Mardock Scramble

roof. The button for the second floor was already flashing yellow.

The elevators closed, and Mincemeat braced his large body as best he could.

The pressure pulled him down. The lift was rising now with ferocious speed. Mincemeat just about managed to stop himself from buckling over.

The violent screeching of the wires could be heard overhead.

Then the elevator shuddered to a sudden halt, throwing Mincemeat’s huge frame into the air for a second before he crashed back down onto the elevator floor, slamming his knee against the steel.

Mincemeat’s face was twisted in fury.

–Flesh, you little shit! This isn’t a fucking carnival ride!

–That’s right.

–Huh? That’s all you’ve been saying since…

A cold sweat broke out on Mincemeat’s brown skin and his lips trembled as he heard:

–THAT…IS…RIGHT.

An unfamiliar voice, straight in his ear—inside his own head.

“Who the hell are you?” Mincemeat couldn’t stop himself from yelling out.

The elevator immediately resumed its ascent, throwing Mincemeat to the floor again. It stopped suddenly on the third floor before plunging straight back down again.

“You shithead!” he roared. He pointed the firearms in his hands at the panel on the door and shot it to pieces with both guns.

The elevator stopped.

A smile returned to Mincemeat’s perspiration-bathed face. “I used to be a pilot, you know. That was nothing…”

The lights went out, but that didn’t worry him. A click at the back of his eyes and his pupils shone red.

Dark, light…it was all the same to him. He rechecked the floor plans showing in his retina.

The bottom third of the elevator door had gotten as far as the second floor. With his two-hundred-thousand- dollar butter knife in his left hand, he burnt off the rest of the panel and pulled out the wiring. He pointed his other hand, firearm and all, at the door.

His eyes skipped over the wires until he found the one that opened the elevator door.

Just then, a fizz, and something sprang up under his feet. An unbearable heat ran through his body. He jumped with a shriek.

Something else leapt up from straight below him, piercing straight through his firing arm.

He rolled up his sleeve to take a look.

There was clean, round hole right between a pair of eyes on his arm. The eyelids were open wide, as if the transplanted eyes were surprised.

Mincemeat broke out in a cold sweat.

It was one damn thing after another.

The shot that came from below had hit the thumb on his shooting hand.

A series of screams emerged from Mincemeat’s mouth as he was shot again, in his hands, legs, and buttocks.

Mincemeat danced his bizarre dance to an audience of no one, yelling inside the box, where no one could see. When he dropped his knife, that too was shot to pieces. An intense surge of sparks erupted forth, scorching his right leg.

He found a moment to squeeze the grip of the gun with his right hand. He pointed the gun straight downward.

At the same time, a 10mm bullet came flying into his left eye. His mechanical eye was crushed right in the socket. Sparks and blood spurted out, littering the floor.

“I’m going to rape the shit out of you for this, you fucking bitch!”

Mincemeat fired dozens of shots at the floor, turning it into mincemeat, living up to his nickname.

Plenty of steaming holes were open in the floor now, and he peered through them, but saw no one. He turned to the elevator door, shooting it up just as he had the floor. When the bullets in the top half of his gun case were spent, he flipped it up into the air and gripped it the other way around.

He pulverized the door, leaving it a bullet-riddled mess.

“I’m going to kill you!”

He charged the door with his shoulder, and it bent open. He pushed it open with his left hand—now minus a thumb—and tumbled into the corridor, out of breath.

Blood and sweat trickled down him in equal measure—his whole body was drenched.

He crept down the corridor, crawling, and hid in the shadow of a pillar.

–Fleshie! Answer me, you bastard! Well! Flesh has been hacked! Well! Medi! Rare! Shit, answer me, someone!

But the only answer he had was wild laughter from an unknown voice, echoing all around.

Confused, Mincemeat scanned the corridor to the left and to the right.

No one.

The laughter was happening inside Mincemeat’s head.

He tried to cut the circuits but found he couldn’t.

Tears welled up in his one remaining good eye.

Regression disorder, someone had called it.

The sounds of battle brought all the bad memories back to him in a haze of black smoke.

His helicopter had been shot down, and two days later he was taken captive. It was on the day of his release, a year later, that he thought up his plan to transplant his wife’s eyes into his arm. His ex-wife, actually— she had served him with divorce papers earlier in the year, when he was already at the limit of human endurance, suffering all sorts of ill-treatment as a prisoner of war.

And his ex-wife had been giving him a look of the sincerest contrition every day—from his right bicep.

Mincemeat tugged at his hair and ripped off his blood-soaked clothes, revealing all the eyes transplanted onto his upper body.

He screamed a wordless scream as he forced himself up.

Brandishing his gun he pulled himself down the corridor, dragging his legs behind him.

The laughter in his head continued loud and shrill, driving him to distraction.

A pair of shutters slammed shut right in front of him—and behind him.

They were fireproof shutters—and odor-proof, made with the building’s particular requirements in mind.

Mincemeat realized that he was once again trapped in a small space, cornered on all four sides.

“I’m gonna fuck you up good and proper, you little bitch! I’ll rip your eyeballs out and skull-fuck your eye sockets!”

He was firing indiscriminately now, shooting everything he had in all four directions. Empty cartridges flew in all directions, and the walls were remodeled under the barrage of bullets.

Just then he felt heat behind him. Mincemeat turned around.

The shutters were right in front of his eyes.

And from beyond the shutters, more bullets came flying.

Both his knees were shot to pieces at almost exactly the same time, and he fell onto them, gritting his teeth in agony.

As he collapsed both his elbows were blown off. His front arms drooped down, useless.

Every single blow was accurate to the extreme.

And in the twinkling of an eye—literally. For each of the eighteen pairs of eyes implanted into his body were being targeted, methodically, ruthlessly. The liquid from the eyeballs was splashed around the room, and the crystalline lenses of the eyes, intermingled with blood and tears, seeped across his body in a thick soup.

Screams of despair filled the airtight chamber.

Still Mincemeat managed to stand, and even as blood and vitreous humor poured from his body, he managed to find the strength to charge the shutters like a frenzied bull.

With a violent crash the shutters buckled under the impact of Mincemeat’s shoulders. Blood splattered the