Chapter Nine
Patient Seventeen
Ever since Tuesday wriggled into my mind through whatever dark corner of hell she'd spawn from, I craved sleep.
When the orderlies entered my cell to strap me to my rusty bed frame, I didn't fight them. It was tempting, since I needed more blood to finish my little nightmare’s portrait.
Lucky for them, I had more pressing matters at hand.
I hungered for the sight of her more than the screams and suffering of my captors.
"Looks like someone finally learned that there's no use fighting us. Rook always wins, Mal.”
Hearing that nickname had my blood sizzling through my veins like acid. That’s not who I was anymore.
My thoughts drifted back to Tuesday, and a strange zen washed over me as they slammed a needle into my antecubital with enough force to make anyone else scream in pain. I only smiled as the drugs dragged me down into the murk of my rotted psyche.
The black gauze wrapping my brain faded, and the scene took shape.
I wasn’t strapped to my bed anymore. Wasn’t even in my cell in solitary. Instead, I was standing in one of the operating rooms, dressed in surgical scrubs, the white fabric soiled with still-warm blood.
Before me was an operation table, with a woman splayed on top, sliced open from her sternum to her lower pelvis.
Her glassy eyes stared vacantly at the ceiling, devoid of life.
I remembered this woman. There was no forgetting her. She’d been sweet and docile. The perfect victim for Malcolm Rook and his evil thirst to butcher, abuse and violate, all in the name of science.
The woman’s bruised and bloody flesh stretching her swollen belly began to writhe. An ugly screech came from the corpse a moment later, and I reached into her with my gloved hands and pulled out her baby.
It wasn’t human. Its flesh was gray, its veins filled with a glowing green liquid. The umbilical cord still attaching the child to its mother was bloated with the same substance.
A voice that made my insides curdle cut through the fog swaddling my mind, and I lifted my glare to find the devil himself standing on the opposite end of the table. Wearing the same scrubs, covered in the same blood.
Malcolm Rook glared at me from across the table with his throat slit, the gash still spewing liquid.
I clenched the scalpel now, setting the baby down in the crook of his dead mother’s arm and lunged at the man who’d destroyed so many lives. The woman, this baby, countless others. To say nothing of my own.
Before I could slice his throat again, as I had that day, the dream changed.
Next, I was lying on a steel table in his laboratory, surrounded by the collection of his past victims. Countless needles were shoved into my body, hundreds, so many that the glass syringes clinked together with the slightest twitch, the Treatment each one held sloshing with the movement.
There were so many, the room was bathed in that caustic viridescence.
The grotesque face of Saint Bart’s pharmacist appeared in my field of vision, two syringes in his hands. “Shall I do his eyeballs, doctor?”
“Not yet.” Rook shoved Fredrick aside, his face appearing next in front of mine. “I’m so disappointed in you,” he said to me with a sigh. “You were once the best physician here. Now look at you. You’re a disgrace. To me. To your grandfather. To all of St. Bartholomew’s.”
I tried to close my eyes only for cruel fingers to pry them open.
“The injections, Fredrick. Now.”
I resisted the urge to scream as two needles were pushed into the sclera of my eyes and I felt the Treatment filling them. The pain obliterated every nerve, overloading my system like a fried circuit board.
“This is your last chance.” Rook raised his voice to be heard over my agonized cries. “Surrender to the Treatment. Let it flow through you. If you don’t, you’ll be removed from my staff. Permanently.”
Even if I possessed the ability to care, I wouldn’t. “I’d rather rot in a cell with the rest of the poor souls condemned to this fucking purgatory than work for you a second longer you evil son of a bitch.”
I couldn’t see his reaction, but the venom coming off him in waves was palpable. “Have it your way. Fredrick, Saint Bartholomew’s has a new patient. Get a fresh intake file, and make it black.”