Half-Off Ragnarok Read online

  The tips of his fingers were gray.

  The door was still open. Looking through into the kitchen, I saw nothing that seemed out of the ordinary or even out of place. He’d probably heard a noise and gone to investigate. There had been no one there to mix a poultice for him. He’d never had a chance.

  “Poor bastard,” I murmured, straightening. “Grandpa, do you think you can jump the fence while carrying Mr. O’Malley? I want to examine his body under better light.”

  “How invasive?” he asked.

  “We won’t be able to put him back.” I felt a pang of guilt at that, and knew I had some sleepless nights ahead. Any family he still had would never know what had happened to him. But I needed to confirm, once and for all, that this was a cockatrice, and that meant a physical examination. This was how we’d save lives. I tried, with only limited success, to put the thought of his grieving family out of my mind.

  Sometimes it can be hard to reconcile being a Price and a scientist with being a decent human being.

  “What are you going to do with the remains?” asked Grandpa.

  “Crunchy.” Alligator turtles are immune to petrifaction, as are all true reptiles. He’d enjoy the meaty bits, and any rocks that wound up in his dinner would just be spat out like so much unwanted roughage.

  Grandpa nodded. “All right.” He cast a regretful look at the house. “He was always a good neighbor. Never asked too many questions. I like that in a man.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “So am I, Alex. So am I.” With that, Grandpa knelt and scooped Bill O’Malley into his arms. The old man’s face was uncovered in the process, revealing eyes the solid, unwavering gray of granite. Grandpa carried him like he was light as a feather, walking back toward the fence. Shelby and I followed. With no reason to suspect foul play, our footprints would be gone long before the police came to check on Mr. O’Malley. Even Grandpa hadn’t been able to dent the sunbaked Ohio ground.

  One by one, we climbed and boosted each other over the fence into our own yard, leaving the dead man’s empty house behind us, lights burning in the windows like signposts, trying to beckon their departed owner home. But he was never coming home again.

  Twelve

  “I knew Evelyn was the one for me the very first time I met her. She slapped me so hard that my jaw hurt for three days, and all because I’d said that sometimes, werewolves could be dangerous. Love is a painful thing.”

  —Kevin Price

  In the kitchen of an only moderately creepy suburban home in Columbus, Ohio, preparing to perform an autopsy on the kitchen table

  “NO,” said Grandma. “Absolutely not. Martin, what were you thinking?”

  “That we sold the Ping-Pong table at the rummage sale last summer, so if we’re going to cut a man up, this is the best place to do it.” Grandpa sounded slightly sheepish. “I told you we shouldn’t have sold it. Things like that always come in handy when you least expect it.”

  “Sorry, Grandma,” I said, without looking up from the complicated business of cutting Bill O’Malley’s clothes off with the scissors from the junk drawer. His joints had stiffened enough to make it hard to bend his arms and legs, and I wound up removing his pants in small pieces, dropping them into the trash can I had ready for just that purpose.

  “Angela. I know this is inconvenient, but we don’t have a better place to perform the autopsy.” Grandpa’s voice was level but firm. He walked over to her, putting one massive hand on her shoulder. “Mr. O’Malley is already gone, God rest his soul, and it’s not like we could use him for spare parts when he’s been half-petrified.”

  “Excuse me?” said Shelby.

  Grandpa continued like he hadn’t heard her. “Now at least this way, he can teach us something before we dispose of his mortal remains.”

  “But does he have to teach us on my kitchen table?” Grandma asked petulantly. Then she sighed. “I suppose you’ll want the autopsy kit.”

  “That would be nice,” I said.

  “I’ll go get it,” said Grandma. “You three, stay here, and try not to get any gore on my kitchen.”

  “I’m coming with you,” said Grandpa. “I think this one is going to require the big tarp.” The two of them turned and left the kitchen, leaving me alone with Shelby and the dead man.

  The dead man was honestly the least of my problems. Shelby crossed her arms, glaring at me, and demanded, “Spare parts?”

