The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(74)

“You’re a good man,” I told the sergeant as he folded up the plastic sheet from beneath my feet, containing its cocktail of torn nail and black blood. “How long until it’s you?”

He looked over his shoulder to make sure the torturer was outside, taking one of his many rest breaks to stretch his fingers out after his work, then leaned in close. “I can get you poison,” he whispered. He looked. “That’s all I can do.”

“That’s enough,” I replied. “That’s all anyone can do.”

The poison was rat poison, but rats and humans share more than a few passing genetic traits. It was enough. The torturer, ironically, didn’t realise what my symptoms entailed until my kidneys were well into failure; even I could perceive the spreading yellowness in my skin was no reaction to having the little bones in my feet crushed one at a time in a vice. I howled with laughter when the torturer realised, shaking in my chair, stained tears rolling down my cheeks at the revelation.

“You idiot!” I shrieked. “You incompetent! You total arse!”

They unstrapped me from the chair and the torturer stuck two fingers down my throat to induce vomiting far, far too late. That was how Vincent found me, on the floor, shaking with laughter in my own blood-flecked puke. The old sergeant stood stiff and steady in the door. Vincent turned from me to the torturer, to the sergeant, and in that instant knew precisely what had happened and how. Anger flickered across his face, and he turned back to me. I laughed the harder to see the look in his eye, but to my surprise Vincent didn’t lash out at the sergeant, didn’t condemn the torturer, but gestured to two orderlies and barked, “Get him to the infirmary.”

They got me to the infirmary.

They even gave me painkillers.

The doctor stared at the floor as she delivered her diagnosis, and my laughter, rather diminished by the loss of hormonal stimulation from my system, was only a smile for Vincent when he came to my bedside. “That was very quick,” he said at last. “I didn’t expect you to contrive a means of death for at least five days.”

“It’s been less than five days?”

“Two and a half.”

“Good God.” Then, “The sergeant’s a good man. He didn’t like what you’re doing. If you shoot him, can you apologise to him first? On my behalf, that is.”

Vincent scowled, flicking through my medical chart in the vain hope of finding some indication that I wasn’t, in fact, already a long way past saving. I had finished puking, finished shaking and burning. The doctors had got to me in time to prevent cardiac failure, but my kidneys were lost, and my liver would follow soon, and that was enough. I didn’t even need to look at a chart to know it was so.

“He’ll be moved to another unit,” replied Vincent calmly. “I am not in the business of unnecessary death.” I nearly laughed again, but breathing was on the way out, so I only managed a grunt. “It’s obvious now that I won’t get what I want, so of course we’ll aim to make your death as comfortable as possible. Is there anything I can bring you?”

“Wouldn’t say no to more morphine.”

“Alas, I believe you’re already at your maximum allowance.”

“What’s the harm now?” His lips twitched, eyes dancing away. My heart jumped a beat. What more? What more could possibly be done to me in the little time I had left? “Vincent,” I murmured, voice slipping low with warning, questioning, “what are you going to do?”

“I am sorry, Harry.”

“So you keep saying, and I’m sure every toenail I left behind is grateful for your pity. What are you planning?”

He didn’t meet my eye as he said, “I need you to forget.”

I was so briefly stunned, I didn’t know what to say. He half-shook his head, and for a moment I wondered if he was going to apologise again. The temptation to try and punch him if he did flickered briefly at the back of my mind, not that I could have possibly landed a blow. Instead, he just walked away and refused to look back even when I started screaming again.


They kept me tranquillised for most of my demise, which was a relief. It kept both the pain, and the thoughts of what was next, subdued. I know I dreamed but, for almost the first time, did not remember my dreams, only that they were fast and hot, reality intruding into the stories of my mind as a prickling on my skin that became the claws of insects, a burning in my stomach that became the carrying of my own guts in a shopping bag, the bleeding in my feet which was simply explained by my wandering mind as the slow swallowing of my body whole by a great snake whose body rippled like a harmonic wave with each new gulp of my flesh. By the time its fangs reached my midriff, my feet were already well into the snake’s belly, dissolving a bone at a time in the slow pulsing acid.

They cut things fine. I was on pure oxygen and my stats still falling by the time they were ready for me. They wheeled in a new device, patched together from who-knew-what dregs of a mad scientist’s mind. It needed its own power supply–a mere two hundred and thirty volts were not enough for this baby. There was some bickering about whether the trolley I lay on should be earthed or not, before one doctor with a great bark of “You’re such children!” pointed out that the metal handcuffs which strapped me to its sides would do a perfectly decent task of channelling any current and that everyone was to treat this procedure as being equivalent to a cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, and be it on their own head if they got stung.