The Surgeon

by David Beers

  The boy extends his arm upward, and his hand is shaking horribly.

  The mother rushes him across the kitchen to a chopping board on the counter. She moves quickly, like some kind of animal herself—like the rat that had huddled in the corner of the box. One of her hands grabs a large butcher knife from the holder next to the board. She raises it above the boy's wrist.

  "So we'll eat you tonight. How does that work for you?"

  The boy is crying and he's saying he's sorry, that he didn't want to hurt the animal, that he won't disappoint her again. His penis has shriveled up to something nearly indistinguishable from the flesh around it.

  "Do you want us to eat you?" she asks in that same calm voice.

  "No," he blubbers.

  Christian winced, his eyes shutting again as the movie turns off. He didn't want to continue.

  "I want to go home," he said.

  You can't, Melissa told him. You have to see this if you're going to help.

  He knew she was right and opened his eyes. The movie resumed playing.

  The boy is still naked, though Christian is watching him on a different day.

  He's in the field again, in front of the box. A rat is inside, perhaps a different one than the time before. Or, maybe it's the same, a rat that couldn't learn from the lessons of the past. Or maybe the lesson the boy taught it was that the box was safe. Someone would free it.

  Christian doesn't think anyone will free it this time.

  The boy squats down and opens the door. He looks for a second, and then says, "No one's going to eat me."

  He reaches in, his hand moving like his mother's had—quick and ruthless. He grabs the small field rat, and the thing squeals and bites his hand.

  This enrages the boy. The thing is attacking him. It isn't his mother. It isn't his father. What right does it have to bite him? Especially after he freed it, or at least one of its brothers.

  The boy brings the rat to his face, standing up as he does. A tiny bit of blood wells at the rat’s teeth, lodged into the skin between the boy's thumb and pointer finger. The blood slides down the inside of his hand, meeting the rat’s fur. The animal doesn't stop struggling and the boy hardens his stare.

  "No. No one's eating me. We'll eat you."

  Christian knows that the boy—for a brief second—considers biting the thing's head off, but ... what will Momma think? he wonders, and Christian hears the thought as clearly as he heard the mother's call for lunch earlier.

  The boy reaches up with his left hand and twists the rat's neck. It stiffens briefly and then goes limp in his hand. The body is still warm and the boy doesn't release its head right away. He stands there, staring at the blood leaking from his hand.

  Finally, he removes his left hand and sees the rat lie still over his thumb. He squeezes the body slightly, watching it puff up above his closed fist. He squeezes harder and sees the dead animal's tongue protrude from its mouth.

  "You bit me," he says, and squeezes even harder. Its eyes are bulging now.

  Don't mess up dinner, a part of him thinks. Not if you don't want to be eaten.

  The boy turns from the box and runs back across the field. He's smiling as he does, because Momma and Daddy will be proud.

  Chapter 15

  Christian placed the sub sandwich down on Tommy's desk.

  "Only one today?" Tommy asked.

  "I didn't want to listen to you making fun of me," Christian said. He didn't look up. so he didn't see the smile cross Tommy's face for a second, clearly thinking Christian joking.

  "Hey," Tommy said. "I'm just kidding about that. You can eat whatever you want."

  "You're going to give him a complex," Luke said from the chair in front of Tommy's desk.

  "Okay," Christian said. "I'll eat what I want. Listen, we need to talk." He looked around for another chair, and found one at the small table in the corner of the room. He pulled it over, leaving the sandwich sitting on Tommy's desk.

  They left the crime scene three hours ago and were just now meeting. Christian didn't know what Luke and Tommy had been doing, only that after he left the body, he went to his apartment and lay on his couch. He hadn't turned on the television or even any music. He laid in silence and thought about what he'd seen.

  "Well, what do you want to talk about?"

  Christian looked up, realizing he'd been sitting in silence for a few seconds, lost in his thoughts.

