The medical team had now managed to bring Max’s high temperature back under control. What they had assumed to be infection was in fact a massive reaction by his body to repair itself. The stem cells had been working overtime, but as this level of regeneration was totally unnatural, it had resulted in the elevated temperature. Left unchecked, it would have been fatal.
As consciousness returned, Max realized he was in hospital, but under guard. Feigning his unconscious state, he tried to formulate some escape plan whilst his body regained its strength.
Overhearing snippets of conversation, he knew he must escape as soon as he was well enough, before the CIA could take him into custody. But how could he slip out of the side ward with the guard on duty, then walk out of the building, and get home to Italy?
If only Carla was here, he longed to hold her again, to see her cheeky grin, and hear her chuckle at some mischief she had planned!
Just then, Max was distracted from his thoughts of escape by a male voice whispering repeatedly in his ear, and grasping his limp hand.
“Max! Max! Listen carefully. Squeeze my hand gently if you can hear me, but make no other sign that you are conscious.”
He lay still and considered the implications of response; the voice repeated the request.
Max decided to take a chance, he squeezed for a second or two and relaxed.
The voice said, “I must go now, but will return and speak to you again.” He left the room to report back to Sam Leighton.
***
As Max thought more about his situation, it dawned on him how vulnerable he was. On the one hand, the CIA wanted him for interrogation and on the other, The Organization would want him silenced. There was no way anyone would attempt to rescue him in his present weakened state.
Fear swept over him, his stomach contents turned to water, and he was about to double up with pain. There was no option; he could give no sign of being conscious, so he lay perfectly still and emptied his bowels in the bed.
The next nurse to check on him could tell from the smell what had happened, Max was starting to come out of his coma, and she reported it to the doctor. Minutes later, the patient had been cleaned up and the doctor commenced a series of tests; he knew that Max was feigning unconsciousness, but for some reason had decided to keep it to himself for the moment.
When someone holds your eyelid open whilst shining a torch into your eye, or touches the eyeball with a sterile swab, it is impossible for a conscious person not to respond with closing pupils, or a blink and a watering eye.
In that instant, Max knew he had practically no time left to mess around trying to come up with a plan.
***
There was no one else in the room as Max opened his eyes and peered around. He tried to raise himself up in the bed, but felt weak and dizzy. He flopped back to recover and think.
Laying there he visualized the whole room. There was a large window to his right, it had opening panels. To the left was a wall between the room and presumably a passage. The head height glazed panel and door allowed nursing staff to look in as they passed by. The two remaining walls in front and behind him were solid.
There was a bedside cabinet and a laundry cart on his left side and judging by the odor, his fouled bedding was in it. There was a pull around curtain for privacy, folded back against the wall.
Which floor level was he on? A look out the window would confirm that.
Again Max quietly and slowly raised himself up, fighting the dizziness and now nausea, as he slid off the bed.
He switched off the monitor and removed the connections to his body, no point in setting off the alarms.
At any moment a guard or passing nurse could see him standing, so he quickly made his way to the window. The room was well above ground level, probably on CIA instructions, to hamper any plans of escape or perhaps assassination.
Max opened the window wide as though he had climbed through, then shuffled his way back to the curtains. He looped the finger sensor cable over the curtain rail and knotted the two ends together, so he could hang from it.
To widen the furled curtain, he unhooked several adjacent curtain hooks in a series, so it lay against the wall, wide enough to cover him. Slipping behind the folds, tight to the wall, he eased himself up by standing on the bed, and slipped his arms through the cable loop, and passed it under his armpits. He stepped off the bed and dangled, pulling the curtain tight to him with his free arms. His feet were well above the hem of the curtain, so he was completely hidden.
Max hung there motionless, wondering how long it would be before someone noticed he was missing. The thin cable cut in painfully, as he hung by it and prayed this would work.
