The Naming of the Beasts

We passed a number of offices, all empty. Most were larger than J-J’s and better furnished: it seemed like she was taking her monastic pretensions to new extremes. One of them, squeezed into a corner between the toilets and the water cooler, bore a terse white-on-black sign that read GILBERT MCCLENNAN, VOLUNTEER LIAISON & FIELD COORDINATOR.

‘Liaison?’ I asked, pointing.

Gil shrugged. ‘Rosie,’ he grunted, grimacing slightly. ‘Organising the meat train.’

‘Delicate choice of words.’

‘What do you want me to call it, Castor? She’s burning them out faster and faster. I don’t even know why we keep her around.’

Because she brings in the money, I thought but didn’t say. Because academics come from far and wide to see the fifteenth-century ghost you’ve caught and pressed between two glass slides. And that brings the headlines, and the headlines grease the baking tin. But that was only half the answer. For J-J, the money was only ever a means to an end.

Gil led the way down to the first floor. There was building work going on here too, but not so much. Massive pieces of equipment were being welded to walls and floors in labs that looked like something out of Victor Frankenstein’s wet dreams. I did the sums in my head. The MOU had only had two floors at the Helen Trabitch, and it was a smaller building. This move must have more than doubled the scale of Jenna-Jane’s operation.

‘Analytics,’ Gil said. ‘Technical and lab support. This is where blood and tissue sampling gets done. X-rays. Computer imaging . . .’ We’d come to a door beyond which an autopsy slab stood in the centre of a small bare room, surrounded by shelves of chemicals and porcelain drainage troughs. The tiled floor gleamed whiter than white, and the heady smell of formaldehyde hung in the air. ‘And autopsies,’ said Gil, ‘as required.’

‘Where is everyone?’ I asked. ‘It’s a weekday morning. Shouldn’t this place be humming?’

‘The official move is next week. There’s only a skeleton staff here right now.’

It was such an easy straight line that I didn’t lower myself to touch it.

‘Everything here,’ Gil said, warming up a little now that he was getting the chance to show off all these shiny toys, ‘is dedicated. These facilities only serve the MOU - we’re hands-off to the rest of the hospital.’

‘Sure,’ I agreed. ‘God forbid you get your CAT scanner all crowded out with sick people when you’ve got a new werewolf to play with.’

Gil shrugged, indifferent to my sarcasm. ‘We’re healing a deeper sickness, Castor,’ he said. ‘But by all means, you just sit up there on the moral high ground and watch the waters rise. Bring a picnic.’

I almost laughed out loud. It was J-J’s rhetoric, barely changed from the arguments I’d had with her before I walked out of here for what I thought was the last time. The end days were coming. Gwillam would call it Armageddon; J-J would call it a disequilibrum event, but they meant the same thing. The dead would fight the living for the top spot in Earth’s wobbly ecosystem, and it would be a fight that would leave the world we knew looking like New Orleans after Katrina. Laws are silent in times of war, Cicero said; J-J thinks they should shut up for the preliminary heats too. She can’t do her job with all that human rights garbage dinning in her ears.

I turned away from the door, my breakfast churning slowly and queasily in my stomach. Gil hadn’t said anything about the leg and arm restraints, or why they should be needed on an autopsy table. I didn’t bother to ask because I already knew the answer.

Part of the problem was that the law was still running to catch up with the way the world had changed. Vast edifices of legislation had been carved out over centuries to protect the rights of the living. Now we had the dead and the undead to worry about too, and the courts were barely scratching the surface of what that meant. If you died and then came back, either in the flesh or as a ghost, who owned your house, your money, your CD collection? Were you still married to the wife or husband you’d had before? Did you have the right to expect them to welcome you with open arms when you didn’t have a pulse any more? Could you give evidence in court? Maybe finger the guy who’d murdered you, or sue the doctor who’d botched your heart op?

The test cases were being brought, and the questions were being asked in the parliaments of the world. In a few years’ time, there might be all sorts of legal restraints on what someone like Jenna-Jane could get away with. For now, a loup-garou enjoyed all the legal protections that a lab rat does, and a zombie had the same civil rights as roadkill.

We descended to the ground floor. ‘This is mostly therapy and interview suites,’ Gil said.

‘Interrogation rooms,’ I translated.

‘If you like.’

I didn’t. But as we walked along the main drag, my death-sense picked up the faint echo of a familiar tune.