Fic: Management of Dead Bodies in Disaster Situations, A Field Manual [One Shot]

Title: Management of Dead Bodies in Disaster Situations: A Field Manual
Author: heddychaa
Pairings: GEN: OC, Gwen Cooper, Jack/Ianto (mentioned)
Rating: R
Genre: Angst, Missing Scene: Day 4 of CoE
Disclaimer: Torchwood's characters, concepts, and events belong to their respective owners, including but not limited to Russell T Davies and the BBC. This is a work of fan-appreciation and no profit is being made.
Summary: Darragh Edmonds is a so-called "disaster specialist". Called to the site of tsunamis, earth quakes, floods, terrorist attacks, he takes up the grim task of putting order to human remains, and he does it well. Cleaning up after a biological attack on Thames House should make for a comparatively easy day for Darragh: after all, the bodies of Thames House have even been so considerate as to pile themselves right at the front door for him. That is, until he's sworn to secrecy and sent, alone, to collect two bodies from the building's eerie top floor.
A/N: Title (and some concepts used in the story) from PAHO's Disaster Manual and Guidelines. Beta'd and worked over with the help of _lullabelle_ and azn_jack_fiend. I PROMISE THE NEXT STORY I POST WILL BE HAPPY AND SUNSHINE AND FUNNY AND NOT MAKE YOU FEEL LIKE THE WORLD IS A BLACK PLACE FULL OF MISERY. JESUS I AM SO SORRY. I promise, I'm actually really quite cheerful in person!



Management of Dead Bodies in Disaster Situations: A Field Manual

When Darragh Edmonds was ten years old, his mother took him to Pompeii to see the casted bodies. She was a history professor, so in their family that was a normal thing to do; he’d already seen the Tollund Man by the time he was six, would go on to see Auschwitz at fifteen. When he thinks back on it now, though, all those trips were probably intended as an effort to nurture an interest in history in her son, not an interest in disasters. An interest in dead people, yes, but the safe kind of dead people. The kind you find in books. Not this kind of dead people.

He looks down upon his assembled crew, taking a mental inventory. More than a few of them are green, in multiple senses of the word: new to this ugly business, and ill to think of it. Not like Darragh. Darragh, who is faced with the reality of at least two hundred dead inside Thames House from an unknown act of biological terrorism and yet still finds the time to come up with word play. Black humour, he’ll call it. That’s healthy, right? He’ll ask his therapist next time he sees her.

It won’t be a complex job, at least not by comparison. He’s worked earthquakes, tsunamis, bombings—sites where you’d find bodies in pieces, bodies with mangled faces, survivors trapped in rubble days after the aftershock, where you’d work plagued by bad conditions and low supplies and poorly coordinated volunteers. He’s done sites where the bodies have been spread out over a hundred mile radius, piled knee deep, broken up into hunks of buildings. Sites in LEDCs with inadequate or non-existent infrastructures, where nobody carries reliable government ID, so you do your best by scars and tattoos and coloured sweatshirts and the odd family photo pushed into your hands by a stoic mother.

So other than organizing his crew, a motley group of pale bureaucrats and stiff-lipped EMTs, Darragh isn’t expecting too much trouble from Thames House, where the bodies wear their names pinned to their chests on government ID tags and they’ve been so considerate as to pile themselves all up against the front door of the building. A testament to their last futile moments scrambling for escape. He imagines them pounding at the glass, trampling each other, howling and weeping, and then shakes the thought away.

“When you’re writing out the cause of death, don’t be tempted to just assume they died from the pathogen,” he reminds the group assembled in front of him. “It may have been blunt trauma from being trampled to death. Don’t take shortcuts.” He doesn’t say "Because these are people’s relatives," because he doesn’t want to upset them, because they already know that (where else did they come from, test tubes?), and because it’s just not his style to get personal about these things.

He’s already running through the protocols, the steps, dividing the ragtag group standing in front of him into teams, pairing up the stony-faced with the sickly to ease his workload. He sets them off to their tasks, and, snapping a mask over his own face, hurries to find whoever the hell it is he needs to speak to about a large space to store and sort his bodies.