Moments later, there was a shout and people rushed into the room. First, they looked out the window and speculated he had walked along the narrow ledge. The CIA agent searched the room, looking under the bed, in the cabinet and then in the laundry cart.
He cursed fluently and profusely, as his frantic search through the soiled sheets left Max’s fecal matter smeared over his hands and suit. He tentatively brushed at the curtain with his arm, not wanting to soil it with his fouled hands, and was satisfied it was not a viable hiding place.
Everyone in the room concluded the patient had obviously escaped through the window, so they left, apart from the agent washing his hands and attempting to wipe his suit. Finally, he closed the window and locked the door as he left.
Max dropped to the floor and worked his arms to revive them. He still had to escape, and now he must get out of sight quickly.
Very carefully he climbed into the laundry cart, arranging the soiled sheets uppermost and exposed, hoping it might deter someone else from searching in there.
Minutes later the recently fouled agent returned with more CIA agents, and as they discussed options, someone else wheeled out the laundry.
From the casual pace of the trolley and the passing voices, Max assumed he was on his way to the laundry. What would happen then? Would he be left alone in a queue of carts, or dumped down a chute, or be discovered when someone pulled the sheets off him?
He now entered a lift and descended a floor, someone got out of the lift, and it continued down.
“Well, you got out then!”
Max recognized the voice of the man who had whispered to him earlier, at his bedside.
“I must admit, I had not come up with a way of getting you out. I have informed Sam Leighton you are conscious, and once you get out of the building, we will get you home. I am taking you down to the morgue.
“A funeral home will collect you at 9am tomorrow from fridge D1, be in it before then. I will switch off that unit, so you should not get too cold.
“The funeral home are not part of the escape plan, so when I leave you in the passage, you are on your own. I have a family; this is some serious shit you are in, and I don’t mean the fouled sheet, so I don’t intend to get involved any more than this.
Ding, the lift stopped.
“The coffin will be searched! The body you will be replacing, will be taken to one of our infamous drug lords,” the lift door opened and the trolley wheeled out and stopped “to lie in state,” the voice added. “Don’t get caught there, it would not be pleasant!”
The voice walked away.
Max listened carefully, his body tensed with the fear of imminent discovery. He heard a swing door open and footsteps approached. There was a rustling sound and he only just held back a scream of panic, as something heavy and soft fell in on him!
After leaving Max alone, the voice called Sam and updated him on the escape so far. Sam then called Carla and explained, warning her that the difficult bit was yet to follow, so not to get her hopes up.
She knew Max was surprisingly resourceful, but could not imagine how he would pass himself off as an autopsied corpse, to trained CIA agents or indeed to the loved one who would view the body in state.
According to the voice, the hospital was locked down tighter than a crab’s ass, when the tide comes in.
***
The final autopsy for the day was completed; the last person to leave was the technician who had dumped his scrubs in the laundry cart, putting the fear of God into Max.
The man was eager to get home to his family; he would be back at 8am the following day, to box up and ship out the murder victim of the local drug lord.
All was quiet again. Max peered out from the depths of the laundry trolley and looked around. He was outside the morgue on the ground floor, and there was no one nearby. Judging by the time, the staff had left for the day and all he had to do now, was slip into the fridge unit D1 and hide there until the morning.
He tried the exit doors to the outside world; they were solid and locked, so no way of slipping out through them.
Max began to shiver, his teeth chattered noisily and uncontrollably: fear, adrenalin and standing naked, on the smooth tiled floor in this air-conditioned room at 5°c, was the reason. He needed to find some clothes and try to keep warm somewhere, but no chance of that in here.
Looking around, Max saw the rows of fridge units, D1 in particular. He reached up to open the small door, and eased out the sliding cradle. The chamber was not empty, which surprised and shocked him somewhat; it was something he had not considered. The focus on escape and the tension when hiding, had occupied his every thought until now.
Yes, he had got out of the nice warm side room and given the CIA the slip, so far, but in reality he was no closer to freedom. He imagined the agents would have had a secure perimeter around the building from the start. Everything in and especially out of the hospital would be carefully checked. They would easily spot an unfamiliar, probably still naked, adult male.
