Zippered Flesh: Tales of Body Enhancements Gone Bad!

by Nicholson, Scott; Shirley, John; Jones, Adrienne; Mannetti, Lisa; Masterton, Graham; Laimo, Michael; Rosamilia, Armand; Colyott, Charles; Bailey, Michael

  “Humph. Most customers find that an advantage,” Dr. Animus said. “The terms of the agreement are quite clear about restitution policies. It was clearly stated in the contract when you signed the papers, sir.”

  Fury overtook Cottrich and he tried to scream out in rage, but only managed a strangled sound from his tongue-filled mouth and snarled lips.

  “I will sue ... sue you for every ... everything you ... you own!” His right arm swung out toward his back and stayed akimbo and stiff.

  “Now, sir, that is not prudent at all, not at all,” the doctor said. “The court would not be disposed toward recognizing you at all. Not to mention the extreme humiliation you would be face.”

  “Humi—humiliation? Look at me! People run shrieking away from me in fear and disgust! Humiliation is the least of my concerns, Dr. Animus!” Cottrich managed to walk awkward strides to a low couch opposite the counter, richly appointed in red velvet and ebony wood, and tried to sit while one leg bent at the knee and the other locked itself from his hip into a right angle. “Argh ... ugh ... I can barely move now! You must do something and do it immediately!”

  “I’m afraid that is not possible,” the doctor said. He smiled, then added, “But there is a clause in the contract, a provision should a customer be dissatisfied. But I must first inspect you to make certain recompense is duly warranted here.”

  He approached Cottrich. He grasped the hands and pressed his thumbs against pressure points, and then did the same with the face, arms, legs, and knees. The doctor straightened, his face wearing a look of slight surprise.

  “Well, it appears as if the connections I’ve made to your nervous system, to your brain, have somehow run amuck,” he said. “That happened once before to a man for whom I replaced an arm.”

  “Wha—what did he do? You—you maim—maimed him!”

  “Sir, the man was a criminal—an escapee whose arm was severed as he escaped his prison cell! He should have been grateful to even sign the contract that released him from that hell!”

  “And wha—what of me? I—I am no cri—criminal! I do not belong in this hell I am in, as he surely did!”

  “Possibly not, sir, but you did sign the contract.” Doctor Animus rifled through the papers in the roll top until he came to the one he wanted. He looked down through the glasses balanced on the tip of his nose. “Ah, yes. Here is the clause in your particular contract! Every ... patient, shall we say, signs an individual agreement. It clearly states here that if said patient feels dissatisfied with the results of his ‘perfectioning,’ he agrees to accept all the conditions of the contract. Ah! There it is, sir, signed in your own signature and with a dot of your own blood to seal the agreement.”

  “What are you telling me, you charlatan?” Cottrich screamed. “If you did this, you can undo it! I want my body back! I don’t care what black magic you have to perform! I will pay you any price—any price at all!”

  “You already have paid,” Animus said. “The price, unfortunately, is far greater than the worth of the merchandise, I’m afraid.”

  “But, you have yet to charge me. No money crossed hands—no bills or notes of credit.”

  “Surely you did not believe my services were free.”

  “Damn you, man! What is the price?”

  Animus merely smiled.

  “Animus, you bastard—what is the price?”

  Animus looked down at the contract again, sighing heavily as if he’d dealt with unhappy customers many times in the past. “According to the contract—a contract you have signed, sir—” he paused for effect, “there is a clause concerningthe return of the merchandise—a reshelving stipulation, one might say. The contract dictates that your original body parts may be returned, should you not be satisfied.”

  “Oh!” Cottrich said, relief raising his shoulders. “Is that all? I was afraid you would tell me you could not reverse the processes—what?” Fear crept back up over his shoulders.

  “Well, under the current circumstances—”

  “What circumstances? Why can you not fix me?”

