Machine Man (serial)

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 trolley, drip stands, equipment that looked like someone should be keeping it sterile. Surgical blades glimmered from the floor tiles in rapidly pooling water, like coins in a wishing well. There was a chunk out of the doorway and a long crack running up the wall. I thought: Earthquake?

I heard the coughing again. I planted my right hand on the table and levered myself up with my left elbow, to see who this was, but it didn’t work. I looked down to see what the problem was, and realized: I was in serious trouble.

Blood pumped enthusiastically from a gash in my left shoulder. No, gash was the wrong word. That implies a cut in something that is mostly whole. This was the opposite. I had a thin chunk of skin and muscle connecting me an arm that was otherwise severed. On the tiles, as if discarded there, was something I had mistaken for a drill. But it wasn’t: it had a long, flat blade. It was a saw. Liquid red ribbons threaded the water around it. I had been brought in for surgery. They had not finished. But they had started.

145.