by Tim Downs
“The flies lay their clutch of eggs,” he said. “Three, maybe four hundred each—and then they take off again. The eggs hatch and maggots emerge; the maggots stuff themselves on the decomposing tissues—thousands upon thousands of them, consuming the body at an astonishing rate. As the famous taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus once said, ‘The progeny of three flies can consume a dead horse more quickly than can a lion.’”
She closed her eyes and held up one hand. “Nick.”
“Since insects pass through distinct developmental stages, by studying the insects on a corpse we can determine almost exactly how long they’ve been there—and thus, the time of death. All you have to do is collect maggot samples from the various orifices. Take your filet, for example: It’s basically a thick slab of muscle tissue, much like—oh, let’s say a cross section of the human thigh—”
“Nick!”
Nick stopped. The woman had a strange look on her face—the sort of look a person gets when they first learn that calamari is really squid.
“Can we talk about something else?”
“You asked me what I do.”
“I know, but I didn’t know you did . . . that. Do you really have to work with dead people?”
“It helps.”
“How can you stand it?”
“As coworkers go, I recommend them.”
She shuddered. “Well, let’s talk about something else.”
“Like what?”
“Something besides work—your work, anyway.”
Nick shrugged. “Okay. What do you do?”
She glared at him. “I’ve been telling you that for the last forty-five minutes.”
Nick blinked. “Would you excuse me a moment?” He pulled out his cell phone and checked for messages again.
“You keep looking at your cell phone,” she grumbled. “A woman notices that too.”
“Sorry. I’m sort of on call.”
“In case somebody dies?”
“In a way, yes. I volunteer with an organization called DMORT—the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team. DMORT is a part of the National Disaster Medical System, under FEMA. Whenever there’s a disaster involving mass casualties—like the World Trade Center or United Flight 93 in Pennsylvania—then DMORT is called in. Whenever the number of casualties is too big for the local coroner’s office to handle, we show up. Our job is to help collect and identify human remains.”
“You volunteer to do that?”
“Sometimes I can’t believe the things I volunteer for.”
“Has there been a disaster somewhere?”
“There’s a hurricane called Katrina moving northwest across the Gulf of Mexico right now. It was a category 1 when it hit Florida the night before last; then it was downgraded to a tropical storm. But now it’s out over the Gulf again, and it’s sucking up energy from the hot sea; it’s up to a category 4 now, and some say it might become a 5. The National Hurricane Center says it’s heading for New Orleans; if it keeps going, my DMORT unit will be activated—just in case.”
At that moment, Nick’s cell phone mercifully rang. He scrambled to open it.
“Nick Polchak.”
“Nick. It’s Denny with DMORT.”
“It’s about time.”
“I called your office first. You’re usually there on a Saturday night.”
“I should be there now.”
“Some grad student answered your phone. He said you were on a blind date—in a restaurant—with a woman.”
Nick didn’t reply; he just kept nodding and staring straight ahead.
“Nick, is it true?”
“Denny. Please.”
“Just tell me: How’s it going?”
“A disaster of unprecedented proportions,” he said. “It makes you wonder if there’s a God.”
“That bad, huh?”
“All the needless suffering—all the wasted resources—it could have been prevented. Why don’t we ever learn?”
“Well, then, I’ve got good news for you. We just got word from the Emergency Operations Center: NDMS has activated us—Katrina’s predicted to make landfall early Monday morning. How far are you from the airport?”
“Twenty minutes. My go-bag is in the car.”
“Whoa, slow down. NDMS has to call you back with travel arrangements first. You should have four hours at least. Relax, have a cup of coffee. Enjoy your date.”
Ten minutes? Okay, but I’ll have to leave right now.” “
“Do what you want. I’ll see you in Baton Rouge.”
Nick folded the phone and looked apologetically at his date.
“You have to go, don’t you?” she said.
“Sorry.”
“It sounds terrible.”
“Relief is on the way. Have you seen our waiter? I’ll grab him on the way out.”
