Chapter Text
Steve’s cell phone blared into the silence of his bedroom, waking him from a deep sleep. His head felt full of cotton as he numbly pressed the “accept” button.
“What?” he grumbled into the phone.
“Harrington.” Nancy’s sharp voice woke him right up. “Need you here ASAP. Motor vehicle collision, motorcycle on motorcycle.”
“Can’t it wait til normal hours?” Steve whined. None of the other pathologists would do this to him.
Nancy sighed. He could feel the disappointment coming out through the speakers. “It can’t. You know we’ve got a full day today, with the burn victims from that house fire. You come in, we knock these out before the day even starts, and we won’t have to stay late.”
Steve hated being the on-call autopsy assistant. He didn’t mind his job during the day, even though most people thought it was morbid. It was nice to work with his hands all day, and to feel like he was helping get closure for some families and loved ones along the way. He got used to the smells after a while, and the sight of gore had never bothered him. But getting woken up in the early hours of the morning and called in? That was sometimes more than he could take.
“Fine,” he said, knowing that Nancy called the shots here. He was paid to be on call; he couldn’t refuse to come in. “Be there in an hour.”
He hung up the phone and glanced at the time. Four am. He sighed. She really couldn’t have waited just another two hours? He pulled himself out of bed, stumbling to the bathroom.
A lightning-quick ball of fur dashed down the hallway and wove itself between his legs, nearly tripping him.
“Seriously, Igor?” Steve groused, bending down to pick up the ginger cat with the pronounced hunch in its back. “You trying to kill me?” Igor had been a rescue, a kitten born with a congenital spinal deformity that had gotten him stuck in the bottom corner at the humane society open house. Steve, lover of all strays, especially the fucked up ones, had been drawn to him like catnip. The name had been too good to pass up.
Steve took a detour to the kitchen and opened a can of Fancy Feast for Igor, spooning it out into his bowl and stroking down his tortuous spine. Igor purred and arched his back, calling even more attention to the kyphosis.
He took a quick shower while his coffee brewed, and was out the door and on his way to the morgue in less than half an hour. He’d learned to speedrun his morning routine when needed.
The hospital was always peaceful in the early hours of the morning. There were enough people around to keep it from being creepy, but not so many as to be overwhelming, like it was during normal business hours. He passed the night shift security guard on his way in, flashing his badge and getting a nod, and made his way to the morgue.
Nancy was already there waiting, changed into her scrubs and tapping impatiently away at the computer.
“Steve. Finally.” She stood without further preamble, and made her way from the observation area into the morgue proper. Steve paused in the locker room to hastily throw on a pair of scrubs, then joined Nancy in donning PPE—the thick gown that covered his arms and reached down to his ankles, calf-length booties over his nasty morgue sneakers, nitrile gloves that reached to mid-forearm, a mask with attached eye-shield, and a surgical bonnet to cover his hair. He hadn’t always worn the bonnet, but after an unfortunate incident with the suction vacuum container and a whole lot of blood in his hair, he’d made the addition to his routine.
Nancy was bent over a clipboard, furiously scribbling down notes. The bodies were laid out on gurneys already, body bags unzipped to reveal the mess. Most of the other pathologists wouldn’t dream of doing the legwork to get the bodies out like that, but Nancy was nothing if not efficient. Steve helped her position the gurneys next to the autopsy tables, and together they shifted the bags over.
“I think we can do these external only,” Nancy said, pausing over the body of a man with long, curly brown hair. “Get the clothes off and take pics, grab me some urine and blood for tox, then we should be good. Pretty obvious what the causes of death were.”
Steve approached the man on the gurney Nancy wasn’t currently looming over. His head had unfortunately taken much more damage than the first man. Steve could see hanks of blonde hair matted with blood and bits of flesh. One brilliant blue eye seemed to watch him as he moved toward the man, but the other half of his face was a pulverized mess of blood, muscle, and bits of bone.
