Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [20]
Then one day, at around three o’clock, a siren went off and ten minutes later an ambulance arrived. Two doctors made their way immediately to the operating room, and I warily accompanied an orderly into one of the tunnels. It was the first time I’d been past the heavy doors.
I stepped into a cramped, wet space, claustrophobic with humidity and thick with the smell of damp bodies and excrement. Naked children lay all over the floor, curled into fetal positions, sprawled on top of each other or huddled upright against the walls. I carefully stepped over them as I tried to find the particular spare we needed. The orderly kicked them out of the way with the casual impatience of a butcher walking through a slaughterhouse. The older spares seemed to know what was coming, and flinched and squirmed as we approached, turning their faces to the walls or attempting to burrow underneath other bodies. My heart started to beat unnaturally hard, and I began to sweat not entirely from the heat. I felt unsafe. Not because the spares were threatening—they were docile, brainless, without purpose of any kind. It was the tunnel itself that triggered bad memories in me, memories I didn’t want to place. The smell was at the back of it, I guess, and the absence of hope.
In the end we found the right one, Conrad Two, and the orderly took him away. Half an hour later he was returned without his right eye. The crater where it had once sat had been roughly stitched together, painted with antiseptic and carelessly bandaged. As the orderly shoved him past me back into the tunnel a smell I recognized crept into my mind, and my stomach cramped violently. It was the sweet, sickly odor of skinFix, a material used to seal incisions when cosmetic niceties are not an issue. I’d never heard of it being used anywhere outside the army, and hadn’t smelt it in over a decade. It’s not something you forget.
After the ambulance left I returned to the corridor tunnel, and stood for a while in front of one of the windows. In the blue, the bodies staggered and crawled like blind grubs, disturbed by the periodic moans of the spare who’d just had part of his face ripped out The body nearest the window looked up suddenly, a motion that was random and meaningless. She had only one arm, and the skin on the left side of her face was red and churned where a graft had been removed. Her eyes flicked across the window and her mouth moved silently, and the worst thing was that her face and body were not yet sufficiently destroyed to hide how attractive her counterpart must be. I walked unsteadily back to the main room, shutting the door behind me.
I drank half a bottle of Jack, injected two mg of Rapt into my arm, and lay facedown on the bed with cushions pushed hard over my ears. And still, as I drifted into the twilight of an overdose which left me unconscious for over seventy-two hours, I thought I could hear the sound of bodies twisting unknowing against each other in the gloom.
Luckily, I guess, Ratchet the droid found me. I’d vomited onto the bed and, sharp thinker that it was, the machine had worked out I was not in the best of shape. It monitored me for the next two days, turning me over when I threw up again, and made sure the spares were fed at the regular times.
Maybe it also whispered to me in my sleep, because when I eventually made it back into the land of the living, I returned with a sense of purpose that seemed to come from nowhere. You’re going to need some back story to understand. Bear with me on the medical stuff, because it isn’t really my field.
The deal with the Farms is this.
The world’s a dangerous place, even if you don’t go looking for trouble. Chances are your body’s going to take some knocks. Diseases, cuts, bruises. Most of these can be dealt with pretty effectively now. There’s only one area where we’re still consulting tea leaves and waving dead chickens at the problem.
There seems to be some inherent difficulty with getting damaged bodies to accept