After repeating his condolences and offering a fictional promise to reschedule at a more opportune time, Nick hurried toward the exit.
The maître d’ met him in the doorway. “Leaving so soon, sir?”
“Gotta run. I was at that table over there—see it? The lady with the long red hair.” Nick pointed and the woman waved back.
“Yes sir, I see it.”
Nick handed him a ten-dollar bill. “She needs more bread.”
3
Sunday, August 28
St. Gabriel, Louisiana
“Folks, I need to ask you to pack in a little tighter so you can hear. Please move all the way into the warehouse. The wind is starting to pick up a bit, and we’d like to get you all out of the weather.” Denny Behringer, the DMORT incident commander, motioned with both hands as if he were parking a 737, and the group began to move forward slowly.
Nick caught Denny’s eye, and the two men nodded a silent greeting.
Nick looked at the group bunched tightly around him. He counted about seventy-five people, thirty of whom he knew. They were all members of his regional DMORT team—DMORT Region IV, consisting of forensic professionals from eight different states across the southeastern U.S. There were pathologists to conduct autopsies; anthropologists to examine fragments of bone; odontologists to match dental records; fingerprint specialists to establish lost identities; and a dozen other forensic subspecialties, including his own. The rest of the group consisted of computer experts, security personnel, and the myriad support staff necessary to run a morgue the size of a football field.
Less than twenty-four hours ago, each of them had been sitting comfortably in his or her home in Atlanta or Memphis or Nashville or Miami. Now, they huddled together in the darkness in the tiny town of St. Gabriel, Louisiana, seventy miles west of the city of New Orleans and just outside Baton Rouge. St. Gabriel had been selected from a short list of candidates as the location for DMORT’s temporary morgue, the place where victims of the coming disaster could be collected and processed away from prying eyes.
St. Gabriel seemed the perfect choice: it was close to Baton Rouge, the location of FEMA’s regional headquarters; it was situated just off Interstate 10, the major artery into and out of New Orleans; and it had no way to say no. The little hamlet of fifty-five hundred people, home to two prisons and a half dozen chemical plants, had been politely but bluntly informed that they would soon have the privilege of contributing to rescue-and-recovery efforts on behalf of their big sister to the east. Before long, a cadre of refrigerated tractor trailers would begin to deliver decomposing bodies right to their own back door. Not everyone in St. Gabriel appreciated the honor; but after repeated reassurances about safety and security, the little town resigned itself to its inevitable role.
FEMA, anticipating the closing of Louis Armstrong New Orleans International, and not wishing to add to the chaos at the airport in Baton Rouge, had decided to assemble the DMORT members at DFW in Dallas—not exactly a stone’s throw away. From there, Nick’s DMORT team had caravanned 370 miles by car and van, arriving just before midnight central time. The roads were desolate when they first headed east out of Dallas
, but once they passed Shreveport and turned south on I-49, they found a steady and ominous increase in traffic coming from the direction of the Gulf Coast. By the time they reached Baton Rouge six hours later, the outbound lanes were aglow with headlights rising out of the south like sparks pouring from the mouth of a furnace.
In obedience to their commander’s instructions, Nick’s group dutifully shuffled forward through the entrance of the 150,000-square-foot warehouse. They were more than happy to move inside; the August heat and humidity were stifling and a light rain was beginning to fall, a presage of what was headed their way. As he approached the doorway, Nick looked up into the sky; in the brilliant light of the mercury-vapor lamps, raindrops magically appeared from the infinite darkness and streaked toward him like silver needles. Above the doorway was a sign in Latin: Mortui Vivis Praecipiant—“Let the Dead Teach the Living.”
Nick felt a tap on his shoulder. A voice behind him said, “A woman walks into a funeral home.”
Nick turned and found himself looking into the face of a very large man. The man looked directly into Nick’s eyes, rivaling his six-foot-three stature, but the man outweighed Nick by at least forty pounds.
“C’mon,” the man said. “A woman walks into a funeral home.”
