Jeremy came home that night, hardly paying any attention to the commute back home or the people on the bus. He went inside of his apartment, threw off random pieces of clothing as he walked down to his bathroom, turned the shower head on, and he drenched himself under some boiling hot water. He did not know how long he was under the shower head, but when he emerged later, he was so weakened by the heat of the water that he collapsed on the ledge of the tub as he attempted to leave the bath.
He started to weep, his arms supporting him as he laid, pitifully, against the edge of the bath tub. Weakened by both the shock of heat on his body and now by his lack of strength following his crying, Jeremy had no choice but to lay against the tub, robbed of both the strength – and the desire – to get out of the bath tub.
The next day came for Jeremy roughly, as he awoke to the twin annoyances of his alarm clock screaming loudly from his bedroom, and the light of morning blaring through the uncovered glass shining from the bathroom window.
It was a struggle to eat, to get dressed, and to walk down to the bus stop and not look like a man who had just walked away from some awful devastation. The bus was a bumpier ride than it seemed as though it usually was, and it didn't help that the closer that Jeremy felt to the facility that he felt sicker and sicker to his stomach, souring hard, almost forming a mass right at the pit of it.
Amidst the raucous cackling of a loud group of black teenage girls, Jeremy rested his head on the heavily smudged glass of the bus window, wanting it all to just end, just as his day outside of the apartment had just started. The bus rounded a corner, and Jeremy felt the mass at the pit of his stomach fall down the pit as he saw the diner that he has visited so shortly ago. Looking at the diner, he found it difficult to think of anything else but the vague face of the waitress that he could somewhat remember having served him the first time he had come to the diner. He was unable to stop himself from thinking about the woman's face, frozen in pain, creating a puddle as her body sunk to the floor, spilling.
The image in an unpleasant one, and Jeremy tried, mostly in vain, to shove the thought of the woman's face and pain-filled, writhing body from his mind. He began to resort to shutting his eyes tightly, wishing that he could stop thinking about such awful things.
He got off at his stop, and walked, wholly unenthusiastically, to the front doors of the facility. Pushing past the doors, Jeremy made his way past the security cameras, the metal detectors, and the bored guard that leaning against the guard's desk, Jeremy walked to the locker room like a man about to walk into his prison.
Undressing and dressing, Jeremy tried to find a mindset that could allow him to cope with what he was about to go through. First he reminded himself of what John had told him that day before, the way of thinking that the most he could do with the position he was in was to give some decency to the bodies he worked on so methodically. He could do something about the way that, at least the bodies he came into contact with, were treated with the bare minimum of respect that had failed to come to them in life and continued through death.
Thinking about the bodies only worked at depressing him further, so he tried on thinking about the other workers who would be in the work room with him. Thinking about his unemotional, mostly silent co-workers didn't work in accomplishing anything, so he soon discarded the idea of thinking about the fact that he wasn't alone – that he was simply just a part of this silent majority of the people who were touching the pale corpses in their far-too large medical dressing.
Jeremy pushed into the Extraction room, and was no more happier than he had been all morning, with the added deficit of having to look at the tableau of the work room as he walked in. He had the image of what he initially saw as he came into the room burnt into his memory before he could blink it away.
The way the room was set up was that it was essentially a room that lead off into a series of rooms that most of the workers on the floor had little to do with, save for retrieving tools or, when they finished with the exhaustive retrieval of fluids and tissue that were related to the manufacture of the anti-age serum, dumping and retrieving a new specimen from the appropriate rooms.
Just looking at the room made Jeremy shudder.
Walking over to his station, Jeremy made a cursory inspection of it. He had abandoned it for the last two days, and he had to make sure that everything was in good and working order. from his instruments, to making certain that the work surface was well sanitized, sterile and as sad as a morgue's work station. Afterwards - after Jeremy had sanitized all of his instruments, inspected them to be in great working order, and then had made certain that everything attached to his station's glorified gurney was in good working order and that nothing was not as it should be, he made the unhappy walk to the Ice Room.
The list on his checkboard for the day gave him a list of the numbers of the corpses that he was to make extractions from. The numbers would correspond with the tags that wrapped around the black trash bags that were stuffed into the large freezer that made up the Ice Room, which themselves were neatly organized on large, sterile, gray shelves that went up four shelve spaces. The numbers that were the bags' identities were readily visible to the eye upon entering the large room, and Jeremy made his work of gathering up the specimen, as quickly as he could, not enjoying the awful cold of the room that reminded him far too much of death, decay, and loneliness.
The corpse was slightly heavier than he was used to, and his heart sank as he understood the meaning of those few extra pounds that weighed the bag down. When he slit the bag open at his gurney, he had to swallow a lump in his throat as he saw the pale, grotesquely angelic features of the toddler that was in the bag.
Its body appeared to be shrunken, almost a little shriveled, in its limbs, but its head was what warranted the most attention. The poor thing, its head must have doomed it from its gestation, which gave it an awful, jarring deformity that seemed to make itself immediatally memorable to Jeremy in a single instant.