  “Grandpa’s a Revenant,” I said, as I resumed cutting off the last of Mr. O’Malley’s clothing. “He was originally several different dead guys. Now he’s one living guy. You should ask him about it sometime. He tells the best dumb mad scientist jokes.”

  Shelby looked at me blankly for several seconds before she said, “You’re a hell of a lot cockier than I’m used to you being, you know that?”

  “That’s because you’re finally seeing me in my element. Work cocktail parties, not so much my thing. Dead bodies? I’m your boy.” I pulled the last of Mr. O’Malley’s clothing off of his body, covering his genital region with one of Grandma’s good hand towels. She’d probably yell at me for that later, but the man deserved at least a little dignity.

  “Disturbing yet endearing,” said Shelby. “What do we do now?”

  “Hmm?” I dug my phone out of my pocket. “Now we examine the body. Have you done this before?”

  “I’ve never done a proper autopsy, but I’ve done plenty of necropsies, and a few cryptid dissections. None where the victim was partially turned to stone, but I know how to hold a scalpel.”

  “Good.” I handed her my phone. “I’m going to want you to take pictures for right now. Once we get into the more invasive procedures, I may need your hands.”

  “Got it,” said Shelby, with a mock salute. “Why are we doing this again? I thought your grandfather was a coroner.”

  I saluted back, motioning for her to follow me as I began to circle the body. “He is, but this isn’t really an autopsy so much as it’s a game of hide-and-seek with the petrifaction. He understands the human body. I understand turning it to stone.”

  “So it doesn’t matter if you butcher the poor man as long as you find what you need, yeah?”

  “Yeah. On that note, there’s some petrifaction of the fingertips and discoloration of the skin to the first knuckle, but the rest of the hand looks normal.” I picked up Mr. O’Malley’s hand, turning it gently. “Normal pliability for this stage of rigor. No signs of internal petrifaction.”

  Shelby dutifully took a picture of Mr. O’Malley’s stone fingertips.

  My next stop was Mr. O’Malley’s head. As expected, his eyes had been fully petrified, becoming hard round balls of stone. His tongue was also petrified, and his lips were discolored, showing the progress of the petrifaction through his system. His cheeks remained fleshy and skin-toned, the tips of his ears and bottoms of his earlobes had been petrified. Shelby dutifully took pictures of all the grayish spots.

  “So is all of this telling you anything?” she asked.

  “It was definitely a visual petrifaction—poison moves with the bloodstream, but this was targeting the extremities as much as it was the eyes and internal organs. That’s a sign of the whole ‘visual allergy’ thing.”

  “Cockatrice, yeah?”

  “Probably. At this point, I’m hoping so.” I looked up long enough to flash her a strained smile. “I’m not really in the mood for another scientific mystery right now.”

  Shelby nodded. “All right then,” she said. “Let’s get back to the dead man at hand.”

  We had almost finished our initial, noninvasive examination of the body by the time my grandparents came back. Grandma was carrying the plain brown briefcase that contained our home autopsy kit, as well as a pair of rib spreaders, a bone saw, and a chisel. I raised an eyebrow at the chisel. “You don’t know how far the petrifaction has spread internally,” she said.

  “Fair point,” I replied.

  Grandpa, on the other hand, was carrying an armload
of protective gear. He dropped smocks, gloves, and non-polarized goggles on the counter before walking to the kitchen table, putting a hand beneath it, and lifting the whole thing casually off the floor. “What have you learned so far?” he asked, as he began spreading a tarp across what would become our autopsy zone.

  “Visual petrifaction confirmed; some damage to the extremities, but the main damage seems to have been to the eyes and throat. His trachea is completely blocked by what looks like concrete. He probably suffocated.”

  “What’s this?” I turned to see Shelby looking at the dead man. She pointed. “Look at the underside of his knee. See? Right there.”

