Son of Tesla

SON OF TESLA: Chapter 29

THE THING WAS DISGUSTING.

Brodham covered his mouth and nose with his hand and Vickers turned his head away, breathing heavily. The rotten smell of decay permeated everything in the room, from the sheet pulled halfway up the body's torso to the air the two agents were pulling in with short, halting breaths. Dr. Watson, the CIA pathologist, held out a small tub of Vicks VapoRub.

"Takes the bite off," he said helpfully.

Brodham and Vickers both dipped a finger in the petroleum jelly and smeared it across their upper lips. Brodham inhaled the sharp odor of menthol through his nostrils. The cool, minty burn floated on the waves of fetor rolling off the corpse. Now he just had to smell two unpleasant things.

"What are we looking at here?" he said.

"I've never seen anything like it in my sixteen years as a forensic pathologist," Watson said excitedly. "It's truly one of a kind."

"Can you be a little more specific?"

"Okay, for starters, the rate of decay. That's what you're smelling."

"What about it?"

"It's through the roof! I mean absolutely meteoric. See this?" he used a long steel utensil to lift a flap of blue flesh that was dangling from the corpse's marbled forearm. A line of thin, watery fluid rolled out from under the flap. Brodham blanched. Watson went on. "That fluid release is indicative of later stages of putrefaction. See, decay in a biological organism happens in two ways: autolysis and putrefaction. That's if there aren't any insects present, and there aren't here.

"Autolysis is sort of like the body eating itself. Enzymes in the cells of tissues and organs break down the cell lining, causing the tissues to liquefy. Putrefaction, on the other hand, is caused by bacteria that live within the pancreas and intestinal tract. These buggers burst through the intestines and begin breaking down the body. They literally cause the soft tissues to melt away."

"And you're saying this...this liquid is putrefaction."

"Advanced putrefaction." Watson was practically hopping from foot to foot. Brodham had never seen anyone so enthusiastic about a rotting corpse.

"So what's the weird part?"

"All of it, man. All of it. See, forensic pathologists later and greater than me have organized the stages of putrefaction into distinct timelines. Of course, decay depends on a lot of things. Environment – was the body in open air? Floating in a pond? Buried six feet under?" He giggled nervously. Brodham was getting more repulsed by the minute. They were deep in the sub-basement of the New York complex, and the cold, barren walls and the crushing pressure of millions of tons of earth above them were grinding on Brodham's nerves.

"Get to the point," he said tersely, inhaling another plug of menthol-infused funk.

"You've gotta understand how it works," replied Watson, who was clearly not used to being rushed. "Another variable is manner of death. Open wounds introduce putrefaction more quickly than internal causes of death. Strangulation, heart attack...spinal ruptures." He said the last while gazing at the body on the metal table in front of them.

"But in general, there's a fairly consistent timeline for putrefaction. In a couple days, you start getting some discoloration around the caecum, right here." Watson drew a circle on the body's lower abdomen with a gloved finger. "After about four days, veins start popping out, usually green or blackish.

"From five days to two weeks, bloating sets in. As the bacteria eats away at the organs, they produce gases that get trapped inside the body. The stomach swells, arms and legs puff out, and the eyes begin to bulge noticeably.