And he did. Speeding faster than he’d ever run in his life, crashing through the forest. His legs pumping furiously. Go…. Keep going, he ordered himself. Don’t stop. Outrun the little bastards. Think about your wife, think about the twins. Go, go, go…. There were fewer wasps now though he could still see thirty or forty of the black dots clinging to his skin, the obscene hindquarters bending forward to sting him again.

I’ll be at the river in three minutes. I’ll leap into the water. They’ll drown. I’ll be all right…. Run! Escape from the pain … the pain … How can something so small cause so much pain? Oh, it hurts….

He ran like a racehorse, ran like a deer, speeding through underbrush that was just a hazy blur in his tear-filled eyes.

He’d—

But wait, wait. What was wrong? Ed Schaeffer looked down and realized that he wasn’t running at all. He wasn’t even standing up. He was lying on the ground only thirty feet from the blind, his legs not sprinting but thrashing uncontrollably.

His hand groped for his Handi-talkie and even though his thumb was swollen double from the venom he managed to push the transmit button. But then the convulsion’s that began in his legs moved into his torso and neck and arms and he dropped the radio. For a moment he heard Jesse Corn’s voice in the speaker, and when that stopped he heard the pulsing drone of the wasps, which became a tiny thread of sound and finally silence.

… chapter two

Only God could cure him. And God wasn’t so inclined.

Not that it mattered, for Lincoln Rhyme was a man of science rather than theology and so he’d traveled not to Lourdes or Turin or to some Baptist tent outfitted with a manic faith healer but here, to this hospital in North Carolina, in hopes of becoming if not a whole man at least less of a partial one.

Rhyme now steered his motorized Storm Arrow wheelchair, red as a Corvette, off the ramp of the van in which he, his aide and Amelia Sachs had just driven five hundred miles—from Manhattan. His perfect lips around the controller straw, he turned the chair expertly and accelerated up the sidewalk toward the front door of the Neurologic Research Institute at the Medical Center of the University of North Carolina in Avery.

Thom retracted the ramp of the glossy black Chrysler Grand Rollx, a wheelchair-accessible van.

“Put it in a handicapped space,” Rhyme called. He gave a chuckle.

Amelia Sachs lifted an eyebrow to Thom, who said, “Good mood. Take advantage. It won’t last.”

“I heard that,” Rhyme shouted.