  “Not only am I bound by the terms of the contract, which I cannot break, even if I desired so,” his smile turned sardonic, then evil. “Did I forget to mention I have a partner in my shop? A silent partner ... at least for the most part.” He snorted out a cruel little snicker. “He reserves the last say in a contested contract. Oh, and he has a little, oh, quirk, you might say. He fulfills the wish, but only for an instant. I told you the price was steep, yet you insisted upon entering that agreement yourself. As I was going to say, when the original removed tissue, flesh, and bone has become atrophied and decayed, it must be ... destroyed. That is common law, despite any contractual determinations. I cannot break the law, sir.”

  “What have you done with me?”

  The physician looked at him as if he should know the answer.

  “I’ve put you in the incinerator.”

  Slowly, so slowly it was almost imperceptible, the bag rolled down the long, steep metal chute, gathering momentum to launch it into the furnace. The heat of the flames singed and desiccated the skin and muscles until they grew tight, then charred and blackened. The fingers, toes, arms, legs, eyes, and finally the lips burned as living flesh, twisted and roiled and bubbled. Finally, all living and dead tissue melded into one, one complete body, united in death as it never could in life; one body without mind or life or soul, united in final eternal uselessness.

  MARVIN’S ANGRY ANGEL

  BY JONATHAN TEMPLAR

  “Is simple procedure, yes?”

  Doctor Gregori grinned at Marvin, exposing nicotine-yellow teeth. This was not a face you would trust to serve you a fast-food burger, let alone operate on your flesh. His eyes betrayed the bloodshot evidence of too little sleep and too many narcotics. There was a slight slur in his speech, detectable even above the guttural accent of some obscure European region where medical training was cheap and easy to acquire, if not exactly legitimate.

  “We not even need to give you anesthetic general. We just numb you, let you watch as we put her onto shoulder.”

  “Have you done many of these procedures before?”

  “Ha!” Gregori barked. “Dozens and dozens! Is popular, people want their own angel. Angels are the answer to the modern malaise; this is what they say, yes? The world is more impersonal, there is no family unit no more, everyone lonely and need love. You are never alone with angel on your shoulder.”

  “That is what they say,” Marvin agreed. It was what his friends said anyway. When they actually spoke to him. Once you had an angel, it seemed you didn’t need friends anymore. You were never alone, company wasn’t something you had to go and look for. Marvin’s circle of friends had been growing smaller and smaller.

  So here he was, ready to have his own angel. This was the cheapest surgery he could find, the fastest turnaround. That was Marvin’s way. If he was going to do this, he was going to do it fast and he was going to pay as little as possible.

  “Okay,” he decided.

  The surgeon clapped his hands in glee.

  “Do I get to choose my own angel?”

  “Is not possible, we have to take one that flesh banks give us, one that is ready for implant. But no to worry, my friend, all the angels is good!”

  Marvin hoped this was true. He had heard stories that suggested otherwise. Dr. Gregori dismissed them with a wave of his hand.

  Within half an hour, Marvin was on an operating table, the left side of his body numb. The surgeon stood over him with a scalpel in his hand, a facemask on, and a bored nurse assisting him—she simultaneously fed something feline she had sewn into a flesh pouch on her abdomen.

  “Is that appropriate hygiene for a sterile theatre?” Marvin tried to say, but the anesthetic turned the question into a wet, drooling garble.

  The doctor gave Marvin the thumbs up. “Is all good!” he said, and then started to cut.

  Marvin lost consciousness.

  There had been a lot of s
tuff on the Web, whispers and rumors, but it was obvious that the angels were losing their appeal. They had been the must-have accessory for a year or so, and everyone who was anyone had one grafted to them. There were places where you wouldn’t dare be seen unless you had an angel glowing on your shoulder—clubs and eateries where they’d never be so obvious as to say you had to have your own if you wanted to enter, but they would still make it clear in their never-quite-subtle manner that you were below the standards they expected if you didn’t.

  But, like all things, the allure faded and a new trend exploded and suddenly the angels weren’t quite as desirable. Celebrities who had clamored for the prettiest the flesh labs could produce were now retreating back to private Beverley Hills surgeries to have the angels removed, often against the angels’ wills.

