Chapter Three
The metal in the guy’s esophagus told me that I didn’t need to worry about any strict religious rituals I needed to follow, most religions frowned upon the idea of major medical body modification, and I’d never heard of anyone having a copper-coated windpipe before. I turned on my voice recorder and set to work. There was no way that I wasn’t going to document what I was finding. Closer examination of the victim’s skin revealed the finest scars I had ever seen. They were so thin and well healed that I had missed them in my preliminary examination. The lines criss-crossed almost his entire body, spelling out a road map of unimaginable pain. It was like his skin had been methodically sliced through and put back together. Like a quilt, or the most advanced Frankenstein’s monster replica I’d ever seen. I wondered if he’d needed multiple skin grafts, and who his surgeon had been. The work was impeccable and if I wasn’t taking my sweet time with the autopsy, I probably would have overlooked the scarring. The razor thin lines held no clues to what sort of surgeries had happened and I was left scratching my head, metaphorically, of course, as I continued on with the autopsy and examination.
Rasputin was aptly named, he had suffered almost torture before he died. The gunshot and stab wounds to his torso hadn’t killed him, which was, in my medical opinion, pretty much a miracle. The stab wounds were gut wounds that would have damaged internal organs and left him crippled and bleeding out for hours. Same with the gunshot wounds. Obviously he didn’t get to a hospital, but I had the distinct impression that he’d gotten back up again even after the stabbing. He’d been hit over the head, too. I was willing to bet that it had happened before the other wounds, and that when he got back up, they’d shot him. Finally, he’d been shot execution style in the forehead and then his throat was slit.
I decided that I needed to see if I couldn’t figure out the order of the events that led up to his death so I first decided to check his eyes for petechial hemorrhaging. If there was burst blood vessels in the whites of his eyes, I could safely say that the trauma to h is head was first or second, assuming the stab and gunshot wounds in his guts happened relatively early in the altercation that led to his death.
I steadied myself to open his right eye with my fingers. I pulled back his eyelid and was shocked to find out that his right eye was completely mechanical. It was like Jackson’s but it looked way newer, cleaner and more eye-like than the clockwork brass thing that Jacks refused to update.
“Huh, that’s gonna make this a lot harder,” I told the corpse. I walked around the table, refusing to lean across the body out of respect, and I opened his left eye the same way.
“Well I’ll be damned,” I muttered when I found the exact same technology in Rasputin’s left eye.
No blood vessels meant no petechial hemorrhaging.
“Cause of death is all of the above then,” I told the recorder, listing off the wounds I’d discovered on the body. “Or at least a combination thereof,” I corrected. “Both eyes are clockwork, but judging from the bruising I’m seeing, I’m going to guess that he was stabbed and faked unconsciousness, then got up and was shot, then hit in the head and when he still got up for more, was subdued from behind, had this throat slit and was finally executed by a single gunshot wound to the head, dead centre.”
I sighed and shook my head. “Not a pleasant way to go, but I have to admit that it is kind of impressive to see a body take this much damage before succumbing to the injuries.”
I stared at the rest of the cadaver and frowned.
“I guess,” I said to to the recorder, “first, I”m going to pull out the bullets, then I’m going to continue this investigation with a Y incision…”
The bullets in his torso came out no problem. I dropped them into the metal collection container and they made the most delightful plinking noise as they hit the bottom. I grabbed my scalpel and made a clean incision while my overactive imagination started warning me that Rasputin would come back to life and be very upset with me for doing this. Luckily for me, nothing of the sort happened.
I barely made it past the Y incision before I had to stop. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. When you spread the ribcage in an autopsy, you reveal all the organs, the guts and everything that normally makes a person tick. In Rasputin’s case, there was a lot of ticking involved.
The first thing I noticed was that his rib-cage was coated with a silver metal, similar to what I’d found in his esophagus, and his heart wasn’t standard. At least, I was pretty sure that humans didn’t come ready-made with clockwork hearts. The make of Rasputin’s fake heart was unlike anything I’d ever seen, to boot. It was much more advanced than what Wayside and Five Points were selling, and it looked far more sturdy, too. The gears were all silent, and nothing moved. No wonder this guy was able to keep going, this heart looked out of place surrounded by the soft red of Rasputin’s flesh, and it certainly didn’t look like the kind of thing that would just stop working. I noticed a few synthetic veins running away from the heart as well, they led into my cadaver’s limbs and I wasn’t entirely sure that I wanted to keep going. The coating on this guy’s bones freaked me out. I’d seen replacement hearts before, sure, but they weren’t entirely made up of plastic and metal. They were usually implants that co-existed with the tissue heart that we were all born with. This was something out of science fiction that shouldn’t exist, but did.
I grit my teeth, really not liking where this investigation of the cadaver was leading. I stared at Rasputin’s opened corpse, scowling. “You shouldn’t exist,” I told him. “But I want to know what else was making you tick.”