  "It's not going to make sense how I know the things I'm about to say, but I'm reasonably confident they're true."

  "What's reasonably confident?" Luke asked.

  "Ninety-two percent."

  Tommy laughed. "Okay, let's hear it."

  "I think the person we're looking for is going to have some scars, and they're going to stem from abuse. I think one or both of his parents might be dead. If it's both, we need to start looking in foster homes, orphanages, and juvenile detention centers for someone with scars who attended the orphanages perhaps ten years ago. If only one parent is dead, we need to look at farms that went under in the past ten years. The farms are going to be a little bit south of us."

  "Slow down there, champ," Tommy said. "What the hell are you talking about? We can't just start sending out manpower on hunches, and that's what I'm gathering this is."

  "It's not a hunch," Christian said and met his eyes. "It's correct and we need to send whatever we have to investigate the leads."

  Tommy looked over to Luke, and Christian could feel the other man's eyes staring at him.

  "Tell us why you think this, then," Luke said.

  "I can't explain it. I've never been able to explain any of it. If I have to try, I guess I'd say the anger we saw with the last woman was the catalyst. He's mad at someone. He's harboring a lot of anger for that person, and it exploded on the old woman. Also, people don't just start cutting off ...." Christian paused for a second, uncomfortable with the next word. "People's breasts. Not without reason. No, this guy has seen some very bad things, and not in the movies. He wasn't born like this; he was made."

  "Luke?" Tommy said.

  "You two look into it. I'll keep with the interviews."

  "Don't you get tired?"

  Tommy closed the car door as Christian got in on the other side. "What do you mean?"

  "You work longer hours than anyone I've ever seen," the kid said. "You're here before I am, and you leave after me."

  Tommy smiled. He'd heard things like this since his youth, and the answer was always the same. He started the black sedan and reversed. "Christian, look at who I'm working with. You and Luke. Both of you are two of the smartest people in the country, and I'm supposed to contribute. Now, you might be crazy—I'm not sure yet. It really depends on what we find when we start looking into your theories, but if you're right ... Well, I'm going to have to work even harder if I want to keep up. I don't have the minds you two have, so I use what God gave me."

  Christian fell into silence as the car rolled out of the parking deck. Tommy said nothing either; he liked being around the kid ... there was a certain comfort that came with his unease. As if Christian was worrying enough for everyone, so Tommy didn't need to—which was a first for him. Luke never worried, about anything, and that meant Tommy needed to. The price of security is insecurity, and all that.

  "You don't think I'm right?" Christian asked once they traveled a few more miles. They were heading to the Department of Social Services, looking into orphanages. The farms would come next.

  "I don't know," Tommy said. He paused a second, but knew Christian wanted him to continue. "I don't know how you can be right. We all saw the same things in there and three hours later you come back with this theory. Luke didn't think of it. I didn't think of it. Nothing in that house really suggested it."

  "If I tell you something, do you promise not to laugh?"

  Tommy glanced over at the kid, but he was staring out the passenger window.

  "Yes."

  "There's a place I go inside myself. It's what separate
s me from most people, I think. My therapist says it’s both real and symbolic. It's real in the sense that my mind can hold almost anything I want it to. It's symbolic in that it allows me to be different in a way I can't out here. Like right now. I hate wearing shoes. I hate shoes, Tommy. They're like casts for your feet. Why do I need to wear a cast on something that has evolved to be the perfect instrument for walking. My skin would grow calluses, and my bones and tendons would toughen. I wouldn't need shoes after the first two weeks, but here I am in my mid-twenties wearing them everywhere I go. Inside my head, I never wear shoes. Does that make sense?"

  " ... Sort of ..."

  "That's fine. 'Sort of' works, I guess," Christian continued. "But when I go to this place, I can find anything I've seen, and when my subconscious works on things while I'm sleeping or concentrating on something else, it shows them to me when I return. It's like watching a movie, to be honest. Well, when I saw the body this morning, I went inside and watched the movie. What I saw was a boy that was abused. On a farm."

