Dead Mann Running (9781101596494) by Petrucha Stefan

Author:Petrucha, Stefan [Petrucha, Stefan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101596494
Publisher: Penguin USA
Published: 2012-09-03T16:00:00+00:00

18

The world’s full of pain and body parts, but if I’d seen worse, I didn’t remember it. I wanted to turn my head, but couldn’t. Not that it would’ve mattered, the image had moved into my brain and kicked everything else out. My chest, arms, and hands tingled. All ten fingers straightened and swelled, like they’d been filled with toothpaste and were ready to burst.

Hudson had been disassembled. He was opened up, then whatever was inside him had been opened up, and so on, until there was nothing left. I wanted to put him out of his misery, but without a crematorium handy, all he could do was suffer, all I could do was watch.

I understood savagery, a primal instinct that could misfire. After all, I’d killed a guy with an axe. But it wasn’t something bestial on display here. I’d seen the work of serial killers fulfilling a grotesque sense of art. But this had no aesthetic. It lacked any passion at all. These were mechanical cuts made by a seamstress with a razor. The opposite of Jonesey’s wide-eyed idealism, the work said, in no uncertain terms, that all existence was pointless except for the shape it had.

The lights kept flashing, the alarm kept sounding, a high tone followed by a deeper one. True to form, Hudson’s rasping was offbeat with both, a fingernail raking a blackboard. At first I thought that was all I was hearing, but there was something else.

Beep, flash, beep, rasping breath, flash, beep…and then a shpp.

The long wide space was orderly and lifeless. There were instruments, hampers and garbage, a row of steel cabinets, and other gurneys, whatever on them covered in sheets.

Beep, flash, shppp…

It wasn’t footsteps. It wasn’t mechanical. The area I was in ended in a half wall, but there looked to be about another ten feet between it and the exit. There was someone in there. Another subject, kept away from the rest?

Rasping breath, beep, flash, shrppp…

I stepped away from the gurney, far back enough to see a coffee table covered with magazines, and the edge of a lounge chair. A figure was sitting in it, reading, turning pages. That was the sound—shrp.

Struggling to control my vibrating arms I grabbed the biggest, sharpest scalpel I could find and headed toward the figure. I don’t know if I actually would have killed someone, but I was so pissed, I wanted to. It didn’t matter if it was a boffin, a lazy guard, or a bagel lady. They were all cogs in this madhouse. Someone should pay.

shrpp …

I picked up speed, jumped the last two feet and saw, in the middle of a pool of sun from a skylight…“Jonesey?”

It was John the Fact-less himself, the reverend Jim Jonesey, server of the Kool-Aid. Happy and about as self-aware as a clam, he was flipping through The New Yorker, yellow tag dangling from his wrist.

He picked his head up. “Hess, oh hey, hi. Glad you made it in. The room was a little cramped, so I thought I’d stretch the old legs.

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