He snapped a series of photographs of the man with his clothes still on, then reached for the fabric scissors. He cut a skin-tight white tee off the man. He was fit. Even more than Steve, and Steve spent a fair bit of time at the gym. Well-defined pectoral and abdominal muscles stood out on his body. Steve worked the tatters of the shirt off of his arms, which were still relatively limp.
“When did these guys come in?” Steve asked, surprised at the lack of rigor.
“Right about when I called you,” Nancy replied as she documented the bloody mess of the other man’s abdomen.
Steve felt a surge of annoyance. Even if this did make it easier to get the clothes off of them, it made it even more unnecessary that he’d been rudely awakened at four in the morning. At the same time, the freshness of the bodies tickled something in the back of his mind. Dustin’s request from a few weeks ago, to let him know if Steve came across any freshly dead, previously healthy individuals. A weird fucking request, but then most things about Dustin were weird. He’d been a weird kid when Steve had babysat him, and he’d just gotten weirder as an adult since he’d started medical school.
Steve shook his head, and turned his attention back to the decedent. The jeans were harder to peel off the man. They were tight, but the fabric was thick enough that cutting through it with the scissors was going to be a bitch. Steve huffed and puffed as he wriggled the jeans down the man’s legs, revealing a lack of any underwear. That can’t have been comfortable.
Once the man was fully undressed, Steve went back over him with the camera, documenting all of his wounds. His head and face were the worst, the left side a complete mess, with bits of brain leaking out the side from where his skull had been cracked.
His left arm and torso were a mess of lacerations, worst on his lower arm where the shirt hadn’t covered. His right deltoid sported a tacky tattoo of a skull smoking a cigarette. Steve snapped a picture of it for possible identification purposes, though he’d glimpsed a driver’s license lying on the table of personal effects.
Steve grabbed a syringe and a specimen collection cup. He pressed over the man’s pelvis, feeling the bladder, then pushed the needle in through the skin to a point he’d become intimately familiar with over the years. He pulled the plunger back, drawing up dark yellow urine, then dispensed it into the cup. He pulled blood from the femoral veins, some from the left and some from the right, dispensing them into their own tubes. Once he was finished, he moved over to the dark-haired man.
“Done with that one?” Nancy asked, nodding over at the blonde man.
“Yeah,” Steve replied. She switched places with him, taking her clipboard over to the blond.
Steve went through a similar process with the second man. He had more tattoos than the first—a ghoulish head, a spider, some bats, a few other things Steve didn’t recognize. His injuries were concentrated on the right side of his body. His skull was largely intact with the exception of one crater over his right temple, bone and brain matter leaking out through the hole. His right leg must have been trapped under his motorcycle, because it was crushed to a pulp, the bones broken in multiple places. The bruising on his abdomen spoke to internal hemorrhage, and the blood loss from his leg certainly hadn’t helped.
He finished with the pictures and gathering the toxicology samples. He turned to Nancy. She was still scribbling furiously away on her clipboard, oblivious to anything other than the body in front of her. Steve cleared his throat.
“D’you need me to open them, or are we good?” Steve asked. If the pathologist determined that the cause of death was evident without a full autopsy, they could do an ‘external only’, examining the bodies without opening them. In motor vehicle collisions like this, with obvious fatal wounds and young decedents, as long as they could get tox samples without opening they could typically leave it at that.
Nancy looked over at Steve, taking a few moments to come back from wherever her brain had been focused. “No, no need to open. I have what I need.”
Steve breathed a sigh of relief. That would mean he had time to grab some coffee and breakfast before starting in on the burn victims.
It wasn’t until later that day, well into the afternoon, that Steve remembered Dustin’s strange request. He walked into the cooler to release a decedent to a funeral home, and his eyes fell on the two body bags from that morning. Still there in the cooler, not yet claimed.
“Anybody contact next of kin on the two MVA’s from today?” Steve asked Deirdre, the head clerk.
“Yeah, ‘course,” she said with a frown. “What, you think I’m not doing my job?” She was a decidedly unpleasant woman, constantly sure she’d been slighted.