The work of the day goes quickly. They find one survivor, an elderly man with the luck of the Irish who’d somehow stumbled upon some manner of biohazard suit in a supply closet. The rest, though, are dead. As Darragh expected, they find the majority of them pushed up against those front doors, piled on top of one another as trapped in the fear of their last moments as the Pompeiani, a mass of clutching hands and tangled hair eleven bodies deep. At the top of the pile it’s the pathogen that killed them, mostly, and at the bottom they start to find the ones who were trampled, ribs and skulls broken like eggshells. A few stragglers they find tumbled down the fire stairs like ragdolls, tucked up in janitorial closets with their heads between their knees as though bioterrorism is like a childhood bogeyman you can still hide from.

Darragh looks over the record-keeping, the scratching pens on clipboards, everything by-the-book.

Step 1: Legally determine or pronounce death;
Step 2: Recover the remains of the dead;
Step 3: Establish identity of the dead;
Step 4: Estimate the time of death;
Step 5: Determine the cause of death;
Step 6: Explain the possible circumstances of death;
Step 7: Prepare the remains for final disposal.

Laura Stephens, died of unknown pathogen at approx. 18:00, no physical injuries. Found with her hands over her face as though she couldn’t bear to watch what was happening around her. 5’6”, Caucasian, blonde, early thirties. She will go in row ten with the other three Caucasian women in their early thirties. Seven women in their early thirties altogether; he can picture their bags all in a row.

“Doctor Edmonds,” someone says to him, and he blinks back his visualization of his temporary morgue, the rows of body bags neat and ordered. It’s one of the Greens, although the day’s work seems to have desensitized him somewhat because he has a little more colour in his face even though his eyes are still haunted. Hefting bodies around can do that to the best of them.

“Yes?” Darragh asks, and can’t help the impatience clipping his tone.

“Well it’s just that they say only the man in charge can go upstairs to collect the bodies there.” The Green shifts from foot to foot a moment, and Darragh rolls his eyes. The Green adds, “Because it’s top secret, what they’re keeping up there. Supposedly.”

Darragh blows a huff of air through his nostrils. Maybe a bit petulant for a grown man, but it’s been a long day and in his line of work, he has so little patience for government-types behind their safe desks making pointless rules. “Alright, then. If it makes them happy.” The Green breathes a sigh of relief and leaves.

At the lift, a suited bureaucrat gives Darragh a long, unnecessary speech of legalese that he completely tunes out, tapping a foot impatiently. At the end, the Suit asks him, “Do you agree?”

Darragh replies, “If it means that I can bloody well get on with my job, then yes.”

So they send him up.

The top floor of Thames House is quiet and eerie, lit up blue like he imagines it must be like at night in an aquarium. Except there’s this awful sense of unease that coils up in him like a scorpion’s tail. As though he’s being watched. The room is full of scientific equipment, all lit up and crackling, and at the head of the room there is a massive smoky tank that bathes the room in its cold glow.

But he’s not here to poke around for state secrets, he’s here to collect bodies. And there they are.

He comes up alongside them, nearly toeing them with his boots. Two men: one late twenties, maybe early thirties; the other late thirties, maybe early forties. Both Caucasian, both brown-haired. He crouches beside them, gives a perfunctory push on the pulse-point of the older man with one gloved hand. Dead, no surprise there. He checks the younger, too, just to be thorough.

No apparent physical injuries, and he’s about to make a preliminary ruling of death by the pathogen. Although – there’s something of interest – a pistol lays discarded on the floor a few feet away. He hums to himself, the sound becoming massive in the acoustics of the empty room. He almost swears he can hear something in that fucking blue tank humming back.

He makes to turn the older man’s body, to check for wounds just in case, when he sees, really sees, the positioning of their bodies, makes himself a voyeur of their last moments of life. They’re curled around each other, Older behind Younger like a shell, his square hands draped as if to sweep Younger’s face. Their legs are tangled up, feet drawn up along one another.

