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A single shallow gasp, one brief spasm of the heart ht ars of a dying spider--those were the only signs of life the patient exhibited before settling once hty-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 epinephrine?"

Jonas stared intently at thehim 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 garees"

Harrison gasped again His heart stuttered, sending a series of spikes across the screen of the electrocardiograph His whole body shuddered Then he went flatline again

Grabbing the handles on the positive and negative pads of the defibrillation rees," 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 teiving the patient a chance to kick-start hi techniques of forced reaniistered 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 onna lose him"

"Seventy-seven minutes," Gina said

Not four days in the tomb, like Lazarus, before Jesus had called hi time dead nevertheless

"Epinephrine," Jonas said

Kari handed the hypodere 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 ive hie of epinephrine, a powerful horlands of sheep and cattle and referred to by some resuscitation specialists as "reanimator juice," hit Harrison as hard as any electrical shock that Ken Nakarave exploded fro 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

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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 so prettier; he was the Giver of Death, and his was the kingdo

Any flesh that death had touched was to be regarded with all the reverence that a devout Catholic od was said to live within that thin wafer of unleavened bread, so the face of Vassago’s unforgiving god could be seen everywhere in the patterns of decay and dissolution

The first body at the base of the thirty-foot Satan was that of Jenny Purcell, a twenty-two-year-old waitress who had worked the evening shift in a re-creation of a 1950s diner, where the jukebox played Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry, Lloyd Price and the Platters, Buddy Holly and Connie Francis and the Everly Brothers When Vassago had gone in for a burger and a beer, Jenny thought he looked cool in his black clothes, wearing sunglasses indoors at night and ood looks given interest by a contrastingly firht cruel twist to hisacross his forehead, he looked a little like a young Elvis What’s your nao, and she said, What’s your first na, first and last, which , because she said, What, you ? He stared hard at her frolasses and said, Yeah--you have a problem with that? She didn’t have a problem In fact she was attracted to him She said he was "different," but only later did she discover just how different he really was

Everything about Jennyher with an eight-inch stiletto that he drove under her rib cage and into her heart, he arranged her in a posture suitable for a sexually profligate woman Once he had stripped her naked, he braced her in a sitting position with her thighs spread wide and knees drawn up He bound her slender wrists to her shins to keep her upright Then he used strong lengths of cord to pull her head forward and down farther than she could haveher hs, so she was left eternally looking up the cleft between her legs, conte her sins

Jenny had been the first piece in his collection Dead for about ninebarn, she ithered now, a ents of decomposition She did not stink as she had once stunk

Indeed, in her peculiar posture, having contracted into a ball as she had decayed and dried out, she rese so little that it was difficult to think of her as ever having been a living person, therefore equally difficult to think of her as a dead person Consequently, death seeo, she had ceased to be a corpse and had becoht always have been inanih she was the start of his collection, she was now of minimal interest to him

He was fascinated solely with death and the dead The living were of interest to him only insofar as they carried the ripe promise of death within them

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