American Gods

“She was stabbed…,” said Mr. Jacquel, and he counted. There was a click as he stepped on a footswitch, turning on a small Dictaphone on a nearby table. “Five times. There are three knife wounds in the left anterior chest wall. The first is between the fourth and fifth intercostal spaces at the medial border of the left breast, two point two centimeters in length; the second and third are through the inferior portion of the left mid-breast penetrating at the sixth interspace, overlapping, and measuring three centimeters. There is one wound two centimeters long in the upper anterior left chest in the second interspace, and one wound five centimeters long and a maximum of one point six centimeters deep in the anteromedial left deltoid, a slashing injury. All the chest wounds are deep penetrating injuries. There are no other visible wounds externally.” He released pressure from the foot switch. Shadow noticed a small microphone dangling above the embalming table by its cord.

“So you’re the coroner as well?” asked Shadow.

“Coroner’s a political appointment around here,” said Ibis. “His job is to kick the corpse. If it doesn’t kick him back, he signs the death certificate. Jacquel’s what they call a prosector. He works for the county medical examiner. He does autopsies, and saves tissue samples for analysis. He’s already photographed her wounds.”

Jacquel ignored them. He took a big scalpel and made a deep incision in a large V which began at both collarbones and met at the bottom of her breastbone, and then he turned the V into a Y, another deep incision that continued from her breastbone to her pubis. He picked up what looked like a small, heavy chrome drill with a medallion-sized round saw blade at the business end. He turned it on, and cut through the ribs at both sides of her breastbone.

The girl opened like a purse.

Shadow suddenly was aware of a mild but unpleasantly penetrating, pungent, meaty smell.

“I thought it would smell worse,” said Shadow.

“She’s pretty fresh,” said Jacquel. “And the intestines weren’t pierced, so it doesn’t smell of shit.”

Shadow found himself looking away, not from revulsion, as he would have expected, but from a strange desire to give the girl some privacy. It would be hard to be nakeder than this open thing.

Jacquel tied off the intestines, glistening and snakelike in her belly, below the stomach and deep in the pelvis. He ran them through his fingers, foot after foot of them, described them as “normal” to the microphone, put them in a bucket on the floor. He sucked all the blood out of her chest with a vacuum pump, and measured the volume. Then he inspected the inside of her chest. He said to the microphone, “There are three lacerations in the pericardium, which is filled with clotted and liquefied blood.”

Jacquel grasped her heart, cut it at its top, turned it about in his hand, examining it. He stepped on his switch and said, “There are two l acerations of the myocardium; a one-point-five-centimeter laceration in the right ventricle and a one-point-eight-centimeter laceration penetrating the left ventricle.”

Jacquel removed each lung. The left lung had been stabbed and was half collapsed. He weighed them, and the heart, and he photographed the wounds. From each lung he sliced a small piece of tissue, which he placed into a jar.

“Formaldehyde,” whispered Mr. Ibis, helpfully.

Jacquel continued to talk to the microphone, describing what he was doing, what he saw, as he removed the girl’s liver, the stomach, spleen, pancreas, both kidneys, the uterus and the ovaries.

He weighed each organ, reported them as normal and uninjured. From each organ he took a small slice and put it into a jar of formaldehyde.

From the heart, the liver, and from one of the kidneys, he cut an additional slice. These pieces he chewed, slowly, making them last, and ate while he worked.

Somehow it seemed to Shadow a good thing for him to do: respectful, not obscene.

“So you want to stay here with us for a spell?” said Jacquel, masticating the slice of the girl’s heart.

“If you’ll have me,” said Shadow.

“Certainly we’ll have you,” said Mr. Ibis. “No reasons why not and plenty of reasons why. You’ll be under our protection as long as you’re here.”

“I hope you don’t mind sleeping under the same roof as the dead,” said Jacquel.

Shadow thought of the touch of Laura’s lips, bitter and cold. “No,” he said. “Not as long as they stay dead, anyhow.”

Jacquel turned and looked at him with dark brown eyes as quizzical and cold as a desert dog’s. “They stay dead here,” was all he said.

“Seems to me,” said Shadow. “Seems to me that the dead come back pretty easy.”

“Not at all,” said Ibis. “Even zombies, they make them out of the living, you know. A little powder, a little chanting, a little push, and you have a zombie. They live, but they believe they are dead. But to truly bring the dead back to life, in their bodies. That takes power.” He hesitates, then, “In the old land, in the old days, it was easier then.”