A/N: Hi, all!
Here's the second helping of stories to tide you over. I'm surprised I finished it two days before the quota. But you're not complaining, right? ^_^ But after this, I probably won't update for about two weeks unless I can get my hands on a computer. Can't say I won't try.
Anyway, continue to review, and fear not. I shall return.
Cheers,
~Rumer
Autopsy Report: Chapter Five
I stared at the dead girl on the bed. Blood had pooled in the sheets around her. I took a closer look at her skin. Old, blood-filled bandages covered most everything. In fact, it seemed to be all she was wearing. But her head from the neck up and left arm were bare. I saw raw, red flesh. Pus infested the wounds, making them seem twice as bad. It looked like she had been infected before she died. In my mind, it seemed that she was being treated, then just…forgotten.
"Jesus," I muttered under my breath, "What the hell could have happened to this girl that could get her this way…" I looked at the small bedside table. A videotape was there. An old videotape, from the looks of it. Curious as I am, I pocketed it for later viewing. You never know what could be on an old tape. For all I knew it could be reruns of Happy Days or a documentary on mollusks. I'd prefer the mollusks.
I walked to the other side of the bed and shined my light around. A partially burnt picture was in a broken frame on the floor next to the bed. I moved an IV stand blocking my way, picked the picture up and blew the dust off of it. Shining my light on the picture, I read aloud.
"Alessa." The picture was of a young girl, maybe late teens, with long black hair and a blank stare. I looked from the girl in the picture to the dead body on the bed, comparing. After several double-takes, I decided that it was the same girl, no doubt about it.
I heard a creaking noise behind me, so I turned to look. The door had waggled on its hinges, threatening to close. I put the picture on the bed next to Alessa and headed to the door. Getting locked inside a room with a decaying body is not my cup of tea, thank you. I'd prefer the body be the day's work, and not a discovery on one of my adventures into the unknown. I hurried through the short hall, up both flights of stairs, and into the storage room. The light was still on, and I left it that way. Without missing a beat, I headed straight to Dr. Ling's office.
When I got there, I knocked once and let myself in without waiting for clearance. Dr. Ling was sitting behind her desk, typing away at a laptop in front of her. She smiled at my entrance.
"Hello, Doctor! Is anything wrong?" The perfect hostess. Gag me with a spoon. I wondered if this woman was really a doctor or a secretary in disguise.
"May I use the intercom, please?" I said in my politest voice.
"Of course." She set a microphone on the desk and flipped a switch. She handed it to me. I took it.
"Will all available paramedics and recovery personnel please report to Dr. Ling's office, please. I repeat, all available paramedics and recovery personnel please report to Dr. Ling's office. Thank you."
Dr. Ling flipped the switch, apparently turning the microphone off. "Why do you want people here, Doctor? Is anything wrong?" Again with the hostess. I decided she was a secretary in disguise.
"You have a body in your basement, did you know that?" I said in my most innocent voice.
"Yes, I know. The woman you supposedly did an autopsy on." I shook my head in disgust. This girl was commanding in front of inferiors, but now it seemed that she swam in the shallow end of her gene pool. There'll be no diving, though.
"No. Another body." I seethed the words out.
"Yes, there are other bodies in the morgue."
I thought about screaming at her and decided against it. She'd probably cry. Before I could do anything, a knock sounded at the door. Ah, perfect timing.
"Come in!" Dr. Ling sang. A young doctor poked his head in. "We responded to the announcement. What's going on?"
I turned around and looked at the man. "I found a body in a secret room in the Storage Room. Please recover her."
"The Storage Room? There's no secret room there…"
"Then follow me. Please excuse me, Dr. Ling." I went out the door and down to the basement, a pack of medical staff at my heels.
***
Several hours later I sat in the passenger seat of my car, driving back to Brahms. Rook was driving, and we were leading an ambulance back to the office. Alessa had apparently stirred up some tension, so they decided to send her back to Brahms so I could work there. Great. Back to work and I still had a week's worth of leave left. How I always wind up working on vacation, I'll never know. Dahlia had gone back in the freezer waiting for proper burial or further analysis, whatever came first. My new project was my new finding - Alessa. Whoop dee dee for me. At least I got paid for cutting her open too. I'd be royally pissed if they didn't, and people get scared of me when I'm pissed. It's an advantage.
