1
KOVACS
The cemetery was bleak, forlorn, and totally fucking decrepit.
Christ. Who’d want to be buried here?
Kovacs stamped his feet against the chill.
A rusted iron fence, complete with Gothic spikes, struggled to remain upright amid the weeds and broken glass. Rows of headstones sat skewed like dragon’s teeth. The stones were monstrosities, encrusted with putto and scripture, their once-polished veneers pockmarked and moss-covered. Roots gnarled the pathways like disgorged pieces of bone.
Stupid assholes, he thought, peering at the stones. He knew how he was going out. Vacuum-sealed in a disinterium. So they knew where to find him.
He sucked at his cigarette to dispel his sudden surliness, but the smoke in his lungs didn’t make him feel any better. It was pouring rain. Which meant he already had a grudge against this corpse for making him come out in such nasty shit.
He motioned for Drone, who was currently shaped in an umbrella configuration, to descend closer. As he huddled under its protection, he realized suddenly what was really spooking him. He was Outside. Outside for the first time in ten years.
He’d taken the Midtown Tunnel off FDR Drive into Queens. Made decent time along the LIE, until he’d come to the barriers and checkpoints. Once he’d received clearance to leave the Blister, he’d driven out onto the Grand Central Parkway, which of course had been empty, like the rest of the freeways. It still creeped him out, all those miles of deserted cement and steel.
Kovacs tossed his cigarette away and pulled the fedora tighter down onto his head. In the distance, the Blister pulsed over the city, conjoined snow globes of energy. Electromagnetic discharges parried with the rain in a surrealistic light show of crimson and turquoise.
His city. Look what they’d fucking done to it. It felt like he was looking at the cover of one of those pulp sci-fi magazines that had been popular in his father’s day—Weird Space Tales, or whatever. Oh, the city’s silhouette was basically the familiar conglomeration of skyscrapers—the Chrysler, the Empire State, they were still there. But they were now surrounded by pointed silver spires, tube-like shafts and swirling elevated cruiseways. Like someone had morphed Manhattan with Oz.
Drone’s stabilizers whined in protest at a sudden gust, and Kovacs was dosed with a face full of rain. Sputtering, cursing, he turned. A medevac dragonfly was setting down about twenty meters away, its blades adding to the storm’s blast, its chitinous body plates lending it a prehistoric menace.
About fucking time.
Three figures spilled out. They plodded forward in their white environmental suits, appropriately ethereal.
“You call it in, flatfoot?” one of them shouted over the roar of the turbines.
The medic got treated to a scowl. Out here was no one’s beat and the guy fucking well knew it.
“Surprised the graveside monitor was still working.”
The man looked around. On the street beyond the outer fence was a row of crumbling brownstones. Probably still some skeletons inside. “A nice neighborhood, once.”
“How long since you’ve done a retrieval outside the Blister?” said Kovacs, trying to sound casual.
The man shrugged. “Six, seven years?”
He pulled a Y-shaped device from his pack that looked like a divining rod. He swept it back and forth, consulting the holographic readout. Its beeping strengthened southwesterly.
“Okay,” said the medic. “Let’s go.”
The device led them deeper into the bone yard, past stunted trees and mausoleums right out of an old flatflick.
God sure had an ironic sense of humor. No, strike that, his mind protested. Leave God out of this. Things were too screwed up. If God actually was behind what had happened… well, beneath that concept lay a hysteria Kovacs knew he’d never be able to wrestle to ground.
“Don’t get your knickers in a bunch, love,” said Drone, noting his tense face. “You’re five by five.” Thinking that Kovacs was worried about the biofilter field Drone was projecting around his body. Its “body language interpretation” mode (highly touted by the manufacturer) wasn’t very good. Even after seven months as partners.
When they’d almost reached the outermost fence, the divining rod announced that they’d arrived. Kovacs could only see a wild growth of hedges until the medics cleared the underbrush with a couple swipes of a scythe.
There. A thin shaft was bracketed to the headstone. Its wafer-like sensors were encrusted with decay. A red light at its summit strobed the darkness in warning.
“What’s it doing way back here?”
They exchanged an uneasy glance.
“Can’t see the inscription.”
Drone grunted and directed a blast of compressed air against the stone’s marble face. Muck clouded into the air and floated away in search of another headstone on which to settle.
PAUL DONNER
b. 1979, d. 2012
There was a matching headstone beside it.
ELISE DONNER
b. 1973, d. 2012
Both had died the same year. A car wreck? Murder-suicide? You wish. Anything to keep the bores away. Probably something a lot more mundane. Food poisoning at the local sushi shack. The second grave—the wife’s—was dark, its monitor unlit. Sorry, pal. All alone on your second time around.
The squad leader nodded. “Two-twelve. Don’t get many this fresh anymore. The current crop’s from the 1950s.”
