“Hello, Professor,” said Iva.
The giant looked up and gently nodded her head in his direction.
“We are almost ready to begin. Do you need my help scrubbing in?” asked Iva. Her voice was mildly tremulous.
“I’m fine, thank you,” the Professor replied politely.
The Professor carried his briefcase over to one of the tables along the side of the room and lay it open. He removed a notebook and opened it, slowly paging through anatomical diagrams and scrawled notes. Then he extracted a small clear bag of white powder and a shortened plastic straw. He tipped out a small amount of the white powder on the shelf in front of him, put the straw to his nose, and snorted the drug up his nostrils.
The Professor bent his knees and hung his shoulders back in ecstasy. He blinked his eyes and rubbed his nose. The high was hitting him hard.
“Why is Martin lying on my operating table?” asked the Professor, his tone somewhere between irritated and surprised.
Iva froze for an instant, then her eyes fell to the floor as she tried to hold back the tears.
The giant grunted and put her hands on her hips. “We had an incident,” she said in Czech, her gravelly voice every bit as manly as her exterior.
The Professor turned his head ever so slightly, looking back over his shoulder. “Where is the Englishman?”
Iva snapped out of her haze and aimed a finger across the room at the giant. She shouted with such fury that spit flew from the corners of her mouth. “It’s her fault. She’s to blame! It should be her lying there, not Martin.”
The giant shrugged her shoulders dismissively and continued to prepare the surgical equipment.
The Professor calmly walked across to Iva and cupped her hands in his. He was gentle and caring. When her body relaxed, and she was no longer recoiling in fear, he embraced her with a hug.
“There, there, my pet. It is a terrible tragedy,” said the Professor as Iva wept on his shoulder.
“It’s not too late,” said Iva. “We can find someone else.”
The Professor held her shoulders and shook his head. “Alas, there is no more time.”
He spun around and animatedly marched across the room to inspect Adam from his toes to his head. The Professor was very impressed with everything he saw.
“A fine specimen,” the Professor said to Adam. “Good evening. We haven’t yet been introduced.”
The Professor reached out to shake, but when he held Adam’s limp hand he immediately knew that something was wrong.
“Oh?” said the Professor. He let Adam’s hand flop onto the operating table. “I see there are more surprises for me this evening.”
Adam closed his eyes in defiance, which irritated the Professor.
“I am not finished talking to you yet,” said the Professor.
Adam ignored him. The crazy fucker could do whatever he liked, but Adam wasn’t willing to indulge him in any way.
“Very well,” said the Professor. “Speculum, please.”
Adam’s eyes were wrenched open by cold steel slipping across the whites of his eyes and pulling his eyelids apart. His eyes burned as his corneas dried, and there was nothing he could do about it. Adam hyperventilated with fury.
“That’s better,” said the Professor. “Now we can have a conversation like two normal adults.” He turned and gestured like a showman to Iva. “You would have already met my anesthetist Iva, and my lovely Masha.”
Was that the beast woman’s name? Well, Masha can go fuck herself!
“You see, I love to play a little game with people I meet for the first time. The way it works, is we each share a fascinating fact about ourselves that no one else knows. Because she does not speak...much...I will share on Masha’s behalf.”
Masha grunted and raised an eyebrow at the doctor.
“You might never have guessed, but Masha was once a participant in the Olympics. She won gold for Russia in weightlifting. ‘The Strongest Woman Alive’,” he moved his hand as if plucking the words from the air, “is what the papers called her.” He paused and sighed. “But it was short lived. The jealous Americans began a smear campaign against my lovely Masha. They accused her of cheating. Take one look at the woman. It’s obvious she’s not all natural woman. But none of them were back then. The Olympic Committee stripped her of her title, her dignity, and banned her from the sport that created her.” The Professor stopped and gazed at Masha with lustful eyes. “She lost everything because of them.”