“No, no, not at all. I know you’re great at your job.” Things worked best with Deirdre if you buttered her up. She softened visibly. “Just curious. They were young guys. They have families?”
She leaned toward her computer, clicked on something, then typed. “Sort of. Munson had an uncle, who’s opted for cremation. Hargrove had a dad. Looks like he also chose cremation. Both going straight to the funeral home, no open casket for those poor bastards.”
Steve thought about what Dustin had said. “Anybody young. Unclaimed. Or going straight for cremation.” He had no idea why he was even considering telling Dustin about this. He couldn’t be up to anything good with that sort of a request. But Steve had an unfortunate soft spot for the little twerp.
He thanked Deirdre, and wandered back down to the cooler. He checked the toe tags on both of the men. Same funeral home. What was the harm in just telling Dustin? The little shit probably wouldn’t even be able to do anything before they were cremated.
Steve finally decided to call him that evening as he was sitting down with Igor to watch a riveting re-run of Survivor.
“What’s up, Stevia?” Dustin never greeted him normally.
Steve sighed. “Well, now I don’t think I will tell you.”
“Aw, don’t be like that,” Dustin cajoled. “Nicknames are just my way of showing love.”
“Sure,” Steve said with a snort. He paused, stroking a finger down Igor’s misshapen back. “There’s two dead bodies that came in today. Young, previously healthy, like you asked. Slated for cremation tomorrow.”
Dustin’s voice sharpened, now fully intent on what Steve was saying. “You serious?” he asked. “They badly damaged?”
Steve shrugged, even though Dustin couldn’t see it. “Motorcycle accident, so yeah. Lot of injuries.”
“Brain intact?”
“Eh, half intact.”
“What does that mean?” Dustin snapped.
“Well, one of them is missing the left side of his head, and the other had some serious trauma to the right side of his head.”
Dustin hummed into the receiver. “I think I can work with that. What about the rest of their bodies?”
“Not great. As I said, they were both in a motorcycle accident.”
“Hmmm. I might have some things I can supplement with if needed.”
Steve’s eyes narrowed. That sounded ominous. “Dustin. What are you up to?”
“Something that could change the world,” Dustin said, his voice hushed and reverent.
“You say that, like, once a month,” Steve pointed out.
Dustin huffed. “Well, this time I mean it. What funeral home did they go to?”
“Smith and Hayes.”
“Oh, good,” Dustin said with a sigh of relief. “Frank works there. He can help me out.”
“Dustin.” Steve let his ‘mom’ voice out. “What the hell are you planning?”
“Nothing.” Dustin was a terrible liar. Steve could tell he was up to something that would get him into big trouble if anyone found out. He regretted telling Dustin about the bodies.
“I gotta go,” Dustin said. “Talk to you later, thanks man.”
Dustin hung up before Steve could press him further. Steve tried calling him back several times, but it went to voicemail. He sent an angry text warning Dustin to behave himself, then turned Survivor back on. There was nothing he could do if Dustin was going to ignore him.
Steve was awakened from a deep slumber by the sound of his ringing phone. He answered without even looking at who was calling.
“What?” he snapped. He expected another plea to come in early from Nancy, before he remembered that he wasn’t on call anymore. He had the day off tomorrow.
“Steve.” Dustin’s voice. He sounded panicked. “I really need your help.”
Steve glanced over at his alarm clock. It was two in the morning. “What the fuck, Dustin? It’s the middle of the night!”
“Yeah, but. I’ve got a situation here. You see, I didn’t quite think through the fact that I’m all brains and no brawn. And this particular project is going to require… a fair bit of brawn.”
“At two am?”
“It can’t exactly wait. I’ve got two dead bodies sitting on gurneys beside my car and I can’t lift them in.”
“You what?” Steve snapped, coming fully alert now.
“Look, if you don’t want me to end up in prison for body-snatching, can you please come to Smith and Hayes ASAP?”
“Why don’t you just wheel them back in?” Steve asked, unsure why he was attempting to reason with Dustin in this absurd situation.
