New Title 2, page 7
He placed a call to the hospital’s security office, and talked to the sergeant on duty, a heavy-jawed KeeZee with three impassive black eyes; as nonhuman as he looked, at least he had features. “I want a guard on Room 40 at all times, until whoever is coming to take her away gets here.”
“Yes, doctor.”
Fleck signed off. He discovered that he still held the can of ad repellant in his hand like a gun, his index finger poised upon its button.
««—»»
After Fleck had reported the call that threatened further violence against his patient, the organization that would give her sanctuary in the Outback Colony, down south, flew two of its people up to Punktown earlier than planned. They arrived the day after the call, first meeting with the being and then with Fleck. They were both soft-spoken but dedicated-looking Choom women, native to this planet, quite human if one discounted the long lips bridging one ear to the other. One of the women bunched up her cheeks as she raised her great mouth in the bow of a smile.
“She has a final request of you, doctor, but I don’t know if it can be granted before we fly her out tomorrow evening.”
“What is it?”
“The eight orbs along her back…she would like to have them removed by you.”
“Removed?” Fleck was genuinely surprised. And then, oddly pleased. “They’re nothing but scar tissue, really; I’ll have her in an operating room within two hours. And while I’m at it?”
“Yes?”
“Ask her if she wants me to remove her tattoos and brands, too. Piece of cake, those.”
“We’ll do that, doctor. Thank you.”
“I only wish we had time for another surgeon, not me, to reconstruct her vocal organs.”
The Choom woman simply gave an elongated smile tight with regret, and nodded agreement.
««—»»
As Operating Room 22 was being hastily prepped, Fleck went on to Room 40 to examine his patient with this last task in mind, the Choom women accompanying him. The human security guard on duty, dressed all in black like a forcer, nodded curtly as he admitted them entrance.
Fleck explained to the vast entity that he had agreed to perform the favor she asked, the disk adhering to the back of her skull turning his words into whatever configuration her brain could interpret. She gave a rumble that he took for assent, or understanding, or gratitude. He looked to the Choom women, as if they might translate this noise for him, but they only smiled at him politely. He asked them to be seated on the other side of a screen he pulled out of the wall to give himself and the creature privacy.
Slowly…carefully…reverently, he reached for the buckles to undo the embroidered cloth that cloaked the series of tumor-like growths upon one segment of her upper surface. He had to walk around her body for access to the catches on the other side. In pulling the garment away, he had to tug a bit to get the straps from beneath her, but he was relieved that she raised herself up slightly on her unseen lower limbs to make it easier. She gave a huge shudder that rippled her caterpillar segments—whether from the strain, or mortification, he couldn’t determine.
“There we are,” he said, trying to keep up a casual one-sided conversation, to ease the encounter for both of them.
He held a wand scanner and ran it around the shiny globes, but he also tentatively reached up and touched them with his bare fingertips. The being gave another shudder, and a choked half-rumble, but did not try to shake off his hand…even when he lay his palm upon one of the nodules, feeling its smooth surface under his palm, and palpated it lightly.
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.”
“All right,” 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 direction. 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.
Mourning Cloak
Wozzy, some of the other prosties called her as a joke. Wozzies were an endangered baboon-like simian that lived in the Outback. From the shoulder blades of the female wozzies grew flaps of skin colored a garish red which they could extend and wave in the air, so as to entice males to mount them from behind. They had gotten their name for resembling, to some, the flying monkeys from the Oz stories.
But her real name was Helena and she did not like being nicknamed after a monkey. And her wings were not red, but a dark brown with yellow trim and a row of bright blue spots along the outer edges. Her designer had taken his inspiration from the wings of the mourning cloak butterfly.
Her wings were hidden now, folded away under her long dark raincoat as she sat in the high-ceilinged waiting room outside the administrative offices of the Solon. She paged through a fashion magazine, ignoring the similarly glossy catalogs which displayed the many women and the lesser number of men available here at the Solon. She herself had graced the cover of the main catalog, some years back. She had been proud of it, then.
The many-floored Solon was the largest legal brothel in the Earth colony of Paxton. The Solon was so named in honor of the first public official in Earth history to organize licensed brothels; in 500 B.C., in order to lower taxes and to raise funds for the erection of a temple to the goddess Aphrodite. Here in one structure was collected a menagerie of exotic beings both human and otherwise. It was a richly diverse museum of desire. There were several floors for B and D, S and M. There were baths and pools, bars and lounges, gymnasiums of sorts for the athletic. There were even ranks of hostesses, as the establishment had dubbed them, who were affordably priced for those of the lower working class.
Helena had been a high-class hostess since the onset. But in the past year, her price had been lowered to the next grade down. The first decline in her price since she had started here, fifteen years ago.
She glanced up at the desk. The woman behind it was talking into her headset. Helena looked at the time. She had to begin her shift in less than an hour, and hoped her personnel officer would agree to squeeze her in before then. The hostesses were expected to be punctual at the Solon.
Her right shoulder ached dully. She wished she had taken a painkiller, and they were back in her medicine cabinet in her tenth floor flat. Like all the hosts and hostesses at the Solon, she lived in an apartment on the premises. Her status enabled her to occupy a flat on her own; no roommate. But would that status change as well, soon?
It was becoming more difficult for her to fold and unfold her wings, of late, particularly the right one. It jutted a bit, didn’t fold as flat as it once had. Self-conscious, she had been wearing baggier clothing. She had not mentioned her worsening condition to her supervisor, and as yet it had gone unnoticed except for a few comments from the other prosties and some regular clients. And one of those had aggravated the problem a month back by wrenching at the wings as he drove into her from behind.
Wozzy, she thought.
It would no doubt be a simple matter for the design team to repair the wings, even if the difficulty proved to be in her brain’s linkage to them. Far less complicated than the team’s addition of the wings—part organic, part delicate mechanism—to her shoulder blades fifteen years earlier. But she did not care to have them repaired. In fact, what she desired was to have them removed.
“Helena?” She lifted her head. A smiling secretary in the doorway. “Ms. Gebhard will see you.”
