Painkiller

by G. Wells Taylor

  Most everybody looked nervous as hell. Family too, he guessed, and friends were packed into the large waiting area looking put out.

  Then he realized with some chagrin that his eyes had lingered too long on a wrinkled old face—fat jowls sagging—white brows clenched over furious blue eyes.

  Similar, he realized, if not exactly the way his own face would be—if he lived that long. Borland had to admit that his own rugged good looks had hit the road so many times that applying the term ‘good’ required some mental soft focus. But that was the way it was for the survivors. Time passed and the years had their way.

  Borland covered the social discomfort of locking eyes with grandpa by gripping and pulling on his own tie—and playing with the lapels on his jacket.

  He let a great puff of air buzz over his lips as he scanned the room trying to find a chair where he could hole up.

  Private clinic maybe—but the waiting room was public.

  Borland cleared his throat and lowered his gaze before bending to snatch up his bags. He shambled across the thick carpet to an easy chair covered in antique floral upholstery. It didn’t suit him at all, but the seat was wedged into a corner away from all the faces.

  Borland was still feeling the squad’s first mission, and he’d tapered himself off the painkillers, thinking whiskey could do the trick.

  Then they told him to lay off the sauce.

  His back and knees were killing him and there was a clicking noise when he breathed through his nose. The squad doctor who’d treated it said the septum was fractured and would require surgery to mend.

  Thanks Aggie.

  Crossing the room, Borland noticed that the old man read the move as rejection. He heaved himself out of his chair with a grunt to show his displeasure. A white plastic bag was wound around the old man’s wrist. French doors set in the wall behind him allowed Borland a backlit X-ray of its contents: pill bottles, toothbrush, razors and comb.

  Borland huffed derisively and his nose clicked.

  A life’s work in an airsick bag.

  Borland dropped his luggage and settled into his chair, but something caused his hair to prickle. A sound: a curious clicking, tapping background noise that filled in the edges of the scene. Then he grumbled.

  Phones.

  All of them had phones, eBooks and palm-coms: a menagerie of wireless devices, one in every hand. Touching base. Updating days. Messaging machines. He frowned at the behavior. That was why Varion was gobbled up by the bottle-full—why the day got out of hand so fast.

  Obsessive tendencies from cradle to grave.

  Borland grunted.

  Obsessed with their obsessions.

  Fingers tapped and stroked at keys and touch screens. Click, tap, and rattle, click, click, click…

  They were all the same. Tappers. Clickers!

  No better than Biters, a waste of...

  Ssskin.

  He cleared his throat, compelled to make some kind of human sound to cover the mechanical whispering.

  But the cough was answered by a painful throb behind his navel, and he burped.

  The hernias got worse after Parkerville. He was a wreck generally, with an injured lower back, pains in his legs and bruises all over. And there were several deep ugly lacerations on his face, neck and side that were barely healed. No question though: the hernias were worse. All the fighting had torn things up. When he sneezed now it felt like his guts were coming out.

  A nurse appeared at the doorway and yelled a name. A rustle went through the gathering as a woman in her early forties got up, grabbed her bags and hurried after the nurse.

  Borland’s stomach made gurgling noises. His belly button had completely inverted, and the grapefruit-size hernia in his right groin bulged out under his belly. He had gas all the time and he couldn’t get comfortable.

  It was time.

  He dropped his chin and peered around the waiting room: queer gold filigree against merlot wallpaper, all the furniture had ridged backs of highly polished wood. The legs too, they were carved into organic shapes.

  Three sets of French doors opened the wall at intervals across from him and showed him a broad deck with a wooded scene beyond. Some men stood out there smoking, and Borland’s hand instinctively reached into his jacket for his flask

  Then he stopped.

  He wasn’t drunk now. It was early enough that he’d managed to get to the clinic without needing a drink. And that was one of the requirements. But they didn’t say anything about after the operation. His flask was just a sampler. He had two bottles hidden in his bags.

  For later.

  You need the surgery.

  He was tired of getting old.

  They said he’d be at the Shomberg Clinic for six days minimum with time off between the surgeries. He’d be cooperative, but knew there was time to bend the rules.

  Too crowded here.

  He was always nervous in crowds. And with Variant Effect on the rise…

  The nurse returned to the doorway and called another name. She waited, and then called the name twice more. The assembled guests shifted uncomfortably.

  The nurse glanced back at her e-board and left the room.

  Borland noticed a gorgeous young brunette on a couch who was either accompanying a male relative, or was about to make some surgeon’s day.

  There has to be an upside for them...

  “Joe Borland?” The nurse’s voice echoed through the waiting area and Borland looked over to see the woman scanning faces.

  He waved to catch her attention, stood up, then winced as he grabbed his bags and followed her.

  CHAPTER 4

  The nurse ordered Borland to wait in a narrow hallway crowded by a long line of chairs. A pre-op doctor would soon go over the basics with him. Most of the seats were taken by people chattering nervously or tapping on their palm-coms. He avoided inclusion by dropping into the nearest chair and sinking into himself. He lowered his eyelids to half-mast and crossed his forearms over his gut.

