Alternating beams of blue and red from the parked police car shaded the night between the uneven glow of smashed headlights. Rubber boot soles crunched across scattered glass as the officer paced, doing his best not to look too closely at the viscous, dark puddle slowly dripping down and growing beneath the driver's-side door of the blue sedan. The car was an absolute wreck; the front crumpled like an accordion, the hood and forward left tire scattered across the road along with indeterminate fragments of car that the sedan had shed in its violent spiral. The front of the eighteen-wheeler looked only marginally better, but that driver was seated on the curb, a hunched figure with hands clasped in front of a bowed head. In the flickering light it was impossible to tell if those hands shook, but the man's shoulders certainly did as he sobbed deeply.
The girl in the sedan was as much a mess as her car.
In the eerie quiet of the scene, punctuated by the truck driver's sobs and the static of the sedan's radio, an uneven, bubbling rasp was the only signal that the girl was still alive. Girl – or woman. The officer couldn't tell with her long dark hair matted with blood like a mask across her face, and her body stretched and sprawled across both front seats despite the safety belt that still clung uselessly to her legs. He had taken one look at the odd angles of her body and knew that if he touched her he would likely just do more damage.
Instead he waited, each drop of blood pooling on the asphalt driving his guilt deeper into his chest.
A sharp, mechanical wail cut through the silence, growing steadily louder. The officer paused his pacing to watch as the ambulance shuddered to a stop and the driver's door opened. A tall, lanky man emerged, hanging off the side of the truck for a moment as he measured the scene as best he could in the floodlights. He let out a low whistle.
"Quite tha' debris field ya got here," the paramedic said, his eyes still surveying the road. His mouth was covered with a surgical mask up to the bottom rim of his glasses, and a hat pulled low blocked any hair from escaping out. The police officer paused, not recognizing the full-sleeve uniform coverall the paramedic was wearing and unable to distinguish any details about the man's face. His eyes searched the side of the van but he didn't recognize the logo. A new company, he guessed.
"Well now, that's what happens in a head-on collision like this," he said, watching as the second paramedic emerged. This one was shorter and wider than the first by at least half a foot in either direction. "Hell, we're all lucky the truck only clipped the sedan's engine or there'd be no need for y'all at all," he finished.
"You call for the driver of the sedan, then?" The second paramedic asked as he spotted and dismissed the hunched figure of the truck driver with the same cold glance. Without waiting for the officer to respond, the paramedic moved with a light step over to the sedan and peered in through the ruined front door. Then, under his breath, "Shiieet."
The warm night air grew hotter as the officer flushed with shame at the condition of the woman he could do nothing for.
"I gave the details to the response team," the officer said to the pair's backsides as they both crouched before the ragged opening in the car. Then, like a switch had been flicked, the team burst into movement. The tall paramedic sprinted back to the ambulance to unload the stretcher while the short one hustled around the side of the sedan so that he could stabilize the woman's head and neck. In what felt like seconds they had her out of the car and moving to the ambulance.
The officer, feeling his uselessness in this moment, scraped his boot against the coarse glass that littered the asphalt as he moved out of their way. As they passed his eyes dropped to her face, which was still smeared with blood but now clear of hair. She was young, but definitely not the girl he'd first supposed from her slight frame. Maybe twenties at most. His throat clenched as she was whisked by, and he looked away, eyes landing on the now-vacant sedan. He squinted when he read the time on the large digital dashboard display.
"Now just how did y'all get here so quickly?" he asked, striding over to the back of the ambulance where the paramedics were preparing to hoist up the stretcher. The officer reached out and rested a hand on the cool metal edge of the ambulance's back door as they lifted. He winced when the stretcher jostled and the woman's body moved in that unsettlingly fluid way unconscious bodies do – as if she were a gelatin mold and not a person.
"By chance," the tall paramedic said, grunting as he managed the final push to get the stretcher inside. He grabbed the lip of his hat and tugged it down further before jumping up to help his partner secure the patient. "Shift's over. We were headed back to tha' station when we found this pretty picture on tha' way. Damn good thing we did, too. Just a lil' longer and this one'd be dead for sure."
The officer's eyes flicked to the woman's body, to the red stains spreading across the sheet beneath her.
"Damn good thing indeed," he admitted, looking away. He shifted his weight from foot to foot. "Which hospital?" he asked to fill the hole he felt growing in his throat.
"Forrester. Just down tha' way."
The officer furrowed his brow. He knew that hospital. They usually didn't contract with out-of-zone privatized emergency response, but this team certainly wasn't from the company assigned to this area.
As the stockier paramedic began to run vitals the tall one jumped back down to the road, reaching over the officer to try to close the back doors. The officer stiffened and his grip held firm.
"Hey now. What about him?" he said, hooking a thumb over his shoulder to the slumped truck driver.
The paramedic barely even looked in the other victim's direction.
"Nah, since we weren't on tha' call we'll let tha' next crew deal with 'im," the tall paramedic said.
Their met eyes briefly, the officer unable to read anything in the masked face.
"Listen," the paramedic said, the slight tightening of his eyes behind the glasses the only visible tell of his annoyance, "we gotta get moving. She's got a small survival window, so we can't wait for tha' on-call crew to get here."
As if to punctuate his point, a heart rate monitor shuttered to a start, publicizing the irregular beats of the woman's life. The weak, staccato rhythm seemed to protest the speed with which everything was moving.
The officer let his hand go limp and the doors slammed shut.
"Rest assured I'll follow up once we get everything else sorted," he called after the retreating back of the taller man. The paramedic gave him an impatient wave, like swatting a fly, before swinging himself up and into the driver's seat.
The engine roared and the ambulance moved away, taking some small fraction of the light with it. The police officer stared at the sedan with a pit in his stomach before turning his attention to the abandoned truck driver, who had fallen into that suspicious sort of quiet that spoke of shock.
In the ambulance, the driver watched the rearview mirror until the blue-red glow of the police car had faded into the blurred nighttime horizon. He flicked the sirens off and leaned back, resting his arm across the back of the empty passenger seat.
"So? We got one?" He asked over his shoulder, not letting his eyes off the road. There was a reason they called this stretch of the highway the Kill Switch, with its tight switchback corners, 65 mph speed limit, and head-on traffic. It was great fishing, but terrible driving.
"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.