And, to make matters worse, it had learned over the centuries to jump species, too, as fluidly as a trapeze artist. No one knew whether the next pandemic was brewing in a pigpen in Bolivia, or on a poultry farm in Macau.
Once all the mice were treated and marked—their tanks separately ventilated, and placed several feet apart—Lantos stoppered the vial of SPI #1 and took it back, for safekeeping, to the freezer in the autopsy chamber. There, she placed it beside the range of samples taken from the deacon’s cadaver, along with the diamond-studded icon and the paper prayer he had held in his rigid hands. Slater had promised Kozak that if the initial lab results on the blood and tissue came back clear, he would allow him to thaw out the paper, unscroll it, and read whatever it said. The professor had looked like a kid who’d been promised a trip to Disneyland.
We are all such strange creatures, Lantos thought, closing the freezer. We have our individual passions and interests, most of them formed in some way in our childhoods, then those same interests become translated in our later lives into careers. Kozak had probably collected rocks and geodes, and wound up a geologist, while she had always been fascinated by the natural world and the myriad forms that life could take. Summers had been spent on the Massachusetts coastline, studying the busy life in the tide pools and clamming with her dad. Where did all this activity come from? How did it all survive? She could see how everything was connected, but what then was her place in it (apart from enjoying, guiltily, the clam chowder)? If there was a natural order—or disorder—who or what was responsible for that? Big questions. She had loved to turn them over and over in her mind, and now, by concentrating on one of the tiniest and yet most indefatigable life-forms on the planet, she got to dedicate her life to the big stuff, after all. If you could figure out the flu, it was like turning the key on a box filled with mysteries.
But a Pandora’s box, if you weren’t careful.
She closed the freezer, and as she turned to leave the autopsy chamber, she thought she saw a yellow glow, like a lanternlight, hovering near the main entry to the lab tent. And maybe someone’s silhouette, too—someone on the short side. But she was peering through several layers of thick plastic sheathing, and it was like looking at something at the bottom of a murky pond. She was reminded of the crabs that would scuttle for cover when she fished her hand into the tide pool.
She parted the curtains of the autopsy chamber and stepped out, face mask and goggles still in place, expecting to see Slater, or maybe even the professor, entering the tent. After so many hours of work, she would be glad of the company.
But she was wrong.
More wrong than she had ever been in her life.
She stopped where she was and stood stock-still, but it wasn’t as if she could become invisible. The human silhouette was gone, the tent flaps were open, and a black wolf, with a white blaze on its muzzle, planted its paws on the rubber matting, its back bristling from the wind, its eyes glaring with a strangely human intensity.
Chapter 38
“The lines are still on the screen!” Kozak shouted to Slater from across the graveyard. He was pushing his GPR back and forth like a vacuum cleaner on the snowy ground.
“So it’s not a computer malfunction?”
Kozak shook his head, his head down and earmuffs flapping, as he studied the digital monitor mounted between the handlebars. The professor had been puzzled by the fissile lines that kept showing up on the geothermal ground charts and had insisted on coming back out again to see if they would reappear.
And they had.
Now, Slater wondered, would he have an explanation? Looking out across the windswept cemetery, Slater could barely imagine how, or why, anyone would have willingly chosen to settle in such a bleak and inaccessible spot as St. Peter’s Island, a place where even the simple act of burial would have required a Herculean effort.
“Of course!” Kozak said to himself, loudly enough that Slater could still hear it across the rows of old graves, while smacking his palm against his forehead.
“Of course what?” Slater said, stepping between the stones and markers.
“These are the kinds of lines and deformations you usually see only in minefields.”
“There were no mines here,” Slater said, coming to his side.
“But there were explosions,” Kozak said, pointing at the crazed web of lines that radiated across his computer grid. “You see where they are?”
“It looks like they’re everywhere.”
“Everywhere in the graveyard,” Kozak said, “but not as you come to the end of the rows. Not as you start to enter the woods.”
“Okay,” Slater conceded, “I’ll buy that.”
“The colonists were setting off explosions in the cemetery. They were using dynamite, probably, to break up the tundra and permafrost.”