  He hoped this posture would convince people he was dead, or at least asleep. So long as they understood that he was not open to interaction.

  Not long after, the frowning old man from the waiting room stumped into the hallway and jammed himself into the last empty chair on Borland’s left. The old man’s plastic bag rattled.

  The two men grumbled simultaneously.

  And time passed.

  The four doors across from them opened occasionally as patients were summoned. Then more waiting.

  One stifling hour later, a man in a suit with thick glasses, bald crown and bluish jowls opened one of the doors. He held up an e-board and read Borland’s name.

  About goddamn time...

  Borland followed him into a crappy office that looked like something you’d see in a low-budget movie.

  Or like the Salvation Army had furnished the dump.

  The doctor’s expression was frozen in place. Oh he fake smiled once, but that was it. The man looked bored, distracted—like he was remembering another time and place. Borland was forced to repeat himself whenever he asked a question or answered one. The doctor had an accent...Eastern Europe? He had to be 35.

  But the man’s disinterest was soon getting under Borland’s skin.

  “I saved the world once, you know...”

  He muttered this under his breath, but the doctor wasn’t listening. The man sat at his desk across from Borland, scrolling around on his e-reader like he didn’t care.

  Borland froze.

  A kinderkid? It’s possible!

  Then Borland realized he might have been studying the man too closely, but the doctor just glanced at him from time to time, looked up from his file to ask a question without focusing his eyes on anything.

  What’s his problem?

  Borland wondered if the Shomberg Clinic had received the Variant Effect Alert bulletin that HQ was sending out to all health care providers and hospitals. That was bound to rattle anyone holding a doctor’s license
.

  Maybe he was afraid of Borland. Especially with the doctor’s age being what it was: did he think his patient was cooking the Variant molecule? Or was he afraid that the new hybrid in the bulletin might set off his own inner beast?

  Borland shook his head and took a deep breath.

  “I know too much,” Borland mumbled matter-of-factly.

  The doctor looked up then, asked more questions about Borland’s health: Do you take any medication? When was your last physical? Do you have any allergies?

  After much repetition, Borland managed to provide answers and clear up a few questions of his own, or at least as much as he wanted to know. He’d didn’t care for the play by play.

  Cut. Snip. Whatever.

  That was when the doctor slipped in a bulletin of his own—how the Shomberg treatment stood up so well to scrutiny because it depended on the patients being awake during the procedure and did not involve dangerous anesthetics or lengthy recovery times

  Borland’s mouth dropped open.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Drop your pants please.” The doctor circled his desk and pulled a short stool over as Borland got to his feet.

  The doctor sat and pointed at Borland’s groin. “And underwear.”

  “I’ll be awake for the surgery?” Borland grabbed at his belt.

  “Pardon me?” the doctor asked, slipping on a pair of vinyl gloves. He peered up over his glasses as Borland repeated the question, and then answered: “Oh, yes. It simplifies everything. People do not realize how risky anesthetic can be during a procedure and post-operatively.”

  “But—I’ll be awake when you do it?” Borland asked again, lowering his pants and underwear.

  “I won’t be doing it.” The doctor contemplated Borland’s hairy crotch and swollen belly.

  “You really should have lost some weight,” he sighed, looking up, sheathed fingers reaching out and abstractedly manipulating Borland’s testicles. “We shouldn’t even operate.”

  “I lost 15 pounds...” Borland grumbled defensively, feeling his face flush unexpectedly when the doctor told him to turn his head and cough.

  “Not enough,” the doctor replied, shaking his head, his gaze shifting up to Borland’s navel. He stared at the swollen lump of flesh that protruded. Then he reached out and forcefully pushed it in.

  “Hey!” Borland gasped, coughed and stepped back. He almost lost his footing when his pants tightened around his ankles, but he caught himself against his chair.

  “You could lose 30 more.” The doctor grabbed his e-board from a short side table and tapped something on the virtual keys.

  “Inguinal hernias, left and right,” he said, checking something off on the cartoon abdomen displayed on the e-reader’s color screen.

  He reached into the breast pocket of his lab coat and pulled out a large pen. He uncapped it, and then stroked it deftly across Borland’s belly, leaving a thick horizontal line of black ink above the protruding navel.

  “The surgeon will cut here,” the doctor said, gesturing at the line before turning away. “He’s not going to like the fact that you’re obese.”

  Borland stared down at his swollen navel and sighed.

  Obese?

  He felt a sudden urge to hit the bottles tucked away in his bags. Call an end to the whole drama.

  The hell with this!

  But from Borland’s point of view the doctor’s black line appeared to curve down to either side beneath the plum-sized hernia like a frown.

  He had to get this done.

  “That’s all there is to it,” the doctor said, saving the information on his e-board and copying it to Borland’s file.

  Wincing at the painful throb in his abdomen, Borland pulled his clothing back into place, loosely fastening his belt.

  The doctor held out his file—the flash card on it flickering as the data saved. He set it on Borland’s palm. “Take this down to accounting. They’ll tell you were to go from there.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Borland had read the background on the website.

