1 . Name: mumbling mice @ 2012-07-06 13:10

Here's a little piece I've been working on for a bit. I'm not entirely satisfied with it, though, so suggestions on how it could be improved would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you and enjoy.

~~~~

It was a dark and stormy night, as they often tend to be. The rain was pounding down on the roof like incessant tribal drumming, a desperate ritual sending a plea to the gods, urging them to peer through the window of this atrocious anomaly of an operating room.

But the doctor knew that there were no gods.

His hands shook as he pierced pale skin the color of a fish belly with a glinting needle. At one point it had been a vibrant, pinkish-tan. Or had it? His forehead wrinkled slightly in thought and he idly stroked the flesh, lightly salted with soft hair, as he tried to remember whose leg it had been.

Oh. Leg.

The medic, as they tended to call him, exhaled in a weak sort of chuckle and pressed his forefinger against his temple. It was the boy’s leg, obviously. How could he have been so stupid to have forgotten the plan? It seemed as though, after awhile when his eyes were sore from staring at one bit for too long, all of the flesh melded together into one. As if it was all meant to be.

He turned and glanced at the cuckoo clock on the wall—2:16 AM. He tried to stifle an instinctual yawn that the numbers triggered and turned back to his operating table to finish stitching his greatest accomplishment yet. He wasn’t sure when he slept last, but it didn’t matter. He was almost finished. There was this second leg to sew on, another minor bit, and then the most important piece of all.

As he bent over to snap the thread with his teeth, he heard a naughty rustling behind him; Archimedes seemed to have found himself an eyeball.

“Dummkopf!” The medic scrambled to his desk and swatted at the bird. Archimedes immediately dropped the slippery, veiny thing from his beak and flew back to the top of the medic’s stationary medigun device, where the birds were often prone to perch.

The medic pinched the eyeball by one of the extended veins and held it up. “Now, where did you come from?” he wondered out loud with a weak smirk. The eyeball didn’t answer him, because it wasn’t sentient. The medic tossed it over his shoulder and it landed somewhere with a soft squish.

As the doctor made his way back to the operating table, there was a commotion down the hall. The medic’s head snapped up and he stared at the closed door cautiously, his jaw tight and his eyes bloodshot and alert behind slightly skewed spectacles. There was a series of slow, leaden footsteps, and then the doorknob began to twitch and jerk, as if the person on the other side was have trouble getting a proper handle of it.

“Doctor?” It was a familiar voice, a voice the medic had been waiting to hear all night. His heart quickening with each beat in sheer excitement, he hastily threw a sheet over the incomplete creature before hurrying to the door.

“Quickly, quickly,” he whispered, ushering in the enormous man by one of his mammoth-sized arms. The heavy (as he was often referred to) had tried his best to add subtly to his bulk by donning a tipped fedora and a wool overcoat that appeared to have been tailored over the body of a grizzly bear. It didn’t do much.

“Sorry, Doctor,” the heavy murmured, removing his hat as the medic slammed the door behind them and began to hastily fiddle with a concerning number of locks to bolt it shut. “Was more difficult than expected. Took longer than hoped.”

“It is fine, it doesn’t matter,” the medic responded breathlessly, running a formaldehyde soaked hand through his graying hair. “As long as you have it…” Taking his words as a cue, the heavy opened his coat and withdrew something spherical and slightly larger than a melon, swathed in a bloodstained strip of muslin. The heavy had barely brought the bundle out into the open before the medic snatched it out of the his hands and turned away, clutching it to his chest as if it was a newborn baby.

“He’s still warm,” he observed in a gravelly monotone, opening his eyes and slowly walking it to one of his empty gurneys, cradling it as gently as he could with such shaking hands.

“Da,” the heavy answered, nervously running his large fingers along the rim of his hat as he stared at his shoes. “I attached him to device. Like you asked.”

He rested the bundle on the gurney and carefully began peeling the layers of muslin fused with dried blood. The first thing he saw were the eyes, a vibrant and electric blue. There was a slight indentation around them from all the hours upon days upon weeks he spent wearing his goggles. He wore them so often, in fact, that the doctor was quite sure that this was the first time he had ever seen his eyes. The engineer, they had called him. The medic stroked his finger along the pattern. The engineer contorted his eyebrows and made a pitiful attempt at a moan past his mouth gag, but it only made the medic grin down at him softly with a fondness in his eyes that somehow managed to be simultaneously gentle and terrifying.

“Fantastically preserved. You didn’t do a thing to the face.” The medic looked up at the other man in the room, who was still hovering by the door and wearing the expression of a kicked puppy. “You did well, my friend. Thank you.” The heavy’s eyebrows raised and he managed the slightest hint of a smile.

