The Neuropathology Of Zombies (18 page)

CHAPTER 23

I made my way to the autopsy suite trailed by armed guards. A rancid stink rushed from behind the door as I opened it; I heard one of the Marines gag.

“Sorry. We couldn’t put the remains of the two autopsies from yesterday in the cooler because it was, eh, el occupado,” I said, turning on the overhead lights.

“Doc, how do ya know them two Driftwood ya cut up yesa’day ain’t in here waitin’ fer us?” asked one of the Marines, speaking with a deep Southern accent.

I turned to face him, “You know, that’s an excellent question, soldier. If there is one thing about zombie movies that pisses me right off, it’s the ‘autopsy zombie’. How do you kill a zombie?” I asked.

“You shoot it in the head,” I answered to the silence. “You shoot it in the head. When you do an autopsy, what do you do? You take out the brain, you chop it up, stick it in a red biohazard garbage bag, and cram it into the chest cavity, then you sew up the body. How the hell is the ‘autopsy zombie’ going to able to walk around? Its brain has been removed; it shouldn’t be possible. It drives me mad when I see zombies walking around with stitched up ‘Y’ shaped incisions on their chests. It’s impossible. Impossible. Major plot flaw,” I answered.

One of the men laughed, “You need help, Doc.”
I walked towards the large door concealing the body storage cooler,

“I bet these guys are frozen solid by now.”
“What are you going to do with them, Doc?” asked one of the
Marines.
“I’m going to autopsy them!”
“But they ain’t dead yet,” pleaded the soldier with the Southern
accent.
“Aren’t they?” I answered.
I walked down the hallway of the loading bay and peered into the
cooler. The two Driftwood hadn’t moved since yesterday; one was still
standing, back to the door, and the other was slumped down in the corner.
The blood smears on the walls and floor had frozen into deep maroon slicks
of ice.
I reached for the handle that secured the cooler door and pulled the
latch open. The cold steel sent a shiver through my body. The door slowly
swung towards me filling the hallway with a frigid chill.
My breath formed clouds around my head as I spoke, “Get ready,
just in case.” I looked at the group of Marines, the whites of their eyes
glowed in the dim light.
The Driftwood didn’t flinch. I opened the door a little further and
slid inside the cooler. The air was cold and bit at my bare arms. I crept up
behind the standing ghoul, I kept low to the ground, and was ready to run
for cover. I crouched down and circled around to his front; he remained
motionless. I stood, and stared into its eyes. I turned quickly and checked
on the monster slumped in the corner; he too, sat still.
I lifted my hand and pushed on the shoulder of the Driftwood
standing in front of me. He toppled over, landing on the floor of the cooler
with a loud thud that shook the cramped space.
I walked back to the group of Marines, “Can a couple of you go get
the gurneys from the autopsy room, we’ll leave the autopsied bodies in here
and take one of the frozen guys with us. That will probably help with the
smell, too.”
Two of the soldiers ran off without saying a word. They reappeared
pushing the stretchers with the badly decomposing carcasses. They steered
them into the cooler and left them against the far wall.
I looked around and saw three empty gurneys along the opposite
wall. “Ok, let’s get this one up on a gurney.” The Marines were now standing over the remains of Mary Osbourne. “Forget about her, let’s get this one out of here. I don’t know how much time I have until these guys
thaw!”
We lifted the heavy frozen body on the stretcher and wheeled it out
of the cooler. I closed the door behind me, secured the latch and made sure
the temperature was still on the lowest setting before heading towards the
autopsy suite with my next patient.

CHAPTER 24

The ice crystals reflected under the bright lights of the autopsy room and the pale, green skin glistened; Mary Osbourne’s dried, smeared blood sparkled like rubies. I walked over to the frozen corpse and began my examination.

The body was clad in a white polo shirt that was cut down the middle, probably by paramedics. There were heart rate monitor tabs stuck to the chest. The pants were light beige and there was a single blue sandal clinging to the left foot.

I rifled my hands through his pockets looking for identification. I found two hundred and fifty American dollars and three hundred of the local currency stashed in the right front pocket. A plastic hotel door card number 1215 from the Marina Star Hotel was alone in the front left pocket. A fat, bulging wallet took up the entire rear right pocket. Inside, the billfold held photographs of two young children, maybe aged seven to ten. There were a multitude of credit cards with the name Andrew Donald punched through the plastic. There was also a driver’s license issued to Andrew Donald, Bradford St, Natchez, Louisiana.

