Desertcrawler

11

He was taken into Zone 13. Face recognition said that he was Jake D’Souza, a citizen of Zone 13, of Locality 13. His legs were missing, there were only the femurs protruding out of the hips. His face was blooded and his beard and hair had turned golden, getting covered by the sand. The flesh of the thumb and forefinger of his left hand were missing too. How was the man alive? The doctors had no idea. He died, however, about an hour later. The coroner was called in, and the autopsy report was written. He found Gellenum traces beneath the man’s fingernails and traces of silica in his nostrils. They sent a photograph of the man to the Gellenum Reserve which was a few hundred kilometres away from them and confirmed that the man worked there. The coroner had cut open his abdomen too, for he found traces of human flesh stuck between his teeth. What the coroner saw almost made him throw up. The man’s abdomen was filled with human blood and flesh. After running DNA tests, the coroner confirmed that the flesh and the blood were the man’s own. Finishing up the report, the coroner sewed the man close and handed the corpse to Ramakant, the morgue attendant. 

Ramakant had been looking at the bizarre proceedings from a corner, as he almost always did, making sure that the coroner gets whatever he wanted during the examination. Had the body come before last week, Ramakant would have been scared as shit. As it happened, things have changed since last week. Before that EMP or something went off in the skies and killed their electronics, things had been better. Even during the war, Zone 13 had been a peaceful zone which saw no unnatural increase in dead bodies. But that EMP which, as he heard on one news channel, was supposed to kill only electronics and not human beings, had somehow annihilated entire Locality 12 and almost half of Locality 13. The EMP on its own did not cause it, as Ramakant came to know later, it was because the EMP had disabled an airbus and it collided with a skyscraper. The skyscraper tore apart on the collision and it fell on top of the Gellenum depot which was on the opposite side of the road. People had heard about Gellenum mine explosions before, but they hadn’t seen it burning before their eyes before. It burnt ten times more viciously than petrol and obliterated the entire Locality 13 within seconds. The firefighters, who went there to take control of the situation, were scorched to the bone. After the fire was controlled with air support, hundreds of unidentifiable and unclaimed bodies started to come in. It was when Ramakant faced terror. Old people, young men and women, and children of the age of his daughter came burnt and charred in hundreds. When the rescue team reached the epicentre of the fire, bodies without limbs and even without heads started to come in. Ramakant would never forget that day. He was sick of the burnt flesh smell and threw up that night in the staff washroom. Never in his half a dozen years of attending to dead bodies, had he ever been nauseated by any corpse, but that day… the smell of burnt human flesh had hit him harder than a truck on a highway. He had to call in sick for the next day. The day after that, the dead bodies had stopped coming. Ramakant was glad that it was over. But now, standing in front of the legless, two-limbed creature, he wondered if he had had enough. He had to take voluntary retirement. He would find something else, there’ll always be something else. But he had seen enough dead bodies for the images to last with him for a lifetime.

Ramakant lifted the corpse to move it to the stretcher and he was shocked by how light it was. It was as if that man was all bones and no flesh at all. He covered it with the white sheet and pushed the stretcher out of the room and through the hallways with his usual dead face, which the other attendants of the hospital dreaded. He swung the door to the mortuary open and brought the corpse in. But he halted there by the door. He looked around him, searching for an empty chamber to put the body in. But the mortuary chambers were all occupied by the recent inhabitants. He went from the beginning to the end of the unidentified section and there was no space left there. He then checked the section with the names. He hated this section. He could deal with a dead body pretty well, but a dead body with a name? It somehow made those corpses seem alive. It made Ramakant think about their lives which was the last thing he wanted to think about. He went searching and searching and then he found one. It was weird. One single chamber was left empty in the middle of all the occupied ones. Ramakant always made sure that the chambers were allotted systematically. How did he leave one empty chamber in the middle then? It must be that new boy, what was his name again? Ramakant forgot. He had joined just a month ago and was still making more mistakes than Ramakant liked to deal with. He shook his head in frustration and went to fetch the body. Before he put the corpse into the mortuary chamber, he wrote its name on the tag hanging from its hand and also wrote it on a blank placate with a removable marker to place it on the front of the chamber. He picked the body up, once again wondering how a human being can be that light, and placed it carefully in the chamber. He pushed the chamber close and put on the placate with his name. He looked at the names of the two chambers between which he lay. They shared the newbie’s surname. Somehow the right chamber had been left empty for that half-man. He stepped back and looked at the names once again and muttered under his breath, “Lily, Jake and Mary… Rest in peace, you guys,” and then he walked away.

Jake had, at last, came back to his family after three long years… in death.

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