A polite knock. The doctor flung the tabloid weekly he’d been reading into a corner of the room. “Ah, come in,” he said with forced formality. And then winced. He still hadn’t gotten used to the creaking hinges.
But seeing the handsome young man, he set that annoyance aside. “My, my,” he murmured to himself.
“I am pleased to meet you,” the young man said. “My name is Gento Roran. I was wondering if I could ask a favor of you.”
The doctor wordlessly indicated a folding chair sitting a short ways off.
“No, here is fine.”
Gento leaned back against the wall. He scanned the room with cold eyes befitting the cool beauty of his face. Even without observing the gurneys, operating tables, and the automated therapy beds lining the back wall, this was clearly the infirmary.
Some of the tools and instruments were the latest designs and models, while the medicine cabinets and the desk and digital office assistant were at least a decade old. The low ceilings and floor and walls were bare concrete. There were no refrigeration units.
All the more telling were the black blotches staining the floor, most likely bloodstains, radiating a palpable aura of constrained malice and accursed loathing. Perhaps that was what kept the air unusually cool.
Gento pointed at a body lying on one of the operating tables. “He dead?”
This was One, the loser of the first match. The doctor shook his head. “Not dead yet.”
“As I should have expected,” Gento said with a thin smile.
The losers were brought here to be resuscitated, in most cases pretty much brought back from the dead.
“What was it you wished to ask of me?” the doctor said, casting a sidelong glance at the tabloid in the corner.
Gento nodded. “I would like to employ your services for a short while.”
“Well. I don’t come cheap.”
“I didn’t expect that you would. But for the time being, you will have to settle for a reward other than money.”
“Meaning?”
“You would behold the fate of the world.”
“You don’t say.”
“I wish to reveal unto you the mysteries of the universe.”
“That sounds a bit too heavy for my tastes. I think you should be looking for Doctor Frankenstein.”
“He did nothing more than raise the dead,” Gento sniffed. “Make my wishes come true and you will see the dead spring spontaneously back to life.”
“Sorry, but the only thing I can operate with is a scalpel.”
“It’s enough. I wish you only to examine a single girl.”
“Where is this girl?”
“I will retrieve her from all that foolish commotion going on above. For reasons that will soon become apparent, this room will not do. You will accompany me to my abode. Everything you need will be waiting for you there.”
“Interesting. But first—”
A stampede of footsteps erupted outside the door. The door banged open. Two corpsmen carried a bloody man in on a stretcher.
“He’s all yours.” The man wearing a baseball cap touched the brim of his visor.
“Round three, eh? Condition?”
“Some sleeping bug injected into his gut. After that, got busted in the head.”
“Understood.”
After moving the body on the stretcher to the operating table, the corpsmen bowed and left. Noting that they hadn’t cast a single glance at Gento or apparently even felt his presence, the doctor said in a matter-of-fact voice, “Seems as if they can’t see you.”
He proceeded to the operating table. The patient they’d brought in was in his early forties. He was wearing a gray crew neck T-shirt. The top of his head was caved in. Gray matter oozed from the cracks in his skull. The kind of injury that anywhere else would receive a fatal diagnosis on the spot.
But he was still clinging to life. His torso—the whole upper half of his body—pulsed up and down. Gento’s face reflected in the blade of the sonic scalpel in the doctor’s right hand as he addressed the patient.
“In these games, if you lose you’re dead. But before picking up any of your appearance money, you’ll likely be spending that much on the aftercare.”
With no warning about covering his eyes or the like, the doctor sliced him open from his throat down to his waist. The flesh practically flew apart. The innards popped out, like they’d been dying to get out.
In the white light, a squirming worm-like creature—less a snake than a stringy sludge worm—no eyes or nose, and a red pinprick of a creepily constricted mouth that curved inwards. Twisted and folded and wounded around itself, writhing in the viscous organic fluids, with no evident awareness of the body itself—it was enough to make the most jaded medical student retch.
The man’s innards had been thoroughly laid to waste by this creature.
“The brain’s a goner, but the rest may come in handy,” said the doctor, cauterizing the wormy bug spilling out of the man’s innards and onto the operating table. The kind of remark that might be expected from a “doctor” who was probably the real thing, though he certainly didn’t act like it.
He took a flask from the medicine cabinet, removed the stopper, and tipped it upside down. A few drops of the tea-colored liquid fell into the undulating abdominal cavity. An acrid vapor of the same color arose. Gento furrowed his brows.