“No can do. Frank already locked up, wouldn’t stay. I’m just supposed to leave the empty gurneys by the loading dock when I’m done.”
“But what are you doing with the bodies, man? What the fuck is going on?”
“Steve.” Dustin let out his long-suffering sigh, the one he used when he thought Steve was being particularly stupid. “I promise I will tell you everything eventually, but this is kind of an emergency. If someone drives by and sees me out here with two dead bodies, I’m toast.”
Steve groaned, but pushed himself out of bed. Dustin was basically his little brother, in every way that mattered. He couldn’t just leave him out there, even if Dustin had gotten himself into this mess. “Fine, fine. I’ll be there soon as I can.”
He only took the time to throw on yesterday’s clothes and take a piss before he stumbled out the door to his car. Thankfully, the funeral home was just a few minutes’ drive. He didn’t see anyone in the parking lot when he pulled in, and wondered if Dustin had just played another thoroughly annoying prank on him. If he had, Steve wasn’t talking to him for weeks. When he drove around the side of the building, though, he spotted Dustin’s hatchback parked near the loading dock. Dustin stood behind the open trunk, two gurneys topped with body bags positioned beside him.
“Steve!” Dustin cried when Steve spilled from his car. “Thank god. I was really starting to worry. Did you know how heavy dead bodies are?”
Steve snorted. “I am, in fact, very aware of how heavy they are, considering it’s part of my job to move them around.”
Dustin beamed at him. “Exactly why you’re the perfect person to help out here.”
Steve crossed his arms over his chest and leveled Dustin with a glare. “Just what, exactly, am I helping out with?”
Dustin glanced around nervously. “I promise I’ll tell you everything, but we’ve really gotta get out of here first. Help me load these up, then follow me to the old lab.”
Steve thought about putting his foot down and insisting on some information before helping, but Dustin looked like he was about to jump out of his skin. Steve sighed, and turned to the gurneys.
He made quick work of the transfer, while Dustin fluttered around him attempting to give him instructions but not actually helping with the lifting at all. Typical. Steve really considered telling Dustin he was on his own after the bodies were safely shut up in the car, but he was in too deep now. He had to figure out what the fuck Dustin was up to this time.
He followed Dustin’s car to the outskirts of town, where Hawkins Research Laboratory still stood abandoned. It was a huge building, and had once employed hundreds of people, but it had been shuttered for almost forty years. Vines grew over the facade, and trees had sprouted up where they shouldn’t be. Most of the windows on the first floor were broken; many of them had been boarded up back when someone still cared about this property, but the more recent broken windows had been left untouched.
The city council had talked about demolishing the building for years after the lab went bankrupt, but never found someone to buy the land. The council was unwilling to foot the bill for the demolition themselves, so they’d just left the building there to rot.
Steve regretted his decision to come with Dustin as soon as he stood behind the open trunk, staring at the bodies. “You’re gonna make me move them inside, aren’t you?” Steve asked.
Dustin ran a hand up and down in the air in front of his own body. “Well I certainly can’t do it. I’m the brains, you’re the brawn. I promise I’ll credit you on the eventual publication.”
“Please don’t,” Steve replied with a grimace. “I’d rather not go to prison.”
Dustin shrugged. “Your loss. This is gonna make me so famous. This is Nobel Prize shit, Steve.”
Steve rolled his eyes, and leaned into the trunk. He’d have to take them one at a time, fireman’s carry. He wished they’d brought the gurneys from the funeral home.
He dragged one of the bags to the edge of the trunk, squatted so he could lift with his legs, then hefted it up over his shoulder with a grunt. It must be the blonde man, it felt too heavy to be the stringbean brunette.
“That’s actually really impressive,” Dustin muttered, his eyes wide.
“Lead the way, then,” Steve said, gesturing to Dustin with his free hand. “This isn’t exactly comfortable.”
Dustin jumped into action, leading Steve around the side of the building. He paused beside a generator sitting near the building with a large extension cord running through a window-well, and pulled the cord to bring it to life. Then he continued around the building to where a glass door had been busted open. Dustin moved the plank of wood that covered the opening, and Steve shimmied in sideways with his cumbersome burden.
