The Ant - Chapter 9 - The Testing Room (in which blowtorch meets genitalia) (867 hits)
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Submitted by Jack McCallum (View user info) at 2005-01-20 12:07:17 EST
(Chapter 1 http://www.ubersite.com/m/56777)
(Chapter 2 http://www.ubersite.com/m/56855)
(Chapters 3-5 http://www.ubersite.com/m/56884)
(Chapter 6 http://www.ubersite.com/m/56930)
(Chapter 7 http://www.ubersite.com/m/57042)
(Chapter 8 http://www.ubersite.com/m/57139)
CHAPTER 9 - The Testing Room
Rob left the bathroom and continued down the hall, past the unconscious lump that was the Skipper, around the corner, and found his path blocked by a set of metal swinging doors which were locked and seemed very sturdy. To the right of the doors was a slot for a key-card, with a tiny red light beside it.
He considered forcing the doors, but he wanted to get to a phone without notice and didn't want to set off any alarms. He ran back the way he had come, and went through the Skippers' pockets, coming up with a white plastic card that was blank save for the black encoded strip on one side. He wished that the Skipper wasn't such a big bastard. He could have taken the guys' clothes as well.
Rob was about to leave when he paused, and then quickly dragged the Skipper into the bathroom, stuck his finger into the hole where the doorknob had been and pulled the door shut with such slow but steady force that it would be impossible for one man to open it without help.
He returned to the locked doors, inserted the card, and watched the red light turn green. He pushed the doors open, stepped through, and heard them click shut again behind him. Now he was in a small space with another door ahead, another key-card slot. This door had rounded edges, like a door on a submarine. Rob inserted his card. The door hissed open.
A breeze seemed to be blowing from behind, making his hospital gown billow and chilling his ass. He looked around. In the ceiling, and to each side of the doors behind his were metal grills, vents which were pouring out cool air. The air was racing ahead of him. He noticed that the edges of the open door were lined with rubber. Gaskets, he thought, and negative pressure. If the doors open, air is forced into the room. Keeping in anything airborne that might try to get out. What the fuck were they working on here?
He walked on, coming to a T corridor. Normal swinging doors. He peeked through the door on the right. A lab. A women and a man bent over microscopes and test tubes in a room filled with equipment. There was a wire rack just inside the door, holding things that looked like Kleenex dispensers. One of the women slid what looked like an ice-cube tray full of hairy molds into something that could have been a microwave oven for all he knew. She closed the door, hit a switch, and the big room was filled with a loud and piercing hum. Rob quickly grabbed one of everything from the dispensers and slipped back into the hall.
He was holding pants, a pullover smock, a hair net like a shower cap, and little booties with thin rubber soles, all of which were made of pale green tyvek. He slipped off his hated gown and pulled on the clothes, then put on the hair net as well, figuring he might as well look the part. His long hair was a bit of a giveaway. Then he went to the left-hand door and eased it open.
The room he came into was as big as a gymnasium.
To one side was an incredible array of diagnostic equipment of the kind that might be used to treat professional athletes; treadmills, weight and exercise machines, all of which were hooked up to medical monitors. There were apparatus used for physical therapy, walkers, wheelchairs and parallel bars.
There were things Rob couldn't figure out. A big metal hoop with a wire mesh backing and leather straps where a person's arms and legs might go. A thing that looked like a big hamster wheel, submerged in a glass-fronted tank of water ten feet high. A blue metal box that looked like a safe, but it was higher than it was wide, about as big as a phone booth.
Then there was the table. It was a broad wooden table near a section of the wall that was composed on cinder blocks. On the table were two rifles, a small machine gun, an assortment of handguns, numerous knives, a sledgehammer, an electric drill, an acetylene torch, an electric cattle prod, and a stack of paper targets of various sizes.
On the other side of the room were computer consoles, desks and chairs, and a number of hospital gurneys, all separated by free-standing screens of white cloth. Rob heard voices coming from that direction, and he thought madly that he could smell each body in the room. He crept forward, dropped to one knee, and peered around the corner of a screen.