Nick rolled his eyes. “Go ahead.”
“A woman walks into a funeral home. She tells the funeral director, ‘I want my husband buried in a blue suit.’ ‘What’s wrong with the black one he’s wearing?’ he asks. ‘No, it has to be blue,’ she says, and she hands him a blank check. “Whatever it costs,” she tells him. So, at the viewing, the husband is wearing a beautiful blue suit. ‘It’s perfect,’ the woman says. ‘How much did it cost?’ ‘Not a thing,’ the funeral director tells her. ‘After you left, a body came in wearing a blue suit. The man was exactly the same size and build as your husband, so—I switched heads.’”
Nick just stared.
“C’mon, Nick, that’s my newest joke.”
“I believe you, Jerry.”
The two men shook hands.
Jerry Kibbee was a member of Region V, the Great Lakes Region of DMORT. Jerry was a funeral director from Fort Wayne, Indiana, a town that Nick had visited once and vowed never to do so again. Kibbee’s Funeral Home served the good people of Ft. Wayne in all the conventional ways: selling caskets, ordering headstones, providing memorable floral arrangements, and coordinating with police over solemn funeral processions to local cemeteries. For his part, Jerry was a simple mortician with a two-year associate’s degree in mortuary science from a local community college. Beyond that, Jerry had no forensic expertise, a fact those new to DMORT might find surprising—but DMORT was founded by people just like Jerry. In the early 1980s, the National Funeral Directors Association assembled the components of the nation’s first portable morgue, and many funeral directors are still counted among its members. The simple reality is that people like Jerry will always be needed at DMORT; there’s always a place for those who are comfortable handling the dead.
Jerry’s weight was all in his torso. He wasn’t fat; he just had a barrel-shaped trunk that overshadowed the rest of his body. His arms, by contrast, were slender, and his legs even more so—like a marshmallow on toothpicks, Nick always said. His face was wide and friendly, and his cheeks were always rosy regardless of temperature or season, giving him a look of constant energy and health—and making him look, Nick thought, like a poster boy for the embalmer’s art.
“Didn’t know if I’d see you for this one,” Nick said.
“You kidding? Wouldn’t miss it for the world. They’ve activated all ten regions this time, did you hear that? They say it’s the first time; they only activated seven after 9/11. Everybody’s here, or over in Gulfport. That’s where they set up the other DPMU.”
“What is this for us, Jerry? Five? Six?”
“Beats me. Are you counting the Houston flood in 2004?”
In fact, it was the seventh time the two men had been deployed together, beginning with the Oklahoma City bombing in April of ’95—DMORT’s first major duty. Like Nick, Jerry often volunteered to deploy with other regional teams to shorten the downtime between assignments. In the past, half of DMORT’s deployments had been in response to major transportation accidents, like the Flight 801 tragedy in Guam or the crash of Flight 587 in the New York borough of Queens. Each assignment posed its own challenges, but everyone knew that New Orleans would be unique—and everyone wanted to be there.
Nick and Jerry had become close friends over the years, perhaps bound together by each man’s own “uniqueness”—Jerry because he was a simple mortician among forensic specialists, and Nick because he was a forensic entomologist: a scientific discipline that even some in DMORT found bizarre. Nick never saw Jerry apart from these deployments, but that’s how DMORT worked. They were like a family, gathering only for special occasions but picking up right where they’d left off when they did.
In the doorway the two men anticipated a rush of cooler air, but they were both disappointed; the portable air-conditioning units had not yet been installed. The sounds of frenzied construction were everywhere, even at midnight.
“Heard any more about the storm?” Jerry asked.
“I listened to the radio on the way down,” Nick said. “Not much new. Katrina keeps picking up steam; they declared it a category 5 this morning.”
“Wow. She’s a big girl now.”
“No kidding. Sustained winds of 175 miles per hour and gusts up to 215.”
“That’s hard to imagine.”
“That’s the problem—nobody knows what to expect.”
“Is she still headed for New Orleans?”
