“Looks like you’ll have to carry the load until we get back,” he said, by way of finishing.
Hush-hush.
John Doe had been found on the road to Fort Benteen. Nothing connected him to whatever was going on there.
“Except hush-hush,” she said to the empty room.
Ordinarily, she could do an autopsy on autopilot: X procedure was followed by Y procedure, and then Z procedure. But this…If she really wanted to do something—for herself—she couldn’t do that. Once she made the Y incision, she would have to turn the mike back on and dictate each step she performed. Only an external examination could be done for her own personal curiosity. Then, and only then, she would turn back to doing The Man’s work.
“External it is,” she said. “What are your secrets, handsome?”
She touched USIF Vandenlugen and was thrilled to see it rise from the ocean, the salt water boiling up into huge clouds beneath its rocket nozzles, and then the ship just hovering over the blue-green surface. The loop lasted about twelve seconds. She watched it repeat five times.
The third tattoo was on the back of his right wrist.
She studied it before touching it. Her anticipation became unease.
It was outwardly bland, an abstract drawing. Circles inside circles inside circles, in shades of gray, black and green with the outermost circle being perhaps an inch in diameter. It didn’t seem to depict anything, and when she touched it, it didn’t do anything: no animation.
She considered that it might not be a design he had chosen…but rather one he had been required to get.
She thought about UPC bar codes, or those square QR codes that smart phones could read.
A shiver caught her unawares.
Don’t brood. Don’t dread. Don’t fear.
She walked quickly around the table. Best to put those thoughts behind her.
The clenched hand. Investigate that.
She slipped back into gloves.
Good idea to see if this is some kind of chronic condition, she thought. If I can identify it, I can know what is still persistent and incurable, where he comes from.
She palpated each finger. They were merely room temperature, not ice-cold like the rest of him (at least when felt through the gloves). The flesh was softer here, but firmer underneath, with thick bones.
A birth defect? Less muscle tissue and far more bone might explain the discrepancies in temperature. But birth defects that led to thick bone mass usually caused other manifestations, such as knobby oversized knuckles, even fused bones. The hand looked unremarkable, no matter how it felt.
She took a pair of forceps and tried to articulate the index finger.
The hand grabbed the forceps.
“Aah!”
ILLUSTRATION BY DANIEL RENEAU
It stopped moving. And, more importantly, her training kicked in.
ER rotation. Molly Boyle, medical student.
Man, mid-60s, thin, is brought in. Disfiguring tumor on left side of head, very inflamed, rank odor. Molly Boyle, shadowing Dr. Pinsker, trying to stay out of his way.
The patient watches them from flat on the gurney, with no apparent sense of urgency. He peers with his right eye; the left is squeezed shut by the mass.
“Conscious but not communicating,” Pinsker says. “Not the same as unresponsive. Got that, Doyle?” (He’d misheard “Boyle” on the first day and she has been too shy to correct him.)
Molly nods briefly.
In a soothing voice, Dr. Pinsker tells the patient: “Sir, I am going to examine your face. I am going to touch it. Okay?”
John Doe nods.
Molly tilts her head to observe.
Pinsker puts both thumbs and forefingers on the surface of the growth and applies gentle pressure.
The tumor splits open, as if ripping a seam.
Maggots, five or six of them, slither out and down in a trickle of pus. They are accompanied by an even more sour stench, as if that could make things any worse.
Molly turns away. Her gorge rises up. She sets her teeth and tongue to keep it down. But her stomach is reacting to instinct. The room spins.
She never loses consciousness, yet she will never remember between that time and—all the clocks said it—one and a half hours later when Dr. Pinsker sits down with her in a couple of plastic chairs in a deserted visitors’ lounge.
“You can’t do that,” he says, and doesn’t need to bother describing ‘that’ in detail.
“I’ve seen maggots and putrescence before—” she says.
“All the worse, then, how your reaction reflected on you.”
“Never on a live human being before. It caught me by surprise.”
“Any external necrotic tissue can host larvae. There are prescription topical ointments specifically for it. You picked an ill-fitting trade if you can’t take surprises.” He does not raise his voice as he speaks; he merely stares at her unblinking, unforgivingly.
He waits for her to say something. When she does not, he says: “The patient is on palliative care now, in case you didn’t hear the instructions I gave the nurse. He’ll die in this facility soon. But suppose he had been on the brink of death at that moment? The last thing he would have seen would have been a young woman turning away in repulsion.”
“I don’t need a…” damn “…guilt trip, Dr. Pinsker. I tried to hold it together, but I messed up.”
“Which brings me to my next point,” he says, still calm as ever. “If you foul up, fess up. Don’t make excuses for yourself.”
She feels ice in her veins.
“I won’t,” she says. “I performed poorly and I’m sorry. I’ll be on the lookout to meet the next challenge that comes my way.”