  “I noticed those during the initial examination,” I said, moving to stand beside her. From here, we had a perfect angle on the wound: two messy punctures, each a little less than five millimeters in diameter, surrounded by a thin ring of petrified flesh followed by a thick ring of bruised and damaged tissue. The marks were spaced about as far apart as a human’s canine teeth, although whatever made them was clearly longer and thinner than a human tooth. I looked at them for a long moment, frowning. Finally, without moving, I said, “Put the table down now, Grandpa. We need to get started.”

  “What did she find, Alex?” asked my grandmother.

  “Those puncture wounds are petrifying.”

  The table hit the floor with a “thump,” and Grandpa frowned at me across the body. “Cockatrice don’t inject venom into their prey.”

  “No,” I said. “They don’t.” But lesser gorgons did. So did Pliny’s gorgons. Oh, hell, Dee, I thought. What did your people do?

  Grandma opened the autopsy kit as the rest of us moved to put our smocks and gloves on. And then, with no further discussion, we got to work.

  As dates go, “come join me and my family in dismantling the man who used to live next door” ranked high in memorability, and low in normalcy. Shelby proved to be as well-trained as she’d claimed to be, and didn’t even wince when my grandfather used the rib spreaders to crack Mr. O’Malley’s chest, revealing the half-petrified surface of his heart. The arteries connecting it to the rest of his body were an equal mix of flesh and stone, striated almost like the bands of fat in bacon. Cutting it loose would have been a difficult, time-consuming process, and so we didn’t bother. Instead, we simply took samples from the heart tissue and the equally damaged lung tissue, placing them in sealed vials for later study.

  Since we already had cause of death—petrifaction—we were able to skip several of the standard autopsy steps, such as weighing the individual organs and examining the contents of Mr. O’Malley’s stomach. Grandpa did make some disparaging comments about wasting good organs, and Shelby somehow managed to keep herself from asking for details about how he would have used them. It was almost peaceful by the time we were ready to devote more attention to the puncture marks behind Mr. O’Malley’s knee.

  The ring of stone around the wounds had expanded during our examination. I frowned as I uncapped a venom extraction syringe and fitted it over the first puncture wound. Shelby frowned too, catching my expression.

  “What’s wrong now?” she asked.

  “The wounds imply a venom-based petrifactor, but the progression in the eyes, throat, and internal organs implies a glance-based petrifactor,” I said, pulling back the plunger. The suction this created would pull any remaining venom from the wound, allowing me to analyze it at my leisure. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Not unless you’ve got one of each, like a sine and a cosine,” said a dreamy voice from the doorway. We all turned to see Sarah standing there, one hand grasping the doorframe, the other pushing her hair out of her eyes. “I woke up and I didn’t know who I was, so I came down here so I could find me.”

  “Angie . . .” said Grandpa.

  “I’m on it.” Grandma set down the pan she’d been holding and shucked off her gloves, dropping them onto the counter before she rushed to put an arm around Sarah’s shoulders. “Come on, sweetheart. You need to get back to bed.”

  “Will you tell me a bedtime equation?”

  “Sure, honey. Sure.” Then they were gone, allowing the kitchen door to swing closed behind them. I sighed. Shelby turned to look at me.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quietly.

  “So are the rest of us,” I said, and moved the venom extraction syringe to the other puncture. “I’ll compare these wounds to the field guide after we dispose of the remains.”

  “Right—body disposal.” Shelby looked briefly unsure. “How were we going to manage that, exactly?”

  Despite my distress over Sarah, and the whole situation, I smiled.

  Breaking into the zoo after hours was surprisingly easy: I had a key card, and there were no guards on duty this late at night. The security camera next to the south employee gate had been broken for months, and so there wouldn’t even be a tape to destroy. Grandpa carried the plastic garbage bag of what had been Mr. O’Malley, before his body met a bone saw and a deadline. Shelby followed him, and Grandma brought up the rear, having finally talked Sarah into going back to bed. We’d need her if anyone found us before we were finished.

  Sometimes it’s a little depressing to realize how simple it is to make a person disappear. I tried not to dwell on that as we walked across the deserted zoo to the reptile house. I watched the bushes the whole way, searching for a sign that the cockatrice had been transported back to its original stomping grounds.

