Dead of Night (Ghosts & Magic #1) Read Online Free Page B

it, never mind one that was used for all kinds of sewing, sticking, and cutting of live people.  
    "You know the drill." Dalton rolled up his sleeves and went over to the sink, starting his scrubbing.  
    I took off my trench coat, then the black hoodie beneath it, and then the white tee beneath that. A few minutes later I had removed my black pants, swat boots, and boxer briefs, and had washed away the bacteria in a hot spray of water from a nozzle next to the operating room door. I grabbed a freshly laundered towel and wiped myself dry, trying to ignore the mirror.
    I wasn't a pretty man. I looked as sick as I felt. My body was rail thin, with grey skin clinging so tightly to muscle and bone that it looked like it had just been laid on top of my skeleton. My head was way too big for my body, my face was small and sharp, and my eyes were sunken and sullen, with no sign of brightness inside the almost wholly black orbs. I had no hair to speak of, and every breath I took carried a hint of pain and decay. I could still remember when I had been healthy, and almost handsome. At least, Karen had always told me I was the most beautiful man she had ever met. It had been enough for me.
    The sink turned off, and I heard the snap of latex gloves. I turned the knob to unlock the operating room door and walked in, my body shaking from the clean cold. I grabbed a fresh sheet and laid it over the table, and then sat down.
    "Just make sure you don't touch me." Dalton entered the room and went over to a safe, bolted into the floor. He put in the combination and heaved it open.
    "It doesn't work like that, and you know it."
    I watched him pull out a sterile bag which contained the medicine. It was nothing but a small, round capsule that contained who-knows-what. By itself, it was nothing too bad. The problem was that it couldn't be taken orally. It had to be injected.
    "It had just stopped hurting, too." I leaned back and twisted a little, exposing a nasty pucker of scarred flesh that served as a twisted target for the treatment apparatus.
    "Sorry, Conor." Dalton picked up the injector from the table next to the bed. It bore a vague resemblance to a gun, except the nozzle ended in a needle that was thick enough for the capsule to blast out of. He popped the side of it open and dropped the capsule in. A small bottle of compressed air went into the back, and would fire the little pill through my innards.
    He flipped it on, and brought it to my stomach. I closed my eyes while he lined up the needle and jabbed it through the scar tissue. It gave pretty easily, having been penetrated so many times before. Even so, his precision was almost embarrassing. Dalton was a black market merchant who had learned medicine on the internet, and he was almost as good of a surgeon as I had been.
    I grimaced through the pain. In the beginning I had taken his offer of anesthesia, but over time I'd realized the stuff he was giving me made me feel worse than the pain did, and cost a lot more to boot. Now I just grinned and bore it, and even watched the procedure with a calm expectancy. Every time I saw the blood start running down my abs I waited for it to be a thick black pus.  
    He put his finger on the trigger. "The hard part."
    I nodded and took a few deep breaths. He'd have to get the capsule in pretty deep. Whatever was in it would spread throughout my system and attack the ugly cells that the base was producing, keeping the factory in check for up to a month at a time, unless I touched someone and caused it to go into overdrive. Why it couldn't actually destroy the mass that was causing the trouble I didn't know, and neither did Dalton. When I asked, he would only say, 'they're working on it'. Whoever 'they' were.
    "On three," Dalton said, shifting the device in his hand, changing his aim.  
    He'd have to get the positioning just right, or it wouldn't travel to the right spot, and would open too soon and be relatively ineffective. It had happened once