At this very moment, the agents were systematically working their way through every room, cupboard and duct, searching for him. It was just a matter of time before they reached the morgue, and time was all on their side.
Max pulled back the sheet covering the head of the body. The corpse was a girl in her mid-twenties, no doubt of Guadeloupian origin and in spite or her facial injuries, was a beauty.
***
It now dawned on Max that escape was impossible. The voice said he had to be in the coffin for collection that morning, and they would check the corpse. There was no way of passing himself off as a dead woman, either to the CIA, the attendant who put the body in storage, or the relative receiving the body.
There had to be another way!
By now, agents would have searched the roof and top floor. Agents on each floor, including the ground floor where he was, would be checking every movement past them, as their net tightened.
All his options were on this floor, so he left the morgue and put on the technician’s cast off autopsy gear. Apart from the lift, a few large storage rooms, the passage and toilets, there was nowhere to go. An agent was guarding the only access point to the area.
Max looked at the ventilation ducting and drain access, these were all physically too small to get into and would be examined anyway.
Back in the morgue, he looked in the long-term storage freezer and bio waste storeroom. The long term bodies hung in clear but frosted up bags, easily checked; not that it was a real option because in there, he would freeze to death within minutes.
The waste drums were just large enough to hold three heads, not a whole body. It reminded him of the daft joke one of his clients told him years ago.
A prisoner had to have a series of major amputations over several months and the governor called the prisoner into his office. The governor said, I know what you are up to, first you have your leg off, then your other leg, then your arm.
You are trying to escape, bit by bit, aren’t you!
At that very moment, Max knew the way out!
***
Max eased the dead girl out of the chamber and carried the flaccid body to the mortuary table, laying it face down. She had a tall, almost statuesque physique, not much body fat either.
Opening up the various cabinets, he selected certain tools and instruments and laid them out on a spare work trolley. He did not want to disturb the carefully laid out sets on the stainless steel table; it would arouse suspicion if he replaced anything out of order. He pushed everything away from the autopsy area, apart from his tool trolley and several bio waste drums from the store.
Max visualized Professor Gunther von Hagens’ TV documentary, where he removed a man’s skin in one piece, leaving it dangling like a misshapen diving suit. If that could be done whilst leaving the body intact, it could surely be done by cutting out and removing all the pieces!
Max proceeded to unpick most of the sutures holding the skullcap in place. The brain slithered out of the skull like congealed blancmange, into a waste drum.
He peeled the skin back from the lower skull, folding the skin over itself like a sleeve cuff. Careful cutting close to the bone ensured that the features and other connections attached to the skeleton, left the outward appearance of the skin undamaged. By now, the forehead had turned inside out, around the neck.
Max made a vertical incision along the spine from mid shoulder to lower mid back, and proceeded to sever the spinal column at the base of the neck so, eventually, he could extract the whole head. He replaced the sutures, re-joining the skin cap to the lower head using the original needle puncture marks.
The remaining thoracic skeleton and spine were broken up using a tool like a bolt cutter, and taken out, along with the lungs, heart and intestine, and dumped in the rapidly filling waste drums. Max left the ribs in place for the moment, to avoid the body caving in, affecting his cutting decisions, and becoming even more difficult to handle.
The pelvis was a real struggle, the substantial bone was difficult to cut into, and the risk of the power saw slipping and chewing through the skin was a challenge. Eventually, with great difficulty, the skin was peeled off the pelvic area.
Max decided to suture up the inside of the anus and vagina, so it looked more normal externally. Also, it might give the game away if the entrails or body fluids were to ooze through.
The arms and legs were the greatest challenge. They were surprisingly heavy, and by now Max was quite exhausted. As he worked, the limbs slithered uncontrollably over the bloodied table, and with nothing to hold them in place except this increasingly large bag of skin, he was close to giving up.
