The Death of Wendell Mackey by C.T. Westing Read Free Book Online Page B

and in other capacities, even visiting him in his room on one of the higher levels. He even remembered some of the unit’s OR nurses from the NAB, which convinced him that the NAB was just a false front, nothing more than the entryway into the institution’s heart. But never did any of them look more comfortable than when hovering over an operating table in their blue scrubs and masks. After a month or two, being wheeled down Unit 200’s bright and lonely Sub-1 hallway usually meant that the IV line was already in his forearm and the iodine swabs and scalpels were soon to follow.
    There were matching scars, one on each side of his torso just below the ribcage. They were the results of some of the early surgeries, and the ridged purple lines and tiny rows of suture holes like centipedes had already begun to fade to white. Then there was his back. At first it would throb and then fade into a soreness that set in like rust on metal. But over the past week the backaches had become crippling, with spasms that felt like the muscles were tearing themselves apart. Wendell reached back with his left hand and scratched at his scapula, feeling something next to it.
    “What is…what is that?”
    Wendell stood up and walked to the bathroom next to his mother’s bedroom. He flicked on the light which bathed gray tile in bilious light. There was the bathtub with a brown ring, the toilet seat missing one of its hinges, and the white—or once white—linoleum peeling at the edges. The white pedestal sink rose up from the linoleum like a cheap china mushroom, and above it and mounted to the wall was the medicine cabinet with a mirrored door. Wendell stared at himself in the mirror. His mat of brown hair, greased and clumped together, had been pushed to one side and frozen in place, probably the result of falling asleep at the kitchen table. His eyes were ringed with red, eyes once blue but now a leaden mix, something between green and gray. Each sclera was yellowed. And under his few days of stubble were sunken cheeks the result of hungry days, and months of a diet laced with pharmacological party mix. Still, his small frame was not completely emaciated, with his arms covered in small but wiry muscles. He took off his t-shirt, and turned his back to the mirror.
    “That’s not good.”
    There were more scars. Two ran horizontally at the back of each shoulder and ended where the trapezius muscles turned up into the neck. At the small of the back were two vertical scars, more raw—and thus, he thought, more recent—than the shoulder scars, seeming to trace the backbone. But what were most striking were the two thick black lines, like bruises, running down each scapula to the lower back. They looked to be ten or eleven inches long, at least. At the center of each was the telltale incision line healed over. It all created a topographical map of sorts, with purpled mountains and running eskers and strip-mined, decimated skin revealing a landscape reengineered and laid waste.
    “This isn’t real,” he told himself. A lie, of course, but one he hoped would bring some comfort. But none came. He stared at the carnage.
    And to his mind came the operating room and the team of doctors scrubbed and gowned and ready for him. They would place him on his stomach, pump the anesthesia, and he would awaken in his room with bandages across his back. Nurses and techs would come in every hour to check his pulse and blood pressure. Scotia would occasionally wander in, pull down on Wendell’s lower eyelids to examine his pupils, or tap his fingers on Wendell’s stomach to listen for abdominal sounds. Blood was drawn from a bruised hole in his arm at least three times daily. By then, even in his weakened state, Wendell knew he had to escape.
    He slipped the t-shirt back on, leaning in and baring his teeth at the mirror, examining the swollen line along the edge of his gums, and caught something in his periphery.
    No, I’m not seeing that, I’m not