The Death of Saema: Chapter 2, Another Piece of Meat

Saema’s body lay in the drawer in the crypt of the LA County Coroner’s Office for nearly 48 hours before one of the autopsy technicians finally came for her. The technician that had come was a middle-aged African American man in a blue apron who stopped with an empty gurney right at the girl’s feet. He walked around the gurney and grabbed her toe tag in his hand, brushing lightly against her cold, stiff soles.

“Saema Markall, case number 20150702003,” he muttered to himself, checking some notes he had with him to verify that this was the right one.

Grabbing her at the ankles, the tech tugged at her forcefully and her clear plastic-bagged corpse slid unceremoniously from the drawer it had occupied for nearly two days onto the metal tray of the gurney he had gotten for her. He tugged her all the way until her bare feet were dangling at the edge of the tray, her head making a loud thud as it slammed down onto the cart. The tech didn’t care and the dead girl certainly didn’t either.

Tossing the clipboard into a small holder on the side of the cart, the technician wheeled Saema’s body down a different route than the one they had taken her through in this crypt before. Here, the man pushed her through a couple large storage areas filled with the bodies of all sorts of people awaiting their autopsy, their toe-tagged feet sticking out of the cold, dark drawers, bringing her to a different set of double-doors that they then passed through. Here, after traveling down a dark, white-walled corridor, they reached a larger room that seemed to be the autopsy prep area.

Saema’s cart was parked near the edge of a row of gurneys upon which other corpses that would soon be autopsied were lying. The tech responsible for preparing her body began by pulling off the plastic tarp that had covered her all this time and tossed it aside into a disposal bin. Saema now lay stark naked in the room for all present to see, her nipples stiff and erect in the cold air, her flesh now quite paler than it was when she was first brought in, her pretty brown eyes now glossed over, yet still staring blankly at the tiled ceiling. He took her hands and dropped them at her sides, her fingers rather stiff and somewhat balled up, but her arms straight against her side, rear, and legs. From a bin on a steel table somewhere behind her head, he grabbed a blank toe tag, this time a blue color with different fields on it, and placed it under her heels, which he adjusted so that her feet were touching, the toes pointing at a 45-degree angle into the room.

Next to her on another gurney lay the body of the Asian heart-attack victim from when she was brought in. His flaccid penis was limp and lying off its side, balanced by his greying pubic hairs. His body tone was rather unremarkable, his gut a bit heavy-set, and his face revealed an air of resignation. His wife and eldest daughter had requested an autopsy to verify that it was the heart attack that killed him.

Across from Saema, a familiar pair of feet with bright green toe nails pointed towards the middle of the room. A single toe-tag hung from the teen’s succulent right big toe, while a female morgue tech was filling out a second toe-tag, noting that the cause of the young girl’s demise had been sudden and massive internal bleeding from a ruptured superior vena cava during the collision that also took her step-mother’s life. Her abdomen and chest were wide open, her glistening intestines, stomach, and liver clearly visible. Her nipples were folded all the way back and touching the cold metal of the steel slab, the front plating of her ribcage now a bloody mass of bone and tissue laying in a tray and waiting to be put back in. A young pathologist’s assistant was behind her, getting some stitching to begin the process of closing her back up. The girl’s mouth still lay agape, her eyes half-opened and staring into nothing, a bloody cut in her head above her eyebrows marking the edge of where her skullcap had been opened up during her autopsy.

Finally, Saema’s cart began to move once more, being pushed past the bodies laying in this room and through a set of double doors. The doors opened into a large autopsy room, one of three that the Medical Examiner’s Office had on-sight. The room was massive: with sixteen autopsy stations in this one room alone, proper staffing was the only thing holding the office back from conducting and completing more exams in a day’s time. In fact, despite the large facility and the theoretical ability to process a large number of corpses, the LA County Coroner only had an average-sized staff. Budget cutbacks and the fact that many people who were hired in various roles often ended up not working out kept the team smaller. Thus, during particularly busy times, despite the physical size of the facility, it was easy for there to be too many corpses to deal with at any one given time, making it so that a body’s stay at the morgue ended up being longer than some families would like.

The tech wheeled her over to Autopsy Station #6 where, with the help of the Pathologist’s Assistant that was assigned to her case, grabbed her by her feet and slung her over onto the cold metal autopsy slab. The Assistant took the blank toe tag off of the cart and nodded as the tech wheeled the empty gurney away, then glanced at the girl’s pale, cold, and nude corpse as he began to look over the paperwork from her case.