Gasping, Jeremy imagined what an awful weight its head must have been on its swan-like, oh so thin neck. Was death, at least in this child's case, a welcome blessing, and life an awful curse to a person born into such a body? It was much easier to glance away from the child's (a boy, he would later realize, upon cursory glance of his frozen, tiny genitals) face, and his softly shut eyes, his longer than usual eye lashes giving him the look of a sleeping child.
Jeremy gently turned the small corpse over, and was grateful for the small blessing that was the fact that he could do his work without having to look at the boy's face. He made the incisions, drained much of the fluid from the child's nape, and cut away the tissue samples, working as well and by the book as he could, under the circumstances. His hands were shaking, and he almost dropped his instruments and his specimens more than once.
He thanked God, more than once, that everything that he was doing was completely standard, and with no deviation between one corpse and the next. It was no scientist's work, despite what it initially looked like, it was no better than factory work. Cut here, drain this, cut this, bag it all up, re-wrap the corpse, and take the next specimen from the Ice Room, until a break came or the end of the day came, one or the either.
Except something different happened this time, something that deviated from the everyday work that happened in the large room full of quiet, alien-looking workers, who cut and moved so methodically.
Jeremy had decided to turn the corpse over after he was finished, and had to keep a hold of the head as he did so, worried that the head would snap loose from the thin remnants of his neck, after it had been so crudely operated on. Remembering the initial instructions that he had been given when he first started working at the facility, he recalled how the technician that had given him his first day of training had told Jeremy that after the extraction process had finished, that you did not have to worry too much about any injury done to the corpses. Jeremy couldn't stomach committing further injury to the child's already defiled body, so he tried, as gently as he could, to turn the pale corpse over.
In doing so, his hand grazed against the boy's chest, and what he felt made him freeze, stilling him in his motions. The chest fluttered, weakly and in a way that was not completely equal with that of a heart beat, reminding Jeremy, somehow, of a cloud of butterflies caught in a drum, their wings beating occasionally on the tight skin. It almost seemed to beat harder, more assuredly as his hand closed gently on the chest.
The words formed on his lips, and he whispered them in deep wonder, even as his mind tried to debunk what he saw, what he felt before him, under his hand. His eyes flew to the child's face, and he could not see any visible signs of livelihood on the boy's face, on his still-blued cheeks and on his shut eyes.
And yet, the more that Jeremy saw signs that should have countered what he believed that he was feeling, the more that he became surer that what he felt was real. He knew that the bodies that they did crude operations on were considered legally dead before they were brought into the facility, he knew that he had to of cut some sort of a function critical to the functions of living when he cut into the nape of the corpse's neck. Blood had not coursed from out of the boy's puncture wounds, and he appeared to be, in every sense of the word, as dead.
And yet, he lived. His chest was not warm under his hand, but it felt less and less cool with each moment that passed. Signs of life filled the poor, broken body, and as he came to the realization that life seemed to remain, or it had returned, to the corpse that he had drained of fluid and tissue that should have been necessary for the capacity to sustain life, Jeremy felt weaker and more despaired than he could have ever believed that he could sanely feel.
He stared down at the stretched-out features of the dead child before him, focusing on the boy's face this time, taking in the terrible nature of the his deformity. God, he looked like he was only sleeping!
Maybe he was only unconscious...
Jeremy stroked the baby's thin chest, and felt the reality of the threadbare beat that began, slowly but surely, to assume the feel of a heart beat that shouldn't be growing.
What was there to do?
The baby was cold, and that was plainly obvious. This room couldn't be helping matters, but it did make it worse. If this child was alive, then the cold room would hurt his already surely critical condition...
He had to get him out of the cooled Extraction room.
Jeremy didn't bother to look around, to make sure that nobody watched him as he scooped the boy up into his arms, wrapped in the remnants of the trash bag. He walked, and would have run if he wasn't afraid of doing further harm to the child, who was badly hurt. Jeremy didn't want to do further harm to the baby, and he held the boy up as gently as he could, recalling how he had always been told to properly hold a newborn. He figured that based on the body of the boy, that what applied to the fragile neck of a new born could also apply to this child.
He walked out of the Extraction room, out through the locker room, holding the child in what was left of the trash bag as though it were his blanket, trying to get some semblance of warmth back into the small body. Down the hallway he walked, until, at last, he walked out through the facility doors, with the woman security guard yelling for him to pay attention to her.
He needed to take the boy back home, he needed to be somewhere where he was loved, kept warm, fed, brought back up to whatever sufficed as healthy for such a sickly child.
Who else would care for the baby, even if he had come back to life, miraculously as he did? They had taken everything that they had wanted from this boy, and all that was left for him was an incinerator in some dilapidated little town, a good truck drive away from the city. Couldn't let them take the baby, couldn't let them hide evidence of what they have been doing.
What he had seen in his dreams must have only been a manifestation of the truth, of what he had already known, on some level. They were alive as their lives were cut out from under them, kept in a near-frozen state, and were burnt alive if they had survived the ordeal.
Jeremy walked blankly across the street, and, not looking where he was going, he did not see or hear the car that sent him flying away, the baby falling from his arms, flying, momentarily, like the angel that it was to him before it hit the pavement with a sickening sound, akin to a melon splitting open. He did not need to look up from where he laid, in shock, in pain, on the pavement.
He wept for the baby, then wept for himself.
No comments:
Post a Comment