Rupture Read online

  Directly behind him was the ledge of a trough cut into the concrete floor. Like an underground subway in quarter scale, the four-foot-deep channel traveled into a tunnel and disappeared into darkness.

  Next to the lamp on the table was an oversized book, its pages open and resembling a wedding register or a ledger for recording guest’s at a wake. Eli pulled the lamp closer and the pages appeared as frail parchment. Only the right-hand page was inscribed in a column along the fold. Eli recognized the slant-angled cursive letters, Gaston’s handiwork.

  The open page contained a single name with identifiers listed on skipped lines below.

  Name: Patrick Sorenson

  Date: June 24, 2005

  Age: 32

  Cause of Death: Motor Vehicle Accident

  There were two categories, both unfilled, that did not fit with the traditional processing of cadavers.

  Shipped to:

  Price:

  Price?

  Eli flipped to the next page but it was blank, so he turned back. During his early years in Anatomy Hall, Eli had witnessed certain events that he could not understand—cadavers that arrived by shipping trucks but were gone the next day, Gaston dismembering a cadaver but the body parts never being used by the medical students. Reading what was before him now, the commodity of bodies, he felt as though some of his questions were about to be answered.

  Then the sound returned—an unwilling, unpredictable churn of rusty cogs against the grain, amplified by both proximity and confinement. Eli sensed motion below the ledge, confirmed by the parallel traction of chains pulling a metal cart into his peripheral view, like a subway train approaching without light or urgency to decelerate.

  Instinctively, Eli stepped back and the cart came to a halt directly in front of him, its sheet-covered cargo shifting with the abrupt stop. Eli guessed the cart was seven feet long, four feet wide, and about three feet deep. Like a large metal bathtub, the cart sat within the concrete trough and had an open compartment below that was mostly hidden. Below this, the cart was secured to the heavy chains that pulled it.

  The familiarity of the cart was unnerving. Staring at it, Eli could see a younger Gaston pushing a similar cart alongside the dissection table, locking it in place while he lifted a body, his strained leverage released by the bony thud of skull against steel.

  The grinding noise changed to idle mode, an over and over repeated like a scratch on an old record but with a metallic click and grind, a cog stripping a gear. Eli approached the cart as though to fulfill an obligatory function: a role, he assumed, which had been filled by Gaston for many years. The machine, in its momentary delay, neither grieved for Gaston nor perceived his replacement.

  Eli imagined the likely occupant of the cart, unified with other cadavers by the process of aging—tanned, wrinkled skin transformed into a leathery shell that obliterated any expression of the living person. This familiar image stayed with Eli as he pulled back the sheet from the cart. It took a moment before the deep wrinkles in his mind’s eye adjusted to the smooth, perfect complexion of a young woman, nude, arms folded modestly across her chest. Eli glanced away as if to preserve her dignity. As a doctor, he was used to clinical nudity, but this seemed perverse.But what dignity remained? Her body pulled anonymously, alone, in an underground cart? To where? To what end?

  Eli examined her skin, his curiosity overcoming any self-consciousness now. She was without blemish or the bruise of trauma, no cut or wound of entrance or exit. As he moved his light over her left hip, the beam caught a mark. He leaned closer so that the circle of light contracted onto the pink butterfly tattoo folded along the iliac crest, wings pulled back in a position of rest, or caution.

  He twisted the tag on her toe into view but the name meant nothing to him.

  Marisa Svengoli.

  The clicking sound increased at a sickening pace and the cart lunged forward. Instinctively, so that the girl was not transported uncovered, Eli flipped the sheet over and toward her head. But the edge caught on her elbow, leaving the left breast exposed.

  The concrete furrow led the cart past a stone wall that jutted at a right angle and separated the room from the tunnel beyond. He squeezed past the wall and stepped into a second room illuminated by the flicker flame inside a dome-shaped incinerator.

  Was this her fate? Cremation?