The inside of the building was in even worse condition than the exterior suggested. The floor was covered in dirt, leaves, and trash—chip bags, beer cans, even a few syringes. A raccoon skittered away from the beam of Dustin’s flashlight, chittering angrily at them. The walls were covered in graffiti and a suspicious-looking black substance that Steve suspected was mold.
“This way,” Dustin said, heading down a long corridor. Steve followed him into a twisting maze of hallways, deeper and deeper into the lab. The further they went into the building and away from the windows, the less detritus there was on the floor ahead of them. The graffiti became sparser, as well, as though people didn’t generally venture this far into the building.
Steve could understand why—the darkness around them was oppressive, barely disturbed by Dustin’s flashlight. All of Steve’s instincts told him to turn around and get out, but Dustin kept pressing forward. The small hairs on the back of Steve’s neck stood at attention. He couldn’t shake the feeling that they were being watched, but the sound of their breathing and footsteps was interrupted only by the occasional skittering of small animals. Steve hoped there was nothing rabid in here. He hated shots.
Dustin opened a heavy industrial door onto a set of stairs.
“Oh, I am absolutely not taking these bodies up any fucking stairs,” Steve snapped.
“Jeez, calm down, man. We’re just going down two flights. To the basement.”
“The basement?” Steve’s voice rose a few octaves. “Is this place not creepy enough for you on the main level?”
“Didn’t think you’d be such a scaredy-cat,” Dustin muttered, starting down the staircase. Steve let out a strangled cry of indignation, but followed him down.
Thankfully, they didn’t have far to go once they’d reached the basement. Dustin led Steve to a door just a few steps from the staircase. It let out a loud groan as Dustin shoved it open, and then something flew directly into Steve’s face.
He shrieked, jumping out of the way and waving his hands in front of him. The body dropped from his shoulder and slipped to the floor with a dull thud. Wings flapped, and Steve heard a high-pitched squeaking sound. His flailing hands brushed past a small, furry body, and then the thing was gone, leaving only Dustin’s flashlight shining in his face.
“Oh my god, relax,” Dustin said, barely getting the words out through his laughter. “It’s just a bat.” He glanced down at the body. “Hopefully you didn’t do any more damage to the body.”
“Fuck off,” Steve grumbled, squatting down to pick it up again. “Don’t see you helping with this part.”
Dustin continued to chuckle as he walked further into the room. He fiddled with something in a corner, and then two large floodlights clicked on, illuminating the room. It was cleaner than anywhere else in the lab. The floor had been swept and the walls cleared of mold. A large stainless steel table stood in the center of the room directly under one of the lights. Several pieces of unidentifiable machinery were arrayed around the table, as well as a tray full of all kinds of scalpels, saws, and suture.
“You can put him there,” Dustin said, motioning to the table.
Steve sighed in relief when he set down the body, rolling his shoulders and neck out.
“Alright, you go get the other one while I get started,” Dustin commanded.
“What? Hell, no! I can’t see a thing without the flashlight.”
“Couldn’t you, like, hold it in your mouth?” Dustin asked with that annoyingly innocent look on his face.
Steve put his hands on his hips and gave Dustin his best glare. “Absolutely not. If you want the second body down here, you’re lighting the way for me.”
Dustin sighed dramatically, but led Steve back up the stairs. No bats attacked him this time around, and the second body was much lighter. Once they had both bodies on the table, Steve grabbed Dustin by the shoulders before he could dive into whatever the hell he was about to do.
“What. The fuck. Are you doing?” Steve asked, punctuating each sentence with a little shake.
Dustin pushed at him. “Unhand me, you blockhead! I’ll tell you, you don’t have to shake it out of me.”
Steve let him go, but didn’t back up. Dustin wasn’t going to worm his way out of this.
Dustin turned to a corner of the room that was shrouded in shadow and called. “Mews! C’mere kitty!” He added a few psst psst noises on the end.