He rations out a faint smile. “That’s better. Right now, those may be words you realized you had to say to get me off your back. But if you’ve got what it takes to get through the program, you’ll learn to make those words a reality. To meet the next challenge. To deal with that which cannot be prepared for, whatever it is. Can you?”
“Yes. Yes. I can do it.”
Molly cut off her own cry with a quick self-scolding and grabbed the tool.
The hand clenched and unclenched again. John Doe stayed dead in all other respects.
She felt for his pulse at the neck, just as a best practice; as she expected, there was none.
She knew the feel of sloughing tissue from a one-day-old corpse; she’d felt it over the rest of his body. She knew he wasn’t somehow alive. In rare cases a hypothermia victim with a faint pulse was mistakenly pronounced dead at the scene. But here, decay had most definitely set in, across the rest of him. There was a special sunkenness—she knew no other word to describe it—to a dead body: the still chest, the face slack and doughy; once you’d seen the real thing, you could only laugh at the TV crime show extras holding their breath and playing dead.
Dead, dead, dead. John Doe was dead. His left hand was alive, from the fingertips down to a couple of inches past the wrist. Molly Boyle accepted it for the moment, as she should have accepted maggots pouring from the face of a living man.
She picked up the biggest forceps from the table. She stood a couple of feet away to give clearance in case the thing—the hand—had more range than she would guess.
It had flopped down onto John Doe’s belly, palm up. She slowly squeezed the palm with the forceps.
The hand was not aggressive. It didn’t lunge toward her with anything that could be interpreted as malevolent will. It opened, closed, opened, closed, “played scales” (it looked like) with rippling fingers—
r />
—and Dr. Molly Boyle tried, with scientific detachment, to discern where the dead John Doe ended and the live hand began, which was hard, because the hand’s movements were causing incidental jiggling of the body—
—and she had a brief, humorous image of the Irish great-grandmother she had been named after using tongs to put a struggling lobster into a cooking pot, which was entirely fanciful as she knew little of the woman besides her name, and hadn’t the Irish in County Cork subsisted on potatoes anyway?—
—and it popped off.
“I knew it.”
She pulled it clear of John Doe’s (real) arm, which ended in mid-forearm with a metallic cap that housed a “female” plug interface.
The hand wiggled and clenched itself again, then stayed still. Tucked inside of a skirt of perfectly realistic “skin,” which furled out at the wrist, was a “male” plug interface, framed by some kind of latticework.
It was a prosthetic hand, of course.
She turned away from John Doe and lay his robotic hand down on the steel side table.
“Let’s see what you are,” she told the hand, almost singing the words. She was careful to point the thumb and fingers away from herself, in case they spasmed again.
Autopsy rooms have good lighting. She could see all of the details of the hand—tiny veins, hair, freckles, wrinkled knuckles, unmanicured nails. Only by looking at the underside of the skirt of skin, which did not pretend to be anything but smooth plastic, could she be assured it was entirely synthetic.
“Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” she muttered. “Buffalo Bill, Silence of the Lambs.” No, no one had been skinned.
The interface inside the wrist reminded her of the plug end of a flash drive. The framing latticework, which protected it and gave some “body” to the wrist, was a series of thin bars and springs. It probably locked the interface into place. Somehow, she had unlocked it when she squeezed it.
She peered into the works and noticed tiny words engraved on a curved piece of the latticework:
Mfg. by Robodyne LLC for US Veterans Administration.
Device #: 235DRJ0003-324EEDCBBV003123
So bland, so matter-of-fact.
She tried to put her own theory into words, but it was really just a series of images in her head:
Fort Benteen had been known to house top-secret experiments since World War I. Imagine the base in …some other era. Where ships from science fiction are real. An experiment of some kind is staged there. Something goes wrong.
Molly visualized a flash of light.
Fort Benteen, present day: the rubble (fallout?) of that disaster from a further era shows up—drops out of the sky?—erupts from underneath the earth?—everything at once?
Molly imagined incredibly advanced equipment everywhere, things like this prosthetic arm, but in the form of strangely-shaped cars, tanks, planes (or pieces of the same) just appearing, poof poof poof….
And bodies.
Men and women in uniforms.
Nude?
She imagined him taking a shower on the base. Unknown to this low-ranking young man, a button is pushed, an experiment starts at a secure building not far away. There is that flash of light; he is propelled through a rip in the four dimensions we live in; death takes him from sheer trauma to his hydrostatic field. He falls, far away from the debris pattern in Fort Benteen. So far away, in fact, that he is recovered by the county sheriff’s office, not linked to the expanding disaster at the base, and winds up—
“On my table.”
She caressed the hand, this evidence of a world more advanced than the one she was trapped in. She pulled back the sleeve to expose the apparatus more. She slid in a pair of forceps and tugged at the depths, trying to find the motor mechanism.
With a metal-on-metal ting, the latticework disintegrated into about 50 parts, showering down onto the table and the floor. The largest piece was a metal bar, as thick as her index finger. The smallest parts (numerous) were nail-like pins that clattered on the floor like broken glass.
