Oliver Twisted

Flatline

He nodded a third time, trying to get her to believe he understood.He believed he understood, but she wasn't so convinced. Even so, she moved aside to let him by; and watched with sallow reluctance as he opened the infirmary door.

In short, the sunken-eyed nurse was right.

Mister Collier was directed to a line of makeshift beds, to begin amputations. He quickly discovered anesthetics were a rarity. And once the weekly imports were exhausted, the show went on regardless.

Men were told to bite down on rags and bits of wood, as their limbs were hack-sawed from their bodies, and the wounds cauterized.

Such things would have qualified as barbarism in Alvany, but Mister Collier kept having to remind himself.

He wasn't home anymore.

Five cities over, the world was a different place.

"Where are the EKGs?" had been the first question out of his mouth.

A male tendant sent him a strange look. "There aren't any. We don't have monitors here. We don't have electricity."

Mister Collier was taken aback. "How do you know if someone is dead?" realizing the stupidity of his own question, he quickly answered himself. "Do you just check the pulse by hand?"

The tendant grunted.

He took it as a yes.

Mister Collier, at the cusp of twenty-two, was still susceptible to insecurity. It would scramble his mind, in bouts, and he'd have to manually set things right again.

He only hoped he hadn't come off as too hopeless. Distraction was all around, siphoning his sense. The biting screams, the openmouthed wails.

Figuring such thoughts were useless, he opted to begin.

Halfway through the day, he was taken to the back of the schoolhouse and shown a giant incinerator. A conveyor belt would deliver the corpses, feeding them in and freeing up space.

"Too many dead," the tendant explained. "We can't call for ambulances out here. They'd only get attacked. And were we to store the bodies outside, they'd only get stolen and desecrated by the rebels."

Mister Collier thought back to the iron gate and the hanging bluecoats.

"You have any to croak on you, just bring 'em back here. Okay? Beds are in short supply, so don't wait. And don't bother with lost causes. Care only prolongs their misery. If a man must die, he should do so swiftly."

The flames took Mister Collier's eyes hostage, crackling and snapping. Through the squared mouth of the furnace he watched them. 

He glanced down, only to realize there was blood all over his apron. 

He'd been too busy to notice till then.

After leaving the makeshift crematory, he decided to check in on Lewis, a young bluecoat who'd been carried in earlier. Lewis was his first amputation—a left arm, right at the elbow joint. He'd apparently been hit by shrapnel, and it had embedded in him, causing a severe infection.

Upon returning, Mister Collier noticed the recovering bluecoat, sheened with a glossy sweat. Something was still wrong. His eyes were without focus, refusing to train in.

A bad sign.

Mister Collier studied the upper-half of his missing arm, deliberating whether to amputate again, this time to the shoulder joint. There had been much bloodloss the first round. And gauging from his ghostly pallor, he figured the young man's heart couldn't take much more. The latter had broken a tooth, biting so hard into his rag. His shrill, muffled screams still rang, somewhere in the dredges of memory.