Gregg Hurwitz - Do No Harm

Clyde darted to the door, shirtless and bloodstained, restraints still banded around his wrists and legs like cuffs and ankle weights. He sprang into the hall as the other cop bore down with a nurse. An old man wearing an oxygen mask lay on a parked gurney between them, awaiting transport to the wards. The cop noticed Clyde first and he yelled something, fast-drawing his pistol.

Fisting the Beretta, Clyde leapt at the gurney, his foot knocking the lever to release the brake when he landed, his momentum sending the gurney hurtling toward the cop. The old man rose with a moan as he flew forward, oxygen mask tangling around his neck. The front of the gurney struck the cop crotch level and his chest flopped forward onto the mattress as he fell, legs scrabbling on the slick tile. His gun went off, blowing out an overhead light, the recoil kicking it from his hands. Peter, who'd been shuffling up the hall behind the second cop and the nurse, ducked his head inside a doorjamb.

Rather than running for the exit, Clyde sprinted toward the heart of the hospital, sidearming the cop's head with a restraint-heavy wrist as he passed. Nurses and interns screamed, scrambling for cover. As Clyde passed Procedure One, Peter swung a leg out to trip him. The thick metal brace caught Clyde across the shins, spilling him onto the floor. Clyde tumbled once, crying out, his bare chest slapping the tile and leaving a bloody Rorschach. His face tightened as he turned and glowered at Peter over a shoulder, haunches already rising beneath him.

His feet slipped for his first few steps, then he hit a crazed sprint, patients and doctors leaping out of his way. By the time the security guards arrived, he had disappeared into the hospital's interior.

Horace Johnson McCannister, a high school dropout with mouselike facial features and a sharp osmotic mind, hummed as he pulled on his shoe covers. His feet had plenty of room at the bottom of the white plastic boots, and the elastic held the tops tight around his scrub bottoms, just below the knees. He always wore shoe covers now, having learned his lesson his first day as a Lab Tech II at UCLA's Center for Health Sciences, when he'd accidentally sawed into a swollen length of colon and splattered shit across his brand-new Rockports. His particular wing of the hospital's seventh floor, the Three Corridor, remained quiet when the med students weren't tinkering with bodies in the gross anatomy lab next door, and it was deathly still now at three-thirty in the morning.

He tossed his keys and cigarette pack on the counter and adjusted his surgical cap before turning to regard the two new bodies wrapped tightly in sheets before him. The prep room shone with metal-stainless sinks and cabinets, countertops and gleaming tools, and, in the middle, the scrubbed-dull embalming table. To Horace's back, the twelve-foot door to the anatomy crypt rose like a castle gate, a wooden rectangle with dark metal latches.

Plastic Surgery had requested ribs still attached to musculature for a 7 A.M. talk-an unusual lecture focusing on the innervation of the teres major. He could see already that one of the bodies was too obese to be of much use to the med students. He'd junk that one for parts and preserve the other intact. The obese body lay supine, wrapped like a mummy. He prodded the bulge of its stomach, debating where to dig in.

It would be a messy process.

Hands sheathed in thick blue gloves, he picked up his autopsy gown but hesitated a moment before pulling it on. He'd had two cups of coffee on his way over, trying to chase reminiscences of sleep from his hazy head, and he'd have to stop soon and take a leak. He opted to go now, before he got sticky.

Shuffling out in his oversize shoe covers, he headed down the empty hall to the bathroom and pissed long and hard, smiling to himself afterward while he fumbled in his autopsy gloves to zip up his fly. Walking back down the hall, he punched a four-digit code into the Omnilock and reentered the prep room.

If he sneaked a cigarette, all lingering traces of smoke would be long dissipated by the time the first students began to arrive in a few hours. He searched the counter, but his cigarettes were gone. Maybe he'd misplaced them on his way to the bathroom. Shrugging on a blue autopsy gown, he slid a surgical mask over his head. The built-in eye shield, a rectangle of clear plastic atop the mask, would be helpful once the sawing began.

He started with the obese body, electing to leave the smaller one for later. Moving it to the embalming table gave him some trouble, but he managed. He used trauma shears to free the cadaver from the white sheets. A bluing elderly gentleman with sagging jowls and a thick mustache, funeral-dressed in a dark suit. The rose in his lapel had wilted. Probably moved straight from the convalescent home to the parlor to the hospital. Once they arrived, bodies were brought to Horace's happy workplace by the freight elevators, which rode up and down the shafts on the backside of the passenger elevators. Hospital staff did their best to keep the bodies out of the patients' sight. Nothing chills the sick like a fresh reminder of mortality.

Horace pulled the clothes off the cadaver and tossed them in a corner. Then, humming Vivaldi's "La Primavera," he shaved the skull with a pair of barber clippers. He used a scalpel to peel the scalp, the fresh meat yielding a steady current of blood. The slant of the table caused the blood to flow toward the feet to a drain, which was hooked up to a sink against the wall. Bodies also yielded viscid fluids and tangles of tissue. Clogged drains here were a bitch and a half.

Once he had the skull adequately peeled, he began to cut a large circle around the top with a Stryker saw. The circular blade did not spin; it vibrated ever so slightly. Horace had, on occasion, slipped and touched the oscillating blade to his hand, but it wouldn't cut flesh, only hard surfaces like bone. The end of the saw heated up, sending up thin tendrils of smoke that he could smell through his mask-a pungent odor like burning hair, like the dentist-chair stench of a tooth being hollowed.

Once he finished, he popped the skull lid off, lifted the frontal lobe of the brain, and cut the connective tissue, starting with the optic nerve, then moving through the other nerves, the arteries, and finally the spinal cord. Wiggling his fingers beneath the brain, he gently peeled it up out of the head.

Passing a string under the artery so the brain dangled from the middle, he lowered it into a bucket filled with formalin and snapped the lid on quickly, clamping down on both ends of the string. Inside the bucket, the brain hung upside down in the fluid, a perfect natural specimen. Had he not suspended it, it would have sunk to the bottom and hardened with a distorting flat spot, and he never would have heard the end of it from neurobiology.

He switched to a pistol-grip Sawzall, an old-fashioned reciprocating saw. Pressure on the trigger sent the straight blade, which protruded from the saw's long body, hammering up and down. Horace sawed off the feet next, wrapping them in a red biohazard bag and dropping them into a top-loading freezer that ran the length of the east wall. The fire red wrapping would tip off the podiatrists that they were dealing with fresh material-ripe, bloody, and possibly contaminated.

Next he attacked the knees and elbows, severing the limbs about ten inches off the joints on either side but keeping the skin and muscles intact. There wasn't a big call for hands, so he left them attached. He dropped all four units in the freezer, praying that would buy him some time with the orthopedics guys, and turned to the big chore of the day-the musculature-attached ribs needed for the morning lecture.

The Sawzall got him through the ribs in short order, the soft organs throwing a good splatter across his gown, then he cut a quadrant around the shoulder and removed the lungs from the ribs with a scalpel. The table's blood gutters grew choked with debris. He bagged the specimen and set it aside, prepped and ready for the talk.