The tarp crinkled under the HAZMAT team’s boots as the blue vinyl bags were hoisted by straps at either end and loaded aboard their appointed truck with all solemnity.
Eph said, “There should be flies.” The work lights set up around the hangar showed that the air above the corpses was clear but for a lazy moth or two. “Why aren’t there any flies?”
After death, the bacteria along the digestive tract that, in life, cohabitated symbiotically with the healthy human host, begins to fend for itself. It starts feeding on the intestines, eventually eating its way through the abdominal cavity and consuming the organs. Flies can detect the putrid off-gassing from a decomposing carcass as far as one mile away.
Two hundred and six meals were set out here. The hangar should have been buzzing with pests.
Eph started across the tarp toward where a pair of HAZMAT officers was sealing another crash bag. “Hold on,” he said to them. They straightened and stepped back as Eph knelt and unzipped the seam, exposing the corpse inside.
It was the young girl who had died holding her mother’s hand. Eph had memorized her body’s location on the floor without realizing it. You always remember the children.
Her blond hair lay flat, a smiling sun pendant hanging from a black cord rested against the pit of her throat. Her white dress made her look almost bridelike.
The officers moved on to seal and take the next bag. Nora came up behind Eph, watching him. With his gloved hands, he grasped the girl gently by the sides of her head, rotating it on her neck.
Rigor mortis fully sets in about twelve hours after death, holding for twelve to twenty-four more hours—they were in that middle range now—until the fixed calcium bonds inside the muscles break down again and the body returns to flexibility.
“Still flexible,” said Eph. “No rigor.”
He grasped her shoulder and hip and rolled the girl over onto her front. He unbuttoned the back of her dress, revealing the flesh of her lower back, the small bulbous nodes of her spine. Her skin was pallid and lightly freckled.
After the heart stops, blood pools inside the circulatory system. The capillary walls, being just one cell thick, soon succumb to the pressure, bursting and spilling blood into the surrounding tissues. This blood settles in the lowest, “dependent” side of the body, and coagulates quickly. Lividity is said to become fixed after about sixteen hours.
They were beyond that time limit now.
From expiring in a seated position, and then being laid out flat, the pooled, thickened blood should have rendered the skin along her lower back a deep, dark purple.
Eph looked out over the rows of bags. “Why aren’t these bodies decomposing as they should?”
Eph eased the girl back flat again, then thumbed open her right eye with a practiced hand. Her cornea was clouded, as it should have been, and the sclera, the opaque white protective layer, was suitably dry. He examined the fingertips of her right hand—the one that had been tucked into her mother’s—and found them slightly wrinkled, due to evaporation, as they should have been.