Читать книгу Solomon Creed: The only thriller you need to read this year - Simon Toyne, Simon Toyne - Страница 31

Solomon looked down at the burned man on the stretcher.

The medics were still trauma focused: elevating the blackened horror of his legs, taking his temperature with a non-contact digital thermometer, covering him with sterile sheets to prevent heat-loss and hypothermia, talking to him the whole time, telling him he was doing OK, telling him to hang in there, that they were going to airlift him to some specialist unit in Maricopa. They were too preoccupied to notice Solomon standing there, a stranger in their midst. But the burned man saw him. He stared directly up through milky eyes that might once have been pale blue.

The vitreous liquid in the human eye is protein, Solomon’s mind told him. When you heat it up it goes white like a boiled egg.

He surveyed the wreckage of the man, his blackened body curling into a foetal position, the result of muscle contraction caused by intense heat. The medics were cutting away what was left of his clothes before the cooked flesh beneath swelled too much and turned them into tourniquets.

Solomon held the man’s eyes and smiled. The smell of him was overpowering, an almost sweet, burnt barbecue smell of human flesh, so reminiscent of pork that in some cannibalistic tribes, humans were referred to as long pigs. He reached out and gently took one of the blackened stumps of the man’s hands, his own perfect white skin making the ruined claw seem all the more tragic in contrast.

‘Hey!’ the voice came sharp and angry. ‘Step away right now! Do not touch the patient.’

Solomon gripped the man’s hand more firmly, knowing it would cause him no pain. He could feel the splits in the baked skin and see distal phalanx bones poking out through the charred, dead flesh of his finger ends. Such acute damage would have destroyed all the nerve endings so he would never feel pain or indeed anything in this hand ever again. But he held it anyway in such a way that the burned man could see it, even if he couldn’t feel it.