  I didn’t see anything.

  Inside the reptile house, the nocturnal animals were wide awake, slithering and skittering around their enclosures . . . and then there was Crunchy, who hung as still and patient as a stone in his tank, waiting to be rewarded for his persistence. I pulled out the stepladder and positioned it in front of the glass, climbing up to the top step. Once I was stable, I unlocked the panel that kept foolish kids from going for a swim, pushing it off to the side. Then I held out my hand.

  “Give me a leg,” I said.

  If Crunchy was surprised by this sudden manna from heaven, he didn’t show it. His neck lashed out as the leg drifted by, and with dismaying speed, what had been a piece of a human body was nothing but a thin red cloud in the water. In a few seconds, even that was gone. I held out my hand again. Grandpa passed me the next piece of Mr. O’Malley. Bit by bit, we fed the old man into the tank, until there was nothing left but a bloody plastic bag, which my grandfather solemnly folded and tucked into his coat.

  “Let’s go home,” said my grandmother, sounding subdued.

  “Alex—” began Shelby.

  “Tomorrow, all right?” I locked the panel over Crunchy’s tank before climbing down from the stepstool and turning to look at her. She was beautiful in the reddish light of the heat lamps on the reptile enclosures. She was dangerous.

  I needed to get her the hell away from my family.

  “Promise?” she asked.

  “I promise,” I said wearily. “Now come on. We’ll drive you back to your car.”

  Together—hopefully for the last time—the four of us walked out of the reptile house and started across the empty zoo. It had been a long day. It had been a long night. And the next few days didn’t look like they were going to be any shorter.

  Thirteen

  “I have always enjoyed the company of dangerous women. Fortunately for me, many of them seem to enjoy the company of dangerous men.”

  —Thomas Price

  The reptile house of Ohio’s West Columbus Zoo, about an hour and a half before the zoo is supposed to open, waiting for a gorgon to come to work

  BETWEEN THE BODY DISPOSAL, cleaning the kitchen, and analyzing the samples we’d taken during our makeshift autopsy, I was too spun up to sleep. Oh, I tried. And when four o’clock in the morning arrived without my catching so much as a wink, I gave up. I’d spent the hours between then and leaving for work doing research, drinking coffee, and emailing home to ask for more details about the Thirty-Six Society—which I didn’t have, naturally, since everyone else in my fam
ily was smart enough to go to bed.

  My car was one of the first into the parking lot. I got out and started down the path to the front gate, noting as I passed the pond that even the geese were still asleep. It was like I had the place to myself. Then again, that could have been a side effect of sleep deprivation.

  I walked around the curve in the path and smiled, the feeling of isolation dissipating as I saw Lloyd already manning his position at the gate. “Good morning,” I called.

  He jumped, coffee slopping over the lip of his mug as he turned to stare at me. “Dr. Preston?” he asked.

  “I know, I’m early.” I shrugged. “I couldn’t sleep. How about you, Lloyd? They always make you come to work this early?”

  “My shift starts as soon as there’s staff on the grounds,” he said, recovering some of his composure. He put his coffee down and reached for his clipboard. “ID?”

  I shook my head as I pulled out my ID card and handed it to him. “Every day.”

  “There were police here yesterday,” he said, in an overly patient tone. “Management wants to be extra sure they know who’s coming and going.” He found my name on his clipboard, checked it off, and handed my ID back to me. “Welcome to the zoo, Dr. Preston.”

  “Thanks, Lloyd,” I said, and waved as I walked through the gate. He didn’t wave back. When I glanced over my shoulder he looked away, and I frowned. I must have been really early if my presence was this confounding to security.

  The zoo was as deserted as the parking lot. I walked quickly, scanning the ground. I was wearing my glasses with the polarized lenses and carrying a hand mirror, just in case. Crow was still at home. If things went as badly as I feared that they might, he didn’t need to be here.