Men, Like Flies

By R. J. Melby

A shrill scream echoes from deep beneath the compound. Animalistic, like the sound of a lamenting soul from the deepest ring of hell. It pierces the vents and sends tremors throughout the underground building. Doctor Kazo Horthep shivers at the familiar sound, scratching at his wrist.

He pushes through the hallway, his mud-stained loafers echoing with each step. He feels the sweat dripping off his forehead all the way down to his chin. His body is an overloaded dryer on the brink of collapse, though it is a cool sixty-five degrees.

The drinking last night certainly didn’t help, but as a man of his profession, who could blame him for drinking a few shots of whiskey every night? Anything to shut out that pesky conscience, the little voice that continually screams at him that everything about this job is as wrong as wrong can be.

He scratched again.

As a college student at the University of Minnesota, he had dreamed of bigger things. A wide-eyed student bent on helping humanity after the Bio-Plague Wars, young Kazo brimmed with potential. But now, at sixty-three years old working for Johansson-Briggs Biological Research Facility, something has changed. Looking into the mirror every morning, he fears something in his eyes, a kind of glazed acquiescence.

Kazo shakes his head as he continues to propel himself through the halls.

Why didn’t they just let me keep my old office? He thinks as he rubs his thick brush of a mustache. He pines for the lush rolling chair and the neat little bookshelf with different puzzles and distraction tools set how he had liked them. He had actual patients then. In there he felt like an actual doctor, instead of an animal tamer. The new offices, in contrast, are significantly less than comfortable.

More like cages, he thinks to himself.

He pauses, then looks up to the white ceiling of the hallway.

How have things come to this?

Kazo recalls that day, the one that had damned his soul. Even then he knew that he should have taken a different course, another class. From the first day he saw Professor Mink’s bright blue eyes, he knew he had made a deal with the Devil.

Bringing his senses back to the now, Kazo takes a deep breath, analyzing the multi-layered smells of the corridor. The metallic mustiness always reminds him of an old church building painted with the smell of death and hurriedly covered with cheap sanitizer. There’s the door, just fifteen feet in front of him. He can feel himself developing a sort of horizontal vertigo, a feeling like dancing on the Empire State Building. His hands feel plump as the usual dread starts to push itself through his veins, a nauseating botfly that wants to break out of his skin.

At the door, he passes his badge over the detector. It beeps its approval as the door clicks, unlocking. His muscles tense as he touches the door latch. It feels cold, colder than death itself.

He opens the door and allows his eyes to adjust to the dimly lit reception room. Kazo winces. He forgets how they don’t like the light too much here, how they’ve grown sensitive to it, as if it has become poison to them.

          At the center of the reception room stands an ominous glass tank, the kind one finds at an aquarium. The only difference is you can barely see through it. It is filled with a foggy gray liquid.

Kazo holds his breath as he walks over and taps on the glass.

          Looking around the reception room, he sees nothing but empty chairs and abstract paintings in cheap plastic frames. The paintings elicit a sort of disgust in his stomach, as the splatters of red give him the impression of blood thrown across a canvas. The velvet green chairs and black painted walls are illuminated by a soft yellow light. The newly built room has clearly been designed with the intent to give comfort, but the false air of it just makes his skin crawl. It is too cold, too dark.

          “Excuse me?” Kazo calls out, looking around the room, trying not to sound put off by the whole thing. He tries to peer through the tank, through the haze behind the glass. The stuff is so thick with chemicals and nutrients, it’s like trying to investigate the bottom of a soup bowl.

          Kazo jumps as an apparition’s hand suddenly presses itself to the glass. It floats for a second, and then makes a motion. He cannot see the rest of the body.

          Forgetting himself, he almost doesn’t recognize the signs the hand creates, which makes it look like a stubby, deformed octopus doing an interpretive dance. It points down to the intercom at the bottom of the glass. Kazo realizes he has forgotten how the higher-ups had changed procedure. Clearing his throat, he proceeds to speak into the microphone.

“Uh, yes, Doctor Kazo Horthep. Just here to see patient twelve,” he squeaks.

          The thing in the glass tank pauses as the machine translates Kazo’s words back to it.

After Kazo stands there for a few seconds, it points him to the door to his left.

          Kazo taps his badge again on another identification pad and walks through the door. To his disappointment, the lights aren’t much brighter in the next hallway.

          They make it darker and darker every day, he thinks with a shiver.