“Isn’t that your cat’s name?” Steve asked, wrinkling his nose. “The one that died a few weeks ago?” Had Dustin finally lost it?
The tinkle of a bell sounded as a small creature loped out of the shadows and into the light. It was a cat. An incredibly disheveled cat. The orange tabby was missing huge chunks of its fur, with large stitches sewn into it’s skin in the bald areas. There were a few patches of black fur and one area that looked almost calico. Most of its right ear was gone, and there was a large metal plate covering half of its skull.
“Astute observation, Steve. That is the name of my dead cat. And this,” he motioned to the cat with a flourish, “is my dead cat.”
Steve let out a nervous laugh. It did look a lot like Mews, but that was insane. “Good joke, Dustin. Is this another one of your weirdly realistic robotics experiments? Why’d you make it so fucked up?”
Dustin bent to pick up the cat, stroking it’s mangled fur. “Not a robot. This is Mews. The original. Touch him. He’s warm.” Dustin thrust the cat out toward Steve.
Steve reluctantly reached out a hand and pressed it to one of the bald spots. Dustin was right. It was warm. He could feel it purring, and breathing.
“So Mews didn’t die?” Steve asked. “You just decided to do some kind of experiment on him? Why’d you have to tell Claudia he died? She was devastated.” Dustin could be a dick sometimes in service of science, but that was pretty far even for him.
“Mews did die,” Dustin said with a wide grin that didn’t at all fit what he was saying. “He got hit by a truck. And then I brought him back to life.”
Steve’s mouth dropped open. “No.”
“Yes,” Dustin replied. He dropped Mews back on the ground, and the cat retreated to the corner. “I had to supplement with some tissue from a couple of other cats, but it worked. I’ve been working on this for years, ever since my first biology class in undergrad. Mews was my first mammalian success.”
“You’re fucking with me,” Steve insisted. “That’s just some other cat that looks like Mews.”
“It is not!” Dustin retorted with a stomp of his foot. “And I’ll prove it to you with my most impressive case yet. I’m going to bring these two,” he motioned to the two body bags, “back to life.”
Steve laughed again. “That’s not possible. They’re both missing really vital pieces. Like parts of their brains.”
Dustin shrugged. “Beggars can’t be choosers. There should be enough to combine usable parts into one body.”
Steve was beginning to realize that Dustin was serious about this. “Are you…” Steve tilted his head to the side and tried to put on his most sympathetic smile. “Are you doing okay, bud?”
Dustin sighed in annoyance and walked around Steve to the table. “I’m not crazy. This is actually going to work. And you’re going to assist.” Dustin unzipped the bags one by one, eyes roving over the corpses as Steve stood there in shock. Dustin poked and prodded at both men, then eventually nodded to himself. “I can work with these. Can you get them out of the bags?”
“Wh- no!” Steve yelled. “You need help Dustin! We need to call your mom.”
“Absolutely not,” Dustin replied, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Steve. Please. I know I haven’t always been the most level-headed individual, but I am serious about this. I just need a little help with the manual labor, and then I will prove to you that I can do this. Do you trust me?”
Steve stared at Dustin, and thought about it. Forced himself to really think about it. Dustin was actually kind of shit at pranks, and lacked any semblance of a poker face. If this was all some elaborate joke he was playing on Steve, there was no way he could’ve kept it together this long. That left two options—the stress of med school had triggered a psychotic break, or Dustin really could raise the dead. He owed it to Dustin to find out firsthand which it was.
“Alright, fine,” Steve said. “I’ll help.” Dustin whooped. “But on one condition,” Steve continued, talking over Dustin.
“Whatever you want, I’ll do anything!”
“If this completely flops, I’m taking you to the ER for an emergency psych eval.”
Dustin rolled his eyes. “Fine, fine, whatever.” He waved a hand like he was dispersing a bad smell, showing no sign of worry that the possibility may come to pass.
Steve nodded. He was all in now. “Okay, then, help me get these bodies out. You’re not getting out of the heavy lifting entirely.”
