The Cleaner

There’s a little secret inside County View Hospital. You learn about it as a part of training day. You get gathered into separate groups and then taken around an in-depth tour of the department your job is focused in. You’re then shown a brief tour for the rest of the hospital, given a slight mention then you’ll get used to the rest of the place the more you work here. And then when you’re taken to the morgue, that’s when you’ll be shown the secret.

We don’t house any monsters here, in case you’re wondering. No ghouls or beasts that eat any corpses or workers that come their way, I can promise you that. But it is a dangerous thing. There’s a good reason that, even if you won’t work in the morgue, you’re given an in-depth explanation about it.

The thing in question is an experimental machine that’s designed to emulsify corpses. The machine achieves this with an acid shower, melting the flesh and organs away into liquid while the bones are left intact. There’s no official name for the thing but I like to call it the Cleaner since at the end it gives the skeleton a bleach white look to it. The Cleaner looks like an iron coffin with some glass on its left and right side, to see how the emulsifying is coming along. Underneath the coffin are some polyethylene tubes that lead down into a large bucket for the mixture of liquids (which tends to come out as a sort of blackened sludge) to be thrown out. It sits inside the middle of the morgue, its sleek and dark gray look contrasting with the muddied whites of the walls, floors and ceiling.

To ensure that any new trainees are careful with the machine, we are told the story about Stephen. Stephen was a morgue’s assistant, a young man who had just gotten the job as recently as we did. He was a smart and charming man, albeit one who was clumsy and forgetful. He did his best to make up for those flaws by following the routine related to the machine as closely as he possibly could.

It was a night shift job and it’d all begin when examination of the body had ended and when permission had been granted by the relatives of the deceased. He’d carter the body inside the coffin and let it rest inside. He’d close the mini doors on the top and bottom sides of the coffin. Then he’d push the red button on the bottom side of the coffin and let it work its magic. While it melted the body, he’d prepare himself by dressing up in a protective suit, complete with gas mask and gloves. Once the machine was finished, he’d wheel the skeleton out from the coffin and bring it to one of the lockers. For the bucket, he’d carry it towards a specially made waste container before taking that to waste disposal.

It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out that on one of these days, something went wrong. In actuality, a few things went wrong. Most of them were beyond Stephen’s control, aside from some key mistakes. The first mistake was the body that was to be melted. For a lack of a better way of putting this, it was a fat man’s corpse. Its weight exceeded what was generally recommended for the machine, yet the hospital had already signed off on the body being emulsified. To be on the safe side, Stephen opted to use a larger bucket to carry all of the mixture at once for when it needed to be moved.

The second mistake was entirely on Stephen and his charms. As he had pushed the button and gotten the Cleaner to work, he received a call from a girlfriend of his. She was someone he had met at the hospital, the one in charge of the tour says she was just leaving work and wanted to see how he was doing. He was in the middle of getting his protective gear on when the call came and Stephen couldn’t help himself in getting distracted. When he finished the call, the machine had finished its duty.

The third mistake he made was zipping up his suit and heading towards the machine without his gas mask or gloves. He felt rushed, he didn’t want to fall behind schedule and risk getting reprimanded. He carefully brought the skeleton to its locker and then went to pick up the pocket.

The first mistake that was made was starting to become realized as the mixture of liquid flesh and acid was a lot heavier than Stephen realized. It wasn’t impossible to lift, it only took more effort than Stephen used to. Since it was a night shift job, everyone else had gone home for the night. Not wanting to leave a job undone, he got to work carrying the bucket to the waste disposal container.

The penultimate mistake was not noticing the bucket had overflowed. Some of the mixture had leaked onto the floor. Holding the bucket up to his chest, Stephen couldn’t see the mess on the floor. And he walked directly on top of it. With a quick slip onto his back, the mixture splashed on top of him.

The last mistake was not even his fault but the hospital’s. The protective suit could only protect itself from low concentrations of acid. Even with the massive dilution of liquid flesh, it wasn’t enough to protect Stephen.

He wasn’t found until hours later, when one of the janitors went to do his work there. The smell was already overpowering before the door was even opened, the janitor had to hold a cloth up to his mouth before he could go inside. Once the door was opened, he found Stephen lying on the floor. He had been trying to get to the sink, resting on his stomach with one of his arms outstretched, a meter or so from the sink. A river of pink and red blood followed him, with bits and pieces of internal organs mixed in. His back was dotted with large holes that only showed Stephen’s skeleton, a thick and viscous sludge and the floor underneath him.

When his body was turned over, his face was unrecognizable. A half melted eyeball, his teeth and his hair were the only clues that showed who he was. What was left of his face was turning into a sort of brownish sludge, mixed in with some dark reds and blacks. A light shade of pink came through in the middle of it all, his brain matter leaking through what remained of his nose.

It took weeks for the smell to eventually pass. Months for both the janitor and Stephen’s girlfriend to start making progress on the road to mental recovery. All because of some little mistakes that piled up into the death of an innocent man.

Moral of the story? Don’t fuck with the Cleaner and it won’t fuck with you.