But a Pandora’s box, if you weren’t careful.

She closed the freezer, and as she turned to leave the autopsy chamber, she thought she saw a yellow glow, like a lanternlight, hovering near the main entry to the lab tent. And maybe someone’s silhouette, too — someone on the short side. But she was peering through several layers of thick plastic sheathing, and it was like looking at something at the bottom of a murky pond. She was reminded of the crabs that would scuttle for cover when she fished her hand into the tide pool.

She parted the curtains of the autopsy chamber and stepped out, face mask and goggles still in place, expecting to see Slater, or maybe even the professor, entering the tent. After so many hours of work, she would be glad of the company.

But she was wrong.

More wrong than she had ever been in her life.

She stopped where she was and stood stock-still, but it wasn’t as if she could become invisible. The human silhouette was gone, the tent flaps were open, and a black wolf, with a white blaze on its muzzle, planted its paws on the rubber matting, its back bristling from the wind, its eyes glaring with a strangely human intensity.

Chapter 38

“The lines are still on the screen!” Kozak shouted to Slater from across the graveyard. He was pushing his GPR back and forth like a vacuum cleaner on the snowy ground.

“So it’s not a computer malfunction?”

Kozak shook his head, his head down and earmuffs flapping, as he studied the digital monitor mounted between the handlebars. The professor had been puzzled by the fissile lines that kept showing up on the geothermal ground charts and had insisted on coming back out again to see if they would reappear.

And they had.

Now, Slater wondered, would he have an explanation? Looking out across the windswept cemetery, Slater could barely imagine how, or why, anyone would have willingly chosen to settle in such a bleak and inaccessible spot as St. Peter’s Island, a place where even the simple act of burial would have required a Herculean effort.

“Of course!” Kozak said to himself, loudly enough that Slater could still hear it across the rows of old graves, while smacking his palm against his forehead.

“Of course what?” Slater said, stepping between the stones and markers.

“These are the kinds of lines and deformations you usually see only in minefields.”

“There were no mines here,” Slater said, coming to his side.

“But there were explosions,” Kozak said, pointing at the crazed web of lines that radiated across his computer grid. “You see where they are?”

“It looks like they’re everywhere.”

“Everywhere in the graveyard,” Kozak said, “but not as you come to the end of the rows. Not as you start to enter the woods.”

“Okay,” Slater conceded, “I’ll buy that.”

“The colonists were setting off explosions in the cemetery. They were using dynamite, probably, to break up the tundra and permafrost.”

Of course, Slater thought, echoing Kozak. It made perfect sense. Global warming might have loosened the hold of the soil, but it was the bedrock beneath that had been fractured already. No wonder that coffin had fallen into the sea.

But what would it mean in the epidemiological sense? What would it mean for the cadavers of flu victims? Would it have created an aerated or unstable ground environment, and if so, would that have contributed to the decay of the bodies and the dissipation of any viral threat? The state of the deacon’s body argued otherwise — he was frozen as solid as an ice cube when he’d been dug up — but he could prove to be an anomaly. The only way to know for sure was to exhume at least two or three more.

And to do it before this storm that was blowing in got any worse.

Slater had pretty much decided on which grave to excavate next. It was a dozen yards or so closer in from the cliffs, and if he followed that one up with the plot at the northwesternmost corner of the lot, he’d have a rough triangle that he could then work either in, or out, from, depending on the results he and Lantos were getting in the lab. By now, he figured, she had created a purified blood sample from the deacon, and might even have begun the live-animal trials. He was eager to find out how she was coming along.

“What do you say we pack it in then?” Slater asked.

But Kozak, rapt in the numbers that were scrolling down one side of his computer screen, simply grunted.

“Vassily?”

“You go; I want to study this more,” the professor said. “I will see you in camp.”

Slater knew enough not to disturb a fellow scientist when he was absorbed in his work — he himself had been known to fall asleep at his desk after ten or twelve straight hours of crunching data — so he clapped him on the padded shoulder of his parka and picked his way back through the graves. But he must have taken a slightly different route because suddenly his foot plunged through the snow and into a hole in the ground. The sole of his boot thumped on top of a creaking coffin.

How could he — and Kozak — have missed this on their general survey of the graveyard days ago?

Pulling his boot out, he got down on his knees and brushed the snow cover away. About two feet down, he saw a casket lid splintered as if it had been hit by an axe. Through a gaping hole in the wood, he saw the dark shadows of a corpse.

Jesus Christ. When had this happened? In the pale and failing light of the day, he couldn’t tell if the damage had been done recently, or if this was just an age-old accident that had been overlooked thus far.

Either way, it had to be contained, and immediately.

“What are you doing?” Kozak called out.

“There’s a hole in the ground here,” Slater hollered, “and a compromised burial plot.”

“That’s not possible,” the professor said, indignantly, heading in his direction. “I covered all the ground, and if there had been a hole of any kind—”

“It’s here,” Slater interrupted, “and don’t come any closer. We’ll have to seal this up right away.” He was already reformulating his exhumation schedule; this grave, and its dimly glimpsed occupant, would have to be the next one investigated. Grabbing up several of the pennant flags that marked the grid, he stuck them as firmly as he could in the snowy earth all around the perimeter of the grave. “Don’t come any closer than you already have,” he warned Kozak again, “and don’t let Rudy or Groves get any closer than this, either.”

He stood up, and looked all around for any sign of intrusion, but the fresh snow had covered any tracks that might have been there. None of this made any sense. If the hole had been made recently, who could have done it? Why would they have done it?

And could they possibly still be on the island somewhere?

“Keep an eye out,” he said ominously to the professor. “We might not be alone here.”

Even as the professor looked at him slack-jawed, Slater took off for the colony. He needed to put the word out that the cemetery was now completely off-limits to everyone — though it was Nika he had foremost in his mind. He could not risk her coming out here to perform some native ritual so long as an open grave posed any possible danger.

The matted pathway was slippery with snow and ice, and as he hurried down it he had to regain his balance once or twice by grabbing a light pole and holding on. The daylight was going fast. Running through the gates he heard a scream — unmistakably from Lantos in the lab.

What now?

Barreling up the ramp and into the tent, throwing all caution — and safety protocols — to the wind, he saw a black wolf leaping up at the plastic sheathing of the autopsy chamber. Lantos was inside, brandishing the Stryker saw and screaming for help. The plastic was already shredded in strips, but the wolf had not yet been able to claw its way through.