The next in a multi-part series by Lance Marwood

Warning: graphic content.

Death is a privilege.

That’s what I keep coming back to, while my fingernails carve trenches into my palms. Squeeze, clench, unclench. Check the middle of my hands with my finger tips to see if any blood’s finally made an appearance.

Still nothing. Clench again.

Death is a privilege.

I know this. I know it better than most. I told you already, I’m a professional. And while most of these goons would sooner pummel these simps into pulp than to reserve some caution, that doesn’t mean I don’t myself take deep pleasure when I get to dunk them in the tank. Or occasionally take the pugilist route; on those occasions it’s usually because I have a special request from a client to carry out some ‘percussion’. But I won’t pretend I don’t enjoy beating some sense into these malcontents. These parasites, trying to break up the freedom we’ve been given.

“Take that, scoundrel,” I imagine myself saying.

No such jokes are on my mind at present.

Listen, you’ve had your bad days. You’ve had those days where you come into a shift and no matter what you’re trying to do, it’s just not working. The floor is roiling, the queue’s fucked, and everything you touch turns to mush. But no matter how much you try to explain yourself, you know you can’t, because the fact of the matter is you know you contributed to the mess, you didn’t hold yourself up above it, and that means you deserve what you get.

But I don’t think I deserve this.

It’s so easy to point to the signs when you know what the result is. But my craft is in knowing what I can get away with in spite of the signs, not because of them. If you’ve got someone with compartment locking up and the piss dribbling down their legs is as brown as public works water, then you have to know that you’re skirting the edge. Any idiot would know that.

But I bring skill and expertise to these proceedings. They don’t keep requesting my services because I don’t, clearly.

So when I say it came as a shock, that should mean something.

Unfortunately, I share space with rank upon rank of useless cannon fodder. Mouth breathers who’d sooner eat the crayons than colour with them. I swear I’ve actually seen a peeler using an actual fucking potato peeler.

Just try asking that kind of barbarian whether he was monitoring ECGs. Bloods. Whether it was still moving, still carrying air, still clotting on cue. Please. He’d just blink and ask you in that simpleton’s stupor, “What for?”

I was watching. I was watching all of it, because I know what I need to look for.

No peaked T waves, no QRS widening, zero signs of impending electrical instability. Serial ABGs stayed compensated; lactate never climbed past what this kind of work brings. Creatinine and BUN were up, sure, but that's the rhabdo; clearance was impaired, not absent. Troponins negative. Hemodynamics stable.

Yes, obviously he was compartmented to fuck. Yes, the rhabdo and the sleep dep and the hypoxia from the waterboarding were on deck. None of that's a surprise, that's the work. But the thing about a tension pneumothorax is that it just presents as breathlessness. Which, you know, when you’re working them in the tank, that’s not really something that is easily differentiated.

“Death was not part of the deal,” the terminal reads.

Still in my shop. The floor’s still littered with detritus from the attempts to revive the son of a bitch. Scads of bloody gauze. Forceps amid the tangle of wrappers, Health United logos winking up from the ruin of carpet. The tank top still open, the brackish water still despite the thrashing that had been taking place up until an hour ago.

The terminal’s purposely minimalist, one of those dumb ones that’s a one-way only, that way there’s nothing a subject could ever get their hands on one in the event of a catastrophic failure of procedure.

You hear horror stories of course, about the operator that gets a little clumsy or too comfortable, just a little careless around a subject with too little clamp and just enough spirit. It happens. The body does pretty incredible things.

It also does stupid things.

Take this dipshit I’d been dunking, for instance. By the time the monitors were screeching alerts, it was already too late, and I didn’t know it.

You get some extra air around the lungs, that can be solved. Your body can find a way to expel it. But when air enters the pleural cavity thanks to a trauma, in this case a fractured rib from a direct hit I’d given him at the start, that air can’t just leave, that’s a one-way valve.

So every breath being brought in from the lung that caused it has nowhere to go, the pressure rises, and now you’ve got a pressure cooker where the stress from the incoming air is pushing on your one good lung and the heart.

Now if it’s spotted in time, you can stick a cannula in the patient and release the air. I’ve done it myself, a couple times. Once intentionally. I can’t tell you the satisfaction you feel when you hear the air hissing. The smell it makes can be tasted behind the mask. Of course it’s the smell of bloodcopper and lungwater, but it’s also got a hint of cherry to it, I kid you not. Though that might have just been the subject, she’d been a diabetic and I’ve noticed the sweetness in their blood at times.

But in this case, I will admit I was fixated on the risk of embolisms or arrthymia. Like I said earlier, I’d be surprised if any of these other idiots I share these halls with would ever have the preparation or insight in the first place to monitor those things.

That’s why it’s so frustrating to be getting these reprimands.

The carpet under my feet is wet from a mix of water and blood and bile. It’s been maybe 10 minutes, but I’ve only just realized I’ve been slightly stepping side to side, making the juices squelch in a soothing pulse. Rhythm, that’s what I realize I’m doing. I’m breathing in and breathing out, just with the soles of my boots to do it.

The next message stops the moving. I can feel the fingernails in my palms. And this time I can feel the familiar slickness of blood from where they’ve found their purchase in my flesh.

“The client will have repayment,” the message reads.

The text itself appears as if a hand is printing it on paper. Is it just me or is it slower as this line is being written?

Death is a privilege, of that there can be no doubt.

It’s time to call in a favour with the one person who can help me in a situation as fucked as this.

∴ If this newsletter has done anything for you, it would mean everything to me to hear it. Hit reply and tell me what you think. One sentence is enough. Regardless, thank you for reading. Thank you for reading in an age of increasing illiteracy, cultural stagnancy, and attention divestment. You are doing something revolutionary. ∴

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