“The National Hurricane Center’s sticking to its original prediction: landfall at 6:00 a.m. this morning near some town called Buras-Triumph—about sixty-five miles southeast of the city.”
The two men continued to exchange the miscellaneous bits of information that each had been able to collect in transit. The Louisiana governor, Kathleen Blanco, had declared a state of emergency on Friday afternoon; in response, President Bush had declared a federal state of emergency the following day, triggering the activation of DMORT. Jerry said that the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, had refused to order a mandatory evacuation of the city until just the day before; he had planned instead to stick to his city’s preexisting emergency evacuation plan. Nick replied that no preexisting emergency plan had ever anticipated a storm of this size or magnitude, and no one knew what would happen when it actually hit. Only residents of the parishes closest to the Gulf had actually been ordered to evacuate, and even then there was no one to enforce the order, so many had stayed behind. In the city itself untold thousands more remained, reluctant to leave their houses or pets or possessions, unwilling to believe that this storm would be any different from the last—or unable to comprehend the potential destructive power of the fourth-largest hurricane in recorded history.
On the radio, political pundits and talk-show hosts had delighted in unearthing the latest dark secrets about the city and its vulnerabilities: New Orleans, they said, is one of the poorest and most violent cities in America; 28 percent of the city’s residents live below the poverty line, more than twice the national average; most of the poor are black, living in the most crowded and lowest-lying neighborhoods; more than half of the elderly have disabilities, making it difficult—if not impossible—for them to flee the city.
And most ominous of all: The city of New Orleans, situated on a narrow bridge of alluvial silt between a river and a massive lake, is the lowest point in the United States besides Death Valley.
The two men finally reached the warehouse and stepped out of the misty rain. The building itself was an abandoned rubber-storage warehouse, but it was rapidly being converted to house DMORT’s Disaster Portable Morgue Unit—the DPMU, as it was commonly known. The DPMU was a marvel of portable medical engineering, a complete and transportable morgue-in-a-box. FEMA maintains two of these units in constant readiness at
its logistics centers in Rockville, Maryland, and San Jose, California. Each DPMU contains more than ten thousand individual items, from scalpels and forceps to autopsy tables and full-body X-ray machines. It also includes computers, fax machines, and state-of-the-art communications equipment, everything necessary to carry out the business of dealing with the dead—in very large numbers.
The concrete floor was covered with a heavy-gauge black polyethylene sheet to help insulate against the dampness and to facilitate the process of repeated decontamination. Nick stepped onto the plastic and felt his wet soles slide just a little and then catch, the way they would on snow-covered ice.
With everyone finally inside the building, the commander called out, “My name is Denny Behringer. I’m the DMORT commander here at St. Gabriel, and I’d like to welcome you all to beautiful Louisiana—the Pelican State, in case this is your first time here. Before we go any further, are there any members of the press present? I want to reiterate what I said outside: This DPMU will be closed to both the press and the public. At DMORT we do everything we can to treat victims and their families with the utmost dignity and respect. Please understand: This is not about secrecy; it’s about privacy. I want you all to take a look at the person standing beside you; if you don’t recognize him or her, ask to see an ID.”
Denny waited. Apparently there were no infiltrators in the group.
“I know it’s late,” he continued, “and I know you’ve all had a very long day already, so I won’t keep you any longer than I have to. I want to give you a quick tour of the DPMU, just to make you all familiar with our basic function and layout. If this is not your first deployment, please be patient—our newcomers need to hear this. After the tour, we’ll hold a quick incident briefing. I know you’re all just dying to sit through a meeting right about now, but hey, what can I say? You’re federal employees now.”
The last remark garnered a laugh from almost everyone. When a DMORT team is activated, its members become temporary employees of the federal government, with all the accompanying rights and privileges—including a mountain of required paperwork and a substantial reduction in pay. Some members of Nick’s DMORT team were highly paid professionals back home—physicians and dentists among them—and volunteering with DMORT involved considerable financial sacrifice.