With the lid cleared away, the corpse was on full display, and Slater had nowhere to stand but a very narrow trough along one side. Kozak’s surmise, however, was right—the man was dressed in a long black cassock that glistened like ebony beneath a sheen of ice; the sleeves were rolled back to reveal a hint of scarlet lining. His hands were clenched tight, and in one he held a tightly rolled piece of paper. In the other, he clutched a copper icon, the size and shape of an index card, with its picture side down. Slater glanced up at the professor for any further elaboration.
“The paper is the prayer of absolution,” Kozak volunteered. “Traditionally, it was placed in the corpse’s hand after it had been read aloud by a priest. As for the icon, that must be what showed up on the GPR. I kept getting hits of metal or hard mineral deposits.”
Slater looked back at the body, whose face was as arresting in death as it must have been in life. He had hypnotic blue-gray eyes, even now, and blond hair—nearly white—that must have once hung down to his shoulders. His face was clean-shaven, and his mouth had fallen open, as if he were just about to speak; his lips were flecked with dark splotches of blood. His expression was one of surprise.
“I would say, from his youth and the fact that he has no beard,” Kozak said, “he was a deacon.”
“Deacon or priest or whatever,” Lantos said, “I think if you can cut away some of that fabric before taking the samples, we’d be better off. The drill could get snagged.”
Slater knew she was right, but it was as if her voice were coming from a mile away. It was more than the muffling of the helmets. He was struggling to maintain his composure and presence of mind, a problem that someone in his line of work should long ago have conquered. He put it down to the effect of all the antiviral drugs he’d been taking, but whatever the cause, he knew that now was no time to lose control.
“You’re right,” he said. “Give me the surgical scissors.”
Anticipating him perfectly, she had them ready. But to put them to use, he would first have to get into the correct position, and there was only one way to do that. Straddling the corpse, he slowly sat down on it, like a rider in a saddle. He could hear the crackling of the ice that coated the body, and it reminded him of the sound of stepping out on a frozen pond. The corpse itself was as stiff and hard as an iron anvil. With the butt end of the scissors, he chipped at the ice on the deacon’s chest until a spot a few inches around had been cleared. Shards of ice had flown up into the corpse’s face, and he brushed them away with his gloved fingertips.
“I don’t think he’ll mind,” Lantos said.
Turning the scissors, he carefully nudged the tip beneath the black cloth, just enough to separate it from the frozen flesh, then snipped until he could pull a piece of the fabric free. He handed it up to Lantos for safekeeping, then, on the opposite side of the breastbone, he did the same. The exposed skin was the color of old ivory, but with a fine sheen, as if Vaseline had been spread on it.
“The cadaver mat,” Lantos said, before he could ask for it.
She handed him a green-rubber sheath the size of a bath towel, which had short vertical and horizontal incisions in it. He draped it across the upper torso, then poked a finger through one hole to loosen it up. In autopsy work like this, the cadaver mat was used not only as a sign of respect but to keep airborne particles to a minimum.
“Okay,” he said, “I can start taking the samples now.”
Lantos, like a nurse in an ER, slapped into his hand a small, low-speed aerosol drill the size of a screwdriver. After making sure that he had located the spot directly above the left lung, he braced himself with one hand, while with the other he pressed the tip of the drill through the hole. With a soft whirring sound, the blade bored into the corpse, then suctioned up a minuscule sliver of lung tissue, which Lantos immediately placed in a vial already marked for that purpose.
Slater was vaguely aware of a commotion up above. “What is it?” he said, trying to maintain his focus.
“It’s nothing,” Lantos said. “Keep going.”
“It’s Nika,” Kozak said. “She’s not feeling very well.”
Slater looked up but saw no sign of her.
Kozak simply said, “Go on,” and weakly waved one hand.
Slater nodded—this was grisly work, he recognized that, and nothing could really prepare you for it—but the sooner he collected the in situ specimens, the sooner they could all leave the graveyard … and that meant the deacon, too. Once these utterly uncompromised specimens had been taken, the whole body would be hoisted out of the shattered coffin and taken back to the autopsy chamber in the colony, there to be thawed out and more thoroughly dissected. He was counting on Kozak to carry the other end of the stretcher.
“Heart next,” Lantos asked, “or brain?”
Somewhere in the woods a wolf howled.
“Trachea,” Slater said, and the next time he handed the specimen up to Dr. Lantos, he noticed that Kozak, too, was missing from the lip of the grave. He didn’t have to say a word before Lantos chuckled and said, “Yep, one more down. Looks like it’s just us chickens from now on.”
Chapter 31