Machine Man - Max Barry [87]
Someone coughed. I opened my eyes, because that was disconcerting. I waited, hoping it might go away. Cark. Cark. It sounded perfunctory. Like the owner didn’t expect it to do much good.
I pondered its implications. Or I floated along on its implications. I let its implications surround me without penetrating. I might have done this for a while, but water began falling on my body. I thought maybe rain but then probably not because I could see the ceiling. I felt my dream state dissolving, and was sad. But it was also good, because I could feel myself coming back. My thoughts began to organize themselves. I raised my head.
I was in an operating theater. Of course I was: I had been brought here for surgery. But things lay scattered and overturned: a gurney, drip stands, equipment that looked like somebody should be keeping it sterile. Surgical blades glimmered from the floor tiles in rapidly pooling water like coins in a wishing well. A long crack ran up the wall. I thought, Earthquake?
Cark.
I saw a man slumped against the wall. His green scrubs were speckled dark down the front. His lips were red. He stared dully at his legs, which jutted out on the tiles. His eyes rose to mine and he blinked once, slowly.
“Help,” I said. He didn’t react. I felt a little bad, because obviously this guy needed some help, too. I planted my right hand on the table and levered myself up on my left elbow, or tried to. It didn’t work. I looked down to see what the problem was.
A tide of blood washed from a gash in my left shoulder. Or not a gash: the opposite of that. Gash implied a cut in something otherwise whole. I had ropy strings of skin and muscle connecting me to an arm that was otherwise severed. On the tiles, discarded, was something I first mistook for a drill. But it wasn’t. It had a long, flat blade. Liquid red ribbons threaded the water around it. It was an electric saw. I looked at the guy on the tiles. “Did you …” I said. Because this guy looked like a surgeon. I thought maybe he had started to amputate my arm but not finished. “Can you …” My voice was a croak. My throat felt abused. The man stared at me without expression. His head bobbed with each beat of his heart. “Why …”
Cark, went the surgeon, and he made a fresh dark spatter down his scrubs. He was not going to help. He was going to lie there and die. Or lie there and watch me die and then die himself. I felt panic. It was not a good time to panic. It was time for objective, clinical assessment. But an ocean of blood was draining out of a canyon in my flesh and my brain gibbered, That’s fatal, you’re going to lose consciousness. I lifted my right arm—I had a right arm—without any real plan and saw bright red. I was lying in a red bath. Blood ran over the sides of the table and pattered on the tiles below. I was a bloody water feature. There was too much blood here. I should be dead.
My legs looked odd. As in, I had some. Beneath the saturated green surgical cloth was a definite leg shape. Tubes ran between layers of the cloth to nearby devices: a black box on a trolley, four different drips. The box was making the slooshing sounds. With each sloosh, the tubes connected to it bucked, dark fluid moving through them. I decided this was keeping me alive. At this moment, the box stopped slooshing and started slurping like an enthusiastic child chasing the last of a milk shake. Beige spots appeared where the tube was connected to the box and raced toward my body.
I grabbed at my mostly severed arm and tried to mash it back on. It was like handling a steak. The sounds—it wasn’t the squishing that got me. The sucking or squelching. It was the rasping. I almost couldn’t do it. But I didn’t want to die. So I did.
Blood squirted. I couldn’t seal it properly. “Help!” I said. Before I’d been prepared to cut the dying guy some slack, but now I really needed him. “Help me, you shit!” I flopped to the edge of the table so I could see him while holding my