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  What did he say? Did he want to see him?

  He’s on his way now.

  Sort it out. Go.

  Sir.

  The door opens quietly, then closes again.

  Someone locks it.

  The man called Ryan carries on talking.

  Why didn’t this show up on the X-rays? Was he X-rayed?

  Four weeks ago. Here.

  Flip flap – the plastic flap of an X-ray film.

  Are these normal?

  Perfectly.

  This is him?

  Yes.

  You’re sure?

  Yes.

  Flip flap. Silence.

  Right… we need to do it now.

  I don’t understand.

  Open him up.

  I can’t –

  You have to.

  No, listen –

  No, you listen, Professor. You’re doing it now, and you’re doing it alone.

  But –

  Now! Do you understand? You cut that thing open now.

  The shock of the words takes a moment to sink in – cut that thing open… that’s what he said… you cut that thing open now – and then it hits me. Panic. Terror. Physical horror. Shit, they’re going to cut me open. Right now. Cut me open. They’re going to CUT ME OPEN…

  I have to do something.

  I have to move.

  Anything. A finger, a hand, a leg. Anything. Just move it… move move MOVE!!

  I can’t move.

  I breathe in, trying to steady my heart, breathing the taste of gas. Rubber. Gas. Tube.

  Breathe slowly.

  Don’t panic.

  Think about it.

  Think.

  Think.

  Think.

  Listen.

  Concentrate, listen.

  Silence. A background hum. Something ticking. A faint solitary beep. No voices. For a moment, I think they’ve gone… but then, from across the room – snap – a rubbery snap, and the murmur of voices again.

  This is ridiculous, Ryan. I can’t operate without consent. What if he dies? What if –

  I’ll clear it. It’s cleared. I can take care of it. Listen, you’re not doing anything – OK? It’s just a minor emergency operation. You had to do it. These things happen, don’t they?

  Yes, but –

  We have to know. We have to find out. There’s no choice. We have to find out right now.

  I don’t understand –

  Click.

  Do you understand this?

  A threatening silence.

  All right. But only –

  Only an exploration. That’s all we need.

  A heavy sigh. Then another sharp snap, the snap of a surgical glove.

  Put this surgical mask on, Mr Ryan. I’m going to need some help.

  The fear is killing me now, overpowering my mind. I can’t think. I have to think. I have to move. Move move move. I’m trying to move myself – trying, forcing, straining, struggling – I’m doing everything possible to think myself into moving my body. But it’s useless. There’s no connection between mind and flesh. Nothing. My body just lies there, inanimate. It’s just a thing. A container. I’m still conscious of it, conscious of its unconsciousness, but I can’t do anything with it.

  Kamal, how is he?

  Tick tick.

  The same. Steady.

  I need you there, Ryan.

  All right.

  Don’t touch anything, just do what I say. Kamal?

  OK.

  OK.

  A chill tingles my skin as the sheet is lifted from my stomach. I can feel the cold white air. I’m naked. Out in the open. Exposed. I can hear a distant whistling sound inside my head, a scary white noise. The sound of fear. I want to clench something, but I don’t have anything to clench with.

  Membraned hands touch my skin. Soft. Then a little harder. Kneading, probing.

  Words.

  It feels all right… a little unusual. Here, I think. Something… maybe.

  The whistle of fear intensifies, then suddenly stops. All at once my head is soundless. Empty and dead. And in the inner silence, I can hear the inaudible sound of a scalpel being plucked from a silver tray.

  I’m going to cut here.

  No…

  Fingertips… then the flat of a hand on my skin.

  Oh no.

  No…

  The slice of the scalpel is quick and tight. At first I feel nothing, just the silent peeling of skin and fat, opening up like a blood-red smile… then suddenly the pain cuts in.

  It hurts.

  Oh, it hurts…

  IT HURTS.

  So sharp it’s dull, like cold, like ice… burning hot…

  It hurts it hurts it HURTS…

  And there’s nothing I can do to stop it.

  Somewhere in the screamless distance, the voices continue.