“Andrew Donald, Natchez, Louisiana. Looks like he has some kids, too,” I said.
I continued with the external exam and removed the clothing. There were defibrillator pad burns on the chest. “They must have thought he was having a heart attack, looks like they tried to shock him,” I said, pointing to the burns.
The rest of the torso was unremarkable. I moved closer and scanned my eyes up and down the arms. The skin was fragile, green, and some areas were beginning to peel. The body was covered by small fluid filled blisters that looked like scales; black liquid leaked from some of the bubbles, trickling down onto the autopsy table. Otherwise, the upper extremities were anatomically normal, just a few scars and a tattoo on the left bicep composed of various Roman numerals.
The lower half of the body was also unremarkable, except for a scar over the front of the left knee that was consistent with an anterior cruciate ligament repair. The skin over the legs was also slipping and green and covered with postmortem blisters.
I circled around the table, “He doesn’t seem to be as badly decomposed as the others, which makes sense because he’s been in the cooler while the other Driftwood have been wandering in the hot streets. The date in the autopsy log book states he arrived a day before this all started. These may be the first cases, the index cases.”
I rolled the body and saw no relevant findings on the back. I examined the body more closely; I hadn’t noticed a bite mark on my initial scan.
“I can’t find a bite mark,” I said. I was puzzled. “With the others, the bite was huge and festering, you couldn’t miss it. Here, I’ve got nothing. No bite mark. How did he get it? Even with the bad deco in the other case, I could still see the bite mark.”
I picked up a scalpel and drove the blade into the skin, making my ‘Y’ shaped incision. The frozen skin peeled off the rib cage in a single, stiff piece. It reminded me of the skin of a turkey that had been sitting in the refrigerator for too long, all dried out and inflexible.
The hedge clippers cracked through the ribs with ease exposing the internal organs. The lungs were expanded and boggy; the heart sat in the middle, not beating. My hands began to throb, the cold interior of the cadaver was causing the blood vessels in my skin to constrict giving me an ‘ice cream headache’ in my digits. I ran my hands under the hot water tap for a minute and then plunged them pack into the pleural cavity. A mist of steam rose into the air as my heated hands made contact with the frozen organs.
I removed the heart and lungs and weighed them. They were normal. There was no deco juice in the empty chest, just some thick globs of coagulated black goo; I placed some in a test tube for future testing.
I yanked out the intestines, they slid through my hands like a slippery wet garden hose and formed a coil as they piled up between me and the cadaver. I then removed the liver and kidneys.
All that was left was the swollen stomach. In order to avoid spilling any of the gastric contents, I clamped the esophagus as it passed through the neck. I then slit the digestive tube just above the clamp and lifted the full stomach out of the now empty shell; the bloated sac wiggled like a water bed as I carried it to the end of the table.
I grabbed a pair of scissors and started to cut along the bottom curvature of the stomach. The partially digested fragments of Mary Osbourne spilled onto the table. Large chunks of un-chewed meat and small pieces of bone soaked in a soup of unidentifiable flesh. I scooped up some of the mash and placed it in a plastic screw top cup for toxicology testing.
I moved to the top of the table and began to dissect the soft tissues of the neck. I glanced down at the face of the creature repeatedly as I worked. Just as I was dragging my scalpel along the top of the hyoid bone, severing it from the tongue, I felt motion. I looked down, the eyes of the ghoul opened and glared directly at me; he was thawing.
Without hesitation I forced my knife deep into the muscles of the neck until I hit the spinal column. I continued the incision completely around the zombie’s neck. Then I frantically grabbed the bone saw and drove it through the vertebral bones, I could see the white paste of the spinal cord seeping through the gaping hole I created. I picked up the scalpel and quickly cut at the tough ligaments keeping the skull attached to the body. Within a few seconds the head fell onto the autopsy table.
“Jesus Christ,” yelled one of the Marines as he ran to the table, gun drawn. “You decapitated the son of a bitch!”
“He was thawing. It was him or me, I picked him,” I replied.
With the danger of Andrew getting up and walking away removed, I decided to examine the organs. I dissected the anatomy and cut out small pieces to look at under the microscope. I found no disease processes. The viscera were slightly decomposed, but not badly, the lungs were heavy and that was about it. Nothing was jumping out at me.
“Pretty healthy guy, it’s a shame. Probably could have lived a long, long life,” I said. “Now, on to the head.”
The head rolled onto its side. I spun it so it was facing upwards. The eyes opened and the jaw began to snap. I lifted the cranium by the hair and plopped it down, resting it on the stump of the neck that remained below the jaw. I held it steady with one hand and with the other, I glided the scalpel across the back of the scalp, peeling the skin away as I uncovered the skull cap. Once the bones of the head were visible, I reached for the bone saw and cut through the ossified encasement.
The tan and red convolutions of the brain gleamed under the lights. I stepped to the side of the table and observed the opened head. Andrew’s eyes scanned around the room, his mouth opening, closing, and shifting from side to side. He was unaware that he no longer had a body, and that his entire brain was showing through the top of his skull.
I glanced around the room and saw the shocked expressions on the faces of the soldiers, they must have thought I was crazy. I returned to the autopsy.
