Chapter Seventeen
Great billowing storm clouds rolled off the lake and disgorged their contents on New Detroit as reports of the massacre disseminated across the network. Malory, though, was unaware of the chaos she’d unleashed—the NDPD press conference, the manhunt, or the extensive bounty placed on her head. She was preoccupied with the intensity of her injury and slowly drowning in her own blood. The other passengers on the monorail avoided her as if she was contagious. None of them recognized her from the reports yet, each focused on their own favorite media to distress from long days of work; some of them read novels, some caught up on late-night dramas they’d missed the night before, a few talked to distant family members, and several were neck-deep in memory replays. Malory’s face was pressed against the glass to feel the cold, and she avoided her reflection. She was pale, and red spittle trickled down her chin each time she drew in a ragged breath. She was worried about making it back to headquarters in time, but her mind was quiet for the first time since the God’s eye was installed, and the ghost let her be. Mal knew Evie would be back, but it was peaceful while it lasted, and she needed to recover.
When she reached her stop, Malory had trouble standing. She used the edges of the seats as a brace. Near the door, she nearly fell face-first across the yellow caution line, and only stayed upright from the kindness of a nearby guy with glasses who reached out to steady her. She wasn’t able to thank him. Instead, she coughed out a chunk of lung on his designer sneakers and stumbled away. The overhead lights in the station stung at her eye, so she kept it shut tight as she went. No one else tried to help her. One step forward, another, and her body was wading through the shallow end of a pool. She was on fire, drenched in sweat, and tiny tremors spread through each of her muscles. All she had to do was get back to the Doc, and then everything would be alright, so she forced herself forward. She passed the vending machines, the food court, and the gift shop. Fuck the pity of everyone’s gazes, the disgust, the refusal to help. When she made it to the street, she almost cried from the sensation of fresh air hitting her skin, the way it teased at lungs that couldn’t draw it in.
When she reached the headquarters, she collapsed into the door as it scanned her identity. It only took a few seconds, but those were seconds of torture she couldn’t handle, and they stretched off into eternity. Everything ached, and the tremors grew worse. Her fleshy arm was curled against her chest and jerked back and forth. She was glad not to see herself; the blood that dripped down her chin and soaked the front of her shirt, her sallow skin, and how she would have been at home in one of her sister’s favorite horror movies. When she thought she was going to die at the entrance, the doors clicked and swung wide, sending her tumbling forward. She managed to stay on her feet, but as she went for the elevator that led down to the Doc, to salvation, the guards on duty barred her path. They held up open palms in front of her, and were ready to draw pistols if she put up a fight. She tried to ignore them, to brush past and be on her way, but one of them reached out and seized her by her mechanical arm. He wrenched it behind her back, and he fell. She did not have the energy to rise. Her mind was fractured, and it floated off elsewhere when cold cuffs closed around her wrists.
As they yanked her back to her feet, she was thinking about the park down by the river where she and her sister spent an afternoon skipping stones on their last day together. A bland hallway blurred away, and then a few flights of concrete stairs, and the guards tried to tell her something as they went. All Malory cared about was the weight of a flat stone in her hand and the way her sister cheered when she hurled it across the surface of the water. It skipped, and skipped, and sank below the current. She stumbled then, and felt a sharp pain radiate up her shoulder—one of the guards smelled overwhelmingly of tobacco and aftershave, and he swore at her in clipped French. The implant translated for her, but she didn’t read it. She had another stone to throw, her sister’s crooked smile to fawn over, and there was a beautiful refraction of sunlight on the river. When she was slammed into a chair and the guard that smoked like a chimney slapped her, reality came rushing back and she coughed up another mouthful of blood. The room spun, and their words were a garbled mess. They asked her questions, but she didn’t answer, and when the guy moved to slap her again, the door opened. The Doc walked into the room.
Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.
“What the fuck are you two idiots doing?” he asked. His digitigrade legs flexed, and he stood to his full height. So much mass, towering over them. His face was mired by hard lines and a will to fight.
“Our jobs,” the guard who slapped her said. He took an unconscious step backward and bumped into Mal’s chair.
“You can do your needless interrogation after I stop her from dying,” the Doc said. He stepped forward and balled each massive hand into a fist. He would destroy them if it was necessary. “Get out.”
“The higher-ups aren’t going to like this,” the other guard said. He wasn’t as intimidated as the other. He didn’t know the Doc’s history, the impressive catalogue of violence honed to perfection before he transitioned to helping others survive.
“They know exactly where to find me,” the Doc said. He raised one of his fists, ready to swing. “Now get the fuck out.”
“Let’s go,” the smoker said. He placed a hand on the other guard’s shoulder, and they left together.
“Can you hear me?” the Doc asked. He moved towards Malory and lifted her chin to meet his eyes. She was hot to the touch, unfocused. He clicked his tongue when he recognized the symptoms.
“Hey, dad,” Mal said. She smiled at the swirling face in front of her. It had been years and years, and she wanted the missing man to hug her tight. She wasn’t sure why it hurt to breathe, and wanted to close her eyes, to sleep forever, but didn’t. “Where have you been? Mom needed you.”
“Let’s get you fixed up, kid,” the Doc said. He bent down and undid the cuffs around her wrists. He made sure she was steady before he turned to leave. “Sit tight, I’ll be right back with some equipment.”
When Malory was alone, she thought she was in a waiting room for the afterlife and expected an interviewer to show up to determine her worth. Answering questions was a crapshoot, since the good never outweighed the bad. There was always another trauma to drag her down, and no amount of soft kisses from a little maniac of a lover, or the kind smile of a sister, or concern from a pseudo-father ever tipped the scales. One star out of ten, would not recommend. At least she’d receive the posthumous fame she’d always wanted, even if it was the implant that drove her to shoot the bastards. She took what she could get from a life that gave her nothing, and never apologized. When the door opened, she almost fell out of the chair. Angels were supposed to have wings, even in her fever-fueled bureaucratic fantasies, and their absence frightened her. Instead, there was a blurry old man who wore a surgical mask and carried an assortment of tools in his massive hands—various trays, tubes, containers, and scalpels, all balanced with little effort. He set them up around her, and shoved a needle in her arm that fed a cocktail of substances and made her eyelids two immovable bricks. She heard a deep and bassy voice just before slipping into darkness.
“You aren’t allowed to die now that you made me care about you, ya little shit,” the Doc said. He’d injected Malory with anesthesia, a variety of steroids, and an ad-hoc antidote for all the toxic components that shocked her system, and then he got to work.
The Doc lifted the girl’s limp body from the chair and placed her face-down on a portable massage table—it would have been far easier back in the lab, but taking her there wasn’t an option, so he improvised. It wasn’t his first makeshift surgery, and it wouldn’t be the last with how often she showed up in such a state. When she was secured on the table, he lubed a long tube and shoved it down her throat; he was on a ticking clock, and had to move fast before she reached critical levels of oxygen deprivation, if she wasn’t there already. He tore through her clothes to expose her pale back, and the sound of ripped fabric echoed through the room. He slathered the shoulder blades in disinfectant and drew incision lines with a felt-tip marker. When he was done, he grabbed a scalpel and made two ten-inch cuts and reached inside to spread the ribs. He carved away the damaged organs one at a time, and slid each implant in place. His hands, swift and practiced, remained steady as he threaded flesh to metal interfaces, fastened nerves in place, and watched them start to inflate with a consistent in and out. Satisfied, he shoved the ribs back where they belonged, closed everything up with stick staples and stitches, and dressed the wounds with fresh gauze. He wiped tick beads of sweat from his brow, removed the tube, and left.
