Pearl

Chapter One: The Girl in the Sedan

"Yeah...It'll be close, but we got one," his partner's voice called from the back, distracted as he worked to preserve their catch. The driver pursed his lips and nodded. 

Once they were clear of the Switch, he tapped the small communicator nestled into his right ear. His ear buzzed with static, followed by an expectant silence.

"This is extraction team two, calling in. We have a rush order for a female car crash victim, headed to Forrester. Details to follow," he said. He flipped open the baby-blue leather wallet he had lifted from the passenger-side footwell of the sedan. 

The woman's face stared up at him from her driver's license. He began listing off specs, starting with the name, race, height. When he had exhausted the information from her ID, he tossed it onto the seat and knocked on the metal sliding door behind him. Immediately, his partner's voice picked up, cataloguing injuries, reporting visible dental work, looking her over for any visible markers of identity.

As his partner droned on, the driver checked the rearview mirror again. That cop had been awful nosy. He unhooked his surgical mask and rubbed his jaw. It was an old boxing injury, one that ached when he sensed trouble. At this point there was nothing left to do but put his faith in the corpse doctor to produce a convincing enough substitute. He scratched the stubble under his chin as he considered.

The ambulance hurtled through the night, winding through the dark highway and well beyond the city limits. The driver settled back and turned on the radio. Soft jazz floated out, covering just enough of the sounds of emergency medical care from the back to put him more at ease. They had miles to go, and he hated it when the patients squished.

                                                                                        ~Part II~

Faces flashed across the computer screen in rapid succession. Each was slack and tinged with purple, eyes propped open by pins to reveal the color of the cornea and rate of decay. On the matching screen beside it, a single steady face looked out from a cell phone picture. Next to it was a similar picture, with gloved fingers from off camera reaching over to pry the left eye open. 

The corpse doctor watched with equally unblinking eyes as the computer went through her library, cataloguing features and selecting the best match based on the information she had just received from the extraction team.

She chewed her lip, a nervous response that triggered when her mind was too focused elsewhere. Her fingernails, too, were chewed to the quick. It was the price she paid for the stress of being both a collector and a businesswoman. 

The computer screen went blank for a brief moment, before presenting three possible candidates with their faces and profiles listed in brief. Two, the corpse doctor dismissed immediately. The first, the shape of the head was wrong, too oval. The second, the body was noticeably bigger in the bust. The third...she squinted through thick bottle cap glasses. The body was a good match, height and weight within an acceptable margin of error from the goal. The facial features, however, were significantly different.

That's where she came in.

If she had more time, the corpse doctor could live up to her name. Death was a friend to those in her line of work. After all, even to a close loved one the discoloration and slackness of death could give a corpse the face of a stranger. With modified plastic surgery, she could craft a close enough mask that death covered the rest. 

But this was a rush order, which meant she had less than six hours to get the corpse prepared and delivered.

With a displeased tsk the corpse doctor memorized the call number and rose from her chair. She left her small dark office and her dual monitors behind, emerging instead into the painfully bright operating room. Tools and contraptions of all kinds lined the walls around a plain operating table, and the chrome instruments gave off a bright gleam that danced in her peripheral vision as she rushed by. 

Past the operating room lay her glory: rows upon rows of morgue-like enclaves, hosting her library and keeping the bodies in stasis, unable to decay any further than when she had first acquired them. She had bodies from all over the world, bodies of all shapes and sizes, procured and preserved by methods of her own design. Thousands of such compartments stretched before her, rising ten to the ceiling and many, many more across down the length of the huge holding cell and spread over twelve rows.

Without a call number it would be nearly impossible to find the right body. With no hesitation the corpse doctor strode down the second row, coming to a stop five columns in. She pressed a switch on the wall, which with a metal whirr activated and began to rotate the capsules until the one she wanted was within reach. She tapped the passcode into the keypad, swung open the small door, and pulled out the table on which the body lay.

She verified that the condition of the body was as recorded, and began to trolley it into the O.R. The list of injuries was long, so she'd need to replicate the damage and account for the facial disparity as quickly as possible to allow time for transport. 

It was a shame about the face, she thought as she set the body on the operating table and considered the array of tools – weapons, really – on the walls around her. This one had been much prettier than the subject it was to stand in for.

Although her specialty was gruesome, the corpse doctor considered herself a kind of artist. Her main skill lay in making post-mortem injuries look and feel like living wounds, and in this she was unparalleled in the country. It was with a displeased frown that she hefted her favorite blunt force trauma weapon, an oversized rod about the thickness of a steering wheel and wrapped in cellophane to prevent any particulates from transferring to the wound, and swung it towards the corpse. A crunch, followed by the pitter-patter of fluids spattering against her glasses and the floor.

Rush orders were always so messy.