Thirteen Specimens

by Thomas, Jeffrey

  When he squeezed, the being thundered inside but with a curious added element like a clattering purr mixed in with it. He saw the faceless head turn as much as it could on its ringed barrel of a neck. “You’re a bit on the coquettish side, aren’t you?” Fleck said quietly, then hoped it hadn’t been translated to her. “That’s what got you into this, isn’t it, my cheeky girl?” He whispered the last bit more softly. But as much as he made a joke of the situation to allay his discomfort, the fact was that he experienced the stirring prelude to his own arousal. He removed his hand and finished up with the wand alone, clearing his throat to give himself a shake.

  Soon enough the being was in Operating Room 22, drugged and drifting toward the horizon of sleep like an oil tanker. She was being draped with cloths to isolate the first region he would attend before he worked his way to the nodes – the angry-looking tattooed curses like two-dimensional barbed wire that ringed her several nether openings. The imp of the perverse caused Fleck to imagine what it would be like clutching the caboose of this living train, pressed up to her ardently, but the image was fleeting and quickly subsided. It left him feeling jarred, however – ashamed, unprofessional. What would Midas think of him, if he knew?

  Then again, Midas had said she was beautiful. Maybe he had meant it, after all.

  Fleck pulled himself up by his bootstraps after that, became all business. The tattoos were deleted in no time, and the skin they had defaced wouldn’t even have to be bandaged. The drapes were rearranged, and next it was time to smooth out the family crests, her family’s and that of her exiled betrothed, who hadn’t been able to wait until after their marriage to seduce her. Fleck took up a stylus-like burning device, similar to the one he had used to erase the tattoos. Despite the more cool demeanor he had forced himself to adopt, he still felt a great satisfaction in eradicating all traces of ownership from his patient’s shining flesh.

  * * *

  Fleck was finishing up after excising the last of the nodules (deposited into a tank of fluid for him to dissect later, out of curiosity) when a siren shrilled to life throughout the hospital. For one jolting moment, Fleck had thought his patient was coming out of anesthesia prematurely and screeching in pain.

  “What is it?” he asked, glancing up around him.

  Moments later, the voice of the security guard posted outside OR 22 came over a speaker. “Our guard outside Room 40 was just attacked. He was killed. No one saw anything, but they’re going to view the camera record...”

  “Dear God,” Fleck breathed, looking again to the slumbering giantess and involuntarily resting a gloved hand against her covered hide as if to reassure her in her dreams.

  “Three more men are coming down here to fortify this position. I can’t let anyone leave the room until then. The forcers are being called in to comb the hospital...”

  “Alright,” Fleck spoke up in reply. “But we’ve got to get her to the roof shuttles right away. We can’t take a chance. She can convalesce on the flight to the Outback...she’ll be fine, now...”

  “Right, doctor...we’ll get a shuttle humming.”

  * * *

  Though he didn’t have to, and his patient wasn’t yet awake for him to say goodbye to, Fleck saw her off as she was loaded onto a medevac shuttle so as to be taken to another, commercial shuttleport – from whence she would be flown with her two Choom benefactors to the Outback Colony for refuge.

  Up here, chilly gusts moaned through the rooftops of neighboring tenement blocks with shops glowing colorfully at street level, and twisted like a flock of wailing wraiths between far larger office and apartment structures soaring so high above him that their tops were lost in cold mist. The wind fluttered his pale orange scrubs, ruffled his hair harshly, and even the coffee he held couldn’t warm him...so as soon as the craft had become no more than the other glittering motes floating in the sky, he pushed away from the roof’s blistered parapet to return to his work. He quickened his pace to outdistance an ad in the form of a young woman in skimpy underwear who came swimming toward him off a nearby billboard, no matter how fetching an apparition she was.

  He felt terrible about the murdered guard – he’d been told, further, that the man had been killed horribly by several great bite wounds like those from a shark – but he was both relieved and gratified that his patient was now safely beyond the reach of her tormentors. Her family...

