SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest

Jackie pumped the cuff and Stitch placed a second hemostat, feeling less blood, less pressure beneath his clever fingers. Jackie pumped again, his expression grim.

“Can’t get it,” he said. “Doesn’t register.”

Stitch felt a moment of incredible frustration, of anger and despair. The kid’s heart still beat, the big, dumb muscle unaware that the body it served was already effectively dead. He looked at the kid’s face, pale and waxen, imagined the brain cells dying by the hundreds of thousands, the systems shutting down one by one, robbed of blood and oxygen and purpose. Such a fucking waste. Gene was a prick and he had screwed up but it was really the war, the goddamned war that Stitch hated, an exercise in futility paid for in young men’s lives.

He looked at the clock on the wall, and heard a bell toll somewhere, as though the world mourned the loss of the boy. A distant, plaintive sound.

“Time of death, 19:53,” he said.

Linda eased her hands out of the boy’s gut. “His name was Hei,” she said, and her voice caught. Linda had been at Frozen Chosin back in 1950, she had been to hell and back, but she still cried sometimes when they lost one.

Again, Stitch heard the lonely sound of a bell, clear and haunting on the cool October air.

“Does anyone hear that?” Jackie asked.

“It sounds like a gong or something,” Sheryl said.

Captain Anthony snapped off his bloody gloves, looking again at the boy’s lifeless face. Gene was going to be cheesed that Stitch had operated on his patient, he would be petty and defensive and wouldn’t even care that he’d killed someone. The kid had deserved better.

Hei. His name was Hei.

Hei groaned, a deep, guttural sound, and started to sit up.

Sheryl screamed and reeled back, knocking the instrument tray to the floor. Stitch automatically reached over to push Hei back down, confused, he’d heard stories of bodies contorting in death but why were his arms coming up, how was he turning to look at Sheryl with his flat dead eyes? His intestines slithered out onto the drape that covered his lower body.

Sheryl screamed again as Hei swiveled towards her, his arms straight out in front of him. She stared at the dead boy, shrieking, her eyes wide and shocked — and the skin of her face seemed to shrivel, to pucker and wrinkle around her eyes, her cheeks hollowing beneath her mask. Her screams became a breathy teakettle sound, rising, going higher — and her entire body visibly shrank. In the space of two seconds, she was shorter, smaller, as pruned as an old woman, her eyes going as flat and dead as the Korean’s.

At the same time came a sound so deep that it was a vibration. Stitch felt his bones quake.

She collapsed and the vibration stopped. Stitch saw that Hei’s skin was now quite nearly glowing, the moldy greenish-white of foxfire. Hei swung his unbent legs off the table, stiff and uncoordinated, and then he was standing, like a sleepwalker in a cartoon, his arms still straight out in front of him, his head angled so that his blank, dead expression was aimed at his own feet. His hands drooped in loose claws. The bloody drape fell to the floor and he was naked but obscenely, his viscera slapped down to cover his genitals, hitting him mid-thigh. The retractors still held the wound open and the stink of hot blood and feces filled the room. Stitch backed up a step, horrified, as Hei turned his whole body towards him.

Hei’s head hung, his eyes unseeing, and he hopped forward without seeming to bend his legs. Stitch felt it then, a sensation that he associated with giving blood, a sense of being drained, but the feeling was so much stronger and there was pain now, sudden and shocking, and he heard Linda screaming and Jackie screaming but he couldn’t look away from the boy and no longer had the strength to scream and then he was gone.

* * *

West had his personal sidearm out and was moving towards the screams even as the patients started cutting up again, their voices querulous with fear and dread. The screams were coming from behind a set of doors in the east wall. Cakes was a half-step behind, unholstering his own weapon, an M1911 pistol. West darted a look back.

“McKay, Burtoni, stay with Young,” he called. “Nurse, get some MPs in here, pronto!”

“What’s the play?” Cakes asked, just as the doors burst open and a figure in a mask and scrubs stumbled out, a man. He tripped on a cot and went sprawling, but was on his feet again in a second and running for the exit.

“Hold up!” West shouted, but the man was only interested in getting the fuck out, he didn’t look back or say boo as he charged through post-op, crashing through the door and out into the night. The screams had stopped but the patients were all talking, shouting, some of them getting up and limping after the masked man, others muttering prayers, the hysterical ROK shrieking like a girl.