  But as his eyes adjusted, he saw that the cart’s path led past the furnace, not through it. And there wasn’t a white-hot fire required to cremate a body but rather a maintenance flame, like a pilot light in a gas heater. Eli glanced around him as if to find the true perpetrator in this morbid practical joke.

  The cart moved at a steady pace toward an uncertain destination. Was he supposed to stoke the fire and hoist the body in like a stump of wood? Is that what Gaston would do? Even though he would never consider it, Eli was relieved when Marisa’s body passed by the incinerator. He felt like her protector now, the mental pronunciation of her name imparting a sense of chivalry. The cart continued toward a dark opening, square and just large enough to allow entrance. At this pace, the cart was four, maybe five, seconds from entrance to the tunnel.

  And then what? Can I still follow it?

  He decided that not knowing was worse than the unseen. Eli stepped off the ledge and landed with his feet balanced on the cart’s rear axle and both hands on the push bar, like a child freewheeling down a grocery store aisle. The cart’s momentum changed to that of the ratcheted pull of a roller coaster up an incline before the breathtaking plunge. Just as the cart broke over the ledge, during that brief moment of equilibrating plateau, Eli realized that this ride would be without the benefit of a safety bar.

  The plunge was hard and deep, into complete darkness with only stone walls rushing past, inches away. Eli gripped hard, his back frozen in the posture of a wind surfer. He endured the ride as the cart bucked and shuddered as if it might disintegrate. He felt the front of the cart rise and then it began to slow, pulled along a flat surface. Dim light seeped through portals spaced wide and high on the walls as the tunnel opened into a corridor. With the cart’s inertia abated, the chain pull caught and it jerked forward.

  The force of acceleration had pushed Marisa against the back wall of the cart so that her neck bent at a right angle, her eyes partially open and staring at him. Eli leaned over and pulled the sheet to cover her again.

  He looked ahead to study their path. Only three, maybe four minutes had passed, but he was now far removed from Anatomy Hall. Water dripped from the ceiling and trickled from the tunnel walls. It filled the trough beneath them and Eli felt his shoes submerged. The trickle of water increased until miniature waterfalls seemed to sprout from the walls, and Eli sensed water rising to his ankles. There was more light now, oblique smoky columns penetrating from the left side. At a distance of thirty yards he saw a door-sized opening in the wall with stone steps leading down into the tunnel. They passed within ten feet of the opening, which was littered with newspaper as if blown in from the street above.

  We must be two or three floors below street level, Eli thought.What am I doing, anyway, riding with this woman underground? She is dead. What further harm could come to her?

  Eli could rationalize it now. Maybe this was the way that the city disposed of the dead, those unknown without family to claim them. Growing up in Memphis, he had heard about tunnels that existed beneath downtown. The newspapers reported the underground passages were a haven for the homeless and an escape route for criminals. Some believed the tunnels stretched farther than downtown. Like the Queens-Midtown tunnel in New York City under the East River, although on smaller scale, one Memphis tunnel reportedly cut below the Mississippi River the length of a mile out to an island that housed a prison camp decades ago. Eli knew now that the tunnel actually existed.

  Farther down the tunnel, another faint column of light appeared along the wall. At that opening, Eli planned to jump from the cart. He would follow one of the stairwells to the street, dial 911, and inform the police
. He briefly considered the story he would tell.

  I entered Anatomy Hall and heard a strange noise underground. A young dead girl, her body pulled along a tunnel.

  He could imagine their response.

  So, Dr. Branch, you broke into a medical school building. Aren’t your medical privileges suspended?

  It did sound absurd, coming from the crazy doctor with the murdered lab technician. Eli decided it was best to tell no one.

  They were halfway to the next doorway now. He considered how high he would have to jump to clear the cart. The water would provide resistance, his feet heavy. But still, it was only a yard or so up to the ledge. He could almost step that far. He tried to relax the muscles in his left leg, stiff with a developing hamstring cramp. Even though the cart moved at the same slow pace, the light from the opening was coming closer, twenty feet away. As he shifted to his right foot, the light diminished, as though a shade had been drawn. A shadow descended, one step at a time, and the silhouette of a man filled the opening in the wall.