  The Shomberg Clinic sold unique soft tissue dissection and repair that had an almost zero failure rate, so sufferers came from all over the world to receive the famous treatment. They used industrial production techniques in their war on hernias because the injuries were so common.

  Dr. Shomberg had developed his innovative surgical repair techniques during World War Two to help young men who were unable to enlist because of their hernias. His repair soon fixed these recruits for service, and before long all branches of the military wanted his aid. His methods soon became the favorite of construction workers and anyone in a strenuous line of work.

  And the repair was so solid his patients could get back to work or service in record time with little chance of re-injuring themselves.

  Shomberg founded the clinic and the clinic grew into a hernia-repair factory.

  Day surgery at most hospitals, the repair as Dr. Shomberg saw it required an extended stay for lasting results. So he developed an assembly-line method that involved constant waves of injured patients arriving and entering the clinic to match the waves of recuperating patients leaving after the three- or four-day repair cycle.

  The various stages of overlap that occurred were responsible for the strange population Borland found wandering the clinic halls.

  There were check-in and orientation day patients, operation day patients, healing day patients and final day—get me out of here—patients. The result was a motley crew of anxious, wounded and relieved individuals—all of them wishing they were anywhere else on the planet, but all of them thrown into a weird brotherhood of embarrassing injury, violation and release.

  Everybody had a limp or soon would.

  Check-in day caused a lot of stress as new patients inserted themselves into the clinic’s production line and bore witness to patients a day or days ahead of them in the process.

  Operation day patients were the worst. They could strike terror into any heart—tumbling out of their beds and shuffling through the ebb and flow of arrivals and departures smelling of disinfectant and body odors, and sporting grime and fear and various fright-wig hairstyles.

  Each of them moving gingerly; fearing that any jarring motion might damage their recent repairs of flesh and steel thread, or worse, according to rumor, start a gory cascade of abdominal wall and intestines.

  Borland hated it all and decided to do his best to avoid identification with any group. He wanted to go in like a Sneak Squad. Keep his head low, have the treatment and get out of there without experiencing any but the absolute bare minimum of human contact.

  As he stumped along the carpeted hallway after the nurse, careful not to jingle his hidden cranking materials, he mused over his ill luck and growing thirst.

  Soon. He thought of the dark brown bottles of whiskey so near. Soon.

  The halls and rooms were designed and built in the 50s, all Arborite and chrome, with 70s upgrades like faux stained glass lamps and dark wood paneling and room dividers decorated with super-graphics.

  Time had stopped at an ugly time.

  Borland wondered if that happened in efficient places. They were too busy doing their jobs in its deepest and darkest rooms—the OR and labs—unable to give more than a passing thought to decor.

  Borland was aware of the ever-present hum and rattle of air conditioning units—the buzz and click of old light fixtures and the starched rustle of the scrubs worn by the nurses and orderlies.

  He realized that the more he tried to shut them out, the more he noticed the sounds. And then he understood an important underlying factor.

  He needed a drink.

  Borland had been cranked for most of the last couple decades so sobriety was close to an alien concept. And that’s what was pushing in on him, causing his ears to ring, allowing him to feel his pulse in his fingertips.

  He needed a drink.

  So he tried to distract himself with the nurses. They went by all manner of ki
nd: fat, thin, broad, awkward or dippy; dressed in ill-fitting floral patterned pants and jackets.

  And they made annoying rustling sounds when they moved.

  As he glanced at their pastel forms he realized that the majority were approaching retirement. These ones either had their men or were moving into a new phase of life.

  Join the crowd...

  As he moved past a recreation room with a pool table, loungers and couches, Borland ignored the mincing nods of the new boys that needed friends, the salty glances of the seasoned who had stories to tell, and the normalizing, shifting gaze of those who desperately wanted to leave their hernias and all Shomberg associations behind them.

  Borland had been through too much to fear a surgical procedure—even one he had to be awake for—but he knew enough about people and Variant to keep an eye out for the wrong kind of look.

  There was a look, and he knew it.

  The Effect was coming back and it could be, in fact was, lurking everywhere he looked in everyone he saw. Even in the doctors and nurses.

  Everywhere, so then...

  Then they wanted him to take powerful painkillers, lie down and have his abdomen cut open. He was supposed to trust a stranger to take him apart and stitch him back together.

  They better have some world-class painkillers.

  His hernias were 98 percent discomfort, two percent pain—he was used to them. He didn’t care about his looks, so he could have put the procedures off pretty simply.

  Until your liver falls out?

  The nurse led him down the corridor, her voice a raspy horn of menopausal know-how, telling him about what he couldn’t do and what he had to do.

  “Don’t remove your wristband. Don’t remove your nametag. Wear it at all times,” she ordered and glanced at his tag as he followed her into the room. “Your number is 328-2. The ‘2’ stands for you.” She walked to the head of a very narrow single bed by the window. “This bed is number ‘2’, so you use it. Same as the closet.” She pointed at a pair of closets marked ‘1’ and ‘2.’ “Anything with a ‘2’ on it is yours.” She smiled through a mass of tanned wrinkles. “Your roommate is number ‘1.’”