  And where celebrity goes, society follows.

  At the start of the year, the flesh farms worked overtime to generate new creations. By its end, they were struggling to cope with the rush of returns, screeching creatures three inches high that had been torn from the shoulders of those they had come to depend on. The most damaged, physically and psychologically, were melted back to their constituent flesh to be reformed. Others were sold at a huge discount. Secondhand dealers flourished. The angels being grafted onto shoulders were no longer fresh from the tank. They were pre-owned. Tainted.

  But suddenly very affordable.

  It didn’t take Marvin long to realize that he and his new dependent were ill-suited to each other.

  He woke after his surgery with a shoulder that felt as if it had been dipped into lye, the agony of his flesh screaming at him. Then he realized it wasn’t his flesh screaming, it was her. She could open her tiny mouth and make a sound that would render a dog unconscious. And, for hours, it proved impossible to stop her, until they had doped her into unconsciousness and sent Marvin on his way with his angel drugged and slumped across his neck.

  “Will be fine, Marvin,” Dr. Gregori said. He sipped a “purely medicinal” glass of something with an alcohol content strong enough that the fumes alone could blind you. “Is normal! Angel wakes up on shoulder of stranger, is tough thing to do, yes? She does not know you, why she be happy? Give her time to get used to you, to find out what lovely man you are, all will be fine.” He patted Marvin on his empty shoulder.

  Behind him the nurse continued feeding the cat-thing in her pouch with milk from a baby bottle. The thing mewled with bliss as she stroked a strange protuberance on its face.

  Marvin meekly accepted the situation, left the surgery with a shoulder still burning, a hazy head from the anesthetic, and an angel snoring into his right ear.

  By the time he got back to his apartment, he was barely conscious. He hit his sofa with a thump and slept for fifteen straight hours.

  When he awoke, she was staring at him.

  The gauze over his shoulder had come loose and he could see the flesh was puckered and red where she had been attached. Her legless body was firm, upright, her arms crossed over her perfectly engineered breasts, her blonde hair loose over her shoulders, her lips pouted in an aggressive manner. She had been designed to be impossibly beautiful, but the quality of the flesh couldn’t disguise the disturbing eyes, the madness that shone from them like torchlight onto an empty stage. She made Marvin nervous, and she was only an inch away from his face.

  “Who the fuck are you?” she asked in a voice laced with venom.

  “M—M—Marvin.”

  “Well M—M—Marvin, get me the fuck off your shoulder NOW!” she screamed. Marvin recoiled, although this did him no good whatsoever—she was, after all, attached to him.

  “I don’t know if that’s possible, you’ve just been implanted,” he said.

  “Do you know who I am?” asked the angel.

  “An angel?”

  “Yes, Einstein, I am an angel. But do you know whose angel I am?”

  “Mine?”

  “No, I am not yours. I am Mimi Fedhora’s angel. I am supposed to be on Mimi’s shoulder. We have a very special relationship, Mimi and I. What the fuck am I doing here?”

  Who was Mimi Fedhora? The name rang a bell in Marvin’s mind, but it was a quiet one simply overwhelmed by all the others that were clanging loudly in alarm.

  The angel screeched and had a tantrum until Marvin agreed that they could go online and look up this Fedhora woman. He had to determine why the angel believed she should be anchored to Mimi.

  Of course. That Mimi Fedhora! She was a soap star, a devastating beauty fading away into late middle age and fighting off each passing year with a warrior’s arsenal of plastic and collagen that had turned her face and much of her body into a surgeon’s playground. She looked like a stranger wearing a Mimi Fedhora facemask, there was so little of the original left.

  Mimi was notorious as the worst of the New Hollywood dames, a woman with a personality so rank, a manner so poisonous, that there were more people who hated her in Hollywood than there were aspiring screenwriters. She had retreated down the ladder to soap operas and the warm embrace of the gossip columns. And then, just recently, she had fallen even further out of favor.