  Hold that, Ryan, just there. Let me clear that.

  What is it?

  I can’t make it out. Just a second.

  Pain and pressure… pressure and pain…

  I don’t understand it.

  What’s that brown stuff?

  Hold that away.

  Look at that. Jesus!

  There’s some kind of… like a shell. Hard, pliable. A plastic. I think it comes up to about here.

  A sudden searing pain rips through my belly… it’s too much too much too much too much…

  What’s in there? What’s underneath it? Is that liquid?

  Wires? They look like moving wires.

  This… I can’t get through it. It has – look – patterning. Like bone structure. Outlines. It could be some kind of shield. That might explain the X-rays.

  A shield? A body shield?

  Perhaps…

  Get in underneath it.

  I can’t without –

  Just prise it up, for Christ’s sake.

  Pass me that.

  It was then, just as the tip of a broad-bladed instrument touched something under my skin… it was then that I felt my fists clench. Out of sight, beneath the sheet… I felt them clench.

  And unclench.

  I felt the movement.

  Movement.

  I could move.

  And in that same miraculous instant, I was suddenly seeing a face. Above me. Behind me. Hovering over my head. Brown eyes, olive skin, a slight beard showing beneath a surgical mask. Kamal, the anaesthetist. I could see him. My eyes were still closed, but I could see him. It wasn’t possible, but I didn’t care. I could see him.

  I could see all around me.

  The pain had gone.

  How?

  How had the pain gone?

  How could I see all around me?

  There shouldn’t have been time to think about it, no time to take anything in… but somehow there was. There was all the time in the world – and I took it all in:

  A small white windowless room.

  White white light.

  Machines and monitors.

  Silver cutting instruments laid out on a tray, like an exhibit of lunatic cutlery.

  A metal table covered with papers and tapes and photographs.

  A white door guarded by a thickset man in a suit.

  And there, standing over me, two masked men, peering intently into the meat of my belly: Casing and Ryan. Professor Casing was the narrow-faced one, the one in the white coat and glasses. Ryan was tall and severe, dressed in a plain black suit. He had silver eyes, a grey face, coal-black hair. An automatic pistol was clipped to the back of his belt.

  They were looking at me, looking inside me, and now I was looking at them. I didn’t know how, but I was looking at them.

  Look.

  Shit, look what they’ve done to me. What have they done? My poor belly… white and flat with a slash of red and – shit! – what is that? Look – a gaping slice, like a bad clown’s grin, fastened back with tiny black clamps, and inside me…

  Oh God, the things inside me… the things I saw. Unknown things. Terr
ible things. Black and brown things, red things, silver things… creamy-white shapes of living metal or plastic or God knows what… all of it moving like a blood-dark shimmer inside me.

  I couldn’t think about it then. It was just too much. There wasn’t time. The frozen moment was nearly over - all the time in the world was fading.

  And I was moving.

  I was moving.

  As Casing dug a spatula into my guts, and Ryan leaned over to get a better look, something electric shifted inside me – and I moved, faster than I’d ever moved before. Jerking upright, tearing the mask from my mouth, ripping the tube from my throat… I didn’t know what I was doing.

  But something inside me did.

  With tapes and wires snapping off all around me, I saw myself snatching the pistol from Ryan’s belt and jamming the barrel against his head, and then a voice hissed out of my mouth.

  ‘That’s enough,’ it said – a cold dry whisper.

  3

  Ryan barely reacted to the sound of my voice, he just turned slowly and looked at me, his eyes calm and still. But Casing was shocked beyond words. I’ll never forget the look on his face – it was the horrified look of a man who’s just seen a monster. A pale naked monster.

  As he stood there staring at me, his eyes aghast, I glanced at the spatula still poised in his hand. The blade was smeared with a scrape of washy brown liquid.

  A scrape of something.

  A scrape of me.

  There wasn’t time to think about it. The big man by the door was moving towards me now, pulling a pistol from inside his jacket. He was huge – thick and heavy - with a large bull head and sharp little eyes. I looked at him for a moment, wondering how a man that big could move so fast, then – without taking my eyes off him – I jabbed the gun against Ryan’s head.