Doctor Pfaltzer was standing before a row of four gurneys, and the bald doctor, whateverdecker, he was there too, along with two attendants. One was big and brawny. He was holding a minicam and videotaping everything. The other attendant was tall and thin, with an alarming adam's apple. It was huge, and bobbed up and down continuously. It reminded Rob of the egg-eating scene in Cool Hand Luke. There were people on the four gurneys, and two of the faces he recognized and remembered from his orientation session.
There was the thin, sallow-faced girl he'd seen before. She was lying on her side, her body lurching beneath the sheet, her mouth gaping open as she appeared to be suffering a mighty case of dry heaves.
There was a young Asian guy lying naked next to her. He seemed to be out cold. The air above him seemed to shimmer. Rob rubbed his eyes and shook his head.
After the Asian guy there was a dark-haired young woman strapped to a gurney the way Rob had been strapped into his bed. She was uncovered as well, and the leather chest strap that crossed her ribcage made her tits stick straight up. She was slowly shaking her head, whispering, "Make it stop. Make it stop."
Rob saw whateverdecker give her a shot and tell her it would be all right. Rob squinted. In the stark white light it appeared that someone had drawn pencil-lines on her body, near every joint of bone. Pfaltzer beckoned whateverdecker over to the last gurney in the row.
They stood over the guy with the receding brushcut hair and the tattoos. He was smiling. "Try it again doc," he said. Pfaltzer stared at him a moment, and then stepped to the side of the gurney, turning the sheet down and exposing the guy's chest. Fucking guy has tattoos everywhere, Rob thought.
Pfaltzer patted the pockets of his white lab coat, and withdrew a syringe that looked like it was designed for elephants. When he removed the protective plastic sheath, the three inch long, thick steel needle flashed wickedly. Pfaltzer suddenly raised his hand over his head and drove the syringe down into the guys' chest. Whateverdecker stood near, watching apprehensively. There was a thud. Pfaltzers' hand bounced upward. Halfway along its length the needle was bent at a forty-five degree angle.
"Remarkable, Mr. Panovsky," Pfaltzer said.
"Fuckin'-a!" Panovsky said.
"Still feeling a little dizzy?"
Panovsky nodded. "Yeah. Fuckin' nearly puked when I tried to get up a minute ago. I'm okay 'cept I still feel like fuckin' pukin'."
"It will pass," Pfaltzer said. He slid the sheet down further. "I bent a sewing needle on your eyeball, could not burn your skin or hair, and cannot seem to cut or puncture your skin. Most remarkable."
He pulled the sheet down until he had exposed Panovsky's groin. Rob was surprised to see that the weird, nicotine-stained hair was the guys' natural color. Panovskys' dick looked about the size of a peanut, and his scrotum had tightened up and looked like a pale walnut.
"How high would you say the ceiling is in here?" Pfaltzer asked casually.
Panovsky, flat on his back, stared straight ahead at the ceiling. "Well, shit, I guess-"
Pfaltzer reached to the end of the gurney and gingerly ran a manicured fingernail along the bottom of Panovskys' left foot.
Panovsky lurched and bellowed, "Haw-haw! Jeezuz, Doc! Stop ticklin' my fuckin' foot."
Pfaltzer muttered to himself, then said aloud, "Are you telling me that you cannot accurately judge the height of the ceiling? I would have thought it a simple task for any reasonably intelligent young man."
Panovsky frowned and studied the ceiling. "Christ, ya think I'm fuckin' stupid? It's about-"
Pfaltzer suddenly grabbed Panovskys' balls viciously, squeezing until the tendons stood out white on his knuckles, and then he pulled with a violent tug.
Rob's stomach did a slow turn and his own nuts crept upwards.
The attendant with the adam's apple looked like he was trying to swallow something that was alive and pissed off.
"The fuck ya doin', doc?" Panovsky asked. "You a fag?"
Pfaltzer laughed heartily. "Normal sensitivity and yet a truly superhuman invulnerability. Simply fantastic."
"We should be carrying out these tests under carefully controlled conditions," Schroedecker whispered. "The well-being of the patients is-" Schroedecker paused and sniffed the air.
Pfaltzer sniffed too. "Something is cooking?" he asked. He pulled the sheet up over Panovsky and told the attendant with the mutant adam's apple to "Set him up on the wall when he feels better." The attendant eased Panovsky's gurney off into the maze of white screens. The attendant with the video camera continued taping.
