Odd Thomas

but in a dioramic snow scene sealed in Lucite.
        My watch revealed that time had not stood still - 11:57.
        Two desiccated brown phoenix palms cast frond shadows across the dusty ground in front of the Quonset hut, as if paving the way not for me but for an overdue messiah. I had not returned to raise the dead, only to examine him.
        When I stepped inside, I felt as if I had cast my lot with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the furnace of Nebuchadnezzar, though this was a heat, laced with an unspeakable scent, from which even an angel could not spare me.
        Alkaline-white desert light seared through the portal-style windows, but they were so small and set so wide apart that I still needed the flashlight.
        I followed the littered hallway to the fourth door. I went into the pink room, once a den of profitable fornication, now a slow-cook crematorium.
        

CHAPTER 55
        
        NO CURIOUS PEOPLE OR CARRION EATERS HAD been here in my absence. The corpse lay where I had left it, one end of the shroud open, one shod foot exposed, otherwise wrapped in the white bed-sheet.
        The hot night and the blistering morning had facilitated and accelerated decomposition. The stench was much worse here than in the rest of the hut.
        The suffocating heat and the stink had the power of two quick punches to the gut. I backed quickly out of the room, into the hall, simultaneously gasping for a cleaner breath and struggling to repress the urge to vomit.
        Although I hadn't brought the foil-sealed towelettes for this purpose, I ripped open one of them and tore two strips from it. The moistened paper had a lemony fragrance. I rolled the saturated strips into dripping wads and plugged my nostrils with them.
        Breathing through my mouth, I couldn't smell the decomposing corpse. When I reentered the room, I gagged again, anyway.
        I could have cut the shoelace that secured the top of the shroud - the one at the foot had broken the previous night - and rolled the body out of its wrapping. The thought of the dead man tumbling across the floor, as if animated again, convinced me to approach the problem with a different solution.
        Reluctantly, I knelt at the head of the corpse. I propped the flashlight against it in such a way as to best illuminate my work.
        I snipped the shoelace and tossed it aside. The scissors were sharp enough to trim through all three layers of rolled sheeting at once. I cut with patience and care, repulsed by the possibility of gouging the dead man.
        As the fabric fell away to both sides of the body, the face came into view first. I realized too late that if I had started from the bottom, I would have had to open the shroud only as far as the neck, to see his wound, and could have avoided this hideous sight.
        Time and the ungodly heat had done their nasty work. The face - upside down to me - was bloated, darker than it had been when last I had seen it, and marbled with green. The mouth had sagged open. Thin cataracts of milky fluid had formed over both eyes, although I could still discern the delineation between the whites and irises.
        As I reached across the dead man's face to cut the shroud away from his chest, he licked my wrist.
        I cried out in shock and disgust, reared back, and dropped the scissors.
        From the cadaver's sagging mouth exploded a squirming black mass, a creature so strange in this context that I didn't realize what it must be until it fully extracted itself. On Robertson's dead face, the thing reared up on its four back legs and raked the air with its forelegs. Tarantula.
        Moving too quickly to give it a chance to bite, I backhanded the spider. It tumbled across the floor, sprang to its feet, and scurried into a far corner.
        When I picked up the fallen scissors, my hand shook so badly that I gave the air a vigorous trimming before I was able to steady myself.
        Concerned that more critters might have crawled into the bottom of the shroud to explore the fragrant contents, I resumed my work on the sheet with nervous care. I exposed the body to the waist without encountering another eight-legged forager.
        In my startled reaction to the tarantula, I had blown the plug out of my right nostril. When the residue of lemony fluid evaporated, I could smell the body again, though not at full strength because I continued to breathe through my