Starting on the legs, Max pulled them up into the body cavity, with the skin peeling away like pulling a leg out of a stocking. The foot was the new challenge, he did not want to slit the skin at the slender ankle if he could help it, a cut or sutures there would be questionable. He eventually eased the foot out.
The second leg was more manageable, now he knew what to do.
The arms were relatively easy and dealt with in the same way as the legs, but the hands needed a lot of care, especially keeping the fingernails intact.
Finally, he removed the ribs, leaving the breast tissue in place for obvious visual effect.
Only about three hours to go, before the funeral home came to collect the corpse; Max was unaware the morgue opened at 8am.
He decided to wash the skin, the table and floor, and pack away the waste drums, in the store.
Although the drained corpse did not bleed like a living person, there was blood spatter over the immediate work area. All these surfaces had to be clean and dry before staff returned.
***
After ditching the technician’s scrubs, Max proceeded to climb into the girl’s skin. As the largest organ of the body, Max should not have been surprised at how heavy it was; a one-piece wet suit seemed like just a featherweight in comparison.
Try as he might, he could not push his head up past the neck; the skin would not stretch enough. The smell of the juicy flesh, and the suffocating feel as it sealed tightly to his face and nose made him retch, but he controlled it. He pulled his head out, then cut a vertical slit into the back of the neck and put in some long, slack sutures so he could draw it closed later, like boot laces.
The legs were a nightmare. As his feet slid down inside the tube of skin, the air trapped in the lower leg farted its way up to freedom. The ankle problem was eased considerably though, because as he stood down to drive his foot past the ankle skin, the air rushing up to escape tended to lubricate its passage through.
Max was sweating profusely with the effort, and the girl’s cold, clammy skin prevented his body’s normal cooling mechanism from working.
At this point, Max decided to tie the neck sutures and then attempt to suture the back opening, so the body had some female curves. The skin to the ribs and waist bagged out at the sides.
He put the sutures in with the tie-off at the waist. Hopefully he would still have enough feeling, through his skin covered fingers, to tighten and tie off the filament.
The arms were a repeat of the legs, but the fingers were extremely tricky. The girl had long slender fingers, but his were fatter and shorter. Fortunately, the suction of trapped air kept everything in place.
The skin clung to his body quite snugly, but it flapped and made farting noises as he moved. The eyelids would not fully lift and that made the final tidy up frustrating and difficult.
With the final sutures in place and tied off, the excess was cut away and binned. A final wipe round, and everything was it should be.
It was getting rather late now to examine the handiwork, but a visit to the toilet showed that Max was all girl. A good-looking girl at that, now he had smoothed back her wet hair and adjusted the skin over his bone structure.
Her breasts were generous and firm, and her cute, but rather pronounced pubic mound would raise more than a smile with most men.
The girl’s mouth had a tendency to hang open as the skin fell away from his jaw, but by biting lightly into the surface skin inside her lower lip, he could keep it in place perfectly.
Although the girl’s ears did not align with Max’s, hearing was not a problem.
Just as he exited the toilet, a door in the corridor banged shut, and he heard voices.
***
Max glided as quickly as he could to the D1 chamber, climbed onto the cradle, flicked the sheet over himself, and slid in. Closing the door fully after him was not possible; it would not slam shut, but stayed just off the latch. There was no handle or lock access inside, which was hardly surprising, no one would need it.
Max breathed deeply to oxygenate his system, in case he had to hold his breath, then settled into position.
Footsteps approached, the door to chamber D1 slammed shut and moments later, the refrigeration motor started up. After that, nothing else was audible to Max, the voice had popped in to make sure all was as it should be, before the technician arrived in a few minutes’ time.
The temperature dropped extremely quickly as the metal lining to the chamber was cooled by the refrigerator. Initially it was just freezing air through his nostrils, but soon the cold penetrated the girl’s skin, making him shiver violently. If someone opened up now, a shivering corpse would be a dead giveaway.