“But I saw potential. She had a gentle heart behind all that strength. I knew she would make a fantastic nurse.”
The Professor walked over to the basin and started scrubbing his hands.
“Is there anything about yourself that you wish to share before I continue?”
Adam screamed a muffled reply. “Go fuck yourself!”
The Professor tutted in disappointment. “So crude.” He soaped his arms up to his elbows with frothy iodine for the last time and rinsed them under the flowing water. The Professor stepped over to a small trolley where a surgical gown, gloves, and hand towel lay folded for him. He picked up the hand towel and carefully dried his hands, one at a time.
“In that case, I will tell you my fact.” He picked up the folded surgical gown, took a step away from the trolley, and let the gown unfold in front of him. He pushed his arms through the sleeves and then donned the gloves.
“I was born in Prague. My mother was a prostitute, and my father was a politician. I argue that my mother had the better morals, but she died before I was old enough to know her. My father had me thrown into a religious school for orphan boys where I could be hidden from the world, and his political opponents. He already had a wife and the scandal would have destroyed any hope he had of rising to power.”
The Professor approached the operating table again. He turned his back so Iva could tie a knot in his gown to secure it in place. Masha offered him a marking pen, which he took with a smile and began drawing dotted lines around Adam’s neck.
“The monks at the school stripped me of my childhood, my innocence, and every ounce of humanity.” The professor’s tone grew increasingly cold and somber.
The Professor stepped across the floor to the operating table where Martin lay, and drew the same intricate markings on his neck. Adam watched as the Professor palpated for landmarks, then outlined the major vessels in the neck.
“When I was old enough, I ran away from the school, and found work in a butcher shop. My employer saw the potential I had for wielding a blade and offered to pay for me to attend medical school to become a surgeon. He was a kind man, who wanted nothing in exchange.”
The Professor gave Adam a quick smile before he passed the pen back to Masha, which she exchanged for a small bowl of iodine and a sponge between a set of closed forceps.
“While I know this is a long story, you need to understand the history to appreciate what happens at the end.” He dipped the sponge in iodine and proceeded to wipe down every inch of skin from the angle of Martin’s jaw down to his nipples, turning him shades of orange and brown.
“But my past came back to haunt me. You see, it’s all about who you know, and I knew no one. No respectful medical school would accept the son of a whore. So every door was slammed in my face. I returned to the butcher with my head hung in shame. He did not allow me to wallow in self pity. He told me ‘If they aren’t prepared to be your teachers, then you will have to teach yourself’. So I did.”
The Professor held the empty iodine bowl up for Masha to refill.
“Thank you,” he said.
He set the bowl down beside Adam and started the same, slow process of wiping his upper body and neck with iodine. The Professor stopped talking for a while, and seemed to let his mind drift somewhere else.
Then he continued, “Can you guess what I did?”
Adam’s wide-open eyes stared into the bright lights. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t blink. He could barely move his head from side to side. His eyes wer
e on fire and the steel speculums were clawing into his delicate eyelids, wrenching them agonizingly apart.
“I got my revenge. One by one, I tracked down every monk who raped me as a boy. They all met the same fate. I kept each of them in a freezer in the back of the butcher store. Every week, I took a new body out and studied the anatomy, dissecting down to the bone with a copy of Gray’s Anatomy at my side to guide me.”
Masha took the bowl of iodine and sponge from the Professor and stood in front of her perfectly laid out trays, folded arms across her chest, waiting impatiently for the old man to finish his story.
“With my new set of skills,” the Professor chuckled, “and a very impressive counterfeit medical degree from Charles University in Prague, I traveled to England, where they offered me a job on the spot as a General Surgeon. I couldn’t have been happier.”
He nodded at Iva, who got up swiftly from the chair she’d been sitting on and walked across the room, out of Adam’s view in the reflection above. Iva pulled over a black camera, sitting atop a tripod, closer to Adam’s operating table. She pulled forward another camera, which she aimed at Martin, and then another which she brought over to the side of the room for a reverse angle view.