One of the rookie medics smirked. “Pretty soon we’ll be digging up Abe Lincoln.”
The leader caught Kovacs’s bloodless reaction and laughed. He leaned over and touched a stud on the tube. A bright medical holo sprung into the air from the headstone. The rain and wind distorted its field, making it jitter and flap. The tube spoke. “Thirty-seven minutes to revival,” it stated. “Critical support structures damaged. Without surgical intervention, survival probability six percent.”
The leader spoke into the comm tattoo on his forearm. A roar rose over the rain. They all turned.
An autodozer growled forward out of the storm, crushing shrubs and bushes in its wake, its steel-toothed maw shuddering in what looked very much like hunger.
***
The coffin dropped onto the mulchy ground. Rain battered away the dirt and decay, revealing its metal skin. “Okay,” said Kovacs to the men. “Knock yourselves out.”
The men attacked its seal with crowbars. The catch released with a crack and the lid was thrown open.
Kovacs’s breath caught in his throat. Contrary to urban legend, hair and nails didn’t grow post mortem. It was the shrinking back of the flesh, exposing more of the nail bed or hair follicle, that created the macabre impression. This guy was no exception. If he’d been handsome once, you couldn’t tell. His features were sunken and wax-like. The lips and eyes were half-open, the hands drifted down to his sides, the Krazy Glue having long ago dissolved.
But that wasn’t what made Kovacs’s eyes widen in shock.
The corpse wore dress blues.
Somebody whistled. “A cop.”
“A detective,” Kovacs corrected, noting the gold shield.
His chest was festooned with ribbons, his legs draped in the American flag.
“Look at them medals. Who was this guy?”
The leader examined the badge. “78th Precinct.”
Kovacs grunted. “Park Slope. Brooklyn.”
“So what’s he doing buried out here in Kew Gardens?”
No one had an answer.
“So who’s gonna do it?” said the leader. “Manual confirmation’s required.”
There were no volunteers.
“Pussies,” muttered Kovacs.
He knelt down and pressed two shaking fingers to the corpse’s neck. For a moment, there was no sound but the crackle of rain on vinyl ponchos. Finally, he nodded. “Still dead.”
Despite their training, everyone there sagged with relief.
***
“Please wait,” the room said. “Close your eyes.”
The top three microns of every exposed surface in the room was flash-incinerated and vacuumed out. There was a popping noise. Red lights went green and the far doors of the decontamination foyer whooshed open.
The crash team continued with the gurney into the operating arena. Kovacs and Drone started to follow them in, but a territorial resident in a mask stopped them. The man actually made the mistake of putting a gloved hand on Kovacs’s chest.
“Whoops,” murmured Drone.
Kovacs grinned. He peeled the resident’s fingers back, careful to inflict the maximum amount of pain without permanently crushing anything important.
The resident’s eyes flashed shock. “Hey, shit! Let go!”
Kovacs squeezed harder, lightening the man’s face a few more skin tones. “Know the penalty for touching a cop?”
“I just—you’re—you’re not allowed in the OR!”
“I document the outcome, pal.”
The resident yanked his hand back. He cradled it under his elbow, glowering, debating another smartass remark. Finally he nodded toward an observation cubicle set off the foyer. “Do it from there.”
Kovacs watched the man flee down the steps into the surgical arena, but the satisfaction he’d hoped for wasn’t there, only numb fatigue. He followed Drone into the cramped space. It stank of sweat and fear.
Through the window, he watched the crash team sweep the body onto the surgery table. The medics dove in, cutting away clothing, applying sensors and IVs. Diagnostic AIs crawled across the body like Tinkertoy spiders.
Kovacs wriggled in the plastic chair. His ass was already going numb.
Drone settled beside him. “Want a soda?” it said.
“Get fucked.”
“Such language.”
“Are you recording all this?” Kovacs snapped.
“All spectrums.”
“Then what am I doing here?” he said.
“You’re my date?”
Kovacs closed his eyes. He swore he could actually feel the damned thing smirking.
Below, in the operating room, the Chief Surgeon probed two dime-sized wounds. One was in the heart area, the other down where the spleen would be. Kovacs marveled at how tidy small-caliber handgun wounds were. You’d think something that could kill you so efficiently would look more… dramatic. Of course, for drama there was the Y-shaped coroner’s incision, sewn shut with loops of heavy black thread.
The body had taken on a sheen, the skin covered in a thin film. A nurse watched data streaming into the air off a black obelisk. “Tissue saturation 45% and falling.”
The doctor touched the skin, brought the moisture up to his nose. “Formaldehyde sweat. Still amazes me.”
“Ready with the trocar,” said the nurse, unimpressed.
