Green Fields (Book 7): Affliction

by Lecter, Adrienne

  “Did I forget anything?” She seemed to ask no one in particular, and I didn’t hear a reply. “Ah, right. One more thing. We will do the amputation of your fingers and toes last. I need you lucid for that because we will test electric conductivity of your nervous system to see what needs to go and what parts have a chance at recovery. I’m not telling you this to be cruel but so you are prepared. It goes without saying that it will be by far not the most painful thing that will happen to you, but from experience I know that it can have a special psychological impact on patients. Once that’s done, we’re done.” Definitely something to look forward to. I was surprised she didn’t add that.

  She hadn’t been kidding about their on-site dentist, it turned out. They did the X-rays right there with a portable machine—I didn’t get an iron apron, but then radiation was the least likely to kill me in this room, I figured. It was incredibly frustrating that I couldn’t tense as he fixed my jaws open with those terrible metal clamps, but the two teeth he pulled came out easily enough that I told myself that this wasn’t so bad. Never having needed more than a filling, I was completely unprepared for experiencing the joy of him drilling four holes into my jaw where the implants would go and adding the anchoring parts. I could have done without the verbal play-by-play he recited while doing his best to split my skull. The pain wasn’t even the worst of it; the vibrations that rattled my entire skeleton did that trick nicely. At least now we knew that the paralytic was working, because I should have been screaming at the top of my lungs by then, but not a single whimper made it out of my throat.

  Dying had lost all the horror it had ever held for me by the time he declared his work done for now. It was living through this that scared the crap out of me.

  The next—for once, pleasant—surprise came when they showed a hint of mercy and taped my eyes shut, suspending me in semi darkness. As much a blessing as a curse as I felt myself lose spatial orientation almost immediately when strong hands grabbed me and flipped me partly onto my side, rearranging my limp legs to their likings. At least they used some lube, but after Raynor’s grand explanation my suspicion was more to make things go more quickly and not to keep my discomfort to a low level. I tried to make myself relax, but with that already being my physical state and no chance in hell of keeping the skyrocketing panic in check, that was easier said than done. That was still bearable, as was the part where they turned me onto my back and first stuck another camera on a long line down my throat to check on the other end. Having that crap shoved down my airways was almost a relief as I felt like I could breathe again, although technically, the damn machine was breathing for me now. The constant, steady beeping of what I presumed was my heartbeat was almost lulling me into a false sense of complacency. If my entire head hadn’t been throbbing with pain down to my collarbones that might have worked. But no more than for the next ten seconds.

  They started with me facing downward, if only for a brief period of time, a few wads of padding keeping me stable, but not exactly comfortable. A sharp burn across the right lower part of my back, and the next moment all the pain radiating from my jaws turned to a light discomfort compared to what was going on now. It hurt so bad that it was surreal. Them turning me over and continuing on my abdomen was worse. I knew that I should have blacked out from it, but I didn’t. Maybe that should have been comforting—the serum must have been working—but it really wasn’t. Strange as that was, it didn’t completely wipe my mental capacity, letting me grab onto snippets of the rapport the team had going on.

  “…Fatal kidney damage.”

  “…That’s enough. If you scoop out any more hepatic tissue, the liver won’t recover.”

  With not-quite perfect timing, the rapid beep of the machine next to me dropped in frequency before it turned to a steady, definitively alarming sound. It seemed like forever until that stopped, then normalized into beeps once more. “She’s stabilizing quickly,” the anesthesiologist reported.

  Some time passed until they started debating heatedly, concluded by Raynor’s snide, “She doesn’t need her gallbladder. It’s not worth leaving that in. A little diarrhea won’t kill her.”

  Then they moved on to my intestines. Some very disconcerting tugging and rearranging later, one of the male doctors surmised, “A good tenth of the small intestine, two inches of the large. Appendix intact.” Well, thank fuck for that.

  That entire area must have been what Raynor had been poking when she’d first examined me, and they weren’t done yet.