“Are we streaming live yet?” asked the Professor.
“No, Professor,” said Iva. “Would you like me to start?”
“Not just yet,” he smiled at her. “Thank you, pet. You can begin pre-oxygenation.”
Iva took her position behind Adam’s head and lowered an oxygen mask over his face. Cool, fresh air flooded Adam’s lungs and his head started spinning.
“Where were we?” said the Professor. “Ah, yes. Skip ahead a few decades and I was the youngest ever member of faculty to take the Dean’s chair. But something more significant happened only a few short weeks later.” He walked across to Masha’s table and inspected each surgical instrument. “I received a letter from Czechoslovakia from a woman who claimed to be my father’s wife. She said my father was dying. That they had no money, not for food, and least of all the medications he needed to prolong his life.”
The Professor nodded again to Iva and gestured with his thumb and index finger for her to give ‘just a little’. Iva picked up a syringe full of milky white medication and injected a small amount into Adam’s IV line.
A sudden calm settled over Adam. He forgot about the pain and discomfort that had ruled his body the past few hours. Every muscle relaxed, and his breathing slowed.
“So I did what any good son would have done. I traveled back to my old home. I learned that my father’s ambitions had come to none. He had lost everything through bad investments and gambling. And this woman, who I now had to call mother, was nothing more than a career prostitute who had taken pity on an old man.” The professor’s tone grew darker and angrier as he told his story. “I found them living in a hovel. The man who had abandoned my beautiful mother and me so that he could one day be Secretary of the Communist Party. He was nothing. A piece of scum on the bottom of my shoe.” He brightened up and stared at the ceiling as if recalling a fond, distant memory. “I didn’t believe he had a heart. Imagine my surprise when I opened up his chest and found one... still beating.”
The Professor patted Adam on the shoulder. “I’m going to remove the tape now. Will you promise me you won’t scream?”
Adam stared daggers at the Professor.
“I’ll take that as a yes.” The Professor ripped the tape off Adam’s face in one swift pull, ripping out the beginnings of a five o’clock shadow. Adam wanted to shut his eyes and wince with pain, but they were still wedged open by the speculums. The Professor removed the speculums from each eye. Adam blinked but his eyelids were like pieces of rough sandpaper rubbing on his dry eyes.
“YOU FUCK! You fucking bastard!” screamed Adam. “You and your whore mother deserved everything you got!”
“Do it now,” ordered the Professor, suddenly devoid of any warmth.
Iva injected another dose of anesthetic, which left Adam in a dazed stupor. She tilted his head back and wet his throat with iodine.
“What are you doing?” Adam asked in a meek voice.
Iva lifted a scalpel. Her hand was trembling. She brought the steel to his neck, just below his Adam's apple, and cut a small incision. A squirt of blood splashed across her cheek. She grabbed a set of artery clamps to stop the bleeding. She clipped the pulsating artery and picked up a set of dissecting forceps. Expertly, she separated the layers of tissues.
“Be careful,” said the Professor. “I don’t want damage to any of the surrounding structures.”
Adam was too relaxed from the cocktail of drugs Iva had injected into him to choke or resist in any way. She broke through into the trachea and a rush of air came out. Adam was no longer breathing through his mouth, but through a man made hole in his throat.
She slipped the plastic breathing tube through the hole and into his trachea. With a flick of a switch, the ventilator took over the work of breathing for Adam.
Iva sewed the tube in place. While the Professor was examining Martin’s body, she came in close and whispered in Adam’s ear.
“I hope you fucking survive because what he’s about to do to you will be far worse than death.”
Adam tried not to let her words tear away the last flicker of hope left burning in his soul. He didn’t want to die, but would life even be worth living if he was forced to bear the scars of whatever butchery was about to take place.
Iva drew up the cloudy mix of drugs into a dirty syringe and slowly injected it into the IV line. The Professor stared down at Adam with eyes full of compassion. He lay a hand on Adam's numb shoulder.
