The Abnormals

Part I: Yun Ling

Aaron Simmons' breath hung like a cloud in the morgue. If the temperature broke forty, an alarm would go off. It was a good thing the detective hadn't dealt with alarms lately because his eardrums were too old to tolerate loud noises. His last partner claimed the room smelled slightly of formalin, but Aaron never noticed any unpleasant odors. No smell could have lingered considering the wall of square fans blew every stench away. More distracting was the pattern of red and white tiles beneath his feet, like walking on a twenty-five-by twenty-five-foot deck of playing cards. A distraction was not a bad thing, though.

Since Janet split, Aaron had considered getting his chicken jerked by a hooker more than once. He didn't want a new marriage, and his sock made a poor conversationalist. In the steel basement of the hospital, looking at the dead prostitute, Bambi Stalling, he was glad he hadn't chosen the hooker route.

Her skull had been sawed open earlier by the coroner to show the brain. Aaron would normally ask the pathologist, Raymond, where the coroner was; however, the sun had set hours ago, and if one more skull had to be divided, he would have left early, too. The only people in the room were two detectives, a pathologist, and most of a stiff prostitute.

"You know the first question I ask." Aaron lifted his shoulders to loosen his navy overcoat that smelled of corn chips and bitterness.

"It wasn't sexual trauma. Mild cervical bruising, but from what I hear intercourse is part of the job." Raymond pointed to the deceased body's crotch, working his finger down the leg. "Just one bruise to the shin, but I'm guessing that was most likely from running into a motel door. No, she died of brain hemorrhage."

"From a head contusion?" Aaron asked, pulling a Donald Duck coffee tumbler from his coat.

"No bruise to the head. Something else caused vomiting, spasms, and slow bleeding."

"Could she have overdosed?" Aaron asked, familiar with many overdosed dead bodies.

Raymond twisted the cadaver's wrist to show clean arms. "There are no needle punctures, so I doubt she's a junkie. To double check, I found no drugs in the blood."

"What foods were in the stomach?"

"Sesame chicken and white rice."

"Great," Aaron said sarcastically. "That narrows it down to the Golden Hen and six thousand other Chinese restaurants in L.A. Could it be some super STD by chance?"

"No fluids were found. More likely it happened outside the job. But look here." Raymond pointed to the left hemisphere of her brain. "You'll see small dots of greenish-yellow. I believe it's a type of bacteria."

"It's not bacteria," interjected an Asian-American girl who Aaron had already forgotten about. "It's a fungus."

"Like foot fungus on the brain?" asked Aaron.

"Not at all," the teenager said with a two-inch square magnifying glass in hand. "Look carefully at colored spots. Each one appears to be a bulb on a stem."

She waited for a response as though Aaron and Raymond knew what she was talking about. The arrival of his new partner, Yun Ling, had made the last week feel like a whole month. Aaron didn't mind that the teen jumped straight to detective. The middle-aged cop was relatively impressed. Nor did he mind working with a sixteen-year-old. And Aaron felt comfortable next to an abnormal possessing super-human intellect. He just disliked Yun Ling's mannerisms, specifically toward him.

Aaron took a swig of decaf. "Just tell us already."

"The genus is ophiocordyceps. A pathogenizing fungus. The unilateris species, for example, spreads through the ant's body and produces compounds that affect the insect's thought process, causing convulsions and making it climb up a plant, thereafter latching onto the bottom of a leaf vein. The fungus kills the ant and continues to invade soft-tissue, like we've seen here. When the fungus is ready to produce, it grows from the ant's head and releases spores."