A crack could be heard from the slab next to her as the skullcap was removed from her neighboring corpse. The body next to her was that of a 33-year-old transgendered woman, who had a very nice, feminine build with full breasts and curvy hips, yet who still possessed a penis. The girl’s penis was limp and flaccid, lying to the side against the shaven flesh of her pubic region. Her chest and abdominal cavity were completely opened up, her well-tanned arioli pressing firmly against the cold steel of the slab. Her ribcage had been sawed away, leaving a mostly empty cavity now. On trays attached to the slab were her heart, lungs, and stomach, the contents of which were being examined, the Assistant there having determined her last meal to have been a chicken salad wrap. The woman’s intestines were sticking out above the flesh of her abdomen, her soft hands lying at her sides. The T-girl had nice, arched, and well-defined feet, her toe nails painted a playful light purple color with a glittery finish to them. The toe tag hanging from her right big toe noted that she had been killed three days ago in a supposed hate crime.

The Assistant working Saema’s case began by taking a large hypodermic needle and jabbing it unceremoniously into the girl’s chest cavity, right in her cleavage. Pulling back on the needle’s plunger, he slowly removed some dark, crimson blood from her cold, unbeating heart. The blood was then carefully vialed and sealed for further analysis by the lab. Next, he took a second needle, this one with a longer tip, and jammed it into her left breast rather forcefully, right below her tender arioli. This time, he removed some of the fluids from her lungs, also which would be used to determine any strangenesses in body chemistry or any other things which may have contributed to the girl’s demise.

After initialing some paperwork and making further notes, he determined that he agreed with Victoria’s original recommendation that a full autopsy be done on Saema.

Pulling the swinging tool tray into reach and grabbing a sharp scalpel, the Assistant began with the flesh just above her right breast and made a sharp incision that encircled the outer folds of the breast and then drew itself down through the cleavage and along the bony surface of her ribcage. As he did this, crimson blood slowly oozed from the flesh, though this was mainly capillary blood since no flow was going on within her system anymore. Stopping at her xyphoid process, he moved the scalpel to the area just above her left breast and did the same thing, drawing the scalpel in a curved-V like motion and meeting the incision from the first cut, blood slowly trickling here, too, pooling over her breast. Next, he put the knife into the cut that he had made at the ribs and then yanked it downwards, not holding back at all, cutting deep through layers of skin and then yellowish fat, finally stopping as the knife met with resistance from her pubic bone. Running the blade through the cuts once more, he made sure to pull the skin and fat away from the incision, leaving a clean, gaping hole. Setting the knife down with a red smear on the metal tray, with gloved hands he pulled back on the delicate flesh he had just rendered.

The girl’s breasts were folded one at a time off to the side, her taut nipples finding themselves lightly pressing against the slab’s cold, metallic surface. Beneath could be seen what was left of the layers of fat he had exposed in the incision process, followed by the bony structure of her ribs interlaced with muscles and other meaty matters. Leaving this for now, he began to pull back on her abdominal walls, separating the flesh and fat, pulling the large flaps off to the side where their tips also nearly rested on the slab’s surface. Her stomach, liver, intestines, and other viscera were now completely exposed to the room of onlookers as the girl lay there silently in death, the fluid of her abdominal cavity a murky mixture of blood, water, and organ juices that had begun to collect as her body cells slowly died within her.

With skills a mixture of those of a butcher and a surgeon, he cut her stomach away from its intestinal bindings and dropped it on a tray near where his tools were. With a smaller scalpel, he cut away at its reddened, muscular flesh, a sour and putrid odor escaping as the pent-up vapors of her partially-digested meal escaped into the room. Finishing his cut, he picked up the stomach and turned it on its side, the chunky juices collecting in a glass container he had set out for this purpose. A lot of what was in there was indistinguishable, but he could make out small bits of pork, a couple kernels of corn, and a few other vegetable-like green bits in the soupy mixture. Once finished, he set the stomach aside and screwed on the cap for the jar, putting it on a nearby counter to be picked up, along with the fluid samples he took a few moments ago, for analysis by the lab.

