Skin : the X-files Read Free Page B

he drinks.” Josh retrieved the folder from under his arm and leafed through it with gloved fingers. “Derrik Kaplan. Caucasian, mid-thirties.
    Blond hair, blue eyes. Acute aortic dissection, died in the ICU.”
    Mike glanced down at the body in the drawer. “Well, he’s blond, and he’s got blue eyes. But he doesn’t look like he’s in his mid-thirties. Does it say anything about the tattoo?”
    Josh shook his head. “No, but like I said, Eckleman is a moron. Look, this is locker fifty-two. Eckleman blows 16

    Skin
    the tags all the time. Especially when the ER is jumping, and after the accident last night—”
    “Josh, are you sure we shouldn’t ask somebody? What if it’s the wrong cadaver?”
    Josh paused, rubbing a gloved finger under his jaw.
    He glanced toward the elevator in the corner of the room, where a stretcher waited to take the body up to the OR for the harvesting. Then he shrugged. “We’ve got consent, we’ve got a body. More importantly, we’ve got an OR reserved for the next hour. So let’s go slice up some skin.”
    He turned, and headed for the stretcher. Mike glanced back at the dragon tattoo. He hoped his classmate knew what he was doing.
    “Watch carefully. I promise, you’re going to like this.” Mike bit his lips behind a papery surgical mask, as Josh played with one of the saline bags that hung from the IV rack above the operating table. There was a sudden hiss as the infusion pump came alive. Mike watched, shocked, as the skin covering the dead man’s chest inflated like an enormous water balloon.
    “The saline empties into the subcutaneous base,” Josh explained, pointing to the three other saline bags that stood at the corners of the operating table. “The pressure lifts the dermis up from the layer of fat underneath.
    Makes it easier to get a smooth cut.” Mike nodded, repulsed but fascinated. The cadaver’s chest—shaved, prepped with Betadine, and inflated with 17

    THE X-FILES
    saline—no longer looked human. The inflated skin was slick, smooth, rounded, a sort of beige color Mike had never seen outside of a J. Crew catalog. “Is this going to be bloody?”
    “Not very,” Josh answered, reaching into the surgical tray by the operating table. “Until we turn him over.
    Most of the blood has pooled along his back.” He pulled a shiny steel instrument out of the surgical tray, showing it to Mike. It looked like an oversize cheese slicer, with a numbered knob near the razor-sharp blade.
    “I’m going to set the dermatome for point-oh-nine millimeters. The goal is to get a piece that you can just barely see through.”
    He leaned forward, placing the dermatome right below the cadaver’s collarbone. Mike considered looking away, then dug his fingers into his palms. In a few months he would be doing rotations in the ER, and he’d see things just as bad—or worse.
    He watched as Josh drew the dermatome down across the man’s chest. A trickle of dark, deoxygenated blood ran down into the chrome table gutters. The thin layer of skin curled behind the blade, and Josh deftly twisted his wrist as he reached the bottom of the cadaver’s rib cage, slicing the strip of skin free. He lifted it gently by an edge and held it in front of Mike.
    It was nearly transparent, a little more than a foot in length.
    “Open the cooler,” Josh said, and Mike quickly found the plastic case by his feet. The cooler was a 18

    Skin
    white-and-red rectangle, with the New York Fire Department seal emblazoned across two sides. Mike opened the cooler and retrieved a small tray filled with bluish liquid.
    Josh put the slice of skin into the liquid, and Mike sealed it shut. The cooler would keep the skin fresh until it could be transported to the skin bank. There, it would be soaked in antibiotic liquid and stored indefinitely at minus seventy degrees Fahrenheit.
    Josh went back to work on the man’s chest. His strokes were deft and sure, and in a few minutes he had skinned most of the