The technician was late arriving and rushed about getting the paperwork in order. He called to remind someone that the girl was to be collected at 9am and could the CIA be on time to check out everything.
With his teeth chattering like a demented typewriter, Max could no longer hold the lower lip in place. Fortunately, the dead skin was so cold and stiff, it stuck there.
Max began running through the various scenarios in his mind.
At some stage, someone would open the fridge door, slide out the cradle and pull the sheet away, to remove the body from the chamber. They would inspect it to confirm it was the right corpse. He had remembered to refit the toe tag, so that was fine; but right at the last moment he had to pull the girl’s eyelids down over his.
The shivering had subsided, and so had his breathing. He would have to hold his breath for a long time while being moved around, there must be no rising and falling of the chest, not even under the sheet.
What about when they needed to handle the body?
As rigor mortise had long passed for this corpse, he must be totally limp, like the girl had been when he lifted her from the chamber.
Easier said than done, he thought.
The door opened, and light faintly penetrated to his retinas. His first reaction was to tense, he was scared stiff, but he overcame the impulse. The technician saw the sheet twitch, but assumed it was just air movement from the opening door.
The trolley slid out, and the body was lifted onto a table somewhere else in the room. Obviously there is someone else here as well, Max presumed.
The morgue door opened, and the two CIA agents walked over to the corpse.
“Is this the body for collection at 9am?” one asked.
“Yes,” the technician responded, “here are the papers. She is going to lie in state at her husband’s home; he is our friendly drug lord you know. But everyone knows he murdered her for sleeping with someone who works for him; he hit her too hard, so now he will probably never know who she slept with.”
“You know all this as fact?” questioned the other agent.
“Fact no, but everyone knows that’s what happened, he got away with it because of a bought alibi.”
“Let’s get this over with,” reminded the first agent, “none of this murder conspiracy is in our jurisdiction.”
The technician whipped off the sheet, but Max was expecting it and contained his urge to twitch at the sudden exposure.
The first agent confirmed, “the body is female, no doubt about that, and it looks similar to the photo taken at autopsy.” He flicked the sheet back and Max felt it settle around him. His breathing resumed at a very slow pace as the sound of footsteps retreated over to the storerooms, then the toilets and finally, out the main door.
Moments later, the technician unlocked the outer door; several minutes later a vehicle drove up and there was conversation.
As the new voices drew nearer, Max could hear what they were saying. Two men from the funeral home were speaking to the technician.
They carried in the coffin and kicked the support feet into place as they set it down, parallel to the corpse.
"So you're not taking the body back to work on it then?" queried the technician.
“No” replied one of the men, with a heavy accent. “He wants her just as she is, in this cheap casket as well. I hear he is still raving on about her cheating him, by dying before she told him who her lover was. I bet his plans for her are not pleasant.”
One of the undertakers pulled back the sheet. “She was beautiful wasn’t she; I wish my woman looked like that.”
“Into necrophilia are you,” the technician joked.
“No you fool, I meant, when she was alive. Looks like she was banged so hard for so long, her fanny is knocked all out of shape.”
“I never noticed that” the technician murmured, “come to think of it, I have never seen one protruding so far; I thought hers was more tucked away, like they are with wide hips. Still, they all feel the same in the dark,” as he walked away sniggering.
***
The two undertakers removed the coffin lid and carefully lifted the body into the coffin. Their care was not out of respect, but to avoid body fluids showering from any orifice, under pressure from the internal buildup of gas, as the bacteria decomposed the body.
Darkness again as the lid clunked shut, then a quick lift and a horizontal glide as the coffin slid over the rollers, into the hearse.
After two hours, Max was stifling inside the hot, almost airtight box and was busting for a piss. His mind switched to more pressing matters though, as the hearse stopped and the men carried the coffin into a room, to lie in state.
The drug lord’s lair!
