Zippered Flesh 2: More Tales of Body Enhancements Gone Bad (39 page)

She awoke in a hospital room, in a bed with the head cranked to a pleasant angle. The covers were tucked so tightly, she felt like the orderlies had made the bed with her still on it, but the blankets were maddeningly thin, and when she tried to draw her arms and legs into herself to ward off the cold, she found that she couldn’t. She was handcuffed to the rail—and footcuffed, if there were such a thing. She couldn’t remember if she’d ever heard of such a thing, and then chased that thought around for much too long before she even questioned why.

And when she did question why, more questions started piling through the door with it, so that all of them were asked (or half-asked) but none were answered. Where was Glenn? Was he okay? Dead, maybe? How was he walking around with a shard of shower door sticking out of his belly like a dorsal fin, and why was he gray? It wasn’t the cancer. Michelle wasn’t a doctor, but she knew cancer didn’t do that. Glenn had looked like a zombie, but people in zombie movies were always sick before they turned. Sick or bleeding. Had falling through the shower door done that? Of course not.

The door to the room opened. It wasn’t a regular hospital door, heavy, hollow-core wood with a stainless handle. It was a metal door that sealed, with a safety glass window crisscrossed with wire. Michelle couldn’t see, but she guessed—correctly, as it later turned out—there was another door that sealed just behind it. And then she realized there was no window in the room, just a wall of curtains with no light coming from behind it. She found that fact somewhat more interesting than the man in the hazard suit approaching her, with a ridiculous grin on his face behind the glass visor. It looked like the grin of a corpse. A corpse trying to hide what it felt like to be in hell.

“Dr. Murtagh,” she said. She sighed for reasons she didn’t understand. “How are you?”

“I think the question is, how are you?” he countered. His voice sounded distant and tinny, like he had the world’s worst cold.

“Aside from the handcuffs and what I presume to be at least half a dozen stitches in my stomach, I feel pretty good.” Michelle thought that understating it was the way to go with the good doctor, who it seemed use information like a bludgeon. She actually felt great!

“Sutures don’t hurt?”

“Where’s Glenn?”

“Glenn has been detained.”

Michelle’s physical vibrance was not enough to keep her emotions in check. Hot, salty tears welled up in her eyes, and she started to tremble with frustrated rage. When she spoke, it was in a quavering voice through clenched teeth. “Where is Glenn?”

“Glenn is being observed—”

“You give me a straight answer or I’ll, I’ll—”

“You’ll what?”

Michelle threw a stunted punch at Dr. Murtagh, who jumped back. He then smiled, like the neighborhood bully who teases a dog on the other side of a fence—or at the end of a short chain. Her fist was, of course, on the end of a very short chain. But that smile, that—to be frank, shit-eating grin—made her not care, and she was every bit the junkyard dog that the doctor was teasing. Chomping, slavering. But only on the inside. On the outside, she twisted the cuff with her wrist, until the blood started seeping. That made Murtagh’s smile fade a bit.

“Please quiet down, Ms. Wambolt,” he said, trying to sound authoritative by using her last name. It came out more like a request. Like a substitute teacher.

Michelle let her arm drop to her side. All the air had been let out of her lungs through some unseen valve. Her chest seemed to deflate, which she at least half attributed to the sag in her menopausal breasts. Her arms did look gray, though. That wasn’t menopause. The last time she saw that color was when she volunteered for that children’s art class. It was the exact color of modeling clay. The exact color of Glenn at the top of the stairs with the shark’s fin of glass sticking out of his gut. And she was starting to see blackish-green blotches, too. 

“What happened to Glenn?” she whispered. But she still felt fine, and a giggle nearly chittered out of her.

“Glenn is showing no signs of slowing down.”

Michelle heaved out a hoarse sigh, almost like a gritty belch, and she squinted her eyes like she couldn’t hear him.

“Glenn is being observed. He is somewhere safe, where he can’t hurt himself or anyone else.”

But he’s not Glenn anymore
, thought Michelle.
Like I won’t be Michelle anymore, very, very soon. But not soon enough for you, Dr. Murtagh
.

“I suppose it won’t hurt to tell you the truth now, not in the shape you’re in. The paramedics he infected with the nanobots had to be destroyed,” explained Dr. Murtagh, leaning in a little bit to make sure she could hear him. “Killed with fire, as my nephews might say. A video gamer phrase if there ever was one. The shame of it is, the little buggers really did kill your husband’s cancer.”

The way he said “little buggers” made her think of the case of the crabs she had in college. But she showed no outward reaction. He didn’t really give her an opportunity.

“But we designed them to be smart. Too smart, it turns out. They repaired, they replicated, and they became self-aware. Then they set up shop in your husband’s nervous system, killing him off from the inside with more alacrity than the cancer ever could. What they did was turn him into a human marionette. And when his blood was introduced to your system—and the paramedics’—you were all infected with the little things.”

The little things
, thought Michelle.
That’s just about right. Better than little buggers. Just a little closer, now
.

Dr. Murtagh leaned over her, almost leering at what he’d created. “We’re going to try an electromagnetic pulse and see what that does to your husband. I wouldn’t get too hopeful, though. At best, it will just shut him down, him and the emergency workers the nanobots have infected. So it won’t bring him back, but it’s easier than reducing a human body to ash.” He sat on the edge of the bed, seemingly unaware of Michelle at all now. “We didn’t cure cancer, but think of the military applications. There goes the Hippocratic Corpus: First do no harm.”