  “Right ovary is removed. Shall we do a hysterectomy just to be sure? There’s already extensive damage and it’s not a vital organ,” a different female voice reported.

  Raynor’s sharp clip came with some delay. “Hormonal balance is often an issue with the female subjects. Leave as much intact as you can. We already have to shoot her up with testosterone to help with muscle regeneration. Let’s not create more of a problem than we have to.” Somehow, I didn’t get the sense that she was concerned with me suddenly growing facial hair.

  A small eternity of not much happening later—I presumed as they were sewing me up once more—I was flipped onto my side, which in and of itself was beyond agonizing. They proceeded to my left leg next, giving me a new reason to panic. This one was bordering on stupid. Considering how much I already hurt, the idea of them having to amputate my leg—and thus removing a good portion of my body that could no longer contribute to the intense, incessant agony—shouldn’t have been so terrifying, but I was rather attached to my ability to move around freely. The wound had been burning like hell in the decontamination shower, which in hindsight had puzzled me as I’d figured tissues would have gone numb as nerves died, but it got worse quickly. It took me a while to realize why—they were peeling the very skin off my thigh, bit by necrotic bit. The parts underneath were a little less excruciating, at least until they started scraping along the bone. Then the high-pitched whirr of the bone saw.

  That was the first time I wished they would just let me die in earnest.

  But it didn’t happen, and neither did they stop. My heart went out for the second time for a count of twenty on that, but they managed to pull me right back from the edge.

  A while later, one of the male doctors complained, “Can someone please make that stop? It’s annoying.” I had no clue what was going on, but suddenly, more light hit my taped-shut eyes, making me guess that they’d had my head covered with surgical sheets before. Fingers prodded my throat, then a sharp pain as a needle went in. Silence fell. I hadn’t realized that the sounds I’d been faintly hearing had been coming from me. Oh, well.

  I still felt something when they opened up my left calf at the side to scrape out more necrotic tissue, so I figured that I now had some kind of metal piece in the middle of my femur, with my leg still more or less attached. Why that idea freaked me out, I didn’t quite understand. I knew that in knee and hip surgery it wasn’t out of the ordinary that entire joints were exchanged, but maybe it made a difference because it was my leg, not some hypothetical patient’s.

  I had no sense of time whatsoever left by then. A gazillion years seemed reasonable to me. Five to seven hours sounded probable, but I could have been wrong. The general level of pain their work caused lessened, from eternal to maybe a thousand on a scale of ten. Some of it even hurt a little less than the residual level of agony. I could tell that they were very methodical about what they were doing with all the cutting, scraping, and suturing. The thought drifted through my pain whether I still had an inch of skin left that wouldn’t end up criss-crossed with fine, white scars. I’d never been especially vain, but that idea left a very bleak aftertaste.

  Twice more they shot me up with their paralytic, Raynor usually waiting until I either made a sound, or some limb or other gave an infinitesimal shudder. My torment went on and on, with small ups and downs but never really changing. All rage and thoughts of revenge were long forgotten, rational thought reduced to a bare minimum of interpreting sounds into words, but no
longer giving a shit about their meaning.

  They were working on my right shoulder with the occasional prod toward my neck when Raynor got chatty with whoever was by her side—I thought I recognized the female doctor who’d been so fervent about cementing my already permanent status of infertility. It wasn’t like any of the female soldiers who’d gotten the serum in the past had gotten pregnant, unlike the partners of the male ones.

  “Hamilton’s continuing incompetence is starting to become a problem,” she remarked, her scalpel never missing a beat.

  The other doctor snorted. “You say that like there’s an alternative.”

  A maybe ten second pause followed, filled with red spikes of pain coming from a quick succession of tiny cuts.

  “Richards is doing a passable job. The men like him,” Raynor offered, quite conversationally. “And you have a prime replacement candidate sitting right down that corridor.”