  As he headed for one of the sheltered rooftop access ports, he saw another shuttle wafting in for a landing, carrying some new bleeding, crying, suffering victim of an accident or – more likely, for this city – atrocious act of violence. Each of the countless wounded passing through this building day after day after day had their own story, lived their own unique but not so unique drama. Could he, should he, try to empathize with them all? Would he ever stop wincing in his heart to see their rent flesh, the flow of their sustaining fluids, the tears on the faces of those that had eyes to shed them?

  He descended to his small office, where the tank containing the eight severed orbs waited for him. He sighed, finished off his coffee, and set about extracting one of the cysts from its bath, setting it down, and opening it up with a hissing stylus device for visual inspection.

  At its fibrous yellowish core he isolated the irritating seed that had been implanted to provoke this growth...rather surprised to see that it remained there intact, hadn’t broken down. In fact, when he viewed it through magnifying lenses, he saw that the black grain had symbols engraved on it, reminiscent of the branded family crests and the tattooed hexes.

  This discovery made him want to pass the knowledge along to Midas, and he wanted to tell him about the being’s personal request from him. Anyway, had Midas been told about the attempt on their patient’s life, her successful evacuation? He glanced at a clock to gauge whether his colleague was on duty, couldn’t recall his current schedule, tried to buzz him here at the hospital. He got a message saying that Midas was not currently in the building. Thus, he tried a call to his home...

  Dr. Midas’ home phone was set to a wide-open channel. This meant that any and all callers would immediately be connected. As a result, on his comp screen Fleck saw Midas’ apartment through the older surgeon’s comp screen. And what Fleck saw was Midas staring back at him. His eyes couldn’t be seeing Fleck in turn, however. Midas’s untidily severed head rested upon its ragged stump on the doctor’s blotted green blotter. A white, broken-off fang glinted in the edge of Midas’ torn lower jaw.

  “Oh Jesus, oh...oh!” Fleck shouted, rolling back in his chair so abruptly that it ended up toppling over backwards, spilling him to the floor. He scrambled against a wall on hands and knees, turned to steal a peek back at the computer on his desk. The surgeon’s empty gaze had seemed to follow him.

  In his home...in his home...

  They couldn’t have expected to find their female there...

  It wasn’t just her they wanted, then.

  Like spitting on the steps of their temple, the father had said...undoing the marks of their justice...

  Fleck’s comp started to beep. A call for him trying to get through. He wanted to stand up, rush over and expunge that terrible image from his monitor, but found himself paralyzed. Then, another sound. Was it gunfire? Gunfire outside his window would be nothing new, but it didn’t sound like it came from the streets below. Gunfire even in the ER was not unheard of – addled addicts, or gangs bringing their wars into the hospital that squandered its resources trying to keep them alive for the next turf skirmish. But the ER was four floors below...and this sounded closer...

  His office door, unlocked, slid open, and into the room darted a naked dark figure as small as a child – a child’s skeleton. It sprang into a crouch atop the table where Fleck had been performing his biopsy. The tank was knocked to the floor, where it spilled its fluid and the seven remaining strange fruits. Fleck’s dissecting implements went clattering and skittering across the floor as well.

  The volcanic crater of a face jerked in his dire
ction. The maw’s webs fluttered wispily. But also, in there, Fleck saw a ring of white teeth rise up from just inside the tire-like lip. There was a gap where one of them was missing, but more rows of teeth waited behind the first. The creature, thin and nimble, bunched itself to spring down at him...and still Fleck was pinned in place by his terror...

  Gunshots crashed into the entity, just before it could pounce, blowing it off the edge of the table. It slammed into a wall and convulsed against it horribly, its arms and legs drumming the floor while a spiraling blast of hawk cries whooped from somewhere on its body.

  A black-garbed security man stumbled into the room, screaming, with a second of the skeletal things riding his back. Before the guard could point the pistol in his fist backward to blow the thing off him, this second creature clamped its pit of a mouth onto the back of his head. Fleck heard a terrible cracking of bone...and the guard’s screams became a liquid gurgle as he dropped onto his hands and knees.

