Chapter 4 : The Dying Doctor
The Greyhound bus wheezed to a stop at Bailey's modest station, its air brakes hissing like a tired sigh. Dr. Carl Winters gathered his medical bag and small suitcase, moving slowly as he descended the steps.
The journey from his home in the valley had taken about three hours, but it felt like much longer. Everything felt longer these days.
At sixty-eight, Carl cut a gaunt figure—tall and thin, with silver hair and deep-set eyes that had seen too much death over the decades. The weight loss from his condition was becoming more pronounced, giving him an almost skeletal appearance that he tried to hide beneath well-tailored clothes. Today, even his best suit hung loose on his thin frame.
Sheriff Nate Craven was waiting for him by the station platform, and Carl was struck by how much his old friend had aged since their last meeting two years ago. Nate's brown hair had gone mostly gray, and new lines of worry creased his face. But his smile was genuine as he approached.
"You're so thin," Nate said by way of greeting. "They could use you for a whip. What's your secret?"
Carl managed a weak smile. "Ah, you know, biology."
They embraced briefly, the kind of awkward male hug that conveyed affection while maintaining emotional distance. Nate took Carl's bags without being asked, leading him toward the patrol car.
"Hell, Carl. It's good to see you."
"You too, Nate. It's been too long."
As they drove through Bailey's quiet streets, Carl found himself studying the familiar landmarks—the old church with its old steeple, the diner where he and Nate had shared countless meals during their years of working together, the small houses where ordinary people lived ordinary lives, blissfully unaware of the horrors that had recently visited their community.
"You must be exhausted," Nate observed, glancing at his passenger.
Carl was exhausted, though not from the journey. The cancer had a way of sapping strength even on good days, and this hadn't been a particularly good day. He'd spent the morning at the oncologist's office, reviewing test results that confirmed what they both already knew—the treatments weren't working.
"Did you eat? I can send someone," Nate offered.
"No, no, no. Coffee is just fine."
They drove in comfortable silence for a while, the radio playing softly in the background. Carl found himself thinking about mortality, a subject that had occupied more and more of his thoughts lately. He'd always known that death was part of his profession, but facing his own death was proving to be a different challenge entirely.
"How's Emma?" he asked, needing the distraction of normal conversation.
"Oh. She's well." Nate's voice carried the warm tone he always used when talking about his wife. "How are the kids?"
"It's an empty nest almost." Nate chuckled. "Thank God! Yeah, and Cindy, she's in love, and... Nate Jr. wants to be a... a lawyer now."
"Oh."
"Sure I can't get you something to eat?"
Carl shook his head. "Why don't you tell me what's going on? What did they say in Montague?"
Nate's expression darkened, the pleasant facade falling away to reveal the strain he'd been under. "Not too much. Ten men dead."
"Nine men," Carl corrected automatically, remembering the details from their brief phone conversation.
"And one inhuman son of a bitch."
The venom in Nate's voice was startling. In all their years of working together, Carl had rarely heard such raw hatred from his friend. Whatever had happened at that mine had shaken Nate to his core.
"What would you call a man who..." Nate began, then stopped himself, shaking his head.
"As bad as that?"
"What's Waddleton gonna do?"
Carl knew Coroner Waddleton by reputation—a political appointee more interested in insurance settlements than justice. The man had never performed an autopsy in his life, preferring to rubber-stamp convenient conclusions that kept the county's liability to a minimum.
"It is the position of the coroner's office," Carl said with disgust, "workman's compensation law being clear, that death benefits shall only accrue to dependents of those whose deaths arise out of the course of their employment. Not merely in the course of their employment. Death by lunatic does not count."
"He just about ordered me to find cause for a second autopsy in the city."
"Oh, that's Fordham Mutual talking."
"Certainly it is, and they've bought every election he's ever stood. If they had their way, the families wouldn't see a dime to bury their men with. It's unconscionable."
Carl had seen this pattern before—insurance companies using their influence to avoid paying legitimate claims, leaving grieving families without the resources to even bury their dead properly. It was one of the uglier aspects of his profession, the way money could corrupt even the most fundamental human decencies.
"What am I gonna find, Nate? Was there a bomb?"
Nate was quiet for a long moment, staring out at the mountain road ahead. "The investigators concluded that there was strong, presumptive evidence of a bomb. That's the best they could do."
"And what do you think?"
"I think I'm cursed."
The word hung in the air between them like a physical presence. Carl studied his friend's profile, noting the deep lines of exhaustion and something else—a kind of spiritual weariness that went beyond mere fatigue.
"Cursed?"
"Well, for laxity and uselessness. The innocent get punished and everything is just dust. I... I think I'm cursed by the Lord. I truly do."
Carl had known Nate for forty years. He had seen him face down armed criminals and deliver death notifications to grieving families, he had watched him maintain his composure in situations that would break lesser men. To hear him talking about divine punishment was deeply troubling.
"Nate, I've known you 40 years. From the bottom of my heart, you're not that special."
Nate glanced at him in surprise.
"That's ego," Carl continued. "Who are you to claim special qualities of sin from the rest of us? If you're cursed, we're all cursed. And I meant that in the nicest possible way."
Despite everything, Nate chuckled. It was a small sound, but genuine. "You're right. I'm going crazy."
"Tell me what happened."
The story that Nate told over the next hour was like something out of a nightmare. The disappearances, the butchered corpse in the woods, the strange man calling himself Joe Allen who moved with inhuman speed and spoke hypnotically. The grotesque sphere in his boarding house room, emitting an sickly green light.
"And then the explosion," Nate concluded as they pulled up to the makeshift morgue facility. "Good men dead because of whatever that thing was."
Carl studied the building—a converted warehouse that had been hastily equipped with the basic necessities for conducting autopsies. It wasn't ideal, but it would have to do. Through the windows, he could see the improvised examination tables and work lights that Nate's deputies had set up.
"Carl, this is one of those nightmare specials," Nate said quietly. "The kind you never get to the bottom of."
As they sat in the patrol car, looking at the building that housed ten corpses and countless questions, Carl felt the weight of what lay ahead. He thought about the diagnosis sitting in his medical files back home, the prognosis that gave him six months if he was lucky. He thought about Emma Craven making dinner for her family, about Nate Jr. wanting to be a lawyer, about all the ordinary people living ordinary lives while something unspeakably evil had walked among them.
"Are you sure you're up to this?" Nate asked, studying Carl's tired features with obvious concern.
"You take off the badge and lie down," Carl replied. "I'll be lucky to get through more than just a few of them tonight. I'll press you into service in the morning."
They got out of the car and approached the building together, two old friends facing the unknown. Carl had performed thousands of autopsies over his career, had seen every conceivable form of human death, but something about this case felt different.
As Nate unlocked the door and led him inside, Carl couldn't shake the feeling that he was walking into something far more dangerous than either of them realized.