Karess came out of the autopsy room looking bleached of color and flushed at the same time. She had her hair tucked up into the shower cap, and when she took the cap off her head, the hair came tumbling down around her shoulders.
She tossed the scrubs to Perry and then tossed the cap in his direction, too, although it landed at his feet. She kicked the booties off with some difficulty, stumbling backward and managing not to fall down only because Brett Barber was standing behind her. She slammed into him, and he caught her awkwardly under the arms. Karess shook her head and looked back at Brett, appearing more annoyed by his presence than grateful. She hurried past Perry, and he could smell her, both in the gown she’d tossed to him and in the breeze she left as she ran: Formaldehyde. Sweat. Shampoo. Powdered flowers.
She smelled, he thought for a horrible moment as he slipped the gown she’d tossed to him over his arms, like the church on the morning of Nicole Werner’s funeral.
“It’s fucked up in there,” Brett said, leaning in to Perry. “I’m just warning you. This whole thing is fucked up. Professor Polson should get her ass fired for bringing us here.”
Perry did not even dignify Brett Barber, who was sweating profusely and breathing hard, with a nod. After he got his scrubs on, Perry followed the other three students and Kurt through the doors to the autopsy room. The doors closed behind him with a pneumatic hush, and the effect was like being teletransported onto another planet, with an entirely different kind of atmosphere: thin, and dustless, and tinged with a terrible sweetness. The walls were white, but everything else was made of gleaming stainless steel, even the floor, at the center of which there was a drain hole. Perry found himself in the center of the room, following Kurt and the other students, with that drain hole at his feet.
In it, there was a nestlike tangle of tawny-colored hair.
Perry took a step back and felt a cold pulsing at his right temple, as if someone were tapping at it with an index finger inside a cold latex glove. He put his hand to the temple.
“Are you okay?” Kurt asked. “You are okay?”
It took Perry a moment to realize that Kurt was talking to him, and that the other three students were staring. He swallowed and said, “Yeah,” and made a conscious effort not to look at the drain hole again, or speculate about its contents.
“Here we have the cabinet of the instruments needed for autopsy,” Kurt said, pointing at a brilliantly shining silver cabinet. He reached into a metal bin and briefly held up what looked like a large, thick needle before tossing it back down.
“Here,” Kurt said, “is chalkboard for recording data.” Perry looked in the direction Kurt had pointed. It was the kind of blackboard Perry remembered from his first-grade classroom in Bad Axe, before the whiteboards and the Magic Markers. What looked like a crude drawing of a torso was on it. A few dots were drawn around the neck. A–17–00 Wt NTD DB was underlined several times beside the drawing. Beside that was a list, checkmarks next to each word:
Liver X
Rt. Lung X
Lt. Lung X
Rt. Kidney X
Lt. Kidney X
Spleen X
Thyroid X
Brain X
Apparently, the last autopsy had been completed.
“The word autopsy”—Kurt pronounced the word as if it were one long vowel—“means ‘see for yourself.’ ”
The students giggled a little at the colloquial quality of this. The simplicity.
“So . . .” Kurt said. (There was no overlooking the showman in him now. He had been waiting for this part. Back in Yugoslavia, he’d probably been an amateur actor, or a magician.) “See for yourself.”
He pulled out a drawer by a handle that Perry hadn’t even noticed was in the wall. It made a slippery tinny sound, and suddenly it was rolling into the room so quickly that the little group of them had to part to make room for it. And then the smell was exactly as he remembered it from Nicole Werner’s funeral—Karess’s sweetness as he slipped the gown over his head—and it took Perry several seconds to realize that there was a sixth person in the room suddenly:
A person on a gurney.
A naked guy with bluish fingers and toes and a sheet thrown casually over his stomach, and what looked like some kind of crude embroidery over his throat, and Perry had to stop himself from saying anything, because the first thing that came to his mind to say was, “Lucas. What are you doing here?”