  ‘Stop there,’ I said, ‘or I’ll kill him.’

  The big man hesitated for a moment, then stopped. He was halfway across the room.

  ‘Drop the gun,’ I told him.

  He looked at Ryan.

  ‘Do what he says, Cooper,’ Ryan told him.

  The big man’s eyes never left mine as he stooped down and placed his gun on the floor.

  ‘Turn round,’ I told him. ‘Stand against the wall.’

  My voice was unfamiliar. Dry and weak, a croaky whisper. And the words – stop there or I’ll kill him… drop the gun… turn round… stand against the wall – they were ridiculous. Like something out of a stupid spy film. I couldn’t believe what I was saying.

  I couldn’t believe any of it.

  It couldn’t be real. These people couldn’t be real. Real people don’t do this. Real people don’t have guns. Real people don’t really do these things. They just don’t. And what about me? How could I be doing this? How could I be sitting here on a hospital trolley, all naked and bloody, with my belly cut open and a gun in my hand?

  How could any of it be real?

  I glanced down at the mess of my stomach, and I knew that it was real.

  It hurt.

  Hurt is real.

  I had to get out of there.

  ‘You,’ I said to Casing, ‘pick up the gun and give it to me.’

  He stiffened for a moment, his eyes twitching in fear, then he slowly bent down, picked up Cooper’s gun and cautiously handed it over.

  ‘Get over there,’ I told him, waving the pistol at the far wall. ‘Away from the door. Face the wall.’

  I waited until he was facing the wall, then I turned my attention to Ryan. All this time, he hadn’t moved. He was just standing there – controlled and serene – his eyes fixed steadily on mine. I still had his pistol held to his head, and now I was vaguely aiming Cooper’s gun at his belly, but it didn’t seem to bother him.

  He just looked at me.

  And I looked at him.

  Then he spoke.

  ‘Robert,’ he said, slowly and calmly, ‘I’m going to take this surgical mask off. Is that all right?’

  I nodded.

  He carefully reached up and lowered the mask from his mouth, revealing a clean and confident smile. It didn’t surprise me. Without the mask, he looked like what he was. I had no idea what that was, but he looked like a man who never let go. A hard man. A big man. He wasn’t big, but he was big. Big as a shiny black wall.

  ‘Why don’t you put the guns down, Robert?’ he said. ‘Just put them down, and then we can talk.’

  ‘Shut up,’ I told him.

  He raised a sleek black eyebrow, then lowered it. ‘What are you?’

  I looked down the gun barrel into his eyes. They were silver, like silver moons. Or brand-new coins.

  The room was white.

  The gun was black.

  My fingers were pale on the trigger.

  ‘What are you?’ he said again.

  That’s the question.

  That is the question.

  ∗

  When I told Ryan to shut up and lie down on the floor, he didn’t move for a while, he just stood there, staring into my eyes. He didn’t look at the gun in my hand, but I knew he was wondering what I would do if he went for it. Would I pull the trigger? Would I shoot him? Could I do it?

  He knew that I could.

  He could see it in me.

  It was there.

  With a slight nod of his head, he slowly lowered himself to the floor.

  ‘Face down,’ I told him. ‘Hands out to the side.’

  He did as he was told.

  Keeping both pistols levelled at his head, I glanced at the anaesthetist behind me. He was wearing a green V-necked tunic over a thin white T-shirt. His eyes were scared.

  ‘Kamal?’ I said to him. ‘Is that your name?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I nodded at Ryan. ‘Can you put him to sleep? Anaesthetize him?’

  Kamal hesitated, his eyes glancing quickly at a pack of plastic syringes laid out on a metal tray.

  I said, ‘I’ll kill him if you don’t.’

  Kamal carried on looking at me for a while, and for a moment I thought he wasn’t going to do anything, and I started wondering what I was going to do if he didn’t – shoot him? shoot everyone? – but then I saw him take a deep breath, and he nodded, and I watched with relief as he reached for a syringe and moved out from behind his machinery.

