Previously…
99: Chapter Thirty-Three, Part Two
The Chock thumbs the hypodermic’s plunger and a quick, thin stream spurts silver from the needle, purges the air clustering in bubbles to the inside of its plastic belly. “Off we go,” he says, and injects Geoff at four circled sites along the Sharpied map he’d had drawn down Geoff’s arm, once at the shoulder and twice at the elbow and wrist, deep into the joints themselves.
The doctor spends the medicine slow at each injection site, feeds the precise amount needed at each stop aided by the whirring, antique goggles sitting on his face like a square black box. The goggles remind Mister of images he’s seen of the night vision suites operators used to strap to their faces, in the old days, before people like the Chock could cram a skull with the works and still leave plenty of room for independent thought.
“Count Mississippis,” the Chock says, and spends the last of the needle in Geoff’s wrist. “Quiet.”
When he’s done, the doc tosses the spent hypo into his tackle box, fiddles with something in the box and cool air puffs in a quick little cloud from its innards.
Mister counts, aloud but soft. At five Mississippis, the flush goes out of Geoff’s cheeks, and at ten he goes from writhing slow with a nightmare’s grimace on his face to breathing deep, like he’s sleeping the best he ever has.
The Chock comes out of the box with something that looks like pale, flesh-colored yarn coiled in a tight spiral inside a heat-fogged plastic pouch with serrated edges. He opens the package with his metal-limned teeth and dumps the rubbery coil into a hand, drops the empty wrapper to one side on the storage unit safehouse’s concrete floor. The Chock takes the coil between his palms, begins rubbing them back and forth with the fleshy yarn between them like someone warming their hands. As he works the three-foot thread from one end to the other, it blushes to tendon pink, grows more pliable with his methodical attentions, loosens and goes limp.
He gets to one end and stops with a few inches of the thread dropping above his hands, blows on it and it sways. The thread’s terminal end grows to a bulb the size of a tear drop and splits, opens and closes like a tiny, hungry maw, and twists between the Chock’s palms like a living thing. The thread crawls up his arm, twists slow around the doctor’s hand, winding first around his index finger, then his palm, wrist, and up his forearm.
“Stop counting,” he says, and Mister stops.
The Chock takes a scalpel from his tackle box and makes a shallow slit, not so deep as it is wide, in Geoff’s wrist, and lifts the disposable medical drone to the cut. The tendrone slithers into the cut, unwinding down the doctor’s arm and into Geoff’s body.
Geoff groans soft, but remains still as the thing slithers beneath his skin and burrows a gyre up and around the length of his arm. A wet sound like someone slicing a crisp apple cracks deep in Geoff’s shoulder, crackles and crunches down his arm as the autonomous tool settles into his flesh and wraps tight around his shattered bones. The Chock goes silent and slack-jawed, watches the progress beamed to a feed in one corner of his goggles’ HUD, light flashing on his forehead and high on his cheeks through the headset’s imperfect seal.
To be continued…