  Fleck’s paralysis was broken. Surgical instruments glimmered icily on the floor, and as he scrambled to his feet he snatched up the stylus he had been using to dissect the cyst. His expert fingers instantly adjusted its invisible beam to its highest intensity.

  The thing on the guard lifted its head, the O-mouth streaming blood, tatters of meat caught between its teeth. The guard had sunk onto his belly, splayed, the gaping back of his skull now a mirror of his attacker’s face. Before the being could let go of its victim or rise, however, Fleck lunged forward as if with a sword and the stylus’ beam punched into the side of the entity’s head. He drew his arm downward, and a long wound sizzled open like flesh unzipped, smoking. Blood as vividly red as a human’s sprayed free. Fleck pulled back his arm, but waved the stylus again from the opposite direction. He caught the thing right across its narrow throat. Just as quickly as a wheezing sound started up from the being, it was cut off...as its head flopped backwards, thumped between its shoulder blades, nearly disconnected from the neck. The creature wilted atop the man it had killed.

  Fleck straightened, looked across the room at the spasms of the first creature. The alarm siren that now filled the corridors and operating theaters and recovery rooms of this institute of healing blended with the being’s agonized howls. Fleck’s heart was pounding, and he was electrically trembling all over, but he walked toward the thing stiff and composed in appearance....ready to go to work. Ready to end yet another anguished soul’s suffering. He was even smiling slightly. The stylus was hissing in anticipation, like a monster on a chain, leading him along...guiding his hand. Ready to reconfigure both patient and doctor in a single stroke.

  October 32nd

  I drove home from my second shift job at eleven-thirty PM, during the most depressing part of Halloween night.

  This was when the magic drained out of the streets like smoke wisping from a blown out jack o’-lantern. This was when the orange of October threatened to char overnight to the gray-brown of November. With a decisive creak, the earth turned on its axis from autumn toward winter. Yes, the magic was still out there, like a storm front on a weather man’s map, but it was migrating south, toward Mexico, where tomorrow they would have their Day of the Dead. So the gate between the living and the dead was still open...just shifting, like the moon, from one sky to another. The two realms were still in communion, overlapping. Our reality and another, the material and the spiritual, yin and yang.

  But in the wet streets my car sloshed through, there was no more festivity. In fact, I had missed it altogether, having gone to the pharmaceutical company where I punched in every day for three PM. But I remembered the holiday clearly, fondly, from my childhood...and I knew what had been lost as the hour trudged – like a trick-or-treater through piles of leaves – toward midnight. It was now just five minutes away, according to my wristwatch with its numbers and hands glowing a faint fungal green.

  At least I had had a tease of the magic on my way to work. There must have been a Halloween party at the Brown School. As I passed the old brick Wright Plastics building, where I used to work as an injection molder, I saw four children in Halloween costumes waiting to cross the street. They had their backpacks on and had either taken their masks off entirely or wore them pushed up on top of their heads, but at least I saw the wind-blown cape of a vampire, their bodies under their winter coats shiny orange, satiny purple, glittering green. Even the elderly crossing guard, whom I saw there every afternoon on my way to work, seemed to be in the spirit, wearing a bright orange jacket – though actually he wore that every day, no matter the season.

  I had slowed and stopped as the old crossing guard shuffled out into the street, glaring pugilistically at me as though daring me to try to dart through the white lines that barred my way before his charges were safely conveyed through them, as if filing along a narrow bridge that spanned a yawning chasm of black asphalt. But I waited patiently, as always, as he held up his stop sign like a king brandishing his scepter and ushered the children across, like spirits being invited into our world from their own.

  I wished I was one of them.

  But now, there were no more trick-or-treaters walking these sidewalks I passed alongside. Leaves that had earlier been piled crisp in the gutters, fluttering about in the brisk breeze like locusts, were now soggy, matted into something close to a slime. Thank God for the children the rain had held off into late in the evening, but now it was falling in torrents that pounded my windshield and made it hard for my wipers to brush aside.

