I worked transport for the county coroner’s office for three years. My job was simple on paper: when someone died, I drove out, loaded the body, and brought it back.
When this accident happened, I had only been there about six months.
One night the call came in for a head-on collision — a little car versus a hook-and-ladder fire truck. When I got there, they sent me walking up the freeway about a quarter mile with a biohazard bag. It was summertime, and the asphalt was hot. Picking up brain matter off that road was like trying to scrape up marshmallow cream — you could never get it all.
I came across a woman’s ID, turned it over to the investigator, and kept walking.
The first body we reached was a woman lying flat on her back in the middle of the freeway. From the neck down she looked completely normal. From the neck up, her head was only about two inches thick.
She hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt.
When the two vehicles hit, her car wrapped around the side of the fire truck and she was thrown headfirst into the driver’s side door. The impact blew every bone out the back of her head.
After we bagged her, we crossed the street to the burned-out car still attached to the fire engine. In what was left of the driver’s seat sat what used to be a man, still wearing his seatbelt. Only his head and one arm from the elbow down were recognizable as human. The rest of him looked like hamburger meat.
We slid a body bag underneath him and started scooping what was left into it. But when it was time to zip the bag closed, I discovered a wiring harness that was stuck inside of him. With quite a bit of difficulty, I finally managed to pull the wires free.
Later at the coroners, while attempting to search for property, we discovered that there was an entire alternator that had somehow gotten embedded in his body. We had no idea it was there.
That night taught me how fragile life really is. One second you're driving down the road, the next you're gone — just pieces on hot asphalt. Fifteen years later, I still can't drive past a bad wreck without thinking about that woman’s flattened head and that man molded some other form.
Some things you can never unsee.