  Eli slid into the hidden compartment beneath the cart. He balanced on the narrow metal platform, his knees soaked by the swirling brown stew. He heard the man moving forward, his appearance perfectly timed with the cart’s arrival. Through a small gap between the cart and the concrete ledge, Eli saw the man, a baseball cap pulled low to his eyes, baggy shirt over sweatpants. The man leaned forward and grasped the side of the cart. With a lateral swing, as though clearing a fence, he hoisted himself inside, landing on top of the body. The buggy rocked sideways with enough force to dislodge it from the track. Eli’s knee slipped and the chain scraped his shin down to the bone. The putrid water bathed the wound and set fire to the gash. He crouched lower under the cart, staying out of sight of the man who was not more than five feet away.

  What is this guy doing?

  Then Eli thought that maybe this was part of the plan. Another processing site for the body to be disposed of, an underground burial to save space in the crowded city cemeteries. He’s just a city employee for this glorified waste management system, the final caretaker.

  The cart stabilized and Eli could hear nothing other than the grind of the chain. He planned to stay hidden and escape up the next set of steps.

  Has the man removed the body? Is he still there? Eli looked behind him but there was nothing but a swirling yellow-brown wake that filled the path. Through a background of falling water, Eli heard the man speaking in a low groan.

  “That’s it now, precious.” And then louder as though signaling ahead. “You’re going to like this one, you dirty bastard.”

  Looking just above the lip of the cart, Eli could see the man’s back humped in a grotesque bend over Marisa with the sheet pulled away. Further down the corridor, a second man appeared. He moved quickly toward the cart, rubbing the palms of his hands together as if preparing for a meal.

  Eli’s confusion resolved to clarity. These men were predators, the dead their prey. Eli’s childhood memory of Gaston, alone with the cadaver, flashed briefly. He couldn’t stop the intrusion then, but he would not let it happen again. With his footing secured on the cart’s axle, Eli pulled himself above the cart and hooked the man’s neck with his arm, pulling him back in a headlock that brought them eye to eye. But instead of struggling, the man yelled, “Hey, wait your turn,” as though a game had started and he was in line before his partner. When his gaze on Eli came into focus, the man twisted violently and Eli strangled him so that the next sentence stopped with “what the?”

  From the force of the man’s pull, Eli knew the man would fight rather than try to escape. He was equal to Eli in age and build and he threw an elbow that sent a compression wave deep into Eli’s right ear. Eli’s head recoiled and he felt the cart shake as the man jumped from it. For a moment, Eli saw nothing.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  DOWNTOWN MEMPHIS

  9:09 P.M.

  Eli knew that he was still vulnerable to another blow, either from this man or his partner up ahead. Upon regaining his focus, however, he saw that both of them had disappeared and he could no longer gauge how far he and Marisa had traveled since the assault. The ringing in his ear distorted his equilibrium, and he held onto the cart handle, waiting for it to pass. The burning pain in his leg changed to a deep ache, and he examined the cut with his fingertip, the swirling turbid water below. The smooth hard surface of his shinbone was exposed. He opened his eyes at intervals for fear of another unwanted visitor. The openings that led to above ground were no longer present. He was relieved that he and Marisa were alone.

  After what seemed like another mile in complete darkness, Eli felt the front of the cart tilt upward and they were pulled along an incline. He thought about the route they had taken since leaving Anatomy Hall. There was a sharp plunge at the beginning followed by a long route deep underground. Now they were being raised back to ground level. Eli was sure that along this track was the cart’s final destination.

  At the top of the incline, the tunnel widened to a mouth flooded with bright light. Eli’s vision had accommodated to that of a cave dweller and he closed his eyes to adjust. His hearing seemed hyperacute as well. There were voices ahead, men’s voices. They had been waiting for Marisa, no doubt.

  As the cart came into full view, Eli crouched again in the bottom compartment so that he was hidden. He could hear approaching footsteps.