The Assistant, a man in his early-50s, put on a pair of magnifying glasses around the top of his head and looked over her other organs quite carefully. Handling her liver, he checked its surface and then punctured the lobes with a needle, taking samples of fluid and then a couple small pieces of its tissue to be examined later, but noting on his report that he saw nothing remarkable about it. Her kidneys also seemed in normal, healthy working order for a girl of 25, so he saw no reason to remove and examine them. With his gloved hands, he ran along the length of her small and large intestines, feeling for any irregularities and making occasional tiny cuts to check at the contents within. Nothing of note was found except in her lower intestines, though here there was simply some well-formed and kernely fecal matter that she had not passed, even at the time of her bowel release upon expiration.

After jotting down a few more notes, the man grabbed a batter-powered bone saw and turned it on, giving the blade a moment to heat up and then began sawing away at the bony armor of her chestplate, her body shaking with every jerk of the saw, her pretty feet wobbling from side to side, her toe tag hanging from her luscious, chocolate-painted big toe swaying wildly. Bits of bone and flesh flew through the air, though the Assistant’s face was protected by a large plastic shield he had put on. As the crunch of one side finally finishing was heard, he adjusted the blade to the other section, cutting away at the bone and tissue there until he had finally finished. Turning the saw off, he set it down and reached inside, hooking his fingers underneath the bony armor and pulling until it cracked off in a gut-wrenching sound, Saema’s feet shifting with this sudden movement. The ribcage was then laid down on a metal tray, the girl’s heart and lungs now in view of all.

As he expertly began to snip away at the heart so he could take a better look at it, a man nearby cleared his throat. As the Assistant looked up, he saw a hispanic man reaching out to grab Saema’s toe tag and read it to himself.

“This our vic from the strangling?” the man in the corduroy suit asked.

“Hey, Suarez,” he replied dryly. “Yeah, just getting her autopsy done now. They processed her pretty thoroughly when she was brought in, so I think you all will be square with any physical evidence.”

“Right,” he said, watching as Saema’s heart was finally plucked free of the piping which kept it in her chest. The heart was laid out in a metal tray and examined under the Assistant’s magnifying eye piece. He then took a scalpel and cut off a couple samples of the muscle walls to have analyzed, but he didn’t see anything out of place.

“Seems like a healthy girl of twenty-five to me,” he said. “So far, everything seems pretty much in order,” he continued, setting the heart aside and then getting his small surgical scissors to begin the work of freeing up her lungs. “You guys call her family yet?”

“Boyfriend should be coming by this afternoon for the I.D., but her family lives out in Philly. Guess they’ll be shipping the broad back up there,” Suarez replied. “Hopefully we’ll get some workable DNA from your investigations and nail the guy that did this, but…”

The Assistant looked up, her left lung in his gloved hand, red juices slowly dripping back into her chest cavity. “But you aren’t sure, right? The guy’s probably not even in the system.” He placed her lung on a scale on the counter off behind Saema’s head to get a measurement as Suarez stared at the girl’s toe-tagged feet and chocolate-painted toes.

“UhhhYeah, right. Probably so,” he said, snapping out of it. “Who knows, but we’ll do our best.” He watched as her right lung was removed, a small sample of tissue taken from it as it was being weighed in a similar fashion to its sister.

“WellTime to take a look at her pretty little brain,” the Pathologist’s Assistant said as he reached for a marker and began drawing a dashed line across her forehead. He grabbed a electronic cranial saw.

“Time for me to go get lunch then,” Suarez said with a laugh. “See you, Chris.”

The loud whir of the saw filled the area while Chris went to work on cutting off the top of Saema’s skull, her body shaking with the spinning of the blade, her tits bouncing slightly against the cold steel of the table, her feet wobbling back and forth. Bits of blood and bone went through the air as he worked, but it only took a few minutes to finally break through. Setting the saw aside, he pulled at the top of her head, her brown hair between his fingers, working it off of her and then placing it down on the tray nearby. There, amidst a bit of blood and cerebral fluid, sat the pink, mushy mass of Saema’s brain. With a scalpel and scooping tool, he traced the edges of the brain and removed it, bringing its spongy mass over to the scale and weighing it, noting the numbers listed. After taking some samples and carefully scrutinizing it, he was finally finished with the main part of her autopsy.

One of the autopsy assistants that was on duty, a female med student of about 23, walked over to Autopsy Station #6.

“Looks pretty standard to me,” Chris said, putting his pen away and handing the girl the clipboard. “Looks like she died from the strangulation. We won’t know if she was drugged or anything until we get the blood samples analyzed, but I think this is a pretty straight-forward thing we have here.”

