Breton Biomedical, Boston, USA
It didn’t take very long to dismember a human body, especially if you knew which parts were valuable and should be extracted carefully and which could be disassembled more quickly.
Dr. Kelley Montague-Breton made her first incision as the clock ticked past two a.m. Her slender hands were deft and confident in white medical gloves that covered her pale, freckled skin and her abundance of strawberry blonde curls lay tucked up inside a medical cap. Her face was freshly cleaned of the precise makeup she wore during the day as armor against the corporate world in the towering offices above. Down here in the levels below ground, Kelley could strip back to essentials. The dead didn’t judge and there was no one to witness her at this time of night.
She wore blue scrubs that hung loose over her slender frame. Naturally petite, Kelley knew she was too thin at the moment, a result of anxiety that gnawed at her gut and kept her from sleep most nights. Nightmares punctuated the few fitful hours she managed — and the sense of dread continued to haunt her days.
Kelley rarely processed corpses herself these days. As CEO of Breton Biomedical, she had an entire team of disarticulators to do the grunt work. But disassembly took her mind off everything else. She could focus on each cut of the blade, each rasp of the saw.
Full tissue recovery was labor intensive, but she would start the process and her team could finish the job later. No part of the precious human body would be left unused. It was an anatomy jigsaw puzzle in reverse as she removed each separate part, complicated enough to keep her attention on the task and not on the email that had come through yesterday afternoon.
The disassembly room was a hybrid space, somewhere between a morgue and an operating theatre with clinical white tiles and stainless steel equipment. Metal trolleys on rolling wheels flanked each side of the room with vats of preserving liquid and sterile storage boxes ready for the parts that would be dispersed after processing. It smelled of strong disinfectant, and air conditioning kept the room at a few degrees below a comfortable working temperature. There was no need for beeping equipment monitoring signs of life — the cadaver on the metal gurney had no need of them.
The man’s pectoral muscles were firm under Kelley’s gloved hand as she cut into his flesh, an intimacy that no living lover could have experienced. He had a scar on his chest, a sunburst of tissue, but the story behind it was now only a memory for those he left behind. As she sliced, Kelley focused on the rhythm of her breath, the quiet tick of the clock, the puff of airflow through the room. For these few mindful hours, she could forget everything else.
Her father had taught her the methods of disassembly during Kelley’s teenage years. A strange bond perhaps, but one she appreciated. Both of them preferred the quiet of disarticulation to the boardroom meetings and etiquette of business that kept the wheels turning and the money pouring in. As an only child, Kelley inherited the company on her father’s death — as well as its secrets. But she was intent on being the last Breton to shoulder this burden of generations.
Neither of her two sons were interested in joining the firm and she intended that they live out the lives they chose. But there was much to be done to keep the curse of knowledge from them and Kelley could only hope she would have the strength to complete what must be done before it was too late.
She looked down at the body before her, a particularly valuable corpse. A Caucasian man in his early forties, naked on the slab, with a square of gauze over his face to preserve some sense of dignity. Not that there could ever be much dignity in death, when a human was reduced to a pile of meat, with nothing of the real person left behind.
This man had the body of someone who worked out regularly and looked after his diet. Shame about the massive heart attack that killed him, possibly from some genetic defect that no amount of lifestyle change could avoid. But the rest of him would help many others — and the bottom line of her company.
It was illegal to pay for corpses or body parts in the USA, and the National Organ Transplant Act and the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act prevented profit from the sale of organs, particularly if used in human transplantation. The business in corpses was payment for ‘processing,’ a service fee for the time and labor to harvest each part, as well as the further use of what remained.
The postmortem biomaterials industry was a necessary one, hidden under technical terms that made it easy to forget there were actual human bodies involved. A basic corpse might be worth thirty- to fifty-thousand dollars, but they could fetch over two hundred thousand once processed into products like demineralized bone matrices, medical implants or skin grafts. Most people didn’t know and, in fact, didn’t want to know about the necroeconomy that lay beneath aspects of health care. They just wanted their pain to stop and another day alive in the world.
While there were rumors of a ‘red market’ for whole cadavers, organs and bones from developing markets, Breton Biomedical worked with a trusted body broker to avoid the potential of using corpses without consent. That had taken other biomedical companies under in the past and Kelley would not have it destroy what her family had worked so hard to build over generations.
She would do that on her own terms.
With a sigh she considered the necessary trip ahead. Back to the place that lay behind her sleepless nights and the dark shadows under her eyes. She could face a boardroom of corporate lawyers or a pack of vitriolic press reporters with a backbone of steel, but what awaited her in England brought her out in a cold sweat.
Kelley refocused on the task at hand, each slice of the scalpel anchoring her to the present moment. This man’s corpse would help countless others without suffering for his donation.
From death comes life. It was the motto of the company, although few knew that the Latin version, Ex morte vita, was carved upon her ancestral family coat of arms back in England on the estate she avoided as much as possible.
Kelley sliced away the remaining ligaments and underlying muscle around the neck, tightened the brace that held the head immobile, and picked up the bone saw. This head was promised to a training school for plastic surgeons who paid handsomely for the labor to process it so they could practice the operations that made them rich.
The physical work of sawing through bone made her sweat a little, even in the cold room. The sound was rhythmic, almost hypnotic, but underneath, Kelley sensed the savagery of dismemberment. It was a violent act to saw the head from another human being and for a moment she imagined the features of another underneath the square of gauze.
A decomposing face with pinches of skin stitched together in a macabre patchwork. Eyes of piercing turquoise, like Egyptian jewels laid out upon the dead.
Kelley imagined those eyes opening and the smell of rot and decaying flesh filling the room. She shuddered and pushed the image away, focusing back on the task at hand as the memory of the stench faded.
After removing the head, Kelley began the painstaking process of harvesting large swatches of skin from the man’s torso. Sold by the gram, skin was an incredibly precious resource. Cadaver repurposing did not cross any legal or moral lines, but Kelley understood that next of kin expectations rarely matched the reality. Did this man’s family know that his body lay in the disassembly room while they were mired in the throes of grief?
But such was the natural order of things.
Her father had always said there was no point in fighting death. It would always win in the end. Time ticked forward and you could not stop the clock.
Their business was built on pushing back the point at which it claimed another life, an attempt to keep the spark of light alive for another month, another year. Her father had lain upon this slab — although Kelley had left his disassembly to others — and she would lie here too one day. She only hoped she could free her sons from their family’s cursed history before then.
She sliced once more and eased back the skin from the man’s chest. It was a delicate task, as each segment of cadaver skin needed to be kept intact. The size of the piece determined its possible usage and the corpse of an adult could provide four to six square feet from the flat surfaces of chest, back and thighs. Large jars of saline solution infused with antibiotics stood on trolleys beside the gurney where the skin would be stored for refrigeration and used within a few weeks. Some would be freeze-dried and turned into biological wound dressings, packaged in foil pouches with rehydration instructions for the military. Clear biohazard markings distinguished it from dehydrated field ration kits that apparently looked disturbingly similar.
The defense contract was one of their most lucrative and also one that Kelley was personally proud of. Those who served their country deserved the best medical care and, while there were many things wrong with the way veterans were treated, at least their skin grafts were of good quality.
As she placed the square of skin in a jar, she wondered where this piece would end up. As much as she hoped it would go to some deserving veteran, it could just as easily be used in bladder incontinence surgery, eyelid reconstruction, or other dermal fillers for those who could not live with what nature gave them.
As Kelley gently placed the final swatch of skin in preserving fluid, she sighed once more. Time was running out. She couldn’t put off the trip to England any longer.