Jack entered the room. Inside were lockers, a laundry cart containing various sizes of green surgical scrub suits, a shelf paper caps, a sink, and a mirror. A list of instructions was on the wall, starting with “Remove ALL street clothes, including underwear.” He took off his clothes, left them in an unsecured locker, and dressed in a scrub suit.
Then he pushed through the next door, labeled with the universal biohazard symbol, into an ultraviolet-lit room. There he paused, wondering what to do next.
A voice over the intercom said, “There’s a shelf of socks beside you. Put on a pair and walk through the door.” He did.
A woman in a scrub suit was waiting for him in the next room.
She was brusque, unsmiling, as she told him to don sterile gloves.
Then she angrily ripped off strips of tape and sealed his sleeves pant cuffs. The Army may have resigned themselves to Jack’s visit, but they weren’t going to make it a friendly one. She slipped an audio headset over his head, then gave him a “Snoopy” hat, like swimming cap, to hold the equipment in place.
“Now suit up,” she barked.
Time for the space suit. This one was blue, with the gloves already attached. As his hostile assistant lowered the hood over his head, Jack felt a dart of anxiety about the woman. In her anger, could she sabotage the process, see to it that he wasn’t completely sealed off from contamination.
She closed the seal on his chest, hooked him up to a wall hose, and he felt the whoosh of air blow into his suit. It was too late to worry about what could go wrong. He was ready to cross into the hot area.
The woman unplugged his hose and pointed to the next door. He stepped through, into the air lock. The door slammed shut behind him.
A man in a space suit was waiting for him. He did not speak, but gestured to Jack to follow him through the far door.
They stepped through and walked down a hallway to the autopsy room.
Inside was a stainless steel table with a body on it, still sealed in its bag. Two men in space suits were already standing on either side of the body.
One of the men was Dr. Roman. He turned and saw Jack.
“Don’t touch anything. Don’t interfere. You’re only here to observe, Dr. McCallum, so stay the hell out of our way.” Nice welcome.
The space-suited escort plugged a wall hose into Jack’s suit, and once again air hissed into his helmet. If not for the audio headset, he’d be unable to hear anything the other three men said.
Dr. Roman and his two associates opened the body bag.
Jack felt his breath catch, his throat constrict. The corpse was Jill Hewitt’s. Her helmet had been removed, but she was still wearing the orange launch-and-entry suit, embroidered with her name.
Even without that identification, he would have known it was Jill, because of her hair. It was a silky chestnut, cut in a bob and with the first hints of gray. Her face was strangely intact. Her eyes were half open.
Both sclerae were a bright and shocking red.
Roman and his colleagues unzipped the LES and stripped the corpse. The fabric was fire-retardant, too tough to cut through.
They had to peel it off. They worked efficiently, their comments matter-of-fact and without even a hint of emotion. When they had removed her clothing, she looked like a broken doll. Both her hands were deformed by fractures, reduced to masses of crushed bone. Her legs, too, were broken and akilter, the shins bent at impossible angles. The tips of two broken ribs penetrated her wall, and black bruises marked the strap lines of her seat restraint.
Jack felt his breaths coming too fast, and he had to quell his rising horror. He had witnessed many autopsies, on bodies in much worse shape.
He had seen aviators burned into little more than charred twigs, skulls exploded from the pressure of cooking brains.
He had seen a corpse whose face had been sliced off from walking into a chopper’s tail rotor. He had seen a Navy pilot’s spine in half and folded backward from ejecting through a closed canopy.
This was far, far worse because he knew the deceased. He remembered her as a living, breathing woman. His horror was mingled with rage, because these three men viewed Jill’s exposed body with such cold dispassion. She was a slab of meat on the table, nothing more. They ignored her injuries, her grotesquely positioned limbs. The cause of death was only of secondary concern to them.
They were more interested in the microbiological hitchhiker harbored within her corpse.
Roman began his Y incision. In one hand he gripped a scalpel, the other hand was safely encased in a steel-mesh glove. One slash ran from the right shoulder, diagonally through the breast, to the xiphoid process. Another diagonal slash ran from the left shoulder and met the first slash at the xiphoid. The incision continued straight down the abdomen, with a small jag around the umbilicus, ending near the pubic bone. He cut through the ribs, freeing the sternum. The bony shield was lifted to reveal the chest cavity.
The cause of death was immediately apparent.
When a plane crashes, or an automobile slams into a wall, or a despondent lover makes a suicide leap from a ten-story building, the same forces of deceleration apply. A human body traveling at great speed is abruptly brought to a halt. The impact itself can shatter and send missiles of bone shards into vital organs. It can vertebrae, rupture spinal cords, crush skulls against dashboards instrument panels. But even when pilots are fully strapped in and helmeted, even when no part of their body makes contact with the aircraft, the force of deceleration alone can be fatal, because although the torso may be restrained, the internal organs are not.
The heart and lungs and great vessels are suspended inside the by only tissue attachments. When the torso comes to an abrupt halt, the heart continues to swing forward like a pendulum, moving with such force it shears tissues and rips open the aorta. Blood into the mediastinum and pleural cavity.
Jill Hewitt’s chest was a lake of blood.
Roman suctioned it out, then frowned at the heart and lungs. “I can’t see where she bled out,” he said.
“Why don’t we remove the entire block?” said his assistant.
“We’d have better visibility.”
“The tear is most likely in the ascending aorta,” said Jack. “Sixty-five percent of the time, it’s located just above the valve.”
Roman glanced at him in annoyance. Up till then, he’d managed to ignore Jack, now he resented this intrusive comment. Without a word, he positioned his scalpel to sever the great vessels.
“I advise examining the heart in situ first,” said Jack. “Before you cut.”
“How and where she bled out is not my primary concern,” Roman retorted.
They don’t really care what killed her, thought Jack. All they want to know is what organism might be growing, multiplying, inside her.
Roman sliced through the trachea, esophagus, and great vessels, then removed the heart and lungs in one block. The lungs were covered with hemorrhages. Traumatic or infectious? Jack didn’t know. Next Roman examined the abdominal organs. The small bowel, like the lungs, was splotchy with mucosal hemorrhages. He removed it and set the glistening coils of intestines in bowl. He resected the stomach, pancreas, and liver. All would sectioned and examined microscopically. All tissue would be cultured for bacteria and viruses.
The body was now missing almost all its internal organs. Jill Hewitt, Navy pilot, triathlete, lover of J&B scotch and high-stakes poker and Jim Carrey movies, was now nothing but a hollow shell.
Roman straightened, looking vaguely relieved. So far, the autopsy had revealed nothing unexpected. If there was gross evidence of Marburg virus, Jack did not see it.
Roman circled behind the corpse, to the head.
This was the part Jack dreaded. He had to force himself to watch as Roman sliced the scalp, his incision running across the top of the crown, from ear to ear. He peeled the scalp forward folded the flap over the face, a fringe of chestnut hair flopping down over her chin. With a rongeur, they cracked the skull. No saws, no flying bone dust, could be allowed in a Level 4 autopsy. They pried off the cap of bone.