The hell it was. “Well you did a shit job.”
She stopped unwrapping the bandage and slapped the end of my stump.
“Ah! Cunt!”
She slapped it again. It was the first time I realized that it didn’t actually hurt. I pulled a deep breath and thought of that fuckface little brat with the earth tone plaid shirt to direct my rage.
“Okay. Alright. I’m up.”
“What? This stump slapping getting you off?”
“No… maybe. But… what happened to my hand? Where’s Marine?”
The nurse went back to unwrapping my stump. It was an oozing mass of disgusting tissue, the skin missing in splattered bits where the black demon spunk had hit it. I was remembering it now.
She took another drag and blew the vapor away. “Got lucky. Nerves’re still mostly there, ‘specially through the core.” She pulled the cigarette from her mouth. “The fuck were you two doing that they pulled the goo on you?”
“The goo?”
She spun around in her chair and pulled open a drawer behind her. She hit a switch inside it and a section of the wall hissed open, spilling fog out of the refrigerated interior.
“Yeah,” she said, standing to pull a bag from it and plopping back into the chair. She hit the switch again and the panel hissed closed, disappearing seamlessly back into the wall. “Dissolves organic mass. Old version spread like wildfire. You got lucky.”
She opened the bag and pulled out a mesh with a pattern printed on it. She pressed a button on the thing and it beeped and writhed once in her hand. She brought it over and put it on my skin. It quickly vacuumed down to a thin outline. A warm wave poured through my body and my head went a bit mushy.
“What’s this?”
“Stabilizes your flesh, cutie.” She put the cigarette back in her mouth and kicked her feet up onto the bed. “So, you fuckin’?”
“Like… right now? I mean, if you want. No stump stuff.”
She stood up and started to pull her scrubs over her head. The door sounded somewhere across the room and her face went grave. She yanked the curtain shut and walked over. I heard a relieved sigh.
“S’just you. Good god, girl.” I heard the cigarette whine and a steady exhale. “He’s up.”
The curtain opened and Marine stared at me like she’d just stomped a kitten to death. She looked down at my new stump and stared at it for what felt like an uncomfortably long time.
“I’m sorry.” The words came out of her sheepish and quiet. “I knew this sort of shit would…” She bit her lip and looked away. “I’ll fix it. I promise.”
“It’s fine. Nurse Slut was going to do stump stuff with me, so really, everything’s coming up aces.”
Nurse Slut came back to the edge of the bed. “Doctor. And that tissue stabilizer’s only good for six hours. So whatever you plan on fixing, do it in a hurry.” She took another drag on her cigarette.
“You’re a doctor? At a middle school?”
“I know.” She blew the vapor in my face this time. “Crazy. Almost like maybe I’m the sort of doctor who sees one-handed little limp dicks without asking questions.”
She turned and went away again. Marine was still staring at my wrist. I looked down at it myself. The electric mesh was glowing a dim glow everywhere the skin had been missing. I could still feel it. My hand, I mean. It was bothering me more than I wanted to let on. I mean, two ladies present? And one clearly eager to get beavered? Is that a saying?
“Don’t worry about it. I can jerk off with both, so it’s fine.”
She stifled a laugh in spite of her attempts to remain serious. “I know where we can get a new one.”
She said the words strangely quietly considering we were in the room with a woman who was fairly blatantly a mob doctor. Well, blatant now. Now that she’d basically said it. Marine was beginning to say something else when the doctor came back.
“Whispering doesn’t make me stupid. If you two want to fuck, just close the curtain.” She was flicking through things on a foldable tablet, though not a particularly nice one. “Only two places got that goo. Considering you came to me and not that hack fuck Sanchez, I’ll guess it was Vircore.” She turned to Marine and pulled the chair under herself, talking as she sat. “Stupid of you going in there at all, let alone dragging a second.”
“I don’t need a lecture on it, Doc. I already feel like—”
“Like this kid’s missing a hand?”
Marine turned her head away and Doc continued.
“I had no choice. And he agreed to go along. He’s an adult. He knew where we were going.”
Doc’s face went skeptical and she pulled a drag from the cigarette. “Did he really?”
“I know that this is a mating display to help me choose which of you is the better mate—” Thanks, animal documentaries. “—but I’m really not too keen on the suggestion that I’m so stupid that I didn’t know what Vircore was. Or what they do to extremely winsome men of action who break in and almost immediately get caught through no fault of their own.”
“So you two aren’t fucking?” She eyed Marine who shook her head a little too quickly for my liking.
Doc looked at me and raised her eyebrows a few times suggestively. I felt conflicted. A knock came at the door and it was opened a second later.
“Nurse Colleen?”
Doc shoved Marine onto the bed and pulled the curtain closed as she walked casually toward the door. She’d also tossed her cigarette onto the sheets. She welcomed the girl in as
