His divining directed his attention to the steel door of the walk-in refrigerator. He took a few steps toward it, all his senses attuned.

A rustling. A stirring. As though from inside. He had spent more than enough time down here not to be spooked by the mere proximity to the dead…but then he remembered the antemortem growth these corpses had exhibited. Clearly, these anxieties had prompted him to revert to the usual human taboos regarding the dead. Everything about his job flew in the face of normal human instinct. Cutting open corpses. Defiling cadavers, peeling faces back from skulls. Excising organs and flaying genitals. He smiled at himself in the empty room. So he was basically normal after all.

His mind playing tricks on him. Probably a glitch in the cooling fans or something. There was a safety switch inside the cooler, a big red button, in the event anyone ever got himself stuck in there accidentally.

He turned back to the jars. Watching them, waiting for more movement. He was wishing he had brought his laptop down in order to record his thoughts and impressions.

Plip.

He had been ready for it this time, his heart leaping but his body staying put. Still in the first jar. He poured out the other one and split the fluid a third time, approximately one ounce in each.

As he did this, he thought he saw something ride the spill from the first jar to the second. Something very thin, no more than an inch and a half in length—if indeed he saw what he thought he saw…

A worm. A fluke. Was this a parasitic disease? There were various examples of parasites reshaping hosts in order to serve their own reproductive aspects. Was this the explanation for the bizarre after-death changes he had seen on the autopsy table?

He held up the jar in question, swishing around the thinning white fluid underneath the lamplight. He eyed the contents carefully, closely…and yes…not once but twice, something slithered inside. Wriggled. Wire thin and as white as its surroundings, moving very fast.

Bennett had to isolate it. Dip it in formalin, and then study it, and identify it. If he had this one, he had dozens, maybe hundreds, maybe…who knows how many, circulating inside the other bodies in the—

A sharp bang from the cooler shocked him, made him jerk up, jostling the jar from his hand. It fell to the counter, but did not shatter—bouncing instead, clattering into the sink, spilling and splattering its contents. Bennett let loose a string of obscenities, searching the stainless-steel basin for the worm. Then he felt warmth on the back of his left hand. Some of the white blood had spattered on him, and was now stinging his flesh. Not burning, but mildly caustic, enough to hurt. He quickly ran cold water over it and wiped it off on his lab coat before it could damage his skin.