Rook wasn't singing. The radio was off. Thank God. I didn't think I could handle it at the moment. I'd probably wind up throwing him out of the car if he started. But lucky for me, he was silent the entire way back. That was a miracle in itself.
We got back to Brahms at about 5:00 that evening. We'd left at seven in the morning, gotten to Silent Hill at eight, started the autopsy at 9, and the rest was downhill from there. At least I'd finished up the other woman I'd been working on before we left. Rook came back with the blood analysis halfway through, stating that the woman's name was Dahlia Gillespie and she too was on White Claudia. Was it just me or was there a pattern here? Probably just me. I'm known to make wild accusations that most people agree with and assumptions that all the evidence points to. I'm just lucky, I guess.
The second we pulled into the parking lot, I heaved a sigh. It was gonna be a long night.
***
I adjusted the mask around my face and made sure all the instruments I needed were still there. They were. The medical team from Silent Hill had taken off the second the corpse was in the operating room. I'd send them the bill later. I'd told Rook to take a blood sample and go home, an order he seemed to deeply appreciate. So Rook was gone, the other medical staff personnel were gone, and I was all by my lonesome with my day's findings. Joy.
I took a scalpel and probe, my two now most used instruments and did an incision across Alessa's collarbones. The flesh parted immediately. Good. Normal skin. I made a midsagittal incision and a large incision across the waist. Taking two pairs of rat-toothed forceps, I grasped the edges of the cuts and pulled. As the flesh parted, I almost cried with relief.
The body's insides were absolutely normal. Thank the Lord above. As I poked around her insides, I noted that everything was there and in almost perfect shape. If not for her wounds on the surface, this girl seemed to have no reason to have died. Maybe it was her overall physical condition that kept her alive for so long. Huh.
Then I noticed something white around her spinal column.
Using all the strength I could muster, I turned Alessa over so I could examine her back. I gasped when I saw what was there.
A hole. A huge, gaping hole was ripped through her back, exposing the spinal column and most of her ribs. The white I had seen was the gurney cloth that Alessa lay on. It was as though something had torn its way out of her, using her back as the door.
Suddenly I felt lightheaded. I set the instruments down on a tray and pulled a white sheet from the white sheet file cabinet and draped it over Alessa's still form.
"Well," I said to myself in a shaky voice, "I guess I know what killed her now."
I pushed Alessa's gurney back inside the freezer. That done, I took off the coat, gloves, and mask and disposed of them. Then I went to my office. I still had to make out my report. I really didn't want to. I felt tired, hungry, and all around bitchy. I just wanted to go home, cook up a big batch of chicken noodle soup, curl up under a thick blanket, and sleep the rest of my vacation away. But I had the report to write…Damn the people who came up with reports. Damn them to hell.
As I walked, I put my shaking hands in my pockets. Yes, shaking hands. I don't know if they were shaking from the coldness of the autopsy rooms or the fact that every body I'd dissected that week had something seriously and almost impossibly wrong with them. I couldn't tell. My poor fingers had begun to warm up when they closed around cold plastic. Puzzled, I pulled out the videotape I had found earlier. Silly me, I had forgotten to tell the hospital personnel about it until it was too late. Oh well, at least I could see what was on it. If it really was a documentary on mollusks, I decided I would make a copy of it. Things like that were too fascinating to pass up.
When I got back to my office, I turned on the portable TV/VCR in the corner and popped in the tape. Sitting down and settling back in my chair, I pushed the play button on my handy-dandy remote control. Static jumbled the tape for a few moments, then cleared, revealing a young girl sitting at a desk of some sort in the dark. Her forehead rested on her laced hands, and she was slumped in a defeated posture. I couldn't make out her face, but I could see that she had light brown hair. Just like Lisa, I thought to myself. The girl started to talk.
"I can't stand it…I can't do this. The girl won't heal. She never heals…even when I change the bandages, the blood and pus just start oozing through! No matter what I do…no matter how many treatments I try…nothing helps. I can't…"
The video flickered and returned to static. I pushed the stop button.
And the first place prize of the 32nd Annual Film Festival goes to…
~~~
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