“No skull fracture,” Luke says as I cut through ribs, removing the breastplate, exposing the thoracic organs, and the putrid odor blooms up our nostrils like a dark deadly flower.

Mahant’s face shield isn’t going to save him, and I watch as he turns a tint of grayish green. Luke lifts the bloc of organs out of the chest cavity and sets it on a big cutting board with a wet heavy sound.

“Is something wrong with the air in here?” Mahant has inched back from the table, and he’s staring at me without blinking.

“Too cold? Too hot?” Anne innocently inquires.

“I mean the ventilation.” He swallows hard.

“It could be worse. We had a floater in here the other day.” She looks at me as I snip open the stomach with surgical scissors. “In fact that’s when the ventilation didn’t seem to be working all that well.”

“It’s the heat wave,” Luke says.

“How would that affect the ventilation?”

“It affects everything.”

“You can imagine how hard our air-handling system has to work in this weather.” I dribble the gastric contents into a plastic carton, and I’m surprised to find undigested peanuts and raisins.

“Obviously she had a snack not long before she died,” I show Mahant the palm of my glove as he backs up another several inches.

“Maybe a trail mix or something like that?” Anne suggests as I snip through the connective tissue of the bowels, dropping sections into a plastic bucket on the floor while Luke removes a kidney from the scale.

“You might want to find out about that,” I say to Mahant as Luke begins sectioning the kidney and Harold makes an incision around the top of the skull.

Then Bryce walks in, and he couldn’t be more oblivious to what’s normal for him and for all of us.

“Taking breakfast orders,” he announces cheerily, and I resist looking at Anne, who clearly has gotten to him with her evil plan. “How many takers do we have for pizza?”

“Jesus,” Mahant stares wide-eyed at him, and Harold pulls the body’s face down like a collapsed rubber mask so he can access the top of the skull, gleaming white and round like an egg.

“Meat or veggie?” Bryce asks as Harold plugs the Stryker saw into an overhead cord reel. “And we have gluten-free.” Bryce raises his voice over the loud whining of the oscillating blade cutting through bone. “But nothing glutton-free,” he can’t resist his favorite pun. “Because you can’t stop eating it,” he says.

Harold picks up a chisel to pop off the skullcap.