The GOOD Doctor

CUT PULL TEAR RIP... Mend Replace Stitch Treat

"Thank you so much doctor!"

SLASH BREAK SEVER BLEED... Transplant Sew Fix Bandage

"You saved my life doctor!"

Some people get into medicine to hear those kinds of words. Some love the feeling of helping others.

"But me... I was forced into this," the doctor says aloud, pulling the bloodied gloves off his hand and tossing them onto the tray of surgical equipment.

"DOCTOR! Why must you always make such a mess?" his nurse barks after him, but the doctor cared little for her criticisms. She was hardly the best nurse on staff, but he had made sure to endear himself to her. In this line of work, only his fantasies kept him from losing his way, and the nurse was his anchor as he slogged through his work day. Her arms bearing the loose skin of suddenly lost weight, her lopsided shoulders failing to hide her spinal problems, that ankle that always managed to get twisted somehow... She was a curiosity to be sure, if only she didn't have such a biting tongue to pull him out of his dream world.

Time passes slowly, as it always does. Two beady eyes trained on an ever ticking clock as he waits for the news of the next operation to reach his ears. He thinks of the "hands" and the "face" of the clock, and how Ed Gein might have made such a thing more literal had he been allowed to continue his work. The doctor fumbles with a pack of cigarettes in his vest. He never smoked in his life, but he loved the idea of how it ruined the bodies of those it touches, and he was always first to offer a light and a death stick to anyone whose hands were a bit shaky. His openness with his pack was one of the few things that had endeared him to the staff of this Las Vegas Hospital. Still, it was hard to hide the whispers of those who judged him for his appearance. They said he kept his nurse around because she was the only other freak on staff, a bit harsh for a woman who still couldn't qualify for a handicapped space, the doctor thought.

The time comes faster than usual as an emergency is wheeled into the operating room. A young man shot with a strange weapon, almost like an early 18th century musket but leaving strange scorch marks on the entry wound despite not being fired at close range. The doctor ran his fingers over the wound as the nurse finishes the preparations. Something new was happening here, he could feel it in the boy's flesh. It was almost familiar, he thought, but the nurse's harping pulled him regretfully back into the duty at hand. In the end it would be a fairly typical removal process, the fun part, but the fixing... good lord the fixing would drag on. The nurse seems to have a new scar on her wrist... wonder how she got that.

CUT

She's very careful, at least so she says. Doesn't look like it was directly to the skin, maybe she got cut through her gloves

PULL

Certainly she didn't get the cut on the job, no one would let her live it down. Perhaps she was involved in some sort of accident while on a date

FIRE

She was probably wearing woolen gloves... Fire?

Alarms blare through the hospital, tainting rooms red as doctors scramble to grab patients and wheel them out. The young man on the table was already too far along to be wheeled outside, and the nurse with a mysterious scar on her hand panics as the doctor stands, hands deep in his patient, not moving an inch as the hospital descends into disorder. The movement of wheelchairs and groaning of patients is suddenly replaced with shrieks of terror as loud unusual gunshots echo through the halls. Sounding almost like grenades exiting a grenade launcher, but with the distinct ting of bullet leaving barrel. Hissing steam can be heard and then seen as it carries across the halls, licking at the operating room door.

The nurse is the corner now, never did have the wits about her. That cut I gave her credit for was probably far less than an accident. An accidental scrape on a loose nail, no doubt.

The doctor flicks the blood from his hands as he turns to the door. There was no fear in his heart, only fascination. The status quo is shaken up, something unusual and unknown is going on outside that door. With no regards for sterilization, he pulls the door open...

When the alarm did not tint the halls red, it was the blood that did so. Screams and crying were heard throughout the hospital, and the rumbling tone of a language the doctor seemed to barely recognize grew closer. He looks down the hallway towards the source of the sound, only to quickly pull himself aside to avoid the gaping maw of something winged and long flying down the hallway too fast for the eye to follow. His heart pounded, adrenaline and glee mixing as he watched the building in utter chaos. His mind entertained a thought for the source of the upheaval, and in the mayhem his common sense did not dare doubt his fantasies today.

The gunfire rings again, with the hiss of steam to follow. The doctor peers out again, looking closely at the bodies on the ground again. Not all bore the same wounds as his patient. Some had the bullet holes of typical weaponry, others had large gashes where weapons had tore open their skin far better than any surgical equipment would dare to do. Some even bore trails of marking across them that were the unmistakable signal that the fatal wound was delivered by a set of jaws...

Someone else came down the hall the flying thing had emerged from, and the doctor almost hid in the operating room once again. But these faces... felt familiar. A group charged past him, machine guns and blades whizzing past the doctor quick enough only for brief identification. Some matched the wounds on the fallen, but there still remained many others whose specific signature did not line up...

"Doctor! I had heard ya were back! Still got dat eye for flesh and blood I see!"

The doctor's head snaps up to look at the source of the voice. Massive and imposing was its source, that steaming rifle held in his hands as a toothy smirk broke his lips. With him stood others like him, at least in appearance rather than form. A smaller one, his intelligence on his features. A fatter one, his lack of intelligence equally apparent on his features. The doctor knew them all, he knew their contours, their crevices, the lines between their skin. Hours he had spent pouring over their bodies, learning how they stretched and broke and tore without ever so much as putting a blade to their rough hide.

"S-s-s-shouldn't ya'll be in in in in-"

"Disguise? No doc! No disguise is our disguise!"

Before the doctor could speak further, the winged one burst back through the halls, corpses draped across its body all the way to the back. It spoke, its voice surprisingly soft for such a fearsome creature.

"Let us go, we should not have killed at all. We risk too much for him."

The intelligent looking stood forward to reply, taking the beast's head in his arms as he did so. "We need him. We did what we had to."

"Plus, da boys needed to let off some steam. We tired of being cooped up!" Said the one with the steam gun, turning back to the doctor.

"Now, ready to go back to work doctor? Maybe ya can take ya friend wit ya?" He said, pointing back into the operating room. The nurse shrinks back further, screaming to be spared, but she was not the one being pointed at.

The young man had already passed from being unattended so long, but where the doctor was going, that wouldn't matter. His silence held for a while, he knew this was exactly what he wanted. But he had to ask himself... Had he changed? Was he really a healer now, a doctor, a GOOD doctor?

He turns back to the group, their impatience not well hidden.

"...It's good to be back in business boys."