temples, far beneath the desert dunes.
Although he didn’t know what Lucifer actually looked like, and though he
assumed that the Father of Lies would be far more heart-thrilling and
formidable than this funhouse version, Vassago found the plastic and
polyfoam behemoth sufficiently impressive to make it the center of the
secret existence that he led within his hideaway. At the base of it, on
the dry concrete floor of the drained lake, he had arranged his
collection partly for his own pleasure and amusement but also as an
offering to the god of terror and pain.
The naked and decaying bodies of seven women and three men were
displayed to their best advantage, as if they were ten exquisite
sculptures by some perverse Michelangelo in a museum of death.
9
A single shallow gasp, one brief spasm of the heart muscles, and an
involuntary nerve reaction that made his right arm twitch and his
fingers open and close like the curling legs of a dying spider-those
were the only signs of life the patient exhibited before settling once
more into the still and silent posture of the dead.
“Eighty-three degrees,” Helga said.
Ken Nakamura wondered: “Defibrillation?”
Jonas shook his head. “His heart’s not in fibrillation. It’s not
beating at all. Just wait.”
Kari was holding a syringe. “More epineplrrine?”
Jonas stared intently at the monitors. “Wait. We don’t want to bring
him back only to overmedicate him and precipitate a heart attack.”
“Seventy-six minutes,” Gina said, her voice as youthful and breathless
and perkily excited as if she were announcing the score in a game of
beach volleyball.
“Eighty-four degrees.”
Harrison gasped again. His heart stuttered, sending a series of spikes
across the screen of the electrocardiograph. His whole body shuddered.
Then he went flatland again.
Grabbing the handles on the positive and negative pads of the
defibrillation machine, Ken looked expectantly at Jonas.
“Eighty-five degrees,” Helga announced. “He’s in the right thermal
territory, and he wants to come back.”
Jonas felt a bead of sweat trickle with centipede swiftness down his
right temple and along his jaw line. The hardest part was waiting,
giving the patient a chance to kick-start himself before risking more
punishing techniques of forced reanimation.
A third spasm of heart activity registered as a shorter burst of spikes
than the previous one, and it was not accompanied by a pulmonary
response as before. No muscle contractions were visible, either.
Harrison lay slack and cold.
“He’s not able to make the leap,” Kari Dovell said.
Ken agreed. “We’re gonna lose him.”
“Seventy-seven minutes,” Gina said.
Not four days in the tomb, like Lazarus, before Jesus had called him
forth, Jonas thought, but a long time dead nevertheless.
“Epinephrine,” Jonas said.
Kari handed the hypodermic syringe to Jonas, and he quickly administered
the dosage through one of the same IV ports that he had used earlier to
inject free-radical scavengers into the patient’s blood.
Ken lifted the negative and positive pads of the defibrillation machine,
and positioned himself over the patient, ready to give him a jolt if it
came to that.
Then the massive charge of epinephrine, a powerful hormone extracted
from the adrenal glands of sheep and cattle and referred to by some
resuscitation specialists as “reanimator juice,” hit Harrison as hard as
any electrical shock that Ken Nakamura was prepared to give him.
The stale breath of the grave exploded from him, he gasped air as if he
were still drowning in that icy river, he shuddered violently, and his
heart began to beat like that of a rabbit with a fox close on its tail.
Vassago had arranged each piece in his macabre collection with more than
casual contemplation. They were not simply ten corpses dumped
unceremoniously on the concrete. He not only respected death but loved
it with an ardor akin to Beethoven’s passion for music or Rembrandt’s
fervent devotion to art. Death, after all, was the gift that Satan had
brought to the inhabitants of the Garden, a gift disguised as something
prettier; he was the Giver of Death, and his was the kingdom of death
everlasting. Any flesh that death had touched was to be regarded with
all the reverence that a devout Catholic might reserve for the