Kovacs had seen enough of these procedures to comprehend the irony. Once upon a time, the pointed metal tube had been a mortician’s device used to remove fluids and gasses, puncture the organs and inject preservative into the chest cavity. Now it was employed in reverse, to remove the formaldehyde solution the corpse’s cells were excreting.
“Cause of death?” asked the doctor.
One of the black slabs replied: “Gunshot wound, left ventricle.”
“Shot in the heart,” a nurse said softly.
On the equipment behind them, the green flatlines glowed.
***
Donner looked like a freshman biology experiment, the muscle of his stomach neatly pinned back, his abdominal cavity on display. The doctor poked around, prodding spleen, stomach, lungs.
“His organs have grown back nicely.”
A nurse surveyed his nether regions. “Mmm-hmm.”
He ignored her. “Secondary wound completely healed. The liver, though. See? That’s degenerative.”
“Cirrhosis? Our hero was a boozer?” asked the nurse.
“Grow another one,” he instructed one of the spiders, which scurried over to something that looked like a microwave oven.
“Question?” It was the resident. The doctor sighed but didn’t object. “Why doesn’t it regrow healthy?”
“The body comes back exactly how it was at the moment of death, understand? The liver would heal rapidly. But maybe not fast enough. It’s safer to just replace it from his stem cells.”
Another nurse pointed. “What’s that?”
The doctor pulled a wad of decomposed gunk from inside the abdomen and sniffed it. “Sawdust.”
Kovacs felt his gorge rise.
“Homicides are autopsied,” said the doctor. “The organs were removed for examination. Afterward, the mortician used whatever was handy to fill the cavity. Sawdust, paper towels…”
“I’ll never eat stuffing again,” someone said.
Kovacs closed his eyes and counted to twenty.
From below: “We’re gonna have to do a full cavity sanitization.”
Drone cocked at a quizzical angle. “Weird. The human need to preserve the body after death.”
“It’s not a need.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s… I don’t know, a cultural thing.”
“It’s a waste of time. And real estate. Is it because of your ancient creation myths?”
Kovacs ground his teeth together. Remember your smarty sensitivity training. “We were made from the earth, so we’re returned to it when—”
“Ashes to ashes. I know,” the machine sniffed. “But flesh ain’t dirt.”
“It’s not literal, dipstick. It’s semantics.”
“Huh? Do you mean a figure of speech?”
“Whatever! Our bodies are matter, but our souls are eternal.”
“Then why do you say smarties don’t have souls? Machines die, too.” It buzzed. “Eventually.”
“You cease functioning. You don’t die.”
“Talk about semantics,” Drone grumped.
Below, the spider was back with the new liver. The doctor glanced at an antique clock on the wall. It read 3:04 AM. The minute hand clicked backwards to 3:03.
“Alright,” he said. “Prep him for surgery.”
***
An hour later, he stripped away his stained gloves.
“Now we wait.”
Kovacs leaned forward. The wounds had begun to look less black and angry. Their edges were pink with freshly healed tissue. The fact that Kovacs hadn’t seen the change was creepier than its occurrence.
Drone was softly singing something. “Wake up, wake up you sleepyhead, get up, get out of bed.”
Donner’s face was motionless in the unnatural way only death brought. Facial muscles only completely relaxed in death, which is why loved ones never looked quite right in the casket.
Kovacs remembered his first funeral, age eight. Uncle Pat had dropped dead in the D’Agostinos produce section. Sadly, Pat’s passion for broccoli hadn’t staved off a coronary. At the funeral, young Kovacs had stared at Pat in the coffin, fascinated, repulsed, thinking how strange death was, but glad, too, knowing he’d freak if Unca were to suddenly look at him and grin, a tiny piece of green floret caught in his teeth…
This is so wrong, he thought.
In the room, Donner sighed.
The resident yelped, stumbling backward into a tray of instruments. The metallic clatter was insanely loud. The doctor shot him a murderous glance. “None of that, goddamn it!”
On the heart monitor, the flatline suddenly rustled.
“Come on, come on you, sleepyhead…”
The flatline jumped again. A couple of ragged spikes.
“Ready with epinephrine.”
A nurse raised a heavy syringe, the image of a mad doctor.
“Get up, get up, you’re only dead—”
Abruptly, the monitors settled into a rhythmical pattern. Healthy, steady peaks.
Beep… beep… beep… beep…
Kovacs tasted blood. He’d bitten his lip.
The doctor wiped sweat from his brow with his sleeve.
Beep… beep… beep… beep…
A priest stepped from the shadows. He was young, not happy with his job. He bowed his head and made the sign of the cross. “The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away, the Lord giveth back. The Lord… can’t seem to make up his mind lately. Amen.” He put a dab of holy water on Donner’s forehead and fled.
“Time of revival, 4:29 AM, October 31, 2054.”
“Hey,” a nurse said. “It’s Halloween.”