Living Dead- John Doe Lives Again

  The news was what he’d expected; death, once you were familiar with it, held few surprises. St. Michael the Archangel had pronounced John Doe dead at 7:18 p.m., with an ETD of 6:10 p.m. The source of this pronouncement, Luis learned after several questions, was an intern. A fucking intern.
...

  Charlie made the first incision at 10:17 p.m. Ignoring all bullet wounds for now, she began with a notch behind the left ear before drawing her PM40 toward the breastbone in a Y cut. John Doe’s flesh split like dough. She copied the cut from the left ear and proceeded down the abdomen, dodging the navel with a juke to the right before stopping at the pubis. There was blood, but barely any. Dead hearts don’t pump. She reflected back the skin and tissues of the chest like saloon doors. Revealed were a set of ribs not so different from the sauce-slathered racks Charlie and Luis often shared at Damon’s #1 Ribs.

  John Doe was old enough that his rib cartilage had begun to morph into bone. Charlie used a serrated knife to saw through the fused cartilage, then took up the stainless steel rib shears. She liked operating these two-handed chrome-glossed scissors; like riding motorcycles and changing her oil, the act felt outsized and brash. She notched the jaws around individual ribs and cut through them. It was the loudest part of any autopsy. Wet cracking noises echoed about the room.
...

  She carried the right lung to a dish near John Doe’s feet, then did the same with the left, However, she could not, as Luis had requested, “prove it.” The right lung was black with nicotine and showed signs of pleurisy but was free of contusions that would indicate a bullet impact. She glanced at Luis, who winked. He’d known the airbags were a dead end. Charlie didn’t accept defeat; she went back for the entrails, almost hungry for them. She parted the bottom of John Doe’s Y cut, detached the rectum, and snipped through the web of fat that kept the intestines in place. She reeled the long, ropy organ into a steel mixing bowl.

  The intestines were not her quarry, The liver, she’d decided, was where the abdominal bullet was hiding, and with the intestines cleared, no organ was easier to extract. Three vessels and a few ligaments later, the big, blubbery organ was in her hands. She settled the liver in the pan alongside the lungs and massaged it.
...

  Within forty minutes of John Doe’s arrival in the autopsy room, while Luis Acocella took fastidious notes and spoke into his mic, Charlene Rutkowski, working roughly from the head down, removed a total of three bullets and several more vital organs from the corpse, taking breaks to razor off samples that she submerged in preservatives for later testing.
...

  She sliced John Doe’s pericardial sac, then finned her hand beneath the heart and wrapped her fingers around it. Warm as a desert rock. She used the PM40 to disjoin the vascular attachments, set down her scalpel, and lifted the organ out. She cradled the tired, brown-red muscle in her cupped hands and carried it to the examination basin, only to find she wasn’t ready to let it go.
...

  The corpse opened his eyes with a sound like the tsk of a tongue, a swift damnation of the stupid sputtering of an outdated race. Luis’s last, worthless word banged around metal surfaces as the corpse flexed his neck again, harder this time, and turned his head, attention apparently drawn by Luis’s voice. And there he was: John Doe, looking at Luis Acocella. Beneath drooping lids, the corpse’s eyes were clouded with mucus. Irises once the color of black coffee had turned mocha from some internal milk. Luis swayed his body to the left as he might to test an unleashed dog’s intent, and the eyes followed. The movement was uneven, but of course it was—the vitreous humor was skipping across dry sockets.

  “Is this…?” Charlie looked at Luis. “Acocella. Luis. Is this…?”

  He did not respond, because whatever Charlie’s question was, the answer was simultaneously absolutely yes and no way in hell. John Doe, however, did respond. The corpse redirected his head in Charlie’s direction. More blood, cool and thick, syruped from the hole in his neck. His white eyes landed on hers, There was something soft there, like the cataracts of an old dog; they were also as unreasonable as stone.

  Luis’s hand again moved by instinct, not to sign the cross but to touch his earpiece. Whatever this was, it must be recorded; Jefferson Talbot might have won the election for ME, but it would be Luis Acocella who handled this right. Doing so might also save his sanity. He depressed the button.

  “John Doe is moving.” His voice was distant and pipsqueak. “That’s John Doe forwarded to the San Diego Medical Examiner’s Office by St. Michael the Archangel on October 23. It’s been four…” He consulted his binder: comforting checkboxes and fillable blanks. “Nearly four and a half hours since ETD and”—he looked at his watch—“three and a half since pronouncement. Vital organs have been extracted. But he is moving. Repeat: John Doe is moving and in a most deliberate—”

  The corpse lifted his right arm toward Charlie.

  Luis’s first impression of the gesture, one he would carry until the end, was not one of violent threat. John Doe had awakened, and his first instinct was to reach out. Who could say why? For contact, for help, for security. But his right deltoid, having been victim to first a bullet and second Charlie’s scalpel, hadn’t the integrity to finish the gesture. The arm sagged.

  Nothing was wrong with the corpse’s hand flexors. His fingers tightened, relaxed, tightened. This motion seemed radically different. This was no open-palmed yearning. These were claws out to snag, an idea worsened by John Doe’s splintered, yellow nails. However he had longed for Charlie in his first seconds, now he craved her in a different way. His half-lidded eyes bulged in her direction, and she took a step back, rattling the tray of surgical tools.
...

  The corpse tried to sit up. He couldn’t, of course; the Y cut had robbed all strength from his abdominals. But there was no mistaking the effort. The flabby obliques quivered beneath a cake of drying blood. The gluteus maximus, flattened to the table, drew taut. John Doe rocked slightly, side to side, testing his equilibrium. He looked like an infant, innocent and ambitious, trying to roll over for the first time.
...

  It was the miscarriage all over again: he waited too long to offer help, Rocking, John Doe achieved enough momentum to allow his torso to slip across his own bodily fluids and topple over the lip of the table. It was an ugly, profane fall, stiff limbs flailing, genitals flopping, the curtain of parted chest flesh rippling on the way down. John Doe landed on his back with a loud slap, spattering tissue across Charlie’s legs. She scuttled backward, her free hand pulling the instrument cart with her. John Doe’s arms and legs kept moving, the legs of an upturned beetle.

  “Not dead,” Charlie said. “What did I do?”

  “He is dead,” Luis said.

  “I cut out his insides!” she cried. “What did I do?”

  “You dropped his heart on the fucking floor!” Luis shouted, “He’s dead! He’s dead!”
...

  John Doe pulled himself forward with first one elbow, then the other, functioning despite the dissected shoulder.

  “What does it want?” Charlie begged.

  Luis found it an astute question. Because the corpse did want; he wanted palpably, achingly. Luis pictured the pedestrians after John Doe’s shooting, how little they’d cared about life versus death, how quickly they’d gone back to the Novocain glow of the same gadgets he adored, how little they, or he, wanted anything real at all. The corpse had brought want slamming back into the world: his want to get closer to them, their reawakened want to survive.

  John Doe’s limbs, slathered with autopsy ooze, fought for traction. He slid closer to Charlie, who did not look capable of further movement.

  “Stop,” she ordered.

  The corpse did not stop. His jaw opened. Bloody drool sluiced down his chin. He heaved himself forward. His spine sank, and Luis wondered if the emptied torso and extracted ribs might result in total skeletal collapse. Not yet, anyway—John Doe’s left hand snagged Charlie’s tennis shoe.

- The Living Dead, chapters: This Is the Place/Invisible Hands/The Miscarriage