Movement caught Rob's eye and he looked back at the first two gurneys. The girl was squirming and crying. "Make it stop! It hurts! It hurrrts!" She started thrashing around more, her dark hair swirling, her breasts swaying, her legs kicking. The lines were still there, near her elbows, knees, hips, wrists, ankles, anywhere there was a jointed bone, and now they were darker and thicker, almost looking like perfect, bloodless knife cuts.
"I thought," Pfaltzer said to whateverdecker with some annoyance as they approached the gurneys, "that you gave her a sedative?"
Whateverdecker frowned, his head gleaming under the lights. "I did. She must be in considerable pain."
Pfaltzer flapped a hand as if the girl's pain were too trivial to be dealt with.
Rob noticed that the air over the Asian guy was shimmering again. It's just like the air shimmer over a barbecue, Rob thought, as whateverdecker prepared another shot for the young woman. Very weird.
The Asian guy's eyes suddenly snapped open. His eyebrows started to smoke, as did his pubic hair.
What looked like bubbles appeared all over his skin simultaneously, fluid-filled blisters which were forming quickly and popping with little wet sounds. Smoke came out of his ears, followed by a trickle of blood which seemed to be steaming.
Rob thought he'd seen it all when he saw a thread of gray smoke rising from the tip of the guy's dick, followed by a flickering blue and yellow flame. Now the guy's dick looked like some weird-ass candle.
The guy stared at the ceiling until his eyeballs suddenly collapsed, a slow, sputtering flow of boiling jelly and blood oozing down his cheeks.
He shuddered violently, took a deep breath, and screamed, "Hot-hot-hot-HOT-HOT!!!"
And then he burst into flames.
"Gott in Himmel!" Schroedecker cried, even as his steady hands finished giving the woman another sedative.
"Scheisse!" Pfaltzer shrieked, shaking clenched fists in the air before him.
Rob couldn't fucking believe his eyes.
The Asian guy was burning merrily now, sizzling and popping like a gummy pine bough. Bits of him slipped to the floor, splattering and blazing on the cold tiles. He burned through the padding under himself, and then melted through the flat metal surface of the gurney in a half-dozen spots, red-hot coals of bone dropping through to the floor.
The guy burned fast, and fairly clean. When it was done, no more than ninety seconds after it had begun, there was nothing left but ash, a few bone shards, and three blackened teeth. Some of the floor tiles were now scorched and cracked.
Pfaltzer and Schroedecker glanced at each other and breathed simultaneous sighs of relief. Then the young woman on the gurney in front of Schroedecker screamed like a banshee and literally came apart at the seams.
Rob saw what was happening and his face went slack a moment, as if his mind were shutting down after being overexposed to too much weirdness. His lips moved weakly. He whispered, "Wow."
The dark-haired young woman had been madly thrashing about, and then had stilled as if the sedative were taking effect. Then the dark areas on her body gaped open like bloodless cuts, and she separated.
Her arms hit the floor with dull thuds, the fingers jarring loose on impact and scrambling about like ants. Her legs kicked and thrashed free of her body, toes popping off and bouncing around on the floor like jelly beans. Her head came away from her neck, and as her mouth worked without air her eyeballs sprang out of their sockets. Then she broke down further.
Hair, teeth, fingernails all flew into the air. A tit went whistling past Rob's head and he ducked. Her arms and legs began flaying themselves, still without blood. Her torso opened up like a zipper had been pulled and a parade of internal organs marched out of her.
The lab-coated men stood transfixed.
The girl's separate parts came together again and began spinning in a lumpy mass that rose into the air. Flesh and bone were breaking down into individual cells. She now looked like a firework, a spinning star-shape of pink and red and white which elongated, arced through the air like the spray from a fountain, and disappeared down a drain set into the floor.
Pfaltzer and Schroedecker looked at each other. The guy who had been taping everything was clutching the camera to his chest, eyes wide and staring.
"A quarantine," Pfaltzer snapped. "We inform-"
There was a gunshot, a loud and flat bang from the other side of the room. Then Panovsky hee-hawed like a donkey. "Fucker just bounced off my chest!" He shouted. "Just like in the Superman comics! Fuckin'-a!"
