Machine Man (serial)

Panic swept through me. It was not a good time to panic. It was time for some of that clinical detachment. But tides of blood were gushing from a gaping canyon in my flesh and my brain screamed, That’s fatal, you’re going to lose consciousness any second now. I lifted my right arm—I still had a right arm—without any real plan for what to do with it and it was bright red. They’ve skinned it! my brain shrieked. And it did look like raw tendon and muscle, but it wasn’t, it was only soaked in blood. I was lying in a shallow red bath. Blood ran over the sides to spatter on the tiles below, like a water feature. And possibly this looked worse because of the added volume of water falling from the ceiling, but still: there was way too much blood here. I should already be dead.

I looked down. My legs weren’t right. By which I mean, I had some. I was lying beneath saturated green surgical cloth, and this was, well, contoured, in a definite legs-and-torso shape. Tubes ran from between layers in the cloth to devices nearby: a large black box on a trolley, two different drips. The box was making the slooshing sound I’d heard earlier. With every sloosh, the tubes connected to it bucked a little, dark fluid moving through them.

The second I decided this was keeping me alive, the box stopped slooshing and started sounding like an enthusiastic six-year-old chasing the last of his milkshake. As I watched, beige spots appeared around where the tube was connected to the box, and rapidly elsewhere along it, racing toward my body.

I grabbed at my mostly-severed arm and tried to mash it back on. Now, I’m not particularly squeamish, but seriously, this was disgusting. I had no feeling there; it was like handling a steak. And 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 from the wound. I couldn’t seal it properly; of course I couldn’t. “Help,” I said, just in case whoever I’d heard coughing before wanted to step in. But no-one came. This was it, I realized: I was actually about to cease living. I felt terror and dizziness and regret. I felt cheated and angry at someone or something. I looked around one last time, in case there was something useful nearby I hadn’t noticed earlier, like maybe a surgeon, and my eyes fell again on the electric saw.

146.