system that supplied the Gate with the awesome amount of energy it consumes. It would be inoperative for two days while repairs were made.
What happened to Lilly?
I don’t even like to think about it. When we pass through the Gate we enter a region that is in many ways beyond the reach of human senses, yet in other ways impinges on our minds unpredictably. Some people emerge from a trip through the Gate as screaming animals, and they never get better. We lose five percent of the goats that way, and a fair number of snatch team novices.
Whatever that region was, Lilly was in it, and she’d never get out.
(5)
Famous Last Words
Testimony of Bill Smith
I never did find out who got the temporary morgue set up. Briley hadn’t had the stomach for it, but apparently Rog Keane had somebody on his staff that had dealt with the problem before. When we got there it was already a going concern.
Personally, I think it would be much neater and sweeter, more compassionate all around, just to dig a big hole where the plane went down and shovel them all in and put up a big stone with everybody’s name carved on it. But nobody’s ever going to buy that idea. The next of kin all want a particular body in a specific grave.
In some crashes, we can accommodate them. In the worst ones, there’s just no way, but they have to find that out for themselves. All that’s left of Uncle Charlie would fit into a plastic sandwich bag.
What are you going to do? Show them a severed hand and ask if that wedding ring looks familiar? Most of them don’t even have faces.
This morgue was in a high school gym. The parking lot was full of cars belonging to relatives, and one news truck from a local television station.
“Easy, Bill,” Tom said, and guided me gently away from the camera crew. “You don’t want to wind up on the six o’clock news. Not
that
way.”
“I hope there’s a hell, Tom. And when those guys get there, I hope the devil’s waiting to shove a camera in their faces and ask them what they feel like.”
“Sure, Bill, sure.”
It was a relief to get inside the gym with the corpses.
There were maybe seventy or eighty of them. What I mean is, that’s how many long, narrow body bags were arranged in neat ranks. Against the far wall were many, many more bags with no shape at all. An FBI team had arrived from Washington. They’d already taken prints from the reasonably intact bodies, and now were at work on whatever fingers they could find. Later, jaws would be examined for dental work, though you’d be surprised how few people get identified that way.
We were introduced to the Oakland Special-Agent-in-Charge, or SAC, as they like to be called. We already knew the boys from the Washington fingerprint team. The FBI inherited this messy job simply because they have more fingerprints on file than everybody else put together. If you read their literature you might think they get about a ninety-nine percent match of names with carcasses. The plain fact is that, after a couple weeks, a lot of next of kin would be told there was just no way to find even a piece of their dead relative, and there would be a lot of memorial services in a lot of chapels. A lot of burned meat would go wherever such things end up for quiet disposal. I’d never asked where that was. Doctors and morticians should have some secrets.
We met the Contra Costa and Alameda County coroners, the heads of paramedic and fire department teams, and quite a few doctors. It was a busy place.
I’ve been to crashes where they were just letting relatives wander through the morgue lifting up the corners of blankets. There’s no way you can make it pretty or easy to stomach, but there are limits. Here, they were mostly going by personal effects.In a separate room they had lines of tables covered with burnt clothing and jewelry, all tagged as to which corpse it had been taken from. A lot of people were looking through this stuff.
Tom and I were looking for Freddie
What happened to Lilly?
I don’t even like to think about it. When we pass through the Gate we enter a region that is in many ways beyond the reach of human senses, yet in other ways impinges on our minds unpredictably. Some people emerge from a trip through the Gate as screaming animals, and they never get better. We lose five percent of the goats that way, and a fair number of snatch team novices.
Whatever that region was, Lilly was in it, and she’d never get out.
(5)
Famous Last Words
Testimony of Bill Smith
I never did find out who got the temporary morgue set up. Briley hadn’t had the stomach for it, but apparently Rog Keane had somebody on his staff that had dealt with the problem before. When we got there it was already a going concern.
Personally, I think it would be much neater and sweeter, more compassionate all around, just to dig a big hole where the plane went down and shovel them all in and put up a big stone with everybody’s name carved on it. But nobody’s ever going to buy that idea. The next of kin all want a particular body in a specific grave.
In some crashes, we can accommodate them. In the worst ones, there’s just no way, but they have to find that out for themselves. All that’s left of Uncle Charlie would fit into a plastic sandwich bag.
What are you going to do? Show them a severed hand and ask if that wedding ring looks familiar? Most of them don’t even have faces.
This morgue was in a high school gym. The parking lot was full of cars belonging to relatives, and one news truck from a local television station.
“Easy, Bill,” Tom said, and guided me gently away from the camera crew. “You don’t want to wind up on the six o’clock news. Not
that
way.”
“I hope there’s a hell, Tom. And when those guys get there, I hope the devil’s waiting to shove a camera in their faces and ask them what they feel like.”
“Sure, Bill, sure.”
It was a relief to get inside the gym with the corpses.
There were maybe seventy or eighty of them. What I mean is, that’s how many long, narrow body bags were arranged in neat ranks. Against the far wall were many, many more bags with no shape at all. An FBI team had arrived from Washington. They’d already taken prints from the reasonably intact bodies, and now were at work on whatever fingers they could find. Later, jaws would be examined for dental work, though you’d be surprised how few people get identified that way.
We were introduced to the Oakland Special-Agent-in-Charge, or SAC, as they like to be called. We already knew the boys from the Washington fingerprint team. The FBI inherited this messy job simply because they have more fingerprints on file than everybody else put together. If you read their literature you might think they get about a ninety-nine percent match of names with carcasses. The plain fact is that, after a couple weeks, a lot of next of kin would be told there was just no way to find even a piece of their dead relative, and there would be a lot of memorial services in a lot of chapels. A lot of burned meat would go wherever such things end up for quiet disposal. I’d never asked where that was. Doctors and morticians should have some secrets.
We met the Contra Costa and Alameda County coroners, the heads of paramedic and fire department teams, and quite a few doctors. It was a busy place.
I’ve been to crashes where they were just letting relatives wander through the morgue lifting up the corners of blankets. There’s no way you can make it pretty or easy to stomach, but there are limits. Here, they were mostly going by personal effects.In a separate room they had lines of tables covered with burnt clothing and jewelry, all tagged as to which corpse it had been taken from. A lot of people were looking through this stuff.
Tom and I were looking for Freddie
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