“Then, we just have to make sure it does, right?” Meg asked her. “And,” she added, staring out at the sparkling water, where Cocoa, determined to get their attention, was doing a backflip, making the water spray and dance like diamonds beneath the blue sky and dazzling sun, “we have to take every minute we can to appreciate everything that’s so amazing about this world.”
Cocoa swam over and stuck her head out of the water to look at them. Lara stroked her back and watched the delight on Meg’s face as the animal slid beneath her hands. She gave Cocoa a fish.
“Meg will stay here with you,” Matt said, rising. “I’m heading over to the local office. Adam will have sent down our assignment paperwork by now. I’ll be back by the end of the afternoon.”
Lara turned to Meg. “You don’t have to babysit me. I have work to do. And I’m sure you have a job to do, too.”
Meg smiled at her. “Right now, my friend,” she said, “you are my job.”
*
Brett stared as Phil Kinny spoke, almost smiling.
He didn’t consider himself completely ignorant when it came to the human body and medical matters, but Kinny had left him and Diego far behind when he started talking about neurotransmitters and other features of the brain.
“Layman’s terms, please, doc,” he begged at last.
Brett was glad that the head was turned away from him; he wasn’t sure he could have stood there like a hardened professional if what was left of Miguel’s face had been staring at him while he tried to grasp what the ME was saying.
“Okay, first, we only use about ten percent of our brain power, give or take. But the brain is divided into sections that are responsible for different chores when it comes to our bodies. You’re heard about people with bullets in their heads surviving for years?” Kinny asked.
“I don’t personally know anyone with a bullet in his head,” Brett said.
“Wait, I do—and so do you,” Diego said.
“Yeah? Who?”
“David Archer, NYC office,” Diego said. “They can’t take the shell out—too dangerous. He gets scanned or X-rayed or whatever every so often to make sure it hasn’t moved. He’s not in the field anymore, works a desk now. Great guy, though.”
“I knew he was shot taking down an Eastern European human trafficking operation,” Brett said. “I didn’t realize he’d been shot in the head, though.”
Diego nodded. “Yep. And he’s basically fine.”
“Yes, depending on where the bullet is, depending on the damage it caused, a person can live a pretty much normal life even with a bullet in his brain. I’ll try to explain more clearly what I think happened to Gomez, though I can’t say I understand all the science behind what I think happened myself,” Kinny said.
“Just give us whatever you’ve got. We’re pretty desperate,” Brett said.
“All right, an anatomy lesson, more or less in layman’s terms,” Kinny said. “The human brain is an amazing thing. Think of it as a computer for a few minutes. The frontal lobes are associated with what we call executive function—thinking things out, consciously controlling our behavior, our ability to reason, and also our capacity for abstract thought. Then we have the cerebral cortex, a layer of neural tissue that covers everything. It’s pretty thick in human beings. While our brains may be smaller than those found in some animals, they’re larger in proportion to our size. Understand?”
“So a blue whale has a bigger brain than ours, but it’s much smaller in comparison to the many tons it weighs, right?” Diego said.
“Something like that, but I digress. None of that matters in regard to my theory as to what happened to Miguel Gomez,” Kinny said.
“Mike the chicken,” Diego said.
Kinny arched a brow. “So you know that story?” he asked.
Diego nodded. Brett looked from one of them to the other, then asked Kinny, “So the chicken story really is true?”
“Absolutely,” Kinny said. “So, in a nutshell, you have the frontal lobe, parietal lobe, temporal lobe and occipital lobe. We perform many different functions, and each of those functions is associated with a particular part of the brain. Even when someone is clinically brain dead, he may still move, react to stimuli, process nutrients, often even breathe without artificial help. In short, I believe, based on what I saw in my autopsy, that parts of Miguel’s brain were still functional even though other parts had been destroyed. In a very real way, he remained alive, at least technically speaking. Just as we breathe due to the programming built into a part of the brain that requires no conscious thought, so we perform other functions.”
Brett frowned, trying to digest the science.
It was actually easier to believe that Miguel’s neighbor had seen a zombie.