  A scarecrow sitting in a lawn chair in someone’s front lawn was saturated by the rain, slumped to one side like a dead man in an electric chair. Sometimes, I knew from my own childhood experience, adults dressed as scarecrows and sat still in their yards until unwary kids drew near, and then they would stand or lunge to startle them. This one, however, was most certainly an actual scarecrow...unless the masquerader were asleep. Or dead.

  The air was so wet it was as though my car drove along the bottom of a dark sea. Even the inside of my car was damp, as if its air accumulated and bottled the evaporating moisture from every drying out, shriveling, rotting jack-o’-lantern in the town. I saw these pumpkins dimly on door stoops. Their eyes would be imperceptibly but steadily squinting more narrow, their fanged smiles sucking in toothlessly.

  Where strings of orange lights had glowed from shrubs, there was bristling blackness. Where windows had glowed with plastic pumpkins and candles, there was gaping blankness. Spooky audiotapes no longer played ghostly wails, howling wolves, crashing thunder.

  It seemed, in fact, that I was the only person alive in these streets.

  I did see another car as I drew nearer to the center of town, however. But rather than being someone coming home from work, I suspected they were coming home from a Halloween party at which they’d imbibed too many festive fluids, because the small white car was driving backwards through a crosswise street that intersected with the one I was on. I decelerated , thinking that the vehicle was reversing carelessly so as to turn into my street, perhaps having overshot the intersection...but as I crawled closer I saw no sign of the careless driver down that side road, and I continued on my way.

  I tried to raise myself from my depression at having missed Halloween by considering that there might still be some horror movies playing on cable. I glanced at my dashboard clock, noted that it was ten to midnight. Sure, I thought, a couple had to be playing, still. I’d make some microwave popcorn, settle into my couch with all the lights out except for my flickering hearth of cathode blue.

  Ahead now I could make out the top of the old brick Crone Plastics building, where I used to be a maintenance worker. The nearby Gray School would be silent and shut at this hour, but I saw that the elderly crossing guard had stayed on late or had arrived early for his next shift. He was hard not to notice in his orange jacket that shone in my headlights. Without children to watch over, he did not glare at me challengingly, did not even look at me as I passed him, just stood there with his stop sign hanging at his side
, the rain exploding off his shoulders and his gray hair plastered to his skull.

  I had noticed only moments ago that my gas was running low, though I could have sworn I’d filled up the tank only that afternoon. Maybe I had a leak. In any case, I pulled into the gas station just beyond the Crone factory...but no one came from inside at the sound of the bell, the interior all dark except for illuminated signs advertizing motor oil and the like. I’d have to take care of it tomorrow, then. I pulled back onto the road to continue on toward home.

  The detritus of the holiday was still sadly in evidence around me. On someone’s front lawn, a soggy scarecrow had fallen out of a lawn chair to lie on its face like a drowned man. How clever, I thought, if it were really an adult in costume, diligently waiting for a last trick-or-treater to come along, or a car like mine, so as to leap suddenly to his feet and give me a start. I watched it out of the corner of my eye as I splashed by in the flume of the street, but the sodden mannequin did not so much as raise its head.

  The rain had stopped and the streets of town were now filled with a damp fog so thick one would think it had blown in off Lake Pometacomet, though that was too far from the town center to be the case. Street lights glowed as if buried in mountains of cotton, though there were no mock candles or garlands of orange bulbs to restore to the town the costume of fantasy it had worn while I’d been spending eight tedious hours in the printing company I worked for.

  I slowed as I neared a street that crossed mine, because I could see a vehicle passing along it. But as the vehicle, a dark green van, cut across, I realized it was moving backwards. What a stupid, probably drunken stunt to pull. Probably teenagers. It was a good thing no kids were still on the streets trick-or-treating. As I came up on the crosswise street, I looked down its dark length and saw the headlights receding into the distance until swallowed in the thick boiling mists.