The doctor waved his hand in front of his face and nodded as he calmly observed the discolored, twisted, festering bug.
“What is the prognosis?” Gento asked.
“The abdomen is a total loss. The lower extremities are worth saving. The hands and head weren’t eaten by the creature. The deal is, die in there and it’s first come, first served.”
“Wouldn’t that encourage the grave robbers to rush the dying along?”
“That enters into the equation. Five people need to sign off on it first.”
“This is a frightening city,” Gento said with a wry smile.
The doctor swept the scorched remains into a dustbin and picked up a laser cutter.
“Incidentally, I happen to have on hand a man with skills resembling yours.”
“You don’t say,” the doctor said, as the man’s head dropped off with a dull thud.
“His specialty is sewing corpses back together again, a kind of mix and match operation, and breathing a facsimile of life into the results. This being a facsimile means it overflows with many times the strength of a normal human.”
“Remarkable.”
The doctor’s right hand flashed again. The pale arm separated at the shoulder and rolled onto the table. But why was Gento telling all this to a doctor he had never met before?
“I’m sure he would be delighted to arm himself with talents like yours. What do you say?”
He spoke with a smile in his voice. If the doctor had turned around, he would have seen no smile on his face.
A clatter of footsteps outside the door again interrupted the conversation. A pair of corpsmen rushed in bearing another “athlete” on a stretcher. The skin of this one had the rough, hard texture of a rhinoceros. It had obviously done little to dissuade his opponent.
Rivulets of water streamed off his hair onto the stretcher and the operating table.
“Did he drown?” Gento asked.
The corpsmen turned and noticed him for the first time.
“Who’s this guy?”
“And what the hell is he doing here?”
The surprise and outrage were hardly unreasonable. What went on behind the scenes at the Coliseum were tightly held secrets, not to mention that viewing a body and the way the man died could easily reveal the techniques of his opponent.
The employees here were kept under lock and key, and the corpsmen had their memories erased after the competition. Even the competitors weren’t allowed out of the locker rooms. The guards had orders to shoot on sight anybody who left before their allotted time.
Somebody with unlimited access to the infirmary, able to witness the losers who ended up there, could upset the delicate balance maintained in the black markets throughout this city.
Not waiting for an answer, the corpsmen were already reaching for the large-caliber machine pistols on their hips. A pair of clicks rang out as their thumbs toggled the safeties—
“Stop it,” the doctor said in an unexcited voice.
A brief moment of hesitation, then the guns cleared the holsters. The next sound was a crisp ping, as if the air itself had turned to ice and snapped cleanly in two.
The barrels of the two guns drew a bead on Gento’s midsection. Aiming for center mass was always the best option. Even at this range, the head was a tricky target. Without a direct hit on the heart, the odds of retaliation were high.
The abdomen didn’t usually guarantee a quick death, but was always good for a TKO. Except their fingers couldn’t pull the triggers.
A slanting line ran through the blue steel of the machine pistols. When it reached the grip and the flesh between the thumb and forefinger, it turned crimson. A moment later, the line reached the wrist and everything above it, hand included, slid off.
Thumping to the floor at their feet, the fingers eerily continued to twitch, to no effect. The two corpsmen stared dumbly at their missing hands, only screaming when the blood started to spurt.
A similar line wrapped around their necks, and their heads soon followed their hands. As if unaware of what had happened, they gazed up at their still-erect bodies. But the eyes soon dimmed, the lids fell.
“What say you?” said Gento, looking at the headless men standing there.
The doctor didn’t answer. Didn’t even seem to hear him. His attention at the moment was focused on the headless corpsmen, all three of them rooted in place like a trio of posts.
“Think of them as a present, a retainer fee so to speak, to work in my exclusive employ. I’m sure you are adept at disposing of unidentifiable bodies.”
“You are a persistent bugger. I accept. But you’ve got to be imagining things if you think there is any sort of employer/employee relationship going on here.”
“Whatever. Once it gets out that these two are missing, there’s bound to be an uproar.”
With that, Gento Roran opened the door and silently disappeared from view, leaving behind the doctor and the thick smell of fresh blood.
“Hire me?” The question at last rose to his lips. “I cannot imagine what for. It should be interesting finding out. But he’s right. All hell is going to break loose.”