Skin : the X-files Read Free

strangely stiff beneath his 10

    Skin
    fingers, his skin rough, almost leathery. He worked in near silence, the minutes ticking by as he tried to coax the man’s heart back to life. He ignored the sweat running down his back, the ache in his arms and shoulders. His mind raced through everything that had just happened, searching for some reason why things had gone so drastically wrong. Was there anything he had missed? Was there anything else he could have done?
    Did he make the right choice when he went for the defibrillator paddles?
    “Well?” he asked, desperate, already knowing the answer.
    “Still nothing,” Crow responded. “He’s gone, Brad.
    You’re just pumping beef.”
    Alger looked at the EKG screen, then back at Crow.
    He glanced at Gomez, who nodded. He felt his shoulders deflate, his arms going limp. Damn it. It had all happened so fast. He glanced toward the Duke, who was still working on a patient near the front of the room.
    Either he hadn’t heard the Code, or he was handling an emergency of his own.
    Alger swallowed, telling himself that he had done everything by the book. The Duke wouldn’t have handled the situation any differently. The guy had gone into arrest less than two minutes after he had been wheeled into the ER. The paddles could have saved him—and they certainly didn’t kill him. Still, Alger felt awful. A man had just died in front of him. He lifted his hands off the man’s bare chest and took a step back from the stretcher.
    11

    THE X-FILES
    Why the hell had he chosen emergency? He glanced up at the clock over the double doors. “Time of death—three-fifteen.”
    He peeled off his gloves as Gomez rolled the stretcher toward the elevator at the back of the room. The elevator was a straight shot downstairs to pathology, then on-ward to the hospital morgue. There would probably be an autopsy, because of the mysterious circumstances behind the man’s death, and maybe the pathologist would be able to tell him what had really happened. But it wouldn’t make any difference to the man on the stretcher.
    Alger’s face went slack as he watched Gomez push the corpse away. His eyelids suddenly seemed as if they were filled with lead. He felt Dennis Crow’s hand on his shoulder. “We did everything we could. People die, and despite what the Duke might think—sometimes it’s not our fault.”
    Alger looked at him, then toward the double doors at the front of the room. He sighed as he watched another stretcher skid into the ER.
    Twelve hours later, Mike Lifton fought back nausea as Josh Kemper yanked open the heavy steel drawer. The thick scent of dead flesh mixed with the antiseptic chill of the refrigerated storage room, and Mike grimaced, wishing he had never agreed to accompany his classmate on the harvest.
    “You get used to it,” Josh said, as he pulled the 12

    Skin
    cadaver drawer forward with both hands. Josh was tall, gangly, with oversize ears sticking out from beneath long, stringy brown hair. “It helps to remind yourself how much money you’re making. Twenty bucks an hour beats the hell out of pouring coffee at Starbucks.”
    Mike tried to laugh, but the sound caught somewhere in his throat. He nervously pulled at the sleeves of his green scrubs, rubbing the soft material between his gloved fingers. He could feel the sweat cooling against his back, and he shivered, staring down over Josh’s right shoulder.
    The body in the drawer was wrapped in opaque plastic with a zipper up the front. Mike took a tiny step back as Josh drew the zipper downward. “Here we go. One stiff, medium rare.”
    Mike blinked hard, his mouth going dry. Then he ran a gloved hand through his short, auburn hair. He had worked with cadavers before; as a first-year medical student, he had poked and prodded enough dead bodies to fill a zombie movie. But he had never seen a body so fresh .
    The man inside the plastic bag was unnaturally pale, almost a blue-gray color, with fuzzy blond hair covering