4
Chen had never seen the chiller so full of fresh ones. The lab was like the hold of a ship on the high seas in search of cod, halibut, and flounder. It stank like day old boy scouts at a jamboree with no one to watch them to be certain they would shower off all of their naturally clinging human sludge. The morgue's usually strong stink accumulation had already become downright toxic.
The autopsy tables were filled with bodies. Chen’s scalpel was dipping Quixotically into the subjects, opening their flesh books to one page after the other of organs, brain dumps, and other exquisite chapters in each decaying body’s doorway to death. He liked the kids best, because they were easiest to handle and quickest to finish. Their chests opened far more easily, and their organs were tiny and easier to lift, turn, and inspect. Why couldn’t everyone be a child? It just seemed unfair. Only thirty-two percent of them were kids. Toss in a few older teenagers in the final stages of their mental insanity and their parents and other relatives of various ages, and he had an orchestra of human widgets that would keep him busy for days and days.
His scalpel parsed the usual incision into a kid’s mom. She was a certain Mabel Looper from 8th Street. Her two kids and husband were with there in the room next to her. Chen liked to dissect the families together. That way, when he was done, there was less paperwork. They could usually be picked up by the family’s funeral parlor with a single transport request that he could copy and place in each person’s file. Easy as pie. He pulled her thorax apart and removed each of her organs to inspect them. The woman had a tumor on her intestine the size of a slightly long wiener. He cross-sectioned it and discovered it was non-cancerous. He noted “fatty cyst” and “attached to small intestine” on her autopsy file. The entire family seemed healthy enough, but the single bullet theory held true. That was the theory that it only took a single bullet to kill a healthy person. Each of the kids as well as the husband and wife proved the one bullet theory. Chen saw so many one bullet deaths from the restaurant that he figured it should graduate from theorem to scientific law. “I hereby declare it to be a law,” he said out loud, just to hear his voice, but no one was listening.
He sewed them up, placed them in body bags and moved them to the cooler. He made sure the tags were properly attached and checked to make certain their names were not only theirs but were spelled correctly. Then, he doubled checked their case numbers. This was the number he would use to find them again on the computer.
He dug into the brain of a man who had been a waiter at the restaurant. He was handsome and had a well toned body. His magnificent health hadn’t helped him survive. The 9mm shell in his brain took him down in a split second. Dr. Yong noted that the bullet had gone through and was missing from his cranium. He took pictures with his cellphone which he uploaded to the man’s numbered case file, checked his other organs, found him fit as a fiddle, and pronounced him dead from a single 9mm gunshot wound to the head. There had been a lot of those today. Most of them had been head traumatized, and it had resulted in their immediate deaths. Mr. Stokes, if anything, was a good shot. In fact, Dr. Yong figured him to be an ace with highly accurate and deadly aim. He must have been a student of anatomy, because his body shots were savvy. The man’s heart area was hit in several places by perfectly aimed bullets shot during Yancy Stoke’s deadly accurate rage. He sewed the man up, cleaned his skin, and placed him in a labeled body bag. In most cases, body bags were not used, but in mass homicides like this one, there were simply not enough tables and movable slabs for all of these bodies, so bags were the only choice the coroner had. As crazy as Dr. Yong was about sex with women each evening, he was totally respectful of his clients. In fact, he suffered mentally for what they had gone through. He sympathized in his mind with their spouses and siblings. He often caressed their shoulders and foreheads, saying, “I am so sorry this happened to you,” as he worked on them. Chen took it very personally which was totally to his credit as a professional and a human being.
Obama Care Page 4