Upgunned Read Online Free Page A

hands in place—one on her thigh, one on her forearm, the same as positioning a mannequin. The Professor zeroed in to do touch-ups on the fingernails.
    â€œHow’s my hair?” said Cognac, looking back over one shoulder at me.
    â€œAh … good,” I said.
    If this was a real photo shoot, I would have had her comb it straight back and add just a little powder to cut the shine to emphasize a “wild” aspect. I would have ditched the incandescent lighting. I would have dashed to my bathroom and started searching for hemlock.
    The Professor pushed the physiognomy of the late Dominic Sharps into different expressions for each photo. The face stayed in position like clay.
    â€œStart shooting,” said the man with the gun. “They don’t all have to be masterpieces.”
    It will always be difficult for me to describe the ensuing half hour, even though I was thinking, Well, this isn’t the weirdest shoot I’ve ever done .
    *   *   *
    Clavius’s first assignment was for me to photograph Skorpia’s surgeries. Right before my eyes and lens, she was reduced to a mere poundage of raw flesh. Thank the gods her face was covered for most of it. That way she was without identity, the way the mutilations of a splayed car-crash victim are masked by blood. The slicing and dicing of her glutes were yet to come. The main attraction of the first workday was a single marathon session—rib removal, breast augmentation, and brow job. There was so little actual blood flow that, through the lens, it looked surreal.
    I had two digital video rigs for coverage on the blow-by-blow, and moved in close with a Hasselblad or one of my Nikons whenever I was permitted. Clavius had specified fast film, high grain, almost no depth of field—no peripheral detail was wanted here. I myself was without identity as well, smocked and filtered, my hands in latex, my feet sterile-bagged, perspiration darkening the HEPA cap that prevented any wayward hair from escaping into the operating environment.
    It was almost loving, the way the specialist slit her open and yawned her wide and took things out and put in other things. Certainly intimate. Most major organs inside your body are a sickly pink or a jaundiced ochre, except for the dark purple and bluish vasculature. Other mystery components looked startlingly inappropriate, like bundled white tube pasta. No matter how sweet you smell on the outside, on the inside you stink like a slaughterhouse or killing field. My lenses fogged up more than once.
    I shot the row of autoclaves, too. In one stainless steel dish, saline bags with serial numbers. In another, two short ribs, pitted and porous like big fossilized fingernails. In a third, mounds and scraps of shining tissue limned in bright red oxygenized blood. Each stage of Skorpia’s transmutation was labeled in black pen on cloth tape. Before, during, after.
    The anesthesiologist—the gas passer—was bored to begin with, and nearly nodded off in the middle of the carving and resectioning. I saw his head bob. Skorpia’s monitor emitted a dire flat beeping noise and I could sense one of the nurses getting ready to ask me to leave the room. I documented it all. This team was hot, and Skorpia was stabilized immediately. She would wake up in pain, mummified in a chrysalis of bandages from which it was hoped a rare beauty would emerge—rarer still, because it had been created with a knife, like sculpture. So rare that it was a million-to-one impossibility in the real world. In turn, she would inspire millions to covet things they could never achieve, not that it would stop them from buying an array of pricey consumer products based on her physical say-so.
    Later, Skorpia married a tycoon of paper products—bathroom tissue, nose-blow, burly towels—and devoted her time to a great many charities. She shunned the limelight because she was getting on in years; christ, she