NAMELESS BODIES, IN UNREMEMBERED ROOMS — open

[MYERS]

[align=center][div style="text-align:justify;width:55%;font-family:verdana;"]With the bomb detonated, Ahab was ground zero all on his own, laying there in silence and staring at the ocean waves with an open, empty eye. Dead, he looked. Half-open maw, claws twitching in place like a beetle on its back would wave its limbs, chest rising and falling with each gasping breath.

There was no bomb. But there was, of course, the fallout.

He felt it all the time. The ache in his arm, the swell and drip of pus from his empty orbital socket, it left a hollow ghost that lingered in whatever scars and remains of his missing pieces he had left. Even where the shrapnel dug into the residual fibers of his optic nerve, he often saw colors swirl in and out of contrast, void faces drift in the peripherals of his missing vision where images ought to be.

But there were no faces.

If you put the two together, maybe crossed your eyes or tilted your head, they were one and the same. The differences were negligible, things you could attribute to a trick of the eye. Ishmael had been a foot shorter and maybe slimmer at the right angle. These were features a human couldn’t quite pick out when looking at two near-identical animals, not like one could tell two breeds of felidae or canid apart. His eye had turned to gelatin when a bullet struck him in the face, where Ahab took scalpels and slept while his skin was pulled and sewn to make an eerily perfect copy.

Ishmael was meant to be a singular entity, the whole story all on his own; take a bear and set it loose in a hospital full of sleeper cells just to say it was a terrible accident, though, and suddenly two parts are needed to tell the lie correctly. One of them is supposed to be dead, the other isn’t meant to be real. One is a ragdoll stitched of parts taught to move from Point A to Point B, the other a secret weapon of the unexpectedly biological kind. Yet both were very, very real.

The sly Ocelot had found that terribly funny. “We’re just extra arms on an elaborate machine. They’ll find us when they need us,” he’d hummed from his usual perch, and it stood as one of those things Ahab had learned to ignore when he wished to spare himself the headache. “And then they’ll discard us like old toys, all except for you.”

But that had been a lie, too, hadn’t it?

Voices hardly register as real or fake, these days. He senses but the words are only sounds, a ringing in the ear like the same bang of the bomb. Presence registers as threat, sounds as the distant crack of gunfire and echoes of death in the halls. Someone says he looks ill. A nurse, maybe, one of the veterinarians that were hired to tear him apart and lace him back together. Or - no, the voice is more familiar than that. A clanmate, a fragment of this family he was trying desperately to reassemble around himself.

Emil is singing, a soft-voiced lullaby but rasping like the sand on his tongue. He sings while the world decays, and Ahab wants to kill him for it.

His arm whirs, clicks. The metal built down to the bone gives an uneasy flex. He swings, hard, for any facial feature he can register first. Michael, Emil, whoever lingered in the hallucinated halls that were crumbling on all sides - they were the enemy and he was the last body standing, an animal let loose to destroy. He was not meant for this world - he was a machine built of organic pieces, made to make ruin of the peace. And he would.

He would.

On the beach below, a wave crashes onto the shore. The world continues to turn. The ocelot laughs, gives a twist of the paw to curl a claw inwards. Come hither, it says, and I will show you how to suffer.