I stepped back and admired my handiwork, “I’m going to do this a little different, I’m going to take the brain out in pieces, maybe we can figure out where the ‘zombie master control’ is located.” I laughed, trying to ease the tension in the room.
I cut out a large hunk of the frontal lobes and watched for any changes. Following my movements, the eyes continued to rotate in the orbits of the skull, and the hungry mouth gnawed at the air.
Next, I removed the parietal lobes and observed no behavioral changes.
Soon, the entire portion of the brain above the cerebellum was laying in pieces on the autopsy table. The thick, shiny membrane that separated the top and bottom halves of the brain, called the tentorium, hid the deep structures. I cut the tentorium off the skull revealing the brainstem and cerebellum. I looked at Andrew’s face, it was still moving but the motions had become more erratic and robot like.
I slid the scalpel as far down into the foramen magnum as I could and severed the spinal cord. I lifted the hindbrain out of the skull, snipping the thin bundles of nerves as they extended from the mass of neural tissue and disappeared into their bony canals. Andrew’s face froze. His eyes flickered like the light from a candle being blown out and then he faded into eternity.
After I finished the autopsy I placed the organs in a red biohazard bag and dropped them into the empty cadaver. I rested the rigid chest plate over the hollow torso and sewed the body shut. The eviscerated carcass slid easily into the black vinyl body bag. A Marine ran the zipper along the outside of the bag and dragged the remains onto the gurney.
“Let’s get him back into the cooler and start on the other one,” I said, pushing the gurney towards the soldiers. Two of them grabbed it and rolled it towards the cooler. I followed behind them.
We lifted the man in the jogging suit on to an empty stretcher. He was frozen in a seated position, his legs outstretched and bent at the hips; they hung in the air as we placed him on his back. Once he was on the gurney, we wheeled him into the autopsy room.
The age scribbled in the autopsy log book stated that Winston Marr was 55-years-old, but he looked much older. The jacket of the jogging suit was unzipped and hung open to reveal a white t-shirt smeared with Mary Osbourne’s blood and feces. The paramedics had cut the t-shirt down the middle and there were heart rate monitors and defibrillator pads stuck to his pale white chest.
“Looks like they tried to shock him, too. Two coronaries at the beautiful resort hotel, you’d think you’d wait to have your heart attack until after you got home!” I said.
I rummaged through his pockets, they were empty. There was nothing to confirm his identity and he had no money. I removed the red and white cotton jogging suit, the t-shirt, and a pair of red running shoes, and examined the naked body.
His skin was dull and pale green. The top layer peeled away with gentle pressure, much like the outer coating of an overripe pare. Small blisters leaked thick black fluid as I moved my hands along the body.
There was a twelve inch long scar running down the center of the chest: a cardiac bypass operation. I could feel a hard, round object just under the skin on the left side of the chest, a pacemaker, no doubt. This man had serious cardiovascular disease.
Other than those few findings, the body was fairly unremarkable. Just like Andrew, there was no bite mark. How did these two men become infected? Maybe I was wrong, maybe it was a toxin.
“There’s no bite mark. Just like the last guy. I can’t find any evidence that an injury occurred. How did he become Driftwood?” I asked no one in particular.
I began my autopsy and found nothing other than the expected cardiovascular disease. Winston’s body was still frozen by the time I was ready to work on the brain; there was no need to decapitate him. I removed the skull cap and gently lifted the brain from the bony vault. I placed it in an empty bucket.
“I am going to keep this brain. I’ll put it in the cooler for now, but we’ll need some dry ice; they must have some on the ship. I think the guys on the mainland will want it, we may not get another one that is this well preserved.”
Winston’s brain was in one piece. The outer cortex was soft and the frontal lobes were beginning to melt away, but the cold temperature inside the storage cooler not only froze the brain nearly solid, it slowed the autolytic process. This combination resulted in a nicely preserved brain that would be excellent for more detailed study in a lab better equipped than the one we had on the Island.
After cleaning the morgue, we pushed the body back into the cooler. Things were getting a little crowded, the four autopsied cadavers and the scattered remains of Mary Osbourne were taking up most of the space. I set the bucket containing the brain on the floor under one of the gurneys.
The soldier with the Southern accent spoke up, “Doc, ain’t you ‘fraid one of them things is gonna eat that brain? Or maybe theys gonna eat each other?”
“No, remember, ‘autopsy zombies’? Geez.” I smiled, shaking my head in taunting disgust.
“Oh, yeah, right, fergot ‘bout them!” he chuckled.
We stepped out of the cooler. I closed the door and secured the latch. I left the light on, not because I was worried anyone would start moving around in there, they were ‘autopsy zombies’ after all, but I felt better knowing there were no ghouls lurking in the dark; the soul of a little boy never truly dies.
I gathered up our morning’s work. The autopsy room was silent. The squawk from a radio startled me and I flinched. The voice was distorted by static, but I could make out the phrase ‘the slides are ready’ and my eyes widened with excitement.
I hurried over to the Marine holding the receiver. “The slides are ready?”
I waited while he spoke into the hand piece.
“Are the slides ready?” I repeated.
“Yeah, Doc, tech says they’re ready,” he finally answered.
“Perfect timing! Let’s head up to the lab,” I said, thrusting my index finger into the air. I felt like a nerd.