She nodded.

“You know the drill. Get the organs we took out preserved and sealed in viscera bags and get her sewn back up. She’ll be getting I.D.’d this afternoon and then we’ll see what the family wants to do with her.”

“Got it,” she replied as he walked away.

The autopsy done, Chris turned and walked a few paces away, removing his gloves as he walked and dropping them in a biohazard bin. Behind him, the transgendered girl's body was completely cut open, her organs being weighed and examined, her skull completely empty, and a look of shock on her face. Meanwhile, the female med student grabbed Saema's feet and, with the help of a young man who showed up with a new gurney, transferred her onto the cart and began wheeling her back to the processing room.

The girl parked Saema’s autopsied body at the end of the line in the processing room, next to the body of a 38-year-old male tourist named Jay Marks who had died during a mugging. A technician was finishing up the final stitches on the already-autopsied corpse. He was around six feet tall, had short, jet-black hair, and a bit of a heavier build. His circumcised member lay limp against black, bushy pubic hair, his glassed-over blue eyes staring at nothing. When finished with the stitching, the tech began making notes on a second toe-tag that would soon be applied to his right big toe.

Saema’s tech looked her stark naked corpse over and then double-checked some paperwork, setting the clipboard she had in hand aside and going over to a nearby work station to grab a tray of tools she would need to get Saema back into a halfway presentable state. Beginning at the bottom of her incision, right at her pubic bone, the girl took a black threading and the long needle she had and began to close up the large incision. Later, this would have to be reopened by the mortuary staff responsible for her final preparations, but for now it was important to seal her back up and get her on ice to retard putrification. Her soft, pale flesh was easily pulled back in as she continued the stitching, though she stopped just below the girl’s cracked ribs. Here, she reached over to the tray containing the sawed up bony mass of her breastplate and placed it back inside her chest. This, too, would be internally wired back into place during the process of prepping her body for her viewing, but this was beyond her current scope right now. Once the ribs were laid in place, she pulled the flesh closed and finished sewing up the center and the two outer lines of the Y on her chest.

Next, a tube of surgical glue was opened and the medical student started with the left fork of the Y and began covering the stitching with clear glue so as to ensure the cuts did not open back up. She continued going over the whole of the incision, which took her several minutes.

With that out of the way, she put the needle, thread, and glue down on a tray and looked at Saema’s face. Since she wasn’t going to put the girl’s brain back in her head, the tech grabbed some filler paper (not unlike tissue paper, though not very absorbent) and began balling it up. She made several wads of the tissue-like substance and then began packing it into her cranial cavity. This had to be done in such a way as to make it very dense, not light, so that her head would retain its proper posture as if the mass that normally was inside it still remained. It took several minutes to get this just right, but she smiled, pleased with her work.

Finally, the tech got a different type of glue - this one meant for more porous materials like bone - and took off the cap. Starting with the back of her head and going in a clockwise direction, she put a generous line of glue against the exposed bone of the skull removal. This glue would take a few minutes to dry completely, so this gave her enough time to pick up Saema’s skullcap and press it into place, adjusting it so that it fit just right and maintained a natural look, and then hold it in place until it was evident it would not move anymore. A thin line of surgical glue was then traced along the red line of the removal sight to ensure that it would take a lot of force to reopen her head.

Sitting back, she looked Saema over and thought to herself that she did a good job. The tech looked at her watch, realizing that the person coming to ID the body would be here in the next couple of hours. With the corpse stitched back up and looking decent, she went over and grabbed a light-blue toe-tag that had already been printed off for her by another tech and contained all of the vital information regarding her corpse, its case information, its storage area in the morgue, and all that was left was for the female med student to write down the determined cause of death, which she did with a black pen. Satisfied, she took this second toe-tag and, with the string in her fingers, placed this tag around her right big toe, on top of the one placed there at the crime scene. This string was carefully tied into place and, once finished, Saema had two separate toe tags hanging from her soft, pale soles.

The final thing to do was to put a blue shroud over the 25-year-old’s nude, stitched up corpse. The medical student grabbed a sheet from underneath the main work table and tossed it over Saema’s body. She then pulled the sheet up and over her face and then tugged at it until it reached her ankles, stopping just shy of her feet. Her bare feet would be left uncovered, the toe tags dangling in the air, to allow for quick identification.

