The Empty Chair

ears, crawled into his shirt and up his pant legs, as if they knew that stinging on cloth was futile and sought his skin. He raced for the door, ripping his shirt off, and saw with horror masses of the glossy crescents clinging to his huge belly and chest. He gave up trying to brush them off and simply ran mindlessly into the woods.
    “Jesse, Jesse, Jesse!” he cried but realized his voice was a whisper; the stinging on his neck had closed up his throat.
    Run! he told himself. Run for the river.
    And he did. Speeding faster than he’d ever run in his life, crashing through the forest. His legs pumping furiously. Go. . . . Keep going, he ordered himself. Don’t stop. Outrun the little bastards. Think about your wife, think about the twins. Go, go, go. . . . There were fewerwasps now though he could still see thirty or forty of the black dots clinging to his skin, the obscene hindquarters bending forward to sting him again.
    I’ll be at the river in three minutes. I’ll leap into the water. They’ll drown. I’ll be all right. . . . Run! Escape from the pain . . . the pain . . . How can something so small cause so much pain? Oh, it hurts. . . .
    He ran like a racehorse, ran like a deer, speeding through underbrush that was just a hazy blur in his tear-filled eyes.
    He’d—
    But wait, wait. What was wrong? Ed Schaeffer looked down and realized that he wasn’t running at all. He wasn’t even standing up. He was lying on the ground only thirty feet from the blind, his legs not sprinting but thrashing uncontrollably.
    His hand groped for his Handi-talkie and even though his thumb was swollen double from the venom he managed to push the transmit button. But then the convulsions that began in his legs moved into his torso and neck and arms and he dropped the radio. For a moment he heard Jesse Corn’s voice in the speaker, and when that stopped he heard the pulsing drone of the wasps, which became a tiny thread of sound and finally silence.

. . . chapter two
    Only God could cure him. And God wasn’t so inclined.
    Not that it mattered, for Lincoln Rhyme was a man of science rather than theology and so he’d traveled not to Lourdes or Turin or to some Baptist tent outfitted with a manic faith healer but here, to this hospital in North Carolina, in hopes of becoming if not a whole man at least less of a partial one.
    Rhyme now steered his motorized Storm Arrow wheelchair, red as a Corvette, off the ramp of the van in which he, his aide and Amelia Sachs had just driven five hundred miles—from Manhattan. His perfect lips around the controller straw, he turned the chair expertly and accelerated up the sidewalk toward the front door of the Neurologic Research Institute at the Medical Center of the University of North Carolina in Avery.
    Thom retracted the ramp of the glossy black Chrysler Grand Rollx, a wheelchair-accessible van.
    “Put it in a handicapped space,” Rhyme called. He gave a chuckle.
    Amelia Sachs lifted an eyebrow to Thom, who said, “Good mood. Take advantage. It won’t last.”
    “I heard that,” Rhyme shouted.
    The aide drove off and Sachs caught up with Rhyme. She was on her cell phone, on hold with a local car rental company. Thom would be spending much of the next week in Rhyme’s hospital room and Sachs wanted the freedom to keep her own hours, maybe do some exploring in the region. Besides, she was a sports-car person, not a van person, and on principle shunned vehicles whose top speed was two digits.
    Sachs had been on hold for five minutes and finally she hung up in frustration. “I wouldn’t mind waiting but the Muzak is terrible. I’ll try later.” She looked at her watch. “Only ten-thirty. But this heat is too much. I mean, way too much.” Manhattan is not necessarily the most temperate of locales in August but it’s much farther north than the Tar Heel State, and when they’d left the city yesterday, southbound via the Holland Tunnel, the temperature was in the low seventies and the air was dry as salt.
    Rhyme wasn’t paying any attention to the heat. His mind was solely on his mission here. Ahead of them the automated door swung open obediently (this would be, he assumed, the Tiffany’s of handicapped-accessible facilities) and they moved into the cool corridor. While Sachs asked directions Rhyme looked around the main floor. He noticed a half-dozen unoccupied wheelchairs clustered together, dusty. He wondered what had become of the occupants. Maybe