  “I don’t remember any of that,” the angel said in a hushed whisper. They read the story about Mimi being accidentally introduced to her replacement in the series Hopes and Dreams, in which she’d been plastic matriarch for six seasons, before the producers had the chance to tell her that she was on her way out. They read about how she’d taken the champagne flute she’d been holding and rammed it into her successor’s face, shattering the crystal into shards and slicing the aspiring actress’ face into so much tattered flesh. There were pictures of Mimi being led away by security people, the thick makeup that hid the sins of her flesh melting down her face. On her shoulder was a screaming angel, the one now stitched into Marvin’s shoulder.

  “That’s you,” he said quietly.

  “I don’t remember any of this. Poor Mimi, they were always against her. Always plotting. She had to fight them, you know, every day. They hate powerful women. They’ll do anything to put them in their place. She stood up to them, stood tall and told them to go fuck themselves. Why don’t I remember this episode in her life?”

  Marvin had remembered something he’d read when he was researching angel implants. That there were cases where hosts had been convicted of crimes and had their angel severed before their sentence began, as the law had no authority to incarcerate angels unless they, too, were considered to be guilty of an equivalent crime.

  “They would have removed you. The trauma must have caused some sort of amnesia.”

  “Well, fuck amnesia. I need to get back to Mimi, she needs me.”

  “Too late for that. You’re my angel now.”

  “I am not your angel. You are a nobody. I belong to Mimi Fedhora and I demand that you take me to her this instant.”

  “No. You’re mine now. Get used to the idea, darling. My shoulder, my rules.”

  The angel, of course, had other ideas and made her objection clear straightaway.

  There was the screaming for a start. Marvin tried to put a stop to that by covering her mouth, but she bit him, so he learned to ignore it.

  She had more subtle tactics, however.

  On his first night in bed with her (after the difficulty of finding a way of sleeping comfortably with her protruding had been overcome with the aid of a complicated arrangement of pillows), she’d asked to see him naked. She’d never seen a nude man before, she said coyly.

  Marvin obliged—the sensuality of the angels was one of their big selling points, and the one that had finally swung Marvin to the idea of getting one for himself. She made approving noises, asked him if he could play with it, show her what it did. This Marvin needed little encouragement to do, but she gave him some anyway. She whispered things into his ears that made his blood rush and his mind boggle.

  And then, at the exact right/wrong moment, she screamed again, and cursed and said the most demeaning things to dampen his ard
or. And she told him she’d do this every single time, that he’d never ever again enjoy a moment of pleasure or peace. That she would ruin everything he enjoyed for as long as she was stuck to him, destroy every aspect of his life unless he freed her. And she promised that she could be patient and determined in her endless assault.

  So Marvin surrendered to the inevitable.

  They had read online that Mimi had been incarcerated at a private mental institution in California, but had been released just days before into private care in the comfort of her own home.

  Marvin and the angel headed for Hollywood—with just one small stop along the way.

  Mimi’s house was not a house. It was a castle, a sprawling complex kept spotlessly clean with barely a sign that anyone actually inhabited any of it—a sterile show home, something to be displayed in the lifestyle magazines of the rich and infamous.

  Mimi was sedated in her bedroom suite, a massive chamber that could have housed a dozen refugee families. One sheer glass wall faced the swimming pool and the grounds of the estate; others led to a walk-in wardrobe larger than some department stores and a bathroom that you could play tennis in.

  All this space was currently of little use to the frail and agitated figure writhing on her bed, $10,000 sheets crumpled beneath her.

  Her three visitors waited impatiently for the sedative to wear off and Mimi to regain a measure of consciousness. Her nurse and the court-appointed guardian stationed at the door had been rendered prone by injections from Dr. Gregori. Marvin hoped the injections would have no permanent effect (he suspected that Dr. Gregori had just plunged the first syringe he could find into the unfortunates and was hoping for the best).