A TALE TAIL HEART

“Move. You,” he barked to the masked man closest to him. “Clear off the table. GO people. NOW” he ordered them as his hands cooked to a deep red under the ultraviolet solar dry-scrub vent. He winced as the denature was painful and everyone scrambled as they had done so many times before but this time was different. This time the patient was an eleven-year-old girl. This was the youngest so far. No one knew what would happen if you did this to a newborn baby, but if you did it to anyone over forty-six, up till now the outcome was usually bad. After thirty-six, the outcome was better bad, but you risked a scrambled mind about half the time and a sociopath the other half. Once someone came out sort of normal.

The child wasn’t breathing, it was the only reason that the Neo- Yamnayan sentry allowed the bus to take her. Took one look and thought she was dead and were too lazy to bother with some mini-stiff. The only sort of evil that was tolerable was slack evil. The inertia keeps them off task. This kid was too old to grill, and too young to be useful, and a pile of work to bury. So yeah, they let the bus pick her up. Let them dig the hole.

“Y’all!” he snapped, “Someone hand me the BUFFERED juice. Come on, motherfuckers. I ain’t gonna be the broom sweep behind the elephant parade, let’s keep this child ALIVE.” He quickly injected the lidocaine under the skin, even though the child wasn’t breathing and consequently turning blue. CPR usually killed them and the shock-jock usually sent them into a coma so there were very few tools in the tool chest left to revive these people once the port started perforating. Or leaking. Or bleeding. Or fucking up in some unpredictable way. The AED was nicknamed the shock jock when Nassar fixed the defibrillator pads using a jockstrap and some sticky.

Archangelo made the incision and guided by the crap ultrasound, he located the soul-consuming locket without shorting it out, and then followed the tail through the subclavian vein but the hard part was getting the lead locking device to the end of the tail. These diabolical things were not made to remove. Not even when they went septic. They were spiked all the way from the middle of the lead into the bio-heart chambers, a virtual Candiru fish barbed in a swimmer’s dick. He had devised a super-duper locking device to squeeze the spikes down using Mexican thumb trap technology that would follow the lead wire down, encapsulate the actual tail, and then squeeze it with a sheath of orb weaver spider silk, the strongest most delicate fibre on earth. Smoothing it down, nothing gave him the heady pleasure that extracting this abomination out of a human being did. It almost made him hard when the lead started to move. That stuck fibrous slurp that put up so much resistance finally gave way to his will in the end.

Now that touch and go was done, it was time for wait and see. It would be a new stat in the annals if the child recovered from the withdrawal of this soul-sucking tech-turd.

“Close up, Gorgeous Monique,” the surgeon said to his right hand in the underway, as he went to take off his non-existent gloves. Old habits die hard.

Gorgeous Monique started to suture the wound shut, and as she put in the last two stitches, the girl’s eyes started to flutter, opening like fried eggs in a thousand-yard stare at the swinging lights over the table. She gasped hard enough to make the last suture weep new blood, and the team surrounded the table at the ready.

“You will all perish. PERISH. Fires will take you. The demons in the oil swamp will eat your cheeks and swallow your tongues… the Yamnayans are coming for… eys tnuik daikor nik… surhop… sirkpin… ranth… wenp…” and her eyes shut tight.

“Well fuck,” said Archangelo. “That’s unexpected.” He rolled his eyes and the team started to laugh.

“Who knew we were reviving a doom goblin?” quipped Monique, as she soaked her hands in the terp and dried them in the Solar dry-scrub.

“One of these days you are gonna set your ass on fire,” Archangelo yelled at her from across the room. “You be careful with that there thing.”

“That’s not how it works,” she deadpanned back at him. “ All that burns is my poor skin from scrubbing in.”

The child stayed prone on the table, as her breathing evened out. As she started to come out of it, she turned to her side and threw up. Mama Nana had just entered through the plastic covering on the giant Titan Tire that served as the entry to the OR, just in time to grab the suction and sanitary wipes.

“Come on, child. Better out than in,” she cooed at the small skeletal frame on the big cold table as she mopped up the mess and gave the girl some mint water. “There there, sweet girl, this will get that nasty taste outta your li’l mouth.”

“Careful, Mama. She ain’t had much good to say so far.” Gorgeous Monique said, nudging Nassar to move his ass over on the beat-up flower couch that they all took turns sleeping on.

“Mmm mm mem mem me memm memm emm amoaaaaamaa awaaaa….” The child started up again. “Wheh.. wheh.. where am I?” she asked as tears started to pour out of her shocked face in a torrent. “This hurts… I hurt,” she said with panic in her face that broke Mama’s heart. Sutures and all, Mama Nana, took the baby girl in her arms and said, “Now you just lay your pretty little head right here on Nana’s chest. I got you… that’s right, I got you.”

