The Light in the Deep

by Alcoac

Rapture Noir. Exiled Inspector Teddy Nuckles wasted not a single good thought when he set eye on the lumbering brute clutching a bag of blood on Opening Day of Rapture. He shot him. In the bag, a beautiful woman's severed head. Chief Sullivan orders him to focus on the Fontaine case, but Tenenbaum's autopsy brings up many a puzzle, including a link to German experiments in Poland.

4. Chapter 4

CHAPTER FOUR

Coming down the ladderwell from the security offices, I stepped into the medical examiner's compartment in the basement of our building. I was met by the bitter stench of rotting corpses and the light sound of someone singing a lullaby in German. Nodding at the security guard manning the front desk, I made my way back into operating theater three. "Guten abend, gute nacht, mit rosen bedacht, mit näglein besteckt, schlupf′ unter die deck," a thin, harsh voice crooned in Reich-speak.

"Don't you ever get tired of that song, Doc?" I said, coming into the spaces.

Dr. Brigid Tenenbaum was elbow-deep in the brute's chest cavity cutting out organs and didn't even glance back at me as she replied, "Not for me I sing, Inspector. Is for my babies help them sleep last final time. "

Tenenbaum had started working for the security force a few earlier as our chief medical examiner. She treated police when we were injured, helped victims of crimes, and conducted autopsies, and by all account had been a great addition to the force. Even still, none of us had gotten used to her otherworldly personality. I guess going through the Second World War in one of Jerry's prison camps will do that.

I brushed it aside. "What's the scene on this ape, Doc?"

"This no ape. I not sure is man, matter of the fact," she said.

"Meaning?" I asked.

"For last hour since I begin study this body corpse, I find many of irregularity. Size of organs too big," she said.

"He is a big boy," I pointed out.

"Organs too big." She was adamant. "Proportionality not consist with size of body. Brain. Heart. Lungs. Stomach. Nothing fits. Like is puzzle with pieces of another puzzle mixed in. Look here." She indicated the thick, black veins leading up from the heart to his right arm, also cut open.

I leaned over, though not so close as to cover my jacket with gore, and she continued, "Axillary artery and brachial artery too thick. Too dark. We move down closer. See there? Like small diamonds in the mine." Her voice grew soft barely above a whisper, "Only one time before I see something like this, but it not this refined. This pure."

"When was that?"

"Poland. The camps. Giftgas. Zyklon-B."