Once everything was finished, her corpse was wheeled out of the processing room through a door on the side and down a long series of winding corridors. Here, her body was wheeled into a hallway with glassed windows set into the walls and cold, empty-looking rooms on the other side. Saema was taken to Viewing Room #14 where the tech left her lying in the middle of the room, walked out, and made sure the door locked behind her.

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It was 2:15 in the afternoon when Phil arrived at the L.A. County Morgue. It had been three days since the death of his girlfriend and he had finally received the call this morning to go and identify her body for legal purposes. It took longer than he thought the process would take, but the woman on the phone with him told him that the coroner’s office was a bit sluggish these past few weeks because of budgetary cutbacks and a volume of crime and natural deaths that had just slowed things down.

He was still in shock that Saema was gone. Even three days after he discovered her violated corpse laying in her apartment, her death still hadn’t sank in. He had known her for a while, it was true, but they hadn’t talked about marriage or anything quite that serious. They had enjoyed their time together and he missed her. Her parents had called him several times over the past few days, distraught with the news of their daughter’s death and, worse yet, the fact that her father was going to have to go out of town for about a month because of his work as a government contractor. It was unavoidable as the plans had been made now for many months. He and Phil had discussed this, along with the girl’s mother, and the only thing they could think of to do was to get her flown back to Philly, embalmed, and stored in a local funeral home until they could have the funeral sometime the next month.

The worker stopped with Phil outside the door marked “14” in a long hallway of similar rooms. In fact, Phil figured each room was identical and they all served the same macabre purpose. The swipe of an access card made a green light flash on and the door clicked open, the light in the room instantly turning on. After his eyes adjusted to the sudden change in lighting, he stared at the center of the room where a very feminine body lay reposed under a light-blue morgue sheet. It was the body of Saema.

The curves of her breast, the shape of her legs, and the soft soles of her bare feet left no mistake in his mind that this was the body of his deceased girlfriend. Staring at her laying on a morgue gurney, covered, with her bare feet innocently reposed there with two toe-tags dangling from her big toe gave him a massive hard on, to which he blushed thinking of. The worker, though, walked up to the head of the gurney and then looked at Phil.

“Sir, are you sure you’re ready?” the shorter Asian man who had led him in here asked.

“Y-yeah. I guess so…” he said, hesitantly.

The sheet was drawn back, past her face, and left lying just above her arioli, the stitched and glued Y-incision on her chest clearly visible. Even the ligature marks from her strangulation still remained. Saema’s face was relaxed, her eyes glassy and fixed at the light above her on the ceiling. Her soft, pale lips parted with her hair drawn along the sides of her face. Looking at her forehead, he could see what looked like dried, clear glue where they had obviously cut her skull open to look at her brain. He wondered what that would have been like, to see her in such a primal, gutted state like that.

Not realizing that so much time had passed, he looked up and snapped out of it as the worker cleared his throat.

“UhYeah. Y-yeah, that’s Saema,” he said, plainly.

The worker nodded, “I’m sorry for your loss. Would you like me to give you a minute?”

Phil simply nodded. As the worker left, he thought to himself about all the things he wanted to do to her. His eyes were drawn to her toes as his mind focused on thoughts of him sniffing between her toes, licking her soles, and sucking on her long toes. He thought of giving her a pedicure with his tongue against her toenails. He thought of licking her soiled asshole, sucking on her tits, and then shoving his cock in her mouth and cumming deep in her throat. None of that would be possible right now, though.

He ran his fingers along the stitching and pushed the sheet down just far enough to see the taut buds of her erect nipples. He stared at them for a moment before pulling the sheet back up and then heading for the door. Phil knew that if he stayed here much longer, he might not be able to control himself.

As he exited into the hallway, the worker thanked him for coming down and offered his condolences again. “Looks like Vargas Funeral Services will be coming by later this evening to pick up her remains. I am guessing the family will want her shipped back up to Pennsylvania?”

Phil nodded again, and with that, he left the building.

Saema’s body remained in the blue sheet, but this time the worker wrapped it tightly around her body, pulling it around her ankles and then wrapping it around her head. With some thick twine, he bound her feet together at the ankles and then tied off the top of the sheet around her brown haired head. Her feet, of course, remained bare and exposed so that the mortuary employees could quickly see who she was when they came later today. The Asian man brought her body back to the drawer that she had occupied for the better part of three days, pushed her in, and left her double-toe-tagged feet facing the freezer room for all to see.