  She got a loud scoff for a reply. “He blew up several of his own people, injured scores more. You’d think that would disqualify any commanding officer from active duty.”

  A clucking sound from Raynor. “Don’t blame command’s incompetence on him. All that would have been needed to prevent that disaster was to offer him leave for a month and a free choice of operatives to use for his mission. You are aware that there is a valid chance that doing so would have prevented this pickle you got us all in? But, no, can’t have anyone seeing the bigger picture and plan ahead.”

  Her conversation partner clearly didn’t like Raynor’s criticism. “Unlike you, you mean?”

  Another brief pause followed. “And why not? I think we lucked out with her.” I wondered if she was referring to me now. Very self-absorbed, but as they’d already been talking about Nate, it was a logical conclusion.

  “I just don’t see it,” the other doctor disagreed. “Romanoff and Zilinsky would have been the vastly superior choices.”

  Now it was Raynor’s turn to scoff. “Last I heard, he wasn’t exactly fit for duty, and have you looked at her psych evals? I would give a lot to know how Miller kept her in check all these years. She’s the very definition of a smoking gun. Put the wrong kind of pressure on that one, and she will blow up in your face. But this one here? She’s intelligent, capable of independent thinking, and the perfect motivator to keep Miller in line. The others might have more experience and sheer combat prowess, but in the end they are only old friends. He’s lost enough of those in his life to come to expect that. But her? He won’t lift a finger if he knows that it’s her life on the line.”

  I didn’t much care for that assessment—even more so as I had to wholeheartedly agree with Raynor, and that rankled—but it gave me a smidgen of hope. They were still talking about Nate as an independent, thinking player in their game, which meant they must have given him whatever reversed the effects of the mind control. It also meant they knew that they had us both by the balls, and that I really didn’t care for.

  “We’ll see,” the other bitch snarked, her petulant tone making it obvious that she grudgingly agreed. “Provided she doesn’t die right under our scalpels, or end up next to useless.”

  “Oh, she’ll always be useful for us, even if she has to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair, locked in here,“ Raynor enthused. “But that won’t happen. Her vitals are already stabilizing. Don’t believe me? Wound healing’s already at over two-hundred percent. Besides, she’s been listening to us prattle on the entire time. I’m sure that the flames of righteous indignation keep her right on track to recovery so she can exact her bloody revenge on all of us.”

  This once, I would have laughed at her joke. While her tone held a playful lilt, I was certain that Raynor knew that she was speaking the truth.

  No answer followed, either because the doctor was done with what she’d been occupied with, or she believed Raynor’s assessment was anyone’s guess. They moved on to the left side of my rib cage, Raynor resuming the conversation about the terrible cafeteria chow with one of her male colleagues.

  More time passed. Endlessly more time. The sheet was removed from my head so that the butcher could continue with my teeth. And then they were done, except for two last things.

  A last sharp burn in the vein at my neck, then all the lines were disconnected, the intubation tube finally removed from my throat. A moment of panic as it took me forever to manage to draw a first breath, but my lungs were ready to work on their own. I did what I’d been wanting to do for a small eternity—I screamed—or tried to. Nothing came out.

  “Your voice box is still paralyzed,” Raynor helpfully supplied as she peeled the tape from my crusty eyes—only to fix them open with some kind of contraption. “This will burn a bit.” She dropped something onto my eyeballs, which did, indeed, burn, but compared to what they’d done to me, it was laughable, as was her warning. “We’ll get to this in a minute,” she promised. “As soon as you feel a slight pain, react.”

  I didn’t quite know what she meant by that—and continued to be puzzled for a good minute—until I felt a sharp pain at the top of the second toe on my left foot. My entire leg jerked involuntarily, making Raynor utter a low, “Eureka.” The same sharp pain appeared at the very base of the big toe next, making me jerk just the same. “Two down, eighteen more to go,” she assessed.