“You are welcome, Doctor.” The heavy walked farther into the room with slightly less caution in his step, towards the gurney that held the covered experiment with a curious expression. He reached out and just barely touched the edge of the sheet when the doctor smacked the back of his hand with the dull side of his bone saw. It left a throbbing welt, and the heavy opened his mouth to protest, to roar out a threat of critical injury, but immediately rethought the decision when he remembered who it was. Instead, he recoiled under the medic’s thousand watt glare. Outside, a peal of thunder ripped through the sky and they both felt it in their guts. The noise caused a stir in the doves above, but the two men took no notice.

“It’s. Not. Ready,” the medic hissed. He turned sharply and stalked to his medical cabinet, which he threw open in an unnecessarily dramatic manner. The heavy drew in a quick breath through his nose at what he saw. He was accustomed to gore (it was part of his job, after all), but there was something deeply unsettling about hearts, livers, lungs, and all other sorts of inside bits floating in a fluid tinged yellow and stinking of chemicals. The medic removed a single jar, which contained a human heart, sustained through a clunky, electronic device that had been implanted in it. It beat on its own, suspended in the solution amidst tiny little bits of itself, unaware of the world around it or what it was to be used for. The jar had been labeled Soldier.

“It seemed right,” the medic explained when he noticed the heavy staring. “He had the essence of a warrior.”

The heavy nodded silently. The soldier had proven, by far, the most difficult class to dispatch. He had put up a ferocious fight, knocking out one of the heavy’s teeth and breaking his right leg. But he died too. Just like they all did.

His death scream, primal and otherworldly, would sometimes echo in the heavy’s ears late at night, when he was trying to sleep but the blood on his hands was keeping him awake.

The engineer’s head began to moan again.

The heavy looked down at his hands. He had worn gloves when he did the deed, but he couldn’t help but get this nagging feeling in his chest that there was something red under his fingernails.

The medic, meanwhile, had come down from the adrenaline rush of obtaining the head and was now simmering in euphoria. Humming, he snapped on a pair of rubber gloves as he glided in an almost dreamlike state towards the ancient victrola he kept in the corner of the room. The record crackled out swing, something upbeat and World War II era. It drowned out the engineer’s moaning and eventually he gave up because no wanted to listen to him. The doves began to stir again, rustling their feathers and glancing around at each other uneasily, as if they were all anticipating something terrible—but the storm had already come.

“You are going to finish it?” the heavy asked him, glancing again at the covered form on the gurney.

“In time,” the doctor answered him, removing a pipe from the pocket of his lab coat. “Allow me a moment to revel in my impending accomplishment.” With an unsettling degree of casualty, he somehow managed to light the pipe on one of the Tesla coils sparkling at the top of a great piece of machinery. He sucked in the smoke and puffed in back out in thoughtful put put puts as he stared out the window at the pitch black storm, for a moment seeming as if he were lost in the blizzard of his own mind. “I’ve been dreaming of this for a long time, my friend,” he whispered when he reemerged. He turned to the heavy, his eyes no longer in dreamy repose but bulging and vivid. “The Uberclass. The ultimate warrior. A compilation of every positive trait that comprised our team compacted into one indestructible man. There will be no need for teams anymore.” He turned back to the window and clasped his hands behind his back. “Just me… and my creation.”

The heavy stared with knotted eyebrows at the doctor, still fiddling with his hat. “But Doctor…” he said hesitantly. “What will happen to me?”

Lightning exploded like fireworks outside of the window, and the doctor’s dark silhouette burned into the heavy’s eyes and wouldn’t leave no matter how much he tried to blink it away.

“You have been nothing short of a godsend, my dear friend.” The medic turned slowly, idly, puffing on his pipe. “I cannot imagine having possibly been able to get half this far without you.” He strolled back to the covered gurney and placed one hand on top of the shrouded form. His fingers curled in on themselves, grasping the sheet, as if he were about to tear it off, but he paused a moment, and they relaxed. He stared down at his hand, his eyes somewhat sad. The heavy stared at the doctor as he appeared to have a momentary struggle within his mind, between longing desire and regret. It was brief, though, and his fingers tensed again and he ripped the sheet off of the form to reveal a hideous, malformed being. It was a disproportional patchwork of their teammates, with bits and pieces that were nauseatingly familiar—the heavy knew all to well, as he was the one who had obtained them for the doctor. A foggy glass dome attached to the chest possessed a mechanical heart, waiting to be replaced by the real thing, and gooey flesh had molded and grew like moss around the tubes that had been jammed into the esophagus, as there was currently no mouth to feed it or breathe for it. The lack of heart and head the heavy had expected.

It was the missing arms that sent him stumbling backwards.

“You have one last job, my friend.”