“Your sacrifice will bring humanity closer to greatness,” said the Professor. He looked in Iva’s direction then turned to face one of the cameras. “I’m ready. Start the live web stream?”
Iva left her place at the head of the table and walked around the room, switching on each camera. In the reflection above him, Adam could see a bright red dot illuminate on top of each camera. They were recording and streaming live.
What sort of people would be watching this? Were they watching to learn, or just tuning in for an evening viewing of light dismemberment and human experimentation before bed?
“Lights please,” said the Professor.
The surgical lights came on with blinding intensity. Adam wanted to shut his eyes to shield them from the brightness, but not even his eyelids responded to the signals from his brain. His mind wanted to go to sleep. It was calling him, begging him to retreat into its warm, dark embrace. Even with his eyes open, and the glowing light burning into his retinas, he knew it wouldn’t take long before he was swept away, but he fought it with the little strength he had left.
“Are we live on the line?” asked the Professor.
Adam heard the clattering of fingers on a computer keyboard somewhere in the room.
“Yes, Professor,” said Iva.
“And all payments have been made in full?”
“We had a few pull out at the last minute.”
“Who?” the Professor demanded to know.
“Shanghai, California, and South Africa.”
“What about Beijing?”
“They have paid, yes.”
“Hmm. Very well, let’s proceed.” The Professor cleared his throat. “Welcome everyone. I am grateful that you have chosen to join me this evening for a very special event.” He spoke loudly and theatrically, the English accent coming out even stronger than before. “What you are about to watch is nothing short of a modern day miracle, a privilege that only a select few, yourselves, have been chosen to bear witness to.”
Iva returned to the head of the table. She closed each of Adam’s eyelids and taped them down.
Though the stimulus was gone, Adam still saw bright halos. He was aware of his body being jolted, and a cold sensation on his skin. The small pillow his head had been resting on was replaced by an ice-cold jelly pad that made the hair follicles on his
head stand on end.
“You are all privileged to be attending the world’s first human head transplant. Or to be more accurate, body transplant. As you know, this is the culmination of twenty years of research and a lifetime of experimentation, and I now believe that we have reached a point technologically, and have gained the expertise needed, to successfully transfer a human head from one host to another with preservation of at least some neuronal functioning.”
The Professor paced between the two operating tables, his voice rising and falling like a true showman. “In my experiments on rhesus macaque monkeys, I was successfully able to retain respiratory and alimentary functioning. We also saw return of basic motor function and deep touch sensation before the animals were terminated at 21 days post surgery… for ethical reasons.”
He paused.
“I had hoped to be working alongside world-renowned vascular surgeon Dr. Edmondo Cortez, whose work in salvaging amputated limbs in factory workers earned him the Da Vinci Award from the American National Surgical Association last year, but unfortunately he could not be with us, and he passes on his apologies. But his presence was always only intended to be as an expert assistant. Sadly, this means we cannot perform the transplant on both subjects. A decision will be made intra-operatively which one to sacrifice. May God guide our hands in making this difficult decision.”
Iva's moist breath tickled Adam's ear.
“Do you hear that?” whispered Iva. “They’re going to cut off your fucking head.”
Oh my god! Help! HELP ME SOMEONE!
Adam screamed inside his head. So loudly that his thoughts drowned out the professor’s speech.
He hadn’t believed in God since the day he found his mother lying dead in the bathtub, but still he prayed.
Please, God. Please don’t let this happen to me. I’ll be a better person. I’ll do anything. Just please don’t let these monsters do this to me.
He had no more tears to cry from his dry eyes.
If you’re listening, God? Please give me a sign. Anything. I promise…
But his prayers went unanswered as he expected they would. Might as well have prayed to the Easter Bunny for all the good prayer ever did the world.
Headhunter: An Extreme Horror Story Page 7