           Once again, his mind drifts back to that genetics class. This job always seems to bring him back to that memory. It is like a painful canker sore that one always finds themselves licking.

The first day of Biology, Professor Mink slapped down a large mason jar, sending tsunami waves through the entire classroom of prospective biologists and silencing the entire room. Inside the jar there were a dark cloud of little insects buzzing around , attempting to break out of their glass enclosure.

The class gazed in awe as Professor Mink spoke in his detached southern drawl, licking at his thin mustache like a sickly tiger. “As it is a subject many of you will be studying closely in the next coming years, I thought it best to introduce something topical for our first day. Class, this is not for the faint of heart.” He presented the glass jar. “Today, we will talk about mutation.”

Young Kazo peered into the jar, his stomach sinking to his pelvis at the sight. The creatures inside looked fat and unnaturally bulbous.

          Professor Mink informed them that the creatures in the jar were enlarged fruit flies, genetically made so that the class could study their mutations and various phenotypes. Each fly’s set of genes had been artificially incentivized to mutate, for educational purposes. These physical mutations mirrored the kind that had been creeping over the populace of the country in the past century, and naturally, it was vital to introduce these parallels to new students.

Young Kazo Hortep felt his heart and lungs convulse. Some flies had shriveled wings, leaving them to crawl the bottom of the mason jar like leprous outcasts. Others had no eyes, just empty disks, so they flew erratically, pounding on the glass furiously in insane anxiety and frustration. One had extra appendages, legs where their antenna should’ve been, as if a child had played mad doctor during its construction.

“Antennapedia”, his teacher had called the condition, labelling it as if it wasn’t a horrifying concept to have arms growing out of your forehead.

The various deformities they looked for in the insects, the technical way the other students spoke of them, made Kazo sick. Snake-like in the way he slithered across a room without a sound, Professor Mink tapped him on the shoulder.

His teacher assured him the little insects could not feel the way humans did, telling him to “think of them as little packets reacting to various stimuli.” He remembers him saying, “There’s no comprehension in any of those eyes, Kazo. Trust me. Any pain you think they feel is merely an illusion.”

“An illusion,” Kazo says to himself, as his mind is brought back to the present again as he enters through the next doorway. Lights begin to slowly appear.

          Every door in the hallway is numbered; All of them, closed and locked tight. As Kazo walks down the lonely corridor, trying his best to keep his professional composure, he hears the familiar clamor. From one door, he can hear scratching like that of a caged animal. At another door, he hears an attempted turn of a doorknob. At first his heart jumps at the sound of clicking, but then he sighs in relief to hear the reassuring clunk of the lock.

Kazo stops at one door, labeled number 964a. He takes a deep breath in, then out, as he takes out his key from his coat pocket. This is where Patient 12 has been shacked since the move.

As he pushes the door open, there appears a closed space made of complete and utter darkness.

His heart pounds in his ears.

Peering through the blackness, he spots a figure huddling in the corner, drugged before the doctor’s arrival.

“Good morning. How are we doing today?” Kazo whispers, trying to sound as kind as possible to his patient. Unlike his colleagues, he doesn’t believe in unnecessary cruelty to the subjects. Physical and verbal abuse always seem to yield disappointing results.

The thing says nothing, just sits there with its arms wrapped around its legs, hidden in the shadow.

 Kazo feels for the light switch beside the door and flips it. The fungi tubes in the ceiling are activated. Slowly, the room is illuminated by a soft blue light.

Reacting to the sudden change in lighting, the patient moans gutturally, beginning to breathe at an accelerated pace.

“It’s okay,” Kazo hushes, putting his hands up to show no ill intent. “Just want to make sure I can see you properly.” He hesitates. “Now, can you turn towards me please?”

The thing stays where it is, but its breathing begins to relax a little. Its lumpy shoulders drop, but only slightly. Kazo hopes that the nurses haven’t overdone the dosage today, or he and the subject will make little progress. Today will be their final go at it.

Kazo studies the poor creature’s back, noticing the growths that have grown larger since his last visit. Little hairs have begun to spring out of the numerous tumors invading the back, like little islands in a sea of sickness. The lacerations don’t look much better either. Some leak a yellow pus, indicating infection.

Feeling a lump in his throat, Kazo asks, “any trouble today?”

The thing just licks at its arms and shivers.

“I know,” Kazo says. “It is rather cold, isn’t it? I’d ask to turn up the heat, but I’m sure my superiors would tell me that’d only upset the other patients. I could call a nurse to bring you a blanket or something later when they change the waste bin. Would you like that?”

