension cord. Curt plugged in the lamps so they shone on the corkboard from either side, illuminating his work-surface with a fierce, even glow that eliminated every shadow. It was obvious he'd thought a
ll of this out, step by step. Sandy wondered how many nights he'd lain awake long after Michelle had gone to sleep beside him. Just lying there and looking up at the ceiling and going over the procedure in his mind. Reminding himself he'd just have the one shot. Or how many afternoons there had been, Curt parked a little way up some farmer's lane with the Genesis radar gun pointed at an empty stretch of highway, calculating how many practice bats he'd have to go through before he dared tackle the real thing.

  "Sandy, are you getting glare from these lights?"

  He checked the viewfinder. "No. With white I probably would, but tan is great."

  "Okay."

  Tony unwound the yellow tie holding the neck of the garbage bag shut. The moment he opened it, the smell got stronger. "Whew, Jesus!" he said, waving a gloved hand. Then he reached in and pulled out another evidence bag, this one a large.

  Sandy was watching over the top of the camera. The thing in the bag looked like a shopworn freak show monstrosity. One of the dark wings was folded over the lower body, the other pressed against the clear plastic of the evidence bag, making him think of a hand pressed against a pane of glass. Sometimes when you collared a drunk and shut him in the back of the cruiser he'd put his hands on the glass and look out at the world from between them, a dazed dark face framed by starfish. This was a little like that, somehow.

  "Seal's open in the middle," Curt said, and nodded disapprovingly at the evidence bag. "That explains the smell."

  Nothing explained it, in Sandy's opinion.

  Curt opened the bag completely and reached inside. Sandy felt his stomach knot into a sick ball and wondered if he could have forced himself to do what Curt was doing. He didn't think so. Trooper Wilcox never hesitated, however. When his gloved fingers touched the corpse in the bag, Tony recoiled a little. His feet stayed put but his upper body swayed backward, as if to avoid a punch. And he made an involuntary sound of disgust behind his cute pink mask.

  "You okay?" Curt asked.

  "Yes," Tony said.

  "Good. I'll mount it. You pin it."

  "Okay."

  "Are you sure you're all right?"

  "Yes, goddammit."

  "Because I feel queasy, too." Sandy could see sweat running down the side of Curl's face, dampening the elastic that held his mask.

  "Let's save the sensitivity-training session for later and just get it done, what do you say?"

  Curt lifted the bat-thing to the corkboard. Sandy could hear an odd and rather terrible sound as he did so. It might have been only the combination of overstrained ears and the quiet rustle of clothes and gloves, but Sandy didn't actually believe that. It was dead skin rubbing against dead skin, creating a sound that was somehow like words spoken very low in an alien tongue. It made Sandy want to cover his ears.

  At the same time he became aware of that tenebrous rustling, his eyes seemed to sharpen. The world took on a preternatural clarity. He could see the rosy pink of Curtis's skin through the thin gloves he was wearing, and the matted whorls that was the hair on the backs of his fingers. The glove's white was very bright against the creature's midsection, which had gone a matted, listless gray. The thing's mouth hung open. Its single black eye stared at nothing, its surface dull and glazed. To Sandy that eye looked as big as a teacup.

  The smell was getting worse, but Sandy said nothing. Curt and the Sergeant were right in there with it, next to the source. He guessed if they could stand it, he could.

  Curt peeled up the wing lying across the creature's middle, revealing sallow green fur and a small puckered cavity that might have held the thing's genitals. He held the wing against the corkboard. "Pin," he said.

  Tony pinned the wing. It was dark gray and all membrane. There was no sign of bone or blood vessels that Sandy could see. Curt shifted his hand on the thing's midsection so he could raise the other wing. Sandy heard that liquid squelching sound again. It was getting hot in the supply room and had to be even worse in the closet. Those Tensor lamps.

  "Pin, boss."

  Tony pinned the other wing and now the creature hung on the board like something out of a Bela Lugosi film. Except, once you could see all of it, it didn't really look much like a bat at all, or a flying squirrel, or certainly any kind of bird.

  It didn't look like anything. That yellow prong sticking out from the center of its face, for instance--was it a bone? A beak? A nose? If it was a nose, where were the nostrils? To Sandy it looked more like a claw than a nose, and more like a thorn than a claw. And what about that single eye? Sandy tried to think of any earthly creature that had only one eye and couldn't. There had to be such a creature, didn't there? Somewhere? In the jungles of South America, or maybe at the bottom of the ocean?

  And the thing had no feet; its body simply ended in a butt like a green-black thumb. Curt pinned this part of the specimen's anatomy to the board himself, pinching the furry hide away from its body and then impaling a loose fold. Tony finished the job by driving pins into the corkboard through the thing's armpits. Or maybe you call them wingpits, Sandy thought. This time it was Curtis who made an involuntary sound of disgust behind his mask, and he wiped his brow with his forearm. "I wish we'd thought to bring in the fan," he said. Sandy, whose head was beginning to swim, agreed. Either the stench was getting worse or it had a cumulative effect.