Dustin nearly made Steve regret forcing him to help, given the amount he whined as they shimmied the two bodies out of the bags, but finally they had both men out and prone on the table, side by side. Dustin looked them over in more detail, instructing Steve to help lift one or the other a few times, and then stepped back with a thoughtful look on his face. He nodded sharply to himself after pondering for a few moments.
“We’re gonna need to use the brown-haired dude’s head for the most part,” Dustin said, motioning to the body, “though we will need the right side of the blonde’s brain and a little of his skull, probably his right eye. The blonde guy’s abdomen is more intact, but his left leg is a mess, so we’ll take the other’s. We’ll need to open them both, though, to see which internal organs are salvageable.” Dustin turned to Steve with a toothy grin. “As luck would have it, you know a little something about opening up bodies.”
Steve groaned. “Dustin, please tell me you didn’t orchestrate this all fully knowing you’d ask me for my dissection help.”
“Unfortunately, I can’t tell you that.”
Steve rolled his eyes, and approached the table of tools Dustin had set out. Everything he needed for an autopsy was here, including an autopsy saw for opening the skulls. Steve didn’t want to know where Dustin had obtained all the supplies. He grabbed a scalpel, rolled up his sleeves and got to work.
Dustin had been right—the brown-haired man (Munson, Steve recalled) had sustained serious injuries to his torso. His spleen had lacerated and filled his abdominal cavity with blood. His pancreas had torn, and the spillage of enzymes had eaten into his liver, stomach, and kidneys, but the organs above his diaphragm were relatively intact. Hargrove’s abdomen was in better shape, the organs all intact, though opening his chest cavity revealed that his aorta had torn from his heart, and his lungs had been punctured in multiple places by ribs.
“Okay, I think here’s what we need to do,” Dustin said, rubbing a blood covered hand over his forehead without even grimacing. They were both far beyond the point of being grossed out by the gore of this situation. “We’ll need to attach Munson from the chest up to Hargrove from the diaphragm down. We’ll cut the spinal cord between T12 and L1 on both of them, use Hargrove’s from L1 down and Munson’s T12 up. Then we’re gonna need Munson’s left leg, since Hargrove’s is shit, and Hargrove’s right arm. We’ll do the brains and skull last.”
Steve stared at Dustin, then back down at the bodies. “How is that possibly going to work? Even if you could get the heart to start beating again, how in the hell are you going to get their spinal cords and joints and vessels and, and…. everything to fuse together?”
Dustin grinned. “The secret sauce.”
“I’m sorry, the what?” They were definitely spending tomorrow waiting for a psych eval.
“I found it when I was exploring the lab.” Dustin hurried over to a cabinet shoved into one corner of the room, nearly tripping over the reanimated Mews in the process. He grabbed a jar from a shelf and brought it back over to Steve. The jar was full of a slimy black substance that seemed to be moving, slowly undulating around in the confined space. “There’s a room in the sub-basement that was absolutely covered in these weird black vines. I’d never seen anything like them before. When I cut into them, they oozed this black stuff. I’d cut myself pretty bad on my hand while I was hacking through them trying to find out if there was anything behind them, and when this black stuff dripped onto the cut, it just… disappeared. Like it closed right up, the pain was completely gone, only a little scar left behind. So I started experimenting with worse and worse injuries, even broke my own finger. It healed everything.”
“You broke your own finger?” Steve couldn’t help but re-enter babysitter mode at that admission.
“Yeah, but it was fine! That’s the point! It’s, like, the ultimate healing serum.”
“So why haven’t you told anyone about it?” Steve asked. “What if it could cure cancer and malaria and shit?”
“I will. All in good time. But I don’t want anyone else getting a jump on the ultimate application of this good stuff.” He patted the jar affectionately. “I wanna be the first one to raise the dead.”
“How did someone as angelic as Claudia raise a legit mad scientist?” Steve asked under his breath.
Dustin pretended not to hear. He clapped his hands and said, “Let’s take a look at the brains!”