As he says this, he eyes the black spots along the neck of his patient. That was how things usually started, before a subject began to change. He tries to ignore the putrid smell from the opposite corner of the room. The people who work in the facility do their best to keep the place clean and comfortable for Kazo’s patients, but with the sheer number of subjects in the system, sometimes it’s hard to keep up with sanitary conditions.

Steeling his nerves, he walks up a little closer to the subject. “Can you show me your signs? Have you been practicing as we asked?” he whispers.

She doesn’t move for a while, simply shivering in the fetal position. Slowly, the creature lifts a hand, running through a form of alphabet in sign language. It does this rather crudely, like a child trying to grab at the moon or sun, a pathetic attempt. She is not doing much better than in their last session.

“Ah, you haven’t been practicing at all, have you?” Kazo tuts.

The creature drops its hand, brushing past thin strands of long dark hair that reach to the stone floor.

“Now, there’s no need to sulk,” Kazo says. “You must remember to keep practicing. We can’t give you what you need if we aren’t able to communicate with you. Now please, let’s see that ‘A’ again.”

It only grunts.

“Please?”

It grunts again but puts up a hand balled like a fist.

Some promise, he thinks over the sound of his heart pounding.

“Good. Very good,” he says. “But fix your thumb. Stick it out just slightly, like this.”

He shows her the sign, but she does not bother to look.

When did I start thinking of it as a she again?  he thinks.

He sighs. “I’m only trying to help, Elizabeth. Unlike the other doctors, I want you to get better. I want to help you. But to do that you’re going to need to help me by practicing your signs.”

Kazo knows this is only a half-truth, but it is the truth, nonetheless. He wants to help her. Unfortunately, there is very little he can do in his position.

He squints as Elizabeth’s face begins to show under the soft blue light that comes from the fungi in the ceiling tubes. He pulls out a small notebook and a pen from his jacket pocket and proceeds to scribble some notes.

He studies her eyes, which now begin to bulge out of her skull like an anglerfish’s. They have already turned from opaque white to glassy black, like obsidian. Her face is becoming startingly skeletal, like all the moisture has been sucked out of her body. He grimaces at the lips that have mostly rotted away.

She licks her teeth in their absence. He covers his mouth, attempting to hide a retch.

Regaining his composure, he cautiously looks closer at her head. He noticed the receding hairline, what once was a beautiful dark meadow of hair has become a scant desert. The hair on her head is thinning dramatically. Then, there is the growing size of her cranium. Soon she will struggle to even hold her head up.

The bulges are haphazard, but the growth cannot be contested. Since their last session, her head has grown a fourth of its previous size. The metamorphosis is moving along steadily and more and more rapidly.

As she bites off the last piece of her lip, he picks himself up. They aren’t going to get anywhere today, he knows, and after the poor performance with the signs, they probably never will. She has changed far too much, and her condition will only get worse. He has seen this countless times before.

He nods, trying to put on his best smile. “I-I’ll do my best to see that you get better conditions here. If you practice some more before my next visit, I’ll put in a request to double your rations.”

Kazo tightens his lip. He knows there won’t be a next time.

          He nods again to emphasize his sincerity, closing the door so as not to frighten her.

            A ghostly screech follows, rattling his spine.

          Turning towards the hall, Kazo finds that he is trembling.

He will have to sign off another patient! How many has he been forced to teach and study before? How many has he already seen go through the same metamorphosis? It’s getting worse and worse! While some showed promise and could be put to use, like the creature in the waiting room, still more had to be sterilized or put to death. All those poor creatures, once healthy men and women… Do they comprehend what is happening to them? Do they deserve to be signed off?

            Is any of this right?

          Doctor Kazo Horthep passes through the final door that leads to the outside world; a world blissfully unaware of what is happening here at his company. He shudders, wiping the sweat off his forehead once more.

          Since when have people become like fruit flies to study in a jar?

          Kazo looks down at the black mark growing on his wrist. He pulls his sleeve up, then shakes his head. I’ll need another whiskey tonight, he thinks, walking out into the darkness. He silences his conscience for another day.

R.J. Melby’s stories have appeared in The Tower, The Spirit River Review, and The Rapids Review, and he is also the recipient of the Contributor to a Literary Magazine Award. He currently resides in Minnesota with his wonderful fiancée and similarly wonderful but grumpy Siamese cat.

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