  Tommy remembered his promise not to make a joke. Christian was looking at him now, and his face said he needed Tommy to understand. Perhaps not believe, but understand.

  "I don't have a place like that in my own head, but I do in real life. When we're done here, do you want to see it?"

  "Are you playing with me?"

  "No," Tommy said. "I'll show it to you."

  "Okay," Christian said. He turned and stared out the window.

  Luke's new friend had taken quite a few liberties with the woman Luke gave him. He hadn't expected that, at least not such savageness. Luke had, of course, spent a lot of nights over the past week figuring out the person he would give his friend—settling on an old woman with no family, no job, and barely any outside contact with the world.

  She had to have blue eyes, though. Luke needed to know if the color mattered or if the friend was simply creating a kaleidoscope of eyes somewhere.

  But no, the color definitely mattered. Not the skin tone or the age, or even the relative beauty. The eye color.

  Luke stood in front of the body's head, the pathologist, Roger Linson, on its right side. Roger was almost finished with the autopsy, but Luke wanted to see if his friend had slipped up during his rage, left a fingerprint or something.

  So far, at the house, they found no fingerprints, but five different sets of hair. Three were cats, one was the old woman, and the third was an unidentified person—most likely Luke's friend, which was careless. For Luke's needs, the friend had to be very careful for as long as possible. Mishaps early on would end Luke's goal prematurely.

  "Did our perpetrator leave anything? Semen, fingerprints, a written address where he can be found?"

  Roger grunted and moved away from the table to the sink. He pulled his gloves from his hands, trashed them, and started washing his hands. "No. There were smudges from the blood stemming off the severed breasts, but that's indicative of a latex glove. The woman wasn't raped, either before or after death, so no semen inside her. I'd ask the techs if they found any in the house. A lot of times guys will bust their load when they're abusing someone like this."

  Luke hated talking to Roger. The man always said the simplest things, as if he was the only one who knew a killer's psychology and Luke couldn't possibly figure out that he should check the crime scene for semen as well. Perhaps one day Roger could fit into his plans.

  "Alright, thanks," Luke said.

  "There is one thing."

  Luke was on his way out the door, but he stopped, holding it open. He knew Roger loved doing this, holding him up just as he was about to leave. Yes, Roger would find his way in to Luke's plans at some point.

  "Yeah?"

  "I found a partial eye lens."

  "Where?"

  "Come back in and I'll show you."

  Luke let the door close and returned to the metal table. Roger pulled out a light and was shining it in one of the dark eye holes.

  "When you remove an eye completely, if you go down deep enough in the cavity, you'll touch brain. There was an eye lens there. I haven't run DNA matches, so I don't know if it's the woman's or not conclusively. However, there were traces of water on it, which leads me to believe it isn't the woman's. I think it had been frozen."

  Luke ignored Tommy's call.

  He wanted to concentrate on his friend. Perhaps he wasn't as careless as Luke originally thought. He had brought the eye lens with him, and then placed it where it might not ever be found. Even when Roger removed the brain, it was too small to be noticed.

  That was a thank you, Luke thought. A ‘thanks for your help’.

  It also meant his friend was more trusting than he portrayed. He brought the piece of eye with him to the house, meaning he thought Luke's offer might be legitimate.

  That was good.

  Trust meant Luke could do more.

  And there was a lot more to be done.

  "What about that movie?" Mother asked.

  "Not right now. I have a headache."

  Bradley picked up the plate from his mother's bed. It was past one in the morning and she was in here asking for a goddamn movie, like he hadn't just worked all fucking day. Not work that she would respect, though. No, now that Father was dead, she was a damned saint.

  "Tomorrow?"

  He looked at the old hag and knew his migraine would disappear if he strangled her to death right now.

  She hadn't turned toward him, of course. She never did. Not since ... well, since what Bradley had done to her.