Steve opened both skulls with the autopsy saw. Munson’s skull was largely intact with the exception of the hole over his right temple. The right side of his brain was missing a large chunk from this area, but the rest of the brain, including cerebellum and brainstem, was in good condition. Pretty much all of the left side of Hargrove’s brain was missing. Dustin instructed Steve to scoop the remaining right hemisphere out of Munson’s skull, then replace it with the intact right hemisphere from Hargrove.
“Theoretically, if this works,” Steve said, hands on his hips as he surveyed the conglomerate brain in front of him, “this guy’s going to have two people’s brains. Isn’t that gonna be… difficult? Like will he—or they, I guess—have all of each other’s memories?”
“Quite frankly, Steve, I have no idea.” Dustin laughed gleefully. “This is a completely new frontier. They might have no memories at all. Though I’m going to guess they’ll at least retain their procedural memory. Mews still knew how to walk and meow and eat.”
Steve had a brief pang of conscience at the thought of playing with someone’s whole consciousness like this, but then he reminded himself there was no way it was going to actually work. He could finish this up, return the bodies to the funeral home, and escort Dustin to the hospital.
Dustin turned back to the bodies, both still open on the table with various markings in pen where they were supposed to connect. “Assembly time!” he announced.
It was more difficult work than Steve anticipated. He had to cut up the bodies in ways that were completely different from what he usually did during an autopsy. He tried to damage the tissue as little as possible, even though Dustin insisted his ‘secret sauce’ would fix everything. It was the principle of the thing. He wasn’t a butcher.
It took about three hours of painstaking work before they had a single conglomerate body on the table in front of them. Dustin had rubbed his black goop over all of the areas where body parts were joined, and filled the abdominal, chest, and skull cavities with the stuff. The various discarded parts of both bodies had been thrown into one of the body bags in a gory mess on the floor. Steve was not looking forward to the clean-up.
“I can’t believe this is finally happening!” Dustin looked like an upper middle class kid on Christmas morning. He rubbed his bloodied hands on his thighs and reached into a pocket, pulling out his phone. “You have to record it. I’m gonna need all the proof I can get.”
Steve grabbed the phone. He wasn’t sure filming this was a great idea, given the number of laws they had to be violating, but at least he wouldn’t be in the shot. He started recording. “Nothing is happening,” he announced.
“Oh ye of little faith,” Dustin called over his shoulder as he rummaged around on the shelves. He pulled out a defibrillator, and attached the electrodes to their respective places on the chimera’s chest. “The special sauce requires electricity. Someone who’s alive already has plenty of electricity flowing through their body, but someone who’s dead needs a little jolt. Had to rig this thing up so it would shock without scanning for a rhythm first.”
Dustin positioned his finger over the big red button on the defibrillator. He took a deep breath in through his nose, and glanced nervously at the body. Steve scolded himself when he noticed he was holding his breath, too, like he was actually expecting something to happen.
Dustin pressed the button. The body jumped on the table, then lay still. Dustin frowned. He pressed the button again. Another jump, followed by stillness. Dustin peeled an eyelid up while feeling for a pulse with his free hand, then rubbed hard on the sternum. No response.
“Well, looks like we’re headed to the ER,” Steve said.
Dustin glared over at him. “No. This is going to work. One more try.” He slathered a bunch of the black goop over the electrodes attached to the body, took a deep breath, and depressed the button for a final time.
This time, Steve could see the electricity as it coursed through the body, fine trails of white light zipping through the skin. The body shook violently for much longer than it should have as a low hum filled the air around them. Steve smelled burning hair as smoke rose from the body’s head.
Finally, the shaking and the lights stopped, and the body lay still. Dustin stared at it in wonder. Steve watched through the phone’s camera as the chest rose and fell.
Dustin turned to Steve with a wide grin. “It’s alive!” he yelled.
The body sat up at the sound of Dustin’s voice, opened its eyes, and roared. Dustin couldn’t take a hint, but when had he ever? He stayed right where he was, staring at the body with glee, until it grabbed him by the throat and started to shake him like a ragdoll.