The APOCs Virus by Alex Myers Read Free Book Online Page B

turned and beckoned her closer with a wave of his hand; it was a gesture that he made with a stiffened arm by simply moving his wrist.  As she neared, the sight became worse.  The corpse's fingers were flattened and strangely large.  The nails protruded from the surrounding skin and were the color of sweet potatoes.  The former smell of antiseptic was replaced with the pungent penetrating aroma of formaldehyde preservative.  The odor attacked her nostrils.  The sickly sweet and sour odor of decaying, rotting flesh radiated from the bodies. 
    The head, thorax and abdomen of each corpse had been violently violated.  Rigor mortis had set in hard.  The assistant moved the bodies with a series of pushes and pulls.  No matter how assiduously the man tried to move them, they kept assuming their original positions.  Puck had his back to Ava as he attached the blade on the handheld saw.  When the assistant was finally satisfied with the positions, he placed a tray of tools on the chest of the nearest carcass. 
    "What you see here, Miss Porter, are four very different specimens."  Puck said as he placed the saw on the tray and stood in front of her. 
    She noticed how he had used the word ‘specimens’ instead of a more humanistic term. 
    He continued with no emotion in his monotone voice.  "The first," he said pointing to the corpse on the right, "is an indigent brought into the Norfolk Morgue yesterday afternoon— succumbed to coronary thrombosis.”  The body of the old man, even after being washed, still looked filthy. 
      “The second," he moved to the right and stood in front of the next body, "died of complications experienced after an attack from a virus carrier."  Ava could see half - healed scar marks on the torso of the middle - aged woman.  "Yes, those are the wounds from the attack."  He said looking at Ava through his eyebrows. 
    "But they are almost healed.  How long after the attack did she die?" 
    "Three and a half hours," he said perfunctorily.  He moved to the next table. "This, Miss Porter is a carrier of the MDR - V6 Virus."  This was the first sign of emotion in him.  She saw a slight widening of the eyes and what Ava appeared to be a smile.  The body was that of a teenaged boy.  He was frozen into an unnatural position; the legs slightly askew from the torso, knees and feet together.  The face was welded with a look of agony.  The specimen had achieved perfect maturity, untouched by the ravages of age.  
    "I love working with this kind of raw material," Puck said.  “There's no excess fat to impede my scalpel slowing down my work.  The arteries are elastic, strong and muscular.  The lungs are clean and pliable, not tarnished by cigarette smoke or pollution.  There are no rampant abnormalities to have to explain.  Yes, working with this tissue is a real pleasure."
    "I'm sure the boy would be happy knowing he was such a big help," Ava said.
    Ignoring her statement Puck said, "And this is what killed him."  He pointed to a gaping, purplish hole just below the boy's sternum.  He then moved to the last table. 
    "And lastly, we have what we theorize to be a virus victim, a minimum week to ten days advanced."  There were immense differences between the body of the boy and that of the fourth.  They differed in more than just size too. The man, Ava guessed him to be somewhere in his thirties, was at least six foot five and weighed close to three hundred pounds.  The neck had been nearly severed. The head was attached to the body by thin pieces of skin and the spinal cord and   was tilted backward as if at the moment of death the cadaver had been watching a plane fly overhead.  Its gums were pulled back from the teeth and the incisors looked incredibly oversized and malevolent.  To say that the prone figure had anything approaching human skin would have been a gross misstatement.  It was too dark, too deviant a brown.  The texture looked scaly. 
    "Now it's time to get