“Damn!”
She dropped the hand onto the floor and looked around her.
Again: “Damn!”
Her cell phone rang.
She looked at the screen. Her boss, Dr. Nicolson.
“Leon?”
“’Lo, Mole.” A Facebook friend-of-a-friend had let out her college nickname, and it had belatedly followed her to her professional life.
She cringed more than usual upon hearing the non-endearment: excitement and all.
“You have a John Doe received from the sheriff’s office?”
“I.” She could not lie—
—No! He is mine. I want this special magic day to last and last! No!
“Yes. I’m starting the autopsy right now.” Were those sirens in the distance?
“White male?” Nicolson said. “Tattoo on left bicep with inscription? USIF?”
Damn sheriff’s office! The sheriff’s department had turned over the body to her office, but had first taken pictures of it where it lay and had put that tattoo’s text into some sort of report. That was how they (they being whoever was “handling” the crisis) had connected John Doe to Fort Benteen. There must be tons of strange machines labeled USIF littering that site right now.
She gave the decedent a proprietary glance.
“Yes,” she had to say. “I have not yet made an incision.”
“Good!”
Those were sirens.
“Do not touch the body. Stay inside the facility. We’re declaring a quarantine.” He paused for a moment.
The sirens weren’t just over the phone. She heard them faintly from outside as well.
When he came back on the line, he said, “We fear that there has been a terrorist incident involving smallpox. The body may be contaminated!”
She came within an ace of shouting “Bull!” into the receiver.
“That’s what’s going on at Fort Benteen. It’s very serious.” He tried to sound earnest. Leon Nicolson was a nice, soft-spoken boss, but she knew he was acting as someone’s puppet right now. “I’m on my way with a DHS biohazard response team.”
She needed time to herself. Just a moment. But she had to have it. So she cut the conversation short. “Okay. I sure hope I don’t contract it. I’ll wait for you. Bye.”
“Uh, bye,” said Nicolson, sounding surprised, as she broke the connection. It was as if he thought he was going to have to talk a blue streak to convince her.
“Smallpox!” she spat. Was that the best they could come up with? Yeah, probably, on such short notice.
She paced back to John Doe, stripped off her gloves again, and touched the spaceship tattoo, and the girlfriend tattoo, and made them move. She soaked in those images so they could last a lifetime.
Sirens were louder now. Coming down Dick Webster Drive, sounded like.
“Oh, John, are you even born yet?” She stroked his yellow hair. As an incredibly lapsed Catholic, she didn’t really believe he could hear her, or was looking down on her from somewhere. (And time travel made rather a hash of the standard ideas of ghosts; could you go back in time, die there, and become a ghost, or go to heaven, before you were born?) But that was the whole point. She had, at some milepost in the past ten years, resigned herself to sleepwalking through life. Refusing to be hurt. Refusing to be sad. Fighting the urge to brood. She had done her best to surgically remove her self. Like a zombie.
Now, she felt herself to be a lightning bolt connected to the future. The government might be able to do scary things to you in that time (she hoped
only the military had to get the circle tattoo). And there would be wars of some kind that required young people to get prosthetic limbs. But the future, with its spaceships that could climb out from under the sea, and its animated tattoos, and its survival of love (she wondered what the woman’s name was, and if they still used the term “fiancée” 25 or 250 years from now) . . .
Sirens. Omnipresent.
“I’ll think about you every day!” She had to speak frantically. It was all ending. Soon, they would whisk him away. “I wish I had met you in life. I hope your death was painless, John. You’ve given me a new lease on life, a new hope that will last forever.” Several sirens had stopped in front of the complex. Of course they had.
She looked at the hand lying as rubble, at the delicate works inside which had sprung apart.
There! Among all of that junk was the one metal bar. She lunged for it.
She desperately turned it over in her hands. Apparently just plain metal. Apparently solid. No labeling of any kind.
These men who were about to come in had no knowledge of how the hand was designed.
She tugged the rubber band out of her hair and tossed it into a bucket.
She could hear shouting upstairs; the skeleton crew of janitors, security guards and receptionists was being rounded up.
She took the metal bar (really a thick metal pin), and began rolling her hair up into it. Her phone rang again; she didn’t need to glance at it to know she wasn’t answering.
The loud ting of the elevator announced that it was opening; it was just outside the double doors.
Her fingers flew in their final bit of work, knotting pinches of hair into a bun around the —
—proof—
—Geisha-style.
The doors did not fly open exactly; but the men who opened them strode in rapidly. The four of them wore gas masks, but she recognized Dr. Nicolson’s trademark red plaid shirt.
“Dr. Boyle! Thank God you didn’t open the body!”
Oddly, her brain accessed an old bit of trivia: that the commonplace “magic” word abracadabra literally means “open corpse.” She almost giggled as she remembered a song by the Steve Miller Band: Abra, abra, cadabra. I’m gonna reach out and grab ya.