“This was not an easy death,” Lantos said, in a more somber tone. “This poor guy died in agony.”
Slater had no doubt about that, either. Taking the bone saw, he cut through the ribs on both sides of the chest, then, with Lantos helping, lifted the sternum and the ribs, still attached, free of the cavity, and placed the whole section in a shallow silver tray.
For the benefit of the audio record, he announced what he had just done.
Then he turned around to survey the unobstructed viscera of the young deacon.
It was as if the man had swallowed a ball of hot tar. The protective cells and cilia lining the bronchial tubes had been razed as if by a prairie fire, and the lungs looked like eggplants, bruised a deep and livid purple. The pericardial sac enclosing the heart resembled a sheet of torn, black crepe paper, and the heart itself, visible through the holes, was as gnarled and dark as a hand grenade.
“Major necrotic damage apparent to nearly all major organ systems. Evidence of both viral and bacteriological pathogenesis.”
“It looks like a bomb went off inside him,” Lantos observed, readying a syringe to draw one of many blood samples to come.
“Not a bomb,” Slater said, “but a storm. A cytokine storm.” The Spanish flu was a diabolical machine, one that hijacked the victim’s own immunological response and turned it against him. Under normal circumstances, the cytokines—soluble, hormonelike proteins—acted as messengers among the cells of the immune system, helping to target microbial infections like viruses, bacteria, parasites, and fungi, and directing the antibodies and killer cells to attack them. But with the Spanish flu, the whole system went into overdrive, the cytokines targeting everything in sight, the antibodies sticking like glue to anything they came into contact with, the killer cells blasting everything in range. It was like a wild shoot ’em up, devastating every cell in the body, compromising every defense mechanism, until the victim ultimately drowned in an overwhelming tide of his own mucus and virus-choked blood.
“And such a young man,” Lantos said, slicing through the heart sac with the tip of her scalpel. Speaking up for the recorder, she added, “Drawing blood samples from the pulmonary veins and inferior vena cava, although what’s left is barely liquid. Thawing is incomplete. Also checking the pulmonary artery, where,” she said, leaning close for a better look, “there appears to have been no clotting.”
Youth, Slater reflected, had been a detriment when it came to the Spanish flu; for that matter, so was a healthy constitution. The stronger the subject, the more powerful his or her immunological response would have been to the disease—and the more powerful the response, the more lethal it was, in turn, when the disease sent the protective mechanisms spinning out of control. As a result, the Spanish flu was most devastating to the young, able-bodied soldiers shipping off to France in 1918, then to the young doctors and nurses who came to their aid. The first responders, as it were. Infants and the elderly, the already infirm, were, ironically, less likely to die from the disease than those in the vigorous prime of life.
Slater was inevitably reminded, as he went about his grisly work, of his night in the medical archives, when he had first studied the slides of the Spanish flu taken from the young doughboy. The soldier’s body had been ravaged just as this one had been, his agonizing death had been the same as the Russian deacon’s. The flu had made no distinctions as it cut its swath through the peoples of the globe.
Gradually, the vials and test tubes and specimen jars began to fill with the samples taken from the lungs and heart, the trachea and spleen, the liver and pancreas and stomach. And when that was done, Lantos reached under the corpse and pulled out the foam block. The body settled back, with an audible expulsion of air, as if relieved.
But only for a minute or two.
As Slater lifted the head, the long blond hair hanging in tendrils over his glove, Lantos put the block under the back of the neck. With his bloody scalpel, Slater made an incision behind one ear, and traced a path over the crown of the head, ending at a point just behind the other ear. Using the hair as a handle, he pulled the scalp away from the skull in two nearly equal flaps, one draping itself over the front of the face, the other hanging down in back. The sound reminded him of the Velcro being ripped apart in the tent flaps.
“You getting tired?” Lantos asked. “We could take a break.”