The men left without a word, closing the doors as they left the room. A voice bellowed out an order in some foreign language, that Max assumed to be do not disturb me for any reason.
The drug lord pulled the lid off the coffin and tossed it aside. What was going to happen now?
The man was mad in every sense of the word. His pride was mortally wounded by her betrayal, and although you cannot hurt a corpse in any way, he might feel relief if he could abuse or humiliate her, at least in his eyes.
Max had heard of revenge shootings, where the perpetrator riddled the corpse with bullets, as though the victim were still alive. Slow painful wounds at first, followed by rounds and rounds of indiscriminate fire as rage took hold.
Out of the blue, there was a tirade of verbal abuse, the voice of the lunatic shouting louder and louder as his rage increased. He kicked out at the coffin support, at the foot end, and the coffin dropped violently at an angle of 45°.
Max could stand this no more, he was not going to lay there and be the passive recipient of a revenge attack. He opened his eyes as best he could under the girl’s lids, and the man stopped mid word. His whole body went ridged and his mouth gaped open.
The angle of the coffin was also too much for Max’s bladder; gravity overcame his ability to hold back, and he pissed himself. The steaming yellow liquid found the easiest way out, through the girl’s vagina.
The man continued to stare fixedly at the specter for a few seconds, and then began to recover his senses. All this could be explained he thought, the corpse had not actually got up and walked!
He drew breath and restarted his tirade.
Suddenly Max grabbed the sides of the flimsy coffin, to pull himself up into sitting position. The wood started to splinter and cave in, reminiscent of an old black and white horror movie.
Max was out now, and standing in front of the man, who had become speechless with terror. His blood drained away, and his eyes lost focus as a faint was imminent. As the man lost control of his bladder and bowels, Max recognized in him, the possibility of vagal inhibition of the heart. His heart had slowed almost to a stop; so Max had to act now.
He pressed his palms firmly against the major blood vessels of the man’s neck, effectively preventing circulation to the brain; this way, there would be no obvious bruising to the neck, and he slowly lowered the man to the ground. A minute later, there was no pulse, so he was dead and no longer a threat.
***
Looking around the room, he realized he was in the study, an impressive room by any standard.
Through the large windows, Max could see the open and well-manicured garden, surrounded by a tall, impenetrable thorn hedge. There was no one in sight; guards were probably patrolling the other side of the hedge.
Max appraised his situation as desperate. He had no idea where this house was or indeed what country he was in.
He knew the drug lord’s guards surrounded the place, even though he had not actually seen any yet.
For all he knew, the CIA might even be on their way here; they must have conducted a full search of the hospital by now, and concluded that he escaped in a visiting vehicle.
He was still in the girl’s skin, naked and with no resources like money or passport.
Assuming he could get away from the property, he still needed to clean up and find some clothes.
Where could he get money for food and shelter?
In which direction should he go; if he hitched a lift, where would he ask the driver to take him?
Max realized he was lurching from one crises to another, without solving anything.
Looking at the dead man on the floor, Max judged him to be of a similar height, but more heavily built. At least if he could shed the skin and clean up, he would look half-decent with the right choice of clothes. Perhaps he could find some money lying around the house.
Max searched the desk for a knife he could use, to slit the girl’s skin; he needed to get out of it quickly. He found one, plus a small handgun with a couple of ammo clips.
The computer screen was displaying a part of an email signed J Sterling and a list of financial transactions, although nothing stood out as noteworthy. He printed the file contents as documents in XPF format and emailed them to an address that had no links back to him. All the other files he tried were password protected, but he decided to send copies of everything that looked useful on the hard drive, to a web server prepared to accept exceptionally large files.
Max downloaded a free software application to handle the transmission of the files, and dragged them into it. This only took three minutes, but the upload to the server might take several hours, so he minimized the active application to hide it, and left it to get on with the task.
***
Max peered out through the keyhole of the door into the room, and seeing no one outside it, he opened the door and stepped out. A stifled scream came from h