  "Plug in one more thing and we'd probably trip the breaker," Tony said. "Then we could be in the dark with this ugly motherfucker. Also trapped, on account of Cecil B. DeMille's got his camera set up in the doorway. Go on, Curt. I'm okay if you are."

  Curt stepped back, snatched a breath of slightly cleaner air, tried to compose himself, then stepped forward to the table again. "I'm not measuring," he said. "We got all that done out in the shed, right?"

  "Yeah," Sandy replied. "Fourteen inches long. Thirty-six centimeters, if you like that better. Body's about a handspan across at the widest. Maybe a little less. Go on, for God's sake, so we can get out of here."

  "Give me both scalpels, plus retractors."

  "How many retractors?"

  Curt gave him a look that said Don't be a bozo. "All of them." Another quick swipe of the forehead. And, after Sandy had handed the stuff over the top of the camera and Curt had arranged it as best he could: "Watch through the viewfinder, okay? Zoom the shit out of the mother. Let's get the best record we can."

  "People'd still say it's a fake," Tony said mildly. "You know that, don't you?"

  Curtis then said something Sandy never forgot. He believed that Curtis, already under severe mental strain and in increasingly severe physical distress, spoke the truth of his mind in baldly simple terms people rarely dare to use, because they reveal too much about the speaker's real heart. "Fuck the John Q.'s," was what Curtis said. "This is for us."

  "I've got a good tight shot," Sandy told him. "The smell may be bad, but the light's heavenly." The time-code at the bottom of the little interior TV screen read 7:49:01P.

  "Cutting now," Curt said, and slid his larger scalpel into the pinned creature's midsection. His hands didn't tremble; any stage-fright accompanying the arrival of the big moment must have come and gone quickly. There was a wet popping sound, like a bubble of some thick liquid breaking, and all at once drops of black goo began to patter into the trough under the easel.

  "Oh man," Sandy said. "Oh, that really stinks."

  "Fucking foul," Tony added. His voice was thin and dismayed.

  Curt took no notice. He opened the thing's abdomen and made the standard branching incisions up to the pinned wingpits, creating the Y-cut used in any human postmortem. He then used his pincers to pull back the hide over the thoracic area, more clearly revealing a spongy dark green mass beneath a narrow arch of bone. Sandy had never seen anything like it.

  "Jesus God, where's its lungs?" Tony asked. Sandy could hear him breathing in harsh little sips.

  "This green thing could be a lung," Curt said.

  "Looks more like a--"

  "Like a brain, yeah, I know it does. A green brain
. Let's take a look."

  Curt turned his scalpel and used the blunt side to tap the white arch above the crenellated green organ. "If the green thing's a brain, then its particular evolution gave it a chastity belt for protection instead of a safety deposit box. Give me the shears, Sandy. The smaller pair."

  Sandy handed them over, then bent back to the video camera's viewfinder. He was zoomed to the max, as per instructions, and had a nice clear picture.

  "Cutting . . . now."

  Curt slipped the lower blade of the shears under the arch of bone and snipped it as neatly as the cord on a package. It sprang back on both sides like a rib, and the moment it did the surface of the green sponge in the thing's chest turned white and began to hiss like a radiator. A strong aroma of peppermint and clove filled the air. A thick bubbling sound joined the hissing. It was like the sound of a straw prospecting the bottom of a nearly empty milkshake glass.

  "Think we should get out of here?" Tony asked.

  "Too late." Curt was bent over the opened chest, where the spongy thing had now begun to sweat droplets and runnels of "whitish-green liquid. He was more than interested; he was rapt. Looking at him, Sandy could understand about the fellow who deliberately infected himself with yellow fever or the Curie woman, who gave herself cancer fiddling around with radiation. "I am made the destroyer of worlds," Robert Oppenheimer muttered during the first successful detonation of an atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert, and then went on to start work on the H-bomb with hardly a pause for tea and scones. Because stuff gets you, Sandy thought. And because, while curiosity is a provable fact, satisfaction is more like a rumor. Or maybe an out-and-out myth.

  "What's it doing?" Tony asked. Sandy thought that from what he could see above the pink mask, the Sarge already had a pretty good idea.

  "Decomposing," Curt replied. "Getting a good picture, Sandy? My head not in your way?"

  "It's fine, five-by," Sandy replied in a slightly strangled voice. At first the peppermint-clove variation had seemed almost refreshing, but now it sat in the back of his throat like the taste of machine-oil. And the cabbagey reek was creeping back. Sandy's head was swimming more strenuously than ever, and his guts had begun to slosh. "I wouldn't take too long about this, though, or we're going to choke in here."