  ‘Will that do it?’ I asked him, gesturing at the syringe in his hand. ‘Will that knock him out?’

  He nodded again.

  ‘Do it,’ I told him.

  As he crouched down beside Ryan and started rubbing at the back of his hand, a sudden spasm of pain ripped through my stomach. I put down Cooper’s pistol and pressed my hand against the wound. It felt sticky, and when I looked down I saw a thin dark liquid – red-black and brown – oozing between my fingers. I clutched myself harder.

  Kamal was fiddling about with the syringe now, tapping it, studying it.

  ‘Come on,’ I urged him. ‘Just stick it in.’

  He glanced at me with mild disapproval, started to say something, then changed his mind and inserted the needle into the back of Ryan’s hand. Ryan flinched slightly, then almost immediately went limp.

  The room was still again.

  White and silent.

  Just the sound of anxious breathing, the hum of monitors, a faint hiss of gas.

  It’s strange, but when all this was happening, it didn’t seem to have any immediate presence. I knew it was happening, and I knew it was real, and I knew it was scaring me to death, but I couldn’t see it at the time for what it was. It was just stuff that was happening: sounds, movement, words, feelings, intent. The ingredients of an event. That’s all it was.

  An event.

  I just lived it.

  It was automatic.

  But now, as I’m playing it over in my mind, as I’m looking back at the things that happened, and the things that I did… now it’s everything. There’s nothing else at all. It’s the only thing in the world, the killingest thing in the world. And even though the memory of it is no
thing more than that – just a memory – it’s still enough to leave me broken and exhausted.

  Kamal was just looking at me now, standing over Ryan’s unconscious body, waiting for me to say something.

  ‘Is that it?’ I asked him, glancing at Ryan.

  Kamal blinked. ‘Yes.’

  ‘How long will the anaesthetic last?’

  He shrugged. ‘Half an hour.’

  I looked over at Casing and Cooper. Casing was still facing the wall, but Cooper was looking over his shoulder at Ryan. He didn’t like what he saw, and as his face darkened and he looked over at me, I picked up his pistol.

  ‘Come here,’ I told him.

  He turned slowly and started moving towards me, walking like a big bad dog – pad pad pad – his dumb lips snarling. When he was halfway across the room, I told him to stop, but he didn’t. He just kept on coming – pad pad pad – lumbering towards me, getting bigger and bigger with every step. I raised both pistols and told him to stop again, but I knew he wasn’t going to. His eyes were cold, he’d had enough. My hands gripped the guns and I levelled them both at his head. I looked down the barrels, watching him get closer and closer – five steps away, four, three, two – and then, just as he was reaching out for me, I hit him, hard and fast, cracking both pistols into his face – crackcrack. His nose broke and he doubled over, moaning in agony. I hit him again, hammering both barrels into his head, and the big man dropped to the floor and lay still.

  I’ve always been stronger than I look. A lot stronger. A creepy guy in one of my Homes tried messing around with me once and when I hit him, I nearly killed him. Broke his nose and his jaw, fractured his skull. And I only hit him a couple of times.

  ‘Casing,’ I said. ‘Come over here.’

  The surgeon turned away from the wall and hesitantly crossed the room.

  ‘Stand there,’ I told him, indicating a spot about half a metre away from me.

  Casing moved, stopped, looked at me.

  ‘Closer,’ I said.

  Casing moved a little closer. He was petrified. Shaking. I could smell his fear – sour and stale – and the smell of it gave me confidence. He was more frightened of me than I was of him.

  ‘All right,’ I told him, ‘listen to me. Are you listening?’

  He nodded.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’m going to lie down on the trolley now. I’m going to put down one of these guns, but I’m keeping the other one right here.’ I poked Ryan’s pistol into Casing’s belly. ‘I’m going to lie down, and you’re going to sew me up. I want this hole in my belly stitched up. Do you understand?’