Parts is Parts

The next morning Mike and his crew of showed up. Mike and three and his assistants pulled up in a white Caravan with government plates, soon to be joined by another two assistants driving a highly modified Hummer with a big cap on the back.

I stood on my one good leg inside the doorway to the Bonesmobile watching them. Mike was all business. He was evaluating my damaged arm as he was shaking my good hand. “Let’s get inside and take a look.”

Without delay, I hobbled back into my modified bedroom, which was the largest open space in the Bonesmobile. I even had an examination table that I had pulled out of a closet and erected before they had arrived...not an easy thing to do one handed, but I managed.

As we filed into the bedroom, Mike looked around and nodded that he could work in this space. His assistants began filing in behind them, each carrying cases of various sizes, some were obviously tool boxes while others had the look of modified rifle or guitar cases.

Mike began talking before I could even ask any questions. “OK Rusty. We’ve been able to pull up the schematics from the old NecroLab files on your modifications and assembly. I’ve had my team and I working on the body of the other zombie...”

“His name was Greg.” I snapped, interrupting him.

“Oh right. Well, we’ve been practicing on Greg’s body and have a pretty good handle on the modifications that were made in your transition from corpse to working zombie. I’ve been pretty impressed by what I’ve found.”

“Yeah, and what is it that you have found?”

“Well, essentially, your limb structures were modified after your death in such a way that most of those moveable parts are easily detached and replaced. Matter of fact, we have at least functioning replacements for each of your limbs, and multiple copies of your hands and feet.”

“You mean they have whole extra limbs just sitting around for me?”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I am saying.”

“How’d they manage that?”

“Best as I can figure, when they were preparing your corpse, they removed each of your limbs in order to wire you up properly and to strengthen your bones with metal casings that make you so much heavier than a living person. Your whole muscular system had to be replaced with a specially designed system of bundled wires and microprocessors that functioned like your own natural muscles. When they did that though, they must have figured on using you in situations like this where you might get damaged, so while they had you all disassembled, they made a bunch of exact replicas of your limb bones and entire sets of the accompanying wires and such.”

“Did they do this for me and for Greg?”

“Yeah. They had to, since each of you is different in size in the various long bones, things just wouldn’t quite fit if we were to mix your parts with his.”

“So replacing this hand and fixing my leg shouldn’t be much of a problem then?”

“Nope. Like I said, we’ve been practicing on...Greg...so we’ve become pretty good at finding the release points on the joints and we can get you fixed up here in a couple of hours.”

“How about replacing the skin I’ve lost?”

“We’ve got some of that too. It was one of last things that Dr. Bernstein was working on before he...retired. We’ve got some very realistic looking synthetic skin that we can use to replace some of the stuff that has worn off, or been...”

“Eaten.” I waved my damaged arm at them, showing them the tooth marks and twisted metal and bone at the end of it.

Mike turned a shade paler when I made that last comment. One of the assistants dropped his case and ran for the bathroom. A couple of the others looked like they wanted to join him, while still others were snickering.

“Well,” he managed to spit out, “in any event, we can replace some of it for you. This new skin is in shorter supply however, and we are still larning to run the machinery to produce more. So, shall we begin?” He motioned for me to get onto the table.

I hopped up onto the table and laid down. “OK Doc, make me beautiful again.”

“That’s a tall order Agent Bones. We’ll be happy with just making you presentable.”

“Yeah, I guess that’ll have to do. Look, I don’t want to distract you and your team here. I’m going to shut down for a bit and watch things from a different perspective. Don’t worry if you feel a draft and a chill in the air, it’ll just be me. If you need me, just call out my name loudly, and I’ll bring myself back online.”

“Uh, OK. Thanks for this chance to make history Rusty.”

“Hey, thanks for putting my ass back together. See you in a couple of hours then.” With that, I detached my Spirit from my body and drifted up to watch them work as they began opening the stacked cases of tools and assembling portable work tables.

I had a chance to reflect on the strangeness that is my so-called life...how many folks can sit and watch a team of mechanics disassemble their limbs and pull out brand new shiny replacements that they almost snap into place like a damn machine with broken parts. Maybe this is the future for living people people too, like for the all too many wounded soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe they too would benefit from the technology...and magick...that had gone into making me possible.

I marvelled at the business like way that Mike and his team basically unzipped the remaining skin on my forearm with a sharp knife, peeled it like a banana and then detached the still shiny, but damaged bones of my forearm at the elbow. Mike tossed the damaged pieces into an open case for return to the NecroLab and then set about attaching the new, fully assembled forearm and hand into place. It was all so amazingly simple, but still so very strange.

Once the new forearm was locked into place, they cut off the peeled off skin and pulled out a roll of skin to wrap around the exposed muscle and nerve system. Once it was in place, they used what appeared to be a hot glue type gun to seal up the seem on the inside of my new forearm. At this point, my hand was still without a covering, but that was fixed when they pulled out a new pair of skin colored gloves, complete with fingernails and even a few stray hairs on the backs of the gloves. They slipped these obviously fitted gloves into place and used the glue gun like device to seal the skin gloves on the exposed edge of forearm skin on hand.

Next was my leg. After examining the damage, Mike apparently wasn’t satisfied that it was just the knee cap that was damaged, so he apparently ordered a couple of his assistants to go get another case. It took both of them to carry in a very long, and obviously quite heavy case that contained a fully assembled leg. The process was quite similar to my arm.

Overall, it took less than two hours to affect the repairs and make me more human looking than I had been in a while. They even took the time to patch up my head and neck, using scissors to cut away patches of damaged skin and then patching in new skin to replace those patches. The glue gun device actually did a passable job of making seals look like healed up scars.

The crew was just starting to pack away the myriad of tools and the used up parts when Mike called my name out. I slipped back into my body and felt things click into place nicely.