Indeed
, thought Michelle.
It was the last thing she ever thought
. 

Her arm shot toward Dr. Murtagh so fiercely, it seemed like it was on a spring and the chain of the handcuffs might snap at its weakest link, but it did not. Infected with self-replicating nanobots or not, Michelle was still just one woman, but that didn’t stop her from repeatedly pulling on the handcuffs, rattling steel against brushed steel once, twice, and again a third time while Dr. Murtagh watched her with a bemused look on his face. He shifted on the bed and pursed his lips at her the way an adult might do toward a silly child.

“You’re going to break your arm,” he said, waving his hand at her blank eyes. “If you can hear me in there. You’ll break it right off.” He scoffed once so loudly his breath clouded on the inside of his faceplate.

But Dr. Murtagh didn’t understand the little things. Not until it was too late. Not until Michelle’s hand really did break completely off at the wrist, exposing the ulna and radius bone like a couple of stilettos, pink with pulsing blood. A flap of skin was still connecting her hand to her arm, but it peeled back like soft latex and stretched, with a thick undercoating of fat and muscle. Michelle drove what used to be her wrist into Dr. Murtagh’s gut, slicing through the hazard suit he wore to keep the nanobots out, the fabric separating as if made of meringue.

He looked at her and groaned, knowing it was already too late as thousands of nanobots streamed into his brain.

CLOCKWORK

BY SHAUN JEFFREY

I knew the black cat was dead. Even if I hadn’t just seen it struck by the car, I would still know it was dead. Finding my father lying on the floor two weeks ago, hands clutched to his chest as though trying to keep warm, made sure of that.

One of the cat’s front paws protruded at an odd angle, its claws protracted as if in a failed attempt to scratch at the vehicle that had bowled it along the road.

The driver of the car hadn’t stopped. Unlike dogs, you didn’t have to report it if you killed a cat.

I gingerly reached out and touched the body. Its fur still felt warm and soft. My fingers brushed a red collar around its neck. The attached tag on the collar told me the cat was called Sooty.

Although it was only a cat, I couldn’t stand the thought of the owner finding the dead feline in or at the side of the road, so I picked up the carcass and, with nowhere else to put it, I dropped it in with the shopping I had bought in town. I would bury it when I reached home.

A car drove by, making me flinch. I wondered what it sounded like; wondered what lots of things sounded like. Deaf since birth, I lived in a world of unimaginable silence. The only time I had been glad of my deafness was when I saw mother screaming after I alerted her to father’s body.

When I arrived home, I reached into the bag and touched the cat. Its body now cold, it had already started to go stiff. I stroked it once, and then opened the gate and deposited the corpse outside my den at the bottom of the garden before heading toward the house.

“You took your time,” mother said as she took the shopping bags from me. She enunciated each word so I could lip-read.

I shrugged and signed that I had lost track of time.

Mother smiled, but she couldn’t disguise the haunted look of the bereaved. She started to say something else, but her lips stopped moving and she pulled out a tin of baked beans dotted with blood. She frowned. “What’s this?”

Already one step ahead, I moved my fingers to say the steaks must have leaked.

Mother nodded. It was a reasonable answer, as the cuts of meat often leaked.

My sister Vicky sat in her highchair, playing with a rattle. I smiled at her and she smiled back. She opened and closed her mouth and I touched her cheek, feeling the vibrations of noise resonating through her skin. While mother put the shopping away, I made my way out to the den, a wooden structure five-foot high and four-foot square that I had built last summer.

The cat lay on the grass outside. If it weren’t for the mangled paw and the specks of blood, it would look as though it were having a catnap.

I picked it up, opened the door, and carried it into the den, stooping as I entered.

It was warm inside the room, and I stood up straight. Sheets of plastic yellowed in the sun made the light that shone through the window appear golden, illuminating the clocks that covered every surface.

There were mechanical clocks, pendulum clocks, mantel clocks, cuckoo clocks, and clocks that I had made. Within the den, I could feel the reverberating beat of the clocks like a huge heart, and feeling the familiar ticktock of the clocks through the ground and walls, I felt it was the closest I came to actually hearing.

Pieces of clocks cluttered the table against the back wall. There were springs, cogs, levers, weights, and a whole host of other parts. I swept some of the bits aside and deposited the cat on the table while I searched for a bag to put it in. Deciding on an old plastic one, I turned back and grabbed the cat. Straight away, I felt the familiar pulse of the clocks through my fingers. For a moment, I imagined the cat was still alive, that I had made a mistake, that it wasn’t dead.

A coiled spring unwound against the cat’s leg. I stared at the clock components. If there was one thing I was good at, it was making broken things work again. And that’s when the idea came to mind. What if I could mend the cat? I wasn’t thinking I could bring it back to life, but perhaps I could give it a semblance of life, could give it movement.

I thought about it for a long while before I set to work.

There was a penknife on the table. I picked it up and unfastened the blade, feeling it click open. A thin sheen of sweat painted my brow as I gingerly held the small penknife against the cat’s soft underbelly. This was stupid. I couldn’t do it, and my stomach recoiled at the thought.