  "I don't know right now."

  He turned away and walked from her room, needing to get away. If he didn't, he'd kill her. He would do almost anything to make sure this headache didn't return. And it had to be from that damn Johnny Consultant. There wasn't any other reason for Bradley to be having migraines; he hadn't felt like this since before his father died. Years and years ago.

  Bradley didn't bother taking the plate to the kitchen. He dropped it in the hallway and went to the garage. It took him a second to turn the lock, his hand was shaking so badly. This headache was going to be a real doozy if he didn't do something about it quickly.

  He felt his phone vibrate in his pocket. Bradley didn't reach for it; he didn't care what the damned message said. If it couldn't help with this migraine, then the person could go fuck themselves.

  Bradley went to the deep freezer and opened it up. Two plastic bags sat inside. He grabbed the one on the right, the newest, and pulled it out.

  Eyeballs stared back at him, glossy with freeze.

  A slightly different shade, he thought. Bradley looked back down in the freezer and thought about grabbing the other bag. No. Not yet. Not until the room is finished. Those are to be the last.

  He wasn't going to rush things, regardless of how bad his head hurt. And the migraine was going away, wasn't it? Just holding the eyeballs, even through the plastic, helped tremendously.

  He took the eyeballs from the bag, then shoved it in his pocket. He would dispose of it later, burning it in the fireplace. He needed to empty the fireplace, just to ensure no evidence was left—but that could wait.

  He took the eyeballs to the pair sitting in the middle of the room, and with great care, pierced each with two needles, shoving them straight through the frozen flesh. He pinned them to the wall, directly above the first pair.

  "Oh, it looks so beautiful, Mother," he said, not truly aware he was speaking to his mom. "Father would love it. He'd see the truth in all of them."

  Bradley hadn't worn a jacket into the garage and the cold was starting in on him. His teeth chattered and his breath came from his mouth in large white plumes.

  "Ohhhh," he whispered.

  He bent down to the eyeballs and gave each one a kiss, his lips slightly sticking as he pulled away.

  Chapter 16

  "You promise not to laugh?" Tommy asked.

  Christian nodded but said nothing. His face held the look of someone who had taken a long pilgrimage, and was finally
about to reach what might be the promised land. The voyage had been hard, but hope lurked just under his tired face.

  It was ten at night and Tommy turned the car's lights off. They had switched out the black sedan for Tommy's personal car and now they sat in front of his condo.

  "Let's go up, then," he said.

  They got out of the car and walked inside the building, taking the elevator up to Tommy's floor. He was nervous that Christian might think this some kind of joke, but it wasn't. Not to him. He'd told Alice, his girlfriend, how he viewed this place, but no one else.

  They stepped outside of the elevator and walked down the hallway. Tommy took his key out and opened the door to his condominium. "Come on in."

  The two walked inside, Tommy leading.

  "This," he said, "is all I have to compare to what you told me."

  Christian stopped walking, standing in the living room. Tommy continued walking, stepping around the coffee table, and sitting down on the couch.

  "Do you see?"

  He watched as Christian looked around the room. What was he noticing? What was he picking up? Would the kid tell him to fuck off and storm out? How great was his perception?

  Christian walked to the wall and looked at the single picture containing people. It was one of Tommy and his mother—his father was nowhere to be seen in it, and that had been true for much of Tommy's life.

  "Your mom?"

  "Yes."

  He moved to a painting. Two elephants, one a mother, the other her baby—both in profile, with the sun setting behind them.

  "And this?"

  "I got a thing for elephants. If there was any justice in this world, they'd rule over us, instead of us over them," Tommy said.

  Christian nodded and stared at the painting for another second. Finally, he turned to Tommy.

  "This is your mansion."

  "Probably not as nice as yours, but yes. It's my place of solitude. I don't get as great of insights as you do, but this is where I can block out the rest of the world."