The dead man's skull is visible through the open door of the crematorium furnace.

And that, somehow, is not the most jarring part of this scene.

The cardboard boxes are.

Eight of them, all coffin-sized, are stacked on gurneys and tables. All contain the body of someone who has died during the coronavirus pandemic. All await their turn in the 1,600-degree heat of the furnaces at Rosedale Cemetery in Orange.

The moment one of the three is turned on, the cardboard quickly burns and fills the room with a thick, gray smoke. And each time a box is pushed inside a furnace, it seems a hearse arrives with another.

"I've never seen anything like this,” says Cliff Mayers, a man built like an aging linebacker, wearing an untucked navy polo shirt and mud-caked work boots.

Patti Sapone | NJ Advance Media

Mayers is in the middle of a 12-hour shift running the crematorium. When the day is over, he and a co-worker will have pushed 22 corpses into those furnaces. On a normal day, he might have five or six.

This is not a normal day.

Today is Tuesday, April 21, a day during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in New Jersey.

It’s the 48th day since the state recorded its first case. It’s the day it will report 92,387 residents have been infected and 4,753 killed by the coronavirus. It’s the day New Jersey will announce another 379 deaths — the state’s highest single-day increase in fatalities since the outbreak began.

Thousands more will test positive today.

Hundreds more will die a lonely death, isolated from family and friends.

Yet life will go on around them as a ruthless disease challenges society in ways never imagined.

A team of three dozen NJ Advance Media journalists documented 24 hours on this historic day in New Jersey. They sought to capture how residents are coping and adapting, and to leave a permanent record of this deeply unnerving moment in history.

From emergency room doctors to EMTs, from kids learning remotely to senior citizens confined to their homes, from booming gun and alcohol sales to the closure of countless small businesses, the pandemic has transformed life in the Garden State.

Some say the worst is over. From inside the crematory, Mayers isn’t seeing it.

“I hope it ends,” he says. “But there's no end in sight."