From where he came, the Surgeon could not say. Nor did he fully realize why he knew himself by that name. Behind him stretched a void. Before him, straightening and shaping, rose a place of life.
Yes, life: that was the ripe scent on the wind, the coarse sound in his ears and the constant, energetic thrum trembling in and through all things, including him.
Waking from a dream.
But what was this place? The Surgeon strode forward, grass crunching beneath his soles. He was in an open area. A park. A sprawling city, draped in evening, encompassed this park. High-rises winking in light and coiled neon snakes hissing names of taverns and shops and slick smoky roads dappled by burning lamplight. Nothing else moved. Past the height of the tallest visible building, the Surgeon saw only blackness—for all intents and purposes, another void.
I’m dressed.
Yes. A long, unbuttoned raincoat hung to his shins, the only clothing on his upper half. A sliver of pale bare torso peeked out. Black slacks belted to his thin waist. The Surgeon recognized that he was too thin. Bones ridged his chest. He could not intimidate or fight his enemies in such an emaciated condition.
Enemies?
Slowly, he felt his own truth growing, filtering into him something revelatory. A purpose had brought him here. Right now, though, he did not know the exact nature of that purpose, only its mounting and nameless portent.
Something was strapped to his chin. He touched it and it was soft, slightly fuzzy and round with a string that went around his head. A surgical mask. At this discovery, he felt a tiny seizure of fear at his exposed face, and so lifted the mask over his nose and mouth. Whether given to him, or brought by him from wherever he’d come, doubtless it was there as a precaution. To ensure he thrive among some unknown danger here.
A weight in his coat. He reached into his right pocket and clutched something cold and metallic. A new synapse formed in his understanding. A soundless symphony played inside him, resounding with a rhythm ageless and brutal and he took out the pistol and looked at it. A Glock 17, equipped with a silencer.
Don’t get caught. He glanced around. Still no one.
I won’t get caught.
Then, some new notion fell upon him.
I can’t get caught.
The Surgeon once more pocketed the gun and walked ahead across the street into the steel teeth of the city, gliding past the lonely facades and the cars parked along the curb. The sense of life around him hummed ever stronger even as he glimpsed no one and nothing else.
Where am I?
Where is everyone?
Then, turning a corner, he saw it—a solitary man, sparse hair and broad gut, tending a wheeled cart on a street corner. Hot Dogs, said a sign beneath him. Three dollars. Next to him stood a collapsed yellow umbrella.
The vendor barely moved, but in just seeing another life form the Surgeon steeled in both queer fascination and unexpected revulsion. He was not alone, and that was good.
Yet he was also not alone, and that was discomforting.
Again he fingered his rib bones. He made off toward the cart. The vendor, preoccupied, glanced up at his approaching footfalls and saw him, then looked down, only to immediately double-take.
“Hey buddy,” said the vendor. He indicated the face mask. “City’s not that filthy, is it?”
The Surgeon stopped a few feet from him, face hot with recycled breath.
The vendor smirked. “There some new flu or something on the air I don’t know about?”
“I’ll—” The Surgeon began. Speech. I spoke. The sensation was odd, almost ticklish, as if he’d agitated a small insect hive in his throat.
“I’ll— I’ll have a hot dog, please.”
The vendor’s eyes narrowed at him, setting off in the Surgeon a prickly burst of anxiety, a demanding urge for retaliation. The bastard suspected him.
Maybe he’s an enemy.
That thrum of life, that monopulse of the city and all its collective inhabitants, heightened around him, constricting him with its energy. He felt dizzy, even a sudden queasiness though right now hunger had far greater sway over him.
With tongs, the man brought up a sweaty pink cylinder of meat and slapped it on a bun. He offered it. “That’ll be three dollars.”
The surgeon checked his pockets. No “dollars”. No money. Only the Glock, which he fished from his pocket and lifted at the vendor. The man gasped and recoiled a couple steps, free hand raised, palm-out.
He’s an enemy.
The Surgeon shot him between the eyes. The vendor fell back, and the Surgeon knew rightness.
He pocketed the Glock and knelt over the body and reassembled his fallen hot dog. He ate hastily, then replaced his mask. The streets brooded, the dark ignorant and vacant.
He was no longer the only life, though. Looming over the vendor’s body, the Surgeon noted curiously the butterfly peeking up from the man’s limp mouth. It hesitated, then, in a confident burst, fluttered up into the night, followed soon by its multicolored brethren leaking in a steady fount from the vendor’s mouth and nose and rushing in swirling exodus from his shattered scalp.
The Surgeon knew rightness.
CHAPTER 2
~~~
Try as it might with all its storms and wonders and giant trees, Nature was losing, thought Marcus Avery, as he drove down the redwood-flanked highway.
In the battle for people’s attention, Nature’s impressive bulk sat defeated against the Gizmo, the Gadget. Even as the redwoods towered so imminent, tickling the clouds, standing as columns of petrified time, what held his daughter’s attention? Her phone. More disappointing yet, what had his wife Patricia’s attention? Her newly-bought smartphone.
“How can a few inches of screen be so interesting?” Marcus said. He gestured at the rain-specked windshield. “When you have all this?”
“What, the same tree over and over?” Laura remarked from the backseat. In the rearview mirror, though, Marcus noticed his daughter’s eyes were fixed on the window. A break from trolling the deadening avenues of Cyburbia, probably. Marcus wanted a snapshot of that image—she looked almost wistful, of an age far older