Pfaltzer continued, "We must inform the families that complications have developed. We must keep our subjects here until we learn exactly how we can profit from them."
"Profit?" Schroedecker gasped. "How could we profit? We are ruined. We have changed the genetic structure of the volunteers. Now most of them aren't even human! The psychological effects, the enhancement of already damaged brain cells and faulty chemical signals, the psychosis-"
Schroedecker was interrupted by an electronic bleating. His pager. He looked at the message on the tiny screen. The bloodwork was coming in on the human test subjects. All the results were the same. Save for number 13.
"Come at me with the knife ya fuckin' geek!" Panovsky bellowed.
Schroedecker shook his head and whispered, "Gott."
Pfaltzer was staring into some hazy middle distance. "All these years of struggle, all these breakthroughs. What have I gained? A little money? Papers published in scientific journals? This experiment could ruin me. Unless I use the results of my work in such a way that I will profit from what I have created."
Schroedecker looked at Pfaltzer, realizing for the first time that the man was insane.
Panovsky laughed. "Try the blowtorch!"
There was a hiss and diminutive roar as the acetylene torch was ignited.
"Try it on my cock!" Panovsky said.
"Imagine, Wolf, a private... force, unstoppable, willing to follow your wishes... I could be anything... do anything..." Pfaltzer snapped to attention suddenly, glancing at the girl with the dry heaves. "This sickly one can wait. I must return to the ward and select three more for observation. Coming?"
"Ahh, fuck man!" Panovsky sounded delerious. "Thing could cut through steel plate but to me it feels like a fuckin' a-one blow-job. Wow!"
Schroedecker shook his head. When he spoke, he sounded listless. "I must attend to things," he said.
Pfaltzer nodded and strode away.
After a moment Schroedecker faced the screen Rob was hiding behind and said, "Above all else, a successful scientist is a keen observer. If you ever hope to survive this madness and return to your old life, I suggest you follow me now, and please, quickly, Mr. Collison."
User Reviews
Submitted by Jack_McCallum (user info) at 2005-08-03 11:41:43 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
Supreme Overlord damage control...
Submitted by Supreme_Overlord (user info) at 2005-07-21 22:21:19 EDT (#)
Ranking: -2
shite
Submitted by munkeypants (user info) at 2005-02-08 12:44:28 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by thecaes (user info) at 2005-01-24 06:33:39 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Cool. I think you were a little slow on showing Rob's amazement as his situation though. Realistically, I think anyone would have been shitting bricks long before.
Submitted by FuckTheArmy (user info) at 2005-01-20 18:34:06 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Yay! Make it snowball! Make it snowball!
Submitted by Remission (user info) at 2005-01-20 16:29:46 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Orgasmic! *splurt*
Submitted by AshK (user info) at 2005-01-20 16:29:03 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Bwahahahaha!
I feel so dirty. Two thumbs up for dirty.
Submitted by Jack_McCallum (user info) at 2005-01-20 16:02:23 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Huh! So much for Bart's censorship-free zone!
Submitted by Jack_McCallum (user info) at 2005-01-20 16:01:44 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Submitted by AshK (user info) at 2005-01-20 15:43:33 (#)
Ranking: 2
Why, thank you.
There isn't an initiation rite, is there?
--
Actually, the initiation rite involves
Submitted by AshK (user info) at 2005-01-20 15:43:33 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Why, thank you.
There isn't an initiation rite, is there?
I believe I would have to be concerned with the ritual your mind would concoct.
Yes, I said coct.
Submitted by Jack_McCallum (user info) at 2005-01-20 15:04:24 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Hey, welcome to the club, Ash!
Submitted by Brdn_Nkd (user info) at 2005-01-20 14:22:03 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Kicker of all ass indeed.
Give us more!
Submitted by ess-arr (user info) at 2005-01-20 14:00:31 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by AshK (user info) at 2005-01-20 13:51:20 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
I just read them all. A fuckin mazing.
Submitted by JonnyX (user info) at 2005-01-20 13:19:42 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
this is some kickass shit, man - you keep it as long as you want, the story is developing nicely!
Submitted by TigerLilly (user info) at 2005-01-20 12:17:48 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
AT-A-BOY!!