“What is it?” Abigail whispered, clearly troubled by the sight of a dead body sitting up.
“Listen!” the doctor whispered back.
I couldn’t hear anything at first, but after a second I did, a kind of hissing sound. After another second or two the sound took shape and I could make out a word.
That word was “Kropp.”
“I come in to prep the body for autopsy and that’s what I find.” The doctor’s voice was shaking.
Again, louder this time: “Kropp!”
“Open the bag,” Op Nine said.
“You’re kidding, right?” both the doctor and Merryweather said at the same time.
“Open the bag.”
“Look,” the doctor said. “I’m a civilian, a private contractor . . . I’m not a field operative. I’ve got a wife and family . . .”
“Open the bag.”
“Do as he says,” Dr. Merryweather said.
The doctor bit his lip, then walked over to the bag and slowly drew the
zipper up and over the head inside. He stepped back quickly as the bag fell open, the material gathering around the body’s waist.
The first thing I noticed was how ripped this guy was, a real Schwarzenegger type. The second thing was the gaping hole in the middle of his chest. And third, he had no eyes.
His lips barely moved, but the sound clearly came from his mouth, a hiss forming into the same word again.
“Kropp. ”
“Yes,” Op Nine said loudly. “He is here. Kropp is here.”
“Alfred Kropp,” the dead man hissed. He had been a hairy guy, and the contrast between the pale, dead flesh and the coarse black hair was striking.
Op Nine gave me a little nudge and I blurted out, “Yes, I’m here.”
“We know thee. ”
My knees started to give way, but not for the same reason they did back in my cozy, safe little room. I grabbed on to Op Nine’s forearm and held tight.
“As you now know us.”
I recognized its voice. I had heard it before, like a thousand years before, and it came back to me then: the little bedroom in Horace Tuttle’s house, Mike dragging me through the broken window, Ashley rescuing me on the great white stallion, the Pandora, the race across the desert to find Mike before he could release the infernal hordes . . . everything, up to the moment when I looked into the demon’s eyes—and that particular moment was a pit, a lightless hole with no bottom that I leaped across, bringing me here to this morgue deep in the bowels of OIPEP headquarters, where a demon spoke through a dead man’s lips.
“What do you desire, O Great and Powerful King?” Op Nine asked.
The body’s mouth moved, but no sound came out. Dr.
Merryweather leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Perhaps you should ask him, Alfred.”
“Me?”
He nodded to Op Nine, who repeated the question in my other ear.
My voice quivering, I asked, “What do you desire, O Great and Powerful King?”