Darragh leans back on his heels, studying the two of them, wondering what it was that possessed them, in their last seconds, to swallow down that evolutionary response that tells you to run, trample, hide, pound your fists against the glass, but to instead lay themselves down together on the chessboard floor like they were going to bed.

He rolls Older onto his back, pats him down, finds nothing to suggest physical violence. Does the same for Younger. Makes a note on their files that a more thorough examination should be performed due to suspicious circumstances. “Gun” he writes, and underlines it twice. They’re the first bodies all day (that he knows of), that don’t wear any ID. He makes note of their identifying features: Younger has a fresh cut on his right cheekbone. Wearing a waistcoat and shirt: nothing helpful there, in a government building. Older is wearing period military in the form of a huge wool greatcoat. Marginally more helpful. He calls them both “John Doe” and then goes about the arduous business of loading them onto the trolleys unaided.

The worst part is over, now. He knows because he is sitting. He looks out on the rows of orange bags, neat and ordered, and sighs in relief. Soon they’ll start the identification and confirmation. The family members. The photos, the jewellery, the government counsellors. The crying. But this part isn’t much his business. The forensic scientists will do their shady work, and then it will be the analyzing of the pathogen, which is even less his business. Soon, there will be a tsunami or an earth quake or a massive plane crash and today will be a distant memory. He drinks his tea, checking over the forms filled out by his crew, noting corrections needed to be made, questionable conclusions to be verified, incomplete information to be compensated for.

That’s when she storms in, all black hair and stomping boots and a right Welsh fury. He looks up from his paper as she says, sounding more exhausted than angry, “I’m special ops.”

He laughs at her, a derisive little guffaw, and pointedly returns his gaze to the forms on the table he’s sitting at. “You think they care?” he asks, tipping his head toward the rows of bodies, his handiwork, his pride, his order in a disordered universe.

She grabs his collar, baring teeth. “You’re going to care, in a few minutes, when one of your bags starts wriggling around out there.”

He blinks at her, not sure what to make of that threat. She drops his shirt.

“Listen, I’m looking for Jack Harkness,” she says. He mentally goes over the names of the dead, and when that doesn’t work, he flicks through the sheaf of paper in front of him. “Wearing an RAF coat,” she elaborates, and suddenly he knows.

“The lovers,” he says, and then flushes, embarrassed to have let it slip.

“What?” she snaps, in a voice hoarse with tears and undercut by suspicion.

“It,” he stammers, flustered. “That is, in Pompeii, they have these bodies preserved just as they were when the ash hit them. Just as they died. Screaming, covering their heads. Cowering. The lovers, well, they died just . . . holding each other. That’s how I found Harkness.” He clears his throat. “I, ah, I left it off the record.”

She gives him a terrifying look, nostrils flaring, but then she softens, although he’s not sure if it’s because she forgives him, or if it’s just that she’s too tired to deal with him.

“He’s in row twenty-seven,” he says. “Him and the man he was with. Ask Smith over there and he’ll tell you which markers they’re under.” He points her in Smith’s direction and watches her go, putting her shoulders back. Gathering her composure. It’s only then that he realizes with a start that he hadn’t asked her the name on the other body. He tuts to himself, scribbling down Harkness’ name before he forgets it. Oversights, oversights.

He slumps forward over his desk, chin hitting the papers, remembering the lovers of Pompeii clutching each other’s backs. The first time he’d seen them, he’d dreamt of their fingernails digging into one another’s shoulder blades, breaths hitting one another’s collarbones, sweaty foreheads buried in one another’s necks. The smell of ash and perfumed hair and the olive oil they rubbed in their skin. Strange that it’s coming back to him now after all these years, all these dead bodies.

He’d put their bodies together, even though it goes against the order of things here. There is a sizable section for men in their early forties, and a middling one of men in their late twenties, each separated by several rows. That is where they should have gone. That is what protocol demands, what all the guidebooks demand.

He’d called them both thirty-five and laid them alongside one another. It’s the most unprofessional thing he’s ever done in the entirety of his career.

He doesn’t regret it.