MEHR Chapter 53 Snippet 5 (Patreon)

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Elsa had moved on from the office, having given up on gleaning any info from the stacks of papers stored in the desk except for a suspicious amount of headshots of Asari at various stages of fairly nasty skin conditions - the alien equivalent of melanoma, maybe. She had taken snapshots of those with her Omni-Tool, thinking that perhaps she could have them translated. 'Universal' translators on the Citadel apparently only had 'English' set for human languages - It was why Elsa often got away with swearing in french in front of aliens.

She opened the door to the second room, and was greeted by the smell of rotten meat just before her helmet's filters kicked in. She entered, and set her Omni-Tool's light in drone mode. The globe of light floated up towards the ceiling, casting a white flickering rays across the moss and blood and bones.

Elsa had just found the hospital's morgue.

"Oh, seigneur...!" she muttered. There were dozens of bodies here, all at various stages of decomposition, but all had been consumed by the same combination of maggots and bioengineered viral agents, which had then used their food as the building blocks for a veritable tapestry of mold and blood that caked the walls. The floor, tables and slabs were hosts to cornucopias of alien fungal growths that seemed to shudder and hide from the light of the Omni-drone, setting off her sensor's motion tracking. The bodies had not been treated kindly: those that had not been granted the dignity of a slab had been casually tossed aside in a corner.

This wasn't a butcher shop. This wasn't even a charnel house... this was a Petri dish, she realized, the work of a scientist gone mad.

I should scream, I should run, I should puke... but I'm not. My God, what's wrong with me?

Reasoning that this was probably the thing Adam Jensen was trying to destroy, Elsa decided to investigate the area further. She took scans of every corpse in the morgue, and saved the Data for Doctor Nazir to examine later. Still, she didn't need a degree in xenobiology to know that most of the bodies here were those of Asari, if what little remained of their blue skin and their crests were any indication.

There were three bodies of note, however: The first one was that of what she assumed was a fairly large human male. His skin had completely rotted away, and the flesh underneath was already home to maggots and mutated overgrown gut flora, but he had to notable distinction of still wearing his underwear. The brand, Boss, was used by the United States and Alliance militaries. Elsa wondered who the man was, and if anyone on Earth had contacted C-Sec to see what had happened to him. Perhaps Nazir or Bau could reconstruct his identity later, she thought, looking at her Omni-Tool.

The second body belonged to a Turian male. This one was still fairly intact, the maggots having consumed only about half of his sand-coloured skin... but Elsa didn't recognize him. Not even a scrap of clothing or underwear, she noted. Could be a cop or a Marine... I've yet to meet a Turian that was neither.

The third body was easily the crowning piece of horror of this place, as it was the flayed skin of a blonde Caucasian human male, stretched out and pinned against the far walls with scalpels and other sharp implements. Not only that... but Elsa quickly realized that this kill was fresh.

Her sensor blinked red from behind her, and the morgue became dark as the light drone was crushed into a thousand little pieces. Elsa fired her shotgun at moving shadows, and when a second light drone emerged from her Omni-Tool her fear made way for anger as it became apparent that she had missed her mark.

The third room was some kind of surgical theatre, that came complete with a table flanked by four mechanical arms, and a ceiling-mounted, ring-shaped rail on which was rigged several mechanized tools to aid a surgeon in his task. Much to Elsa's relief, this place was impeccably clean, a shocking contrast from the frescoes of meat moss in the morgue.

She looked at the theatre: it was quite spacious, with enough room for twenty finely carved wooden chairs to surround the table and give the sitting spectators plenty of elbow room. On the table lay a file folder. Besides the table a grotesque skeleton of black steel hung slack on a display mount.