“And you see? That is why we keep her around. Who else can do that?” Archangelo said. “She may be the only port in this shit-storm.”

“The doom goblin is coming around. What was that trash-talk she woke up with?” Monique asked. “I’ve never seen a reaction quite like that.” She said.

“I don’t exactly know,” Archangelo said, “I wonder if it was because I had some trouble getting the hemostat to stop up the backflow of that locket when I was getting the tail out. Shit-talk almost sounded like a programmed take-down from the enemy. Like a company warning that is meant to frighten anyone who dares remove the device. You know, don’t you dare tear the tag off your mattress, don’t you dare stick this fork into an electric socket, and don’t you fucking dare remove this locket.” He took a swig of the homebrew that Nassar had perfected over the last seven months. It was cold and it was good.

The child sat up. “Who are you?” She said. “How did I get here?”

“One question at a time. We are the Under-Makers. Kind of like the opposite of the undertaker. Instead of putting the dead away, we like to think we give life back, at least to the lucky ones. “ He lit a cigarette, which was unpopular. Monique started to cough and Nassar started to lecture. Archangelo just sat there taking one luxurious drag after another. The girl asked how she got there, and they explained that the bus found her on the side of the road. Her mother had already expired. When they got the Geiger out, mom’s soul had already been sucked out. The child started to weep again.

There must be trouble in government, because the number of corpse shells found lately escalated. It was almost like the Neo-Yamnayans were stockpiling for some catastrophic event. Well, whatever the result; one point for the Under-Makers and minus one for the Neo-Yams.

“I hurt. Why do I cry?” The child asked. “I haven’t cried since I was a baby.”

Of course she hadn’t. The diabolic heart shaped locket started extracting the soul in micro-increments from birth. As a child got past toddlerhood, flat affect set in. By the time adulthood was reached, it took a shitload of therapy and psychedelic drugs to get people even close to the margins that held normalcy between them. Still, damaged was better than dead and a bent soul better than no soul.

“Give her thirty milligrams of MDMA, will ya?” He said into space, meaning Gorgeous Monique in particular, and she stood up, yawned, and went to the medicine trunk. This was the only thing that seemed to reverse the flat affect that seemed to double down once the device was removed.

“What’s yer name, Kid?” Archangelo asked the girl.

“Delphine, I think,” she said simply.

“Well, Delphi, I reckon you’re gonna be just fine,” he said hoping.

“ The heart in my head hurts. The one behind my eyes,” she said.

“I bet it does,” he said. Waking up from the removal caused a headache that rivaled a box wine hangover. He wasn’t quite medically sure why, since the removal was done with local anaesthetic, but he remembered his own extraction, and it was a Chateau de Meningitis headache if ever he had one.

“I believe I can feel my soul. Why does it hurt?” She asked, her innocence killing him softly.

“It hurts to be alive, “he said.

“Then why do you want to live?” She asked.

“Because it isn’t only hurt, kid. You will feel joy like you’ve never known,” he answered, remembering Elisabeth.

Archangelo knew he wasn’t quite right in the head, that he could cut people with impunity and feel nothing. Not anything when they died and only a mild sense of accomplishment when they lived. The only thing that made his dick hard and his heart race, was sticking it to the Neo-Yams. Of all the emotions he had that were messed up, anger was the one he most enjoyed. After Elisabeth died, he had no interest in recovering joy. It held no interest for him. Rage had replaced his love for lust, and he preferred how that felt.

The child started to giggle quietly to herself on the metal table in her gown. She started to writhe like a little snake, her curls shaking with pleasure. The team had never seen MDMA affect a newbie like that before. Usually it put a plug in the weeping tap that opened when they woke up. It was sad. After so many of them started bawling for humanity, for lost years and lost loved ones, it made them all start laughing. There was nothing funny about it except the predictable repetition. The discomfort. The blubbering. One man crawled into a corner and wept so offensively that Archangelo was tempted to put the bloody thing back in him just to make him shut up.

Delphine jumped down off the table, a pink spot appearing on her gown and came over to the two sleeping on the couch like she meant to join them before Mama Nana snatched her up and perched her on her generous lap.

“Now hush, little one. You just lay that pretty head down and rest, Mama got a song, I hope you’ll like it. I used to sing it to my babies when they was small.” As Mama Nana started to sing her haunting melody, an emotional perfume calmed and clung to the particles in the air, and the whole room went quiet. At once the child’s eyes rolled up in her head, and she began to hum along with the melody, but this time no word soup came. Just a single tone, and then her head popped up. Delphine kept Archangelo in the crosshairs.

“I know who you are,” she said. “You are the light. The fire and the sword. The one tasked with taking us all home.”