  I tried very hard not to count, same as I did my best to ignore the sequence of sharp pain that followed. I did a moderately good job until they got to my hands. Without the tubes still connecting me to the sensors, no one could hear my heartbeat go through the roof, but I felt it. There was still too much of the paralytic coursing through my veins for me to pull back after the thumb of my left hand had done some nice jerking action, but I tried to mimic it for the index finger. I didn’t even know why—I knew that, bluish-purple and swollen as it was, there was no rescuing it. But Raynor had been right about her previous assessment—it was one thing to bear a shitload of pain as they scraped the necrotic flesh from my very bones, but a different thing entirely to know that something as visible as a finger amputation would happen.

  “Stop it,” she hissed at me from somewhere next to that arm. “You think you’re being smart? You’re not. Do you really want to end up sitting in a field somewhere, having to cut off half of your hand with a pocket knife to keep from losing your entire arm?”

  The not-so lucid part of my brain helpfully supplied that of course I’d be using a bigger knife—and likely not me, but Nate—and that thought sobered me up. I didn’t try to simulate a reaction again when she went back to testing—not when it took zapping my knuckle for that finger, and the middle part of the next to get any positive results. I kept very still while they did what had to be done, same as when she continued with my right hand. I was actually surprised when I could feel something in my ring finger before she hit the knuckle. The pinkie, no change there, but that had been obvious.

  Raynor got chatty again while she finished up. “You’ll likely lose several of your remaining nails, but the growth zones are mostly intact so they will regrow. Just as if you’d slammed your hand in a door.” Yeah, that was exactly what it felt like. I was starting to think they’d locked her in here just to keep the already apocalypse-ravaged world safe from her sense of humor.

  She appeared above where my wide-opened eyes were staring unmoving up at the bright lights, donning a fresh pair of gloves. She checked my eyes twice again before she pulled some contraption of a machine closer; between the ultra-bright lights and whatever she’d dropped into my eyes, everything was too blurry to make out. “This will only take a few seconds.” It did, and it hurt like shit. And then I was blind.

  Temporarily so, I figured, or else she would have just scooped out my eyeballs, I was sure. It was still hard not to panic as I felt more liquid hit my eyes before they were taped shut once more, only this time with soft, cotton pads that reached well onto my cheeks and forehead.

  “You might need corrective laser surgery later, should it turn out that your corneas wer
e still more damaged, but this will be an improvement,” she promised—and squeezed my upper arm, as if that would lend any comfort. “We’ll sit you up next and see if you can stand on your own. You’re still too weak to support your weight fully, but we should get a reading on whether your balance is good. We made sure to size the femur implant perfectly, but there’s always a chance of the leg not ending up the same length as it was before. Ready?”

  I so wasn’t, but it turned out to be a rhetorical question. Getting moved hurt like a bitch. Sitting, too. More moving, getting worse. By the time they got me into an upright position, what felt like ten people were holding on to me. The moment my feet touched the ground and there was pressure on my toes—or what remained of them—the agony tripled. When my left leg had to take my weight, that increased exponentially—but somehow I remained lucid through all of that, because apparently, whatever was in that serum kept my brain from shorting out. That reminded me awfully of the night when Martinez had woken me up to help him get the putrefied goo out of the wound where the rebar had speared Nate, right at the very beginning. I thought I’d remembered him being unconscious through most of that, or at least the latter half of it. Now I knew that hadn’t been the case. Whatever Martinez had doped him up with to keep him still, I didn’t know but could guess now, but it certainly hadn’t knocked him out. So many fond memories.

  I really couldn’t say, blind, disoriented, and half-crazy with pain, but Raynor seemed satisfied. “We’re done here,” she proclaimed. “Let’s hope you’ll make it through the night, or all these hours of hard work are wasted.”

  Gee, how I hated being such a potential nuisance. But just as she sounded rather positive, I knew deep inside that I would make it. I’d had my chance to die—way back in that damn motel in the middle of nowhere. I’d gotten back up from that deathbed, and I’d be damned if I didn’t pull that stunt a second time.