Page 82 of White Lights
And sees something …someonefalling through the air.
Limbs flailing. Overcoat flapping in the wind.
Not screaming, but—
As the body gets closer, Dez sees a bloody mouth open in abject horror.
She screams as the body smashes into the snow, face up, inches in front of her.
It lands with so much force that a sickening pink mist rises from it.
Horrified, Dez leans forward and gazes into the grisly crater in the snow. The dead man’s eyes are open, pale and tortured. His hair is matted across his crushed, misshapen face. There’s something … wrong about the way he looks. Not just his shattered limbs and vacant eyes, but his shredded skin, the way it fits him. It’s like itdoesn’tfit him.
Like he’s been dead awhile.
“No.”
Bile rises in Dez’s throat as she stumbles away from the mangled corpse, tripping over her feet, falling on her knees in the snow. She looks up at the sky, where she knows he fell from. He didn’t leap from anywhere. Impossible. There are no towers near enough for him to have jumped off of.
So what happened?
It’s like the man fell fromnothing.
Is he real? Or is this another twisted special effect, designed to fuck with Dez?
Charles Costella. Alice Quinn. Is any of this real?
She tries to stand but tremors rock her body.
Breathe.
Her lungs don’t listen.
Footsteps sound behind her on the tri. She knows this man is past helping, long past saving. And Dez doesn’t want to be caught and questioned by whoever’s on their way. She staggers back from the body with her hands up, as if to say she didn’t do it.
Several men in hazmat suits and gas masks march in a line out of Goliath. The Maintenance Department.
“Looks like another suicide,” one of them says without surprise or remorse.
Dez observes with disgust how the men in black barely seem to notice her, how robotically they have the procedure down.
Body in the body bag. Cordon off the area. Make it look like nothing happened.
But it did happen. Dez saw it.
And it wasn’t a suicide. She just doesn’t know what it was.
“WHAT IS THAT?”DR. LEBEVREshouts in the kitchen the next morning.
Dez looks down at her stainless-steel bowl of half-beaten eggs. What now? She didn’t sleep last night, tormented by the memory of that body falling from the sky.
“Aren’t we making Spanish tortillas?” she asks the chef, tightening her grip on the bowl to keep her hands from shaking.
“This is an abomination.” With his hand, Lebevre skims the surface of Dez’s bowl, then holds one scarred and mottled fingertip, dripping with egg, before Dez’s eyes.
She sees a miniscule white fleck.
“Eggshell,” he says.
