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Finishing with the eyedrops, Gina checked her watch "Sixty-eight e to tell her to shut up, as though ti it out, minute by minute

Blood purees" Helga spoke so sternly that she ardly pace of his reheating

Flat lines on the EKG

Flat lines on the EEG

"Coed "Come on, coh one of its upper doors but through the waterless lagoon In that shallow depression, three gondolas still lay on the cracked concrete They were ten-passenger o been tipped off the heavy chain-drive track along which they’d once carried their happy passengers Even at night, wearing sunglasses, he could see they did not have the swan-neck prows of real gondolas in Venice, but sported leering gargoyles as figureheads, hand-carved froarishly painted, perhaps fearso The lagoon doors, which in better days had swung sondola, were no longer motorized One of them was frozen open;

the other was closed, but it was hanging froh the open door into a passageway that was far blacker than the night behind hilasses He didn’t need theht Where an ordinary man would have been blind, he could see

The concrete sluiceway, along which the gondolas had once ht feet wide A much narrower channel in the sluiceway floor contained the rusted chain-drive h hooks that had pulled the boats forward by engaging the steel loops on the bottoms of their hulls When the ride had been in operation, those hooks had been concealed by water, contributing to the illusion that the gondolas were actually adrift Noindling into the dreary realm ahead, they looked like a row of stubby spines on the back of an i, he thought, is always fraught with deception Beneath the placid surface, ugly rind away at secret tasks

He walked deeper into the building The gradual doard slope of the sluiceas at first barely perceptible, but he are of it because he had passed that way many times before

Above him, to either side of the channel, were concrete service walks, about four feet wide Beyond them were the tunnel walls, which had been painted black to serve as a non-reflective backdrop for the moments of half-baked theater performed in front of them

The idened occasionally to form niches, in some places even whole rooms When the ride had been in operation, the niches had been filled with tableaus houls andover the prostrate bodies of their beheaded victims In one of the rooraveyard filled with stalking zo saucer had disgorged blood-thirsty aliens with a shark’s profusion of teeth in their huge heads The robotic figures had rimaced, reared up, and threatened all passersby with tape-recorded voices, eternally repeating the sa words and snarls

No, not eternally They were gone now, carted away by the official salvagers, by agents of the creditors, or by scavengers

Nothing was eternal

Except death

A hundred feet beyond the entrance doors, he reached the end of the first section of the chain-drive The tunnel floor, which had been sloping imperceptibly, now tilted down sharply, at about a thirty-five-degree angle, falling away into flawless blackness Here, the gondolas had slipped free of the blunt hooks in the channel floor and, with a sto lurch, sailed down a hundred-and-fifty-foot incline, knifing into the pool beloith a colossal splash that drenched the passengers up front, et a seat in the back

Because he was not like ordinary men and possessed certain special powers, he could see part of the way down the incline, even in that utterly lightless environh his perception did not extend to the very bottoht vision was limited: within a radius of ten or fifteen feet, he could see as clearly as if he stood in daylight; thereafter, objects grew blurry, steadily less distinct, shadowy, until darkness sed everything at a distance of perhaps forty or fifty feet

Leaning backward to retain his balance on the steep slope, he headed down into the bowels of the abandoned funhouse He was not afraid of what hten hie than anything hich this world could threaten him

Before he descended half the distance to the lower chamber, he detected the odor of death It rose to him on currents of cool dry air The stench excited hiardless of how exquisite, even if applied to the tender throat of a lovely woular, sweet fragrance of corrupted flesh

5

Under the halogen lamps, the stainless-steel and white-ena roourations of an arctic landscape polished by the glare of a winter sun The roo into the deadthe air teital thermometer that was patched to Harrison "Body terees"

"Seventy-twonow," Ken said "Medical history, the Guinness Book of World Records, TV appearances, books, movies, T-shirts with our faces on ’ees"

"Soht back after ninety minutes," Kari res Besides, they were so screwed up, they chased bones and buried cars"

Gina and Kari laughed softly, and the joke seemed to break the tension for everyone except Jonas He could never relax for a h he knew that it was possible for a physician to get so tightly wound that he was no longer perfor at his peak Ken’s ability to vent a little nervous energy was admirable, and in the service of the patient; however, Jonas was incapable of doing likewise in the rees, seventy-three"

It was a battle Death was the adversary: clever, hty, and relentless To Jonas, death was not just a pathological state, not s, but actually an entity that walked the world, perhaps not always the robed figure of myth with its skeletal face hidden in the shadows of a cowl, but a very real presence nonetheless, Death with a capital D

"Seventy-four degrees," Helga said

Gina said, "Seventy-three ers into the blood that surged through the IV line