“You tell me, my marine biology expert,” Dr. Smith said.
She moved the focal point, scanning along the sample. “The cells on the right-hand side are skin cells,” she said. “For the most part, they look normal. But the cells on the left—”
“You took a two-inch core out of the man’s thigh. The cells on the right are surface cells. Those on the left are the deeper muscle cells.”
“Yes. They look odd. Almost as if they’ve exploded from the inside.”
“They have,” Dr. Smith said. “The deeper you go, the more damage you see. The highest level of epidermal tissue shows no damage at all.”
“Could it be a chemical burn?” she asked, unable to take her eyes off the ruined cells. “Maybe something that soaked in and then reacted.”
“There’s no residue present,” Smith said. “And any chemical strong enough to do that would wreak havoc with the epidermis on its way in. You ever get strong bleach on your hands?”
“Good point,” she said. “But what else could do this?”
“What could do all of this?” he said. “That’s the question we have to ask ourselves.”
She sat up and turned to face him. “One cause. Three events.”
“If you can think of one thing that would fit the bill…” he said.
Her mind began to churn, not in hopeless, powerless circles, as it had while she sat over Paul, but in forward motion. She could almost feel the synapses waking up and firing, like lights going on one by one in a dark office tower.
“It looks like thermal damage,” she said. “But high heat or fire would damage the surface layer of the epidermis the most.”
“Exactly,” he said. “That’s the whole reason we have an epidermal layer of dead skin cells. As thin and weak as it is, it’s basically a shell designed to keep moisture in and other things out.”
She turned back to the microscope and glanced at the cells one more time. She thought about the plastic slivers under the other scope to her side. What could possibly deform thick, heavy plastic without melting thinner lighter plastic, cause carbon deposits on metal as if it had been arc-welded, and destroy human tissue from the inside out?
Gamay looked up from the microscope again. “Mrs. Nordegrun told Kurt she’d seen things in her head.”
Smith scanned through the notes. “She told Kurt that she’d seen stars in front of her eyes right before she went down. She said, ‘I don’t want to sound crazy, but it looked like miniature fireworks going off in front of my eyes. I thought I was seeing something, but when I closed my eyes tight they were still there.’”
“I once read about
astronauts experiencing something similar,” Gamay said. “On a shuttle mission a few years ago, they saw sparks or shooting-star patterns even when they closed their eyes.”
Smith sat up a little straighter. “Do you remember the cause?”
She thought back. “They were in orbit during a solar flare event. Despite the shielding on the crew’s quarters, some of the high-energy rays made it through. As these rays impact the cones and rods in the eye, they trigger neurological responses that register as starbursts in front of their eyes.”
“Not a hallucination?”
“No,” she said. “They’re actually seeing these things the same way I see you right now. Cones and rods transmitting a signal to the mind.”
Dr. Smith listened and nodded thoughtfully. He stood up, walked over to the microscope, and took another peek at the tissue sample himself.
“When I was in the Air Force, probably before you were born, I remember a young man who walked in front of one of our Phantom jets during the middle of a radar test. He was just a kid, an enlisted guy a month out of basic. Nobody saw him coming. Unfortunately for him, that particular jet was what we called a Wild Weasel, designed to emit powerful radar bursts and flood the enemy screens with so much signal that they couldn’t pick out our planes from the mess on their screens.”
“What happened?”
“He let out a shout, fell to his knees, and then flat on the floor,” Smith said. “The chief shut the radar off, and we dragged the kid to the infirmary, but he was already dead. Strangely, his skin was not hot to the touch. Turned out he’d fried from the inside out. As horrible as it sounds, he’d basically been cooked like a meal in a microwave. I was just a medic at the time, but I remember looking at his tissue under a microscope. It looked an awful lot like this.”
Gamay took a breath, trying to put away the horror of what she’d just been told and focus on the scientific evidence.
“And the metal looks as if it’s been arc-welded,” she said.
He nodded.