  From his floor-level view, it appeared that they were in a narrow concrete corridor, like the receiving dock of a warehouse. A man spoke loudly, as if into a speaker.

  “The body’s here. Where you want her?”

  There was a crack of static in response. “Set her up on the table, Bennie. We’re ready.”

  There was an electrical buzz and the cart came to an abrupt stop, as though a brick had been thrown at the wheels. The name Bennie struck Eli hard—from Gaston’s journal. Bennie had carried Gaston to the final procedure that initiated the old man’s death.

  “Look boss, she’s so pretty.”

  Eli recognized Tongue’s garbled speech from the guardhouse at RBI. He could see the man’s enormous boots at the rear of the cart.

  “Just get her feet and quit looking. You know we’re on camera,” Bennie said.

  Eli felt the cart shift as Marisa’s body was lifted. He watched the legs of both men, shuffling under the weight of her body as they carried it through a doorway off the platform.

  Eli was alone now. The cart was parked below the concrete ledge and there were no signs or any indication of where he was. He studied the cart path before him as it made a sharp U-turn and doubled back on a parallel track from where they had come. A red light began to flash, followed immediately by a loud buzz as the cart jerked forward. Just before it reached the U-turn, Eli jumped off and caught the edge of the platform, pulling himself up to the concrete floor. He looked behind him as the empty cart fell out of sight.

  Eli followed the trail of voices down a brightly lit hallway angling sharply to the right. The floor was made of white tile that had been scrubbed hospital clean. He looked around the corner and saw that the men had stopped at the end of the passageway. They pushed a gurney inside an elevator and the doors closed behind them.

  Eli ran the full length of the hall. There was no light above the elevator to indicate which floor it was on. He entered a stairwell just to the left of the single elevator shaft and climbed one flight. He tried the door but it was locked.

  The door on the next level opened into a foyer, like the lobby of an old theatre. The light in the foyer came from a single column of glass erected in the center of the crescent-shaped space. The column appeared empty but when Eli approached it, he saw a small flesh-colored object that rotated in a counterclockwise direction. It was no bigger than a marble but there was a remarkable set of eyes and the buds of little hands and feet—a human embryo.

  Eli stepped around the column, following the same direction as the life form rotated. It had no attachments as if suspended by the light itself. As he cir
cled, however, the embryo diminished, losing its distinctive features until it was barely visible as a grain of sand.

  Eli reversed his circle, moving right. The embryo not only regained its original form but developed and grew fingers and toes and an arch in its back, the head tilted gently to reveal tiny ears and a wispy tuft of hair.

  Eli wanted to study the illusion further, but at the far end of the foyer, the shadow of a figure distracted him and he hid behind the glass column. The glare obscured his vision but he could tell that the person was moving toward him. A door off the foyer opened, the influx of light revealing the person in the doorway to be Tsarina. She held a blanket-covered bundle in the crook of her arm. The door shut behind her.

  Eli’s mind raced as he tried to make sense of it. He had gone to Anatomy Hall to search Gaston’s room for information that might explain his death. He wasn’t prepared to find the journal that linked his brother’s childhood operation to the company that had now hired him. The operation was funded by Regent Biotech.

  And then the tunnel, the girl’s body, traveling underground a mile, two miles? The systematic transport of bodies for experimentation. Bodies for sale? He was sickened by the sudden realization that his father had allowed the smuggling of cadavers to the biomedical device company.

  Eli waited a full sixty seconds. He guessed he had traveled at least a mile in the tunnel. Now, with Tsarina’s appearance, he knew exactly where he was. Seeing no further movement, he crossed the foyer, opened the door, and entered the Oval Terrace of RBI.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  RBI

  OVAL TERRACE

  9:25 P.M.

  Eli stood outside the top grandstand of a deep amphitheater, with semicircular rows of chairs at least thirty feet above the center pit. All of the seats were empty. Although modernized, Eli recognized it as similar to the old surgical amphitheatres in which students peered over their seats to watch an operation being performed below.