He flicked down a pair of bronze goggles over his pale brown eyes. From beside the green glass of the lenses on opposing side stretched dark brown leather strapping the goggles over his temple and behind his head. His short Mohican avoided the straps, the brown of the leather blending into the short sides of his hair. On the left lens there was a smaller lens, clear glass, some sort of magnification piece. He stared down into gaping hole in the petite girl’s chest. The girl, only sixteen with plaited auburn hair and emerald eyes glowing with pain, had had the flesh and the muscle burned clear from her chest. Frazzled ribs and blackened lungs were visible through the fissure. The brown haired man stood still, staring unaffected by the atrocious injury before him.
“She’s done for” He sighed turning to his assistant, a pale red haired girl. “Are you sure?” She questioned, too afraid to look at the injury itself. “If you would look then you would know. Even if I could reconstruct the muscle and skin of her chest the lungs are sure to God not going to survive more than a week” He was disappointed in himself, what he was capable of, and the emotion echoed in his tone. The girl with the gaping chest all the while sat, silent, listening, knowing what was to come. The doctor in the bronze goggles slipped them up onto his brow and turned to a pallet on his right. Laying on it was a syringe on black liquid and beside that was a mouth prop. “I’m not going to lie, this will hurt, but I doubt it can be much worse than what you’re already going through” He told the young girl restrained to the operating bed.
He took the mouth prop and forced it into her mouth to stop her from biting of her own tongue and executing more pain than she was already going through. Then he took hold of the syringe in his hands in leather gloves the same shade as that of his goggles. “I can’t watch” The red headed nurse said, running and hiding behind a large chrome gear which was key to the progression of the clock on the old hospital buildings outer wall. The man sighed, two leathery fingers creating an opening by pushing the left lung aside a little. The entire heart came into view, blackened as the lungs were. Using his left hand the man pushed the syringe into the left ventricle of the heart and slowly the black liquid within it was drained into the girl’s blood stream.
In a palpitation all the pain in her eyes was gone. All life drifted from them and the powerful gritting from her jaw was softened and her jaw hung down. The doctor retracted the syringe from her heart and removed his hands from within her chest. He closed his eyes, resting his bloody leather fingers on her eyelids and closing them in time with his. “Why?” He asked, aimed at the cowering nurse. “Why can’t this bloodshed end? We’re trapped in an impossible war, we get a hundred more dead each day, hundreds more injured, and eighty percent are innocent people trapped between one side and another” He screamed this with anger overtaking him, his face red and his eyes watering.
The doctor felt a nip on his toe, even through the thick boots that protruded up past his shins half covering the brown fabric pants that were held over his shoulder by suspenders of leather the same as upon his gloves and goggles. He looked down as he jumped back instinctively to find a clockwork copper machine that resembled a small scorpion. “There is no rest” He cried, slamming his foot down upon the bot. The metal exploded into fifty so pieces under the thrust of his foot. The scorpion was no longer of harm in having already administered its poison but why allow it prolonged mechanical life. The man fell to his chair, a russet brown wooden chair supported by a gold coloured metal that stood upon three metal wheels. He flicked his toe and slid backwards towards his desk and stopped directly before it, spinning to face it directly. From the second draw down on the right hand side of the desk he revealed an antidote of green liquid in a syringe and quickly administered it.
“Dana” The man addressed the nurse. “I can’t stand by any more, I'm sick of this constant onslaught of sick, of attacks on us even in here” On that note he stared to the ruins of the scorpion. "No matter how small they are" He groaned sliding open another draw and taking from it a small copper machine. The woman with orange hair now rose into sight from hiding. “A gun!” She exclaimed, “And what do you expect to do with that?” The man’s heart sunk, because he knew all he would do would cause more injury, send more people here. But behind that he knew what his plan was, he knew what he wanted and that he wouldn’t use it unless it was in a moment of pure desperation. “I think I can fix this Dana” He sighed pushing the pistol into a holster at his waist. “And what if you can’t?” Dana pleaded. “What if I can?” He left her to consider that, sliding from his surgery into the hallway.
~S
