Riding on the back of Dana's motorcycle was the most terrifying experience in my life. I would rather get shot at again. Beth's brief description of it didn't do it justice. It was a monster of a machine. The rumble of the bike rattled my teeth along with all the windows on every house on the street.
I had my hands wrapped tightly around her waist with my hands locked together in a death grip so I wouldn't fall off. If I was squeezing her too hard she didn't mention it. I doubt she could feel it. Her stomach was rock hard and her back was a sheet of muscle. It was like I wrapped my arms around a tree trunk.
I didn't know where we were headed. I had my eyes squeezed shut. It felt like we were going about a million miles per hour. It was going to be ironic if Dana got into an accident and killed us on the way to the doctor. If we slammed into a wall we would be mashed into paste.
I hadn't even realized that we stopped until I felt Dana prying my fingers apart. I still felt like we were moving. My entire body was still shaking from the ride. Dana said something to me, but I couldn't hear her. I wanted her to turn the engine off and then realized that it was off. I took off my helmet. She stored it and her bright pink helmet in a saddle bag while I waited for the world to return to normal.
We weren't at a hospital, we were down by the docks. She had parked in front of a giant, seemingly abandoned warehouse.
"I thought we were going to a hospital," I said.
"No, I said I was taking you to a doctor. This is where he works."
"This doesn't look like a very sanitary place."
"You've trusted me this far. Just go inside. Nothing bad is going to happen to you. Shadow uses this guy all the time."
"But you've never used him," I said.
"Doctors are for people who get hurt."
She took my hand and basically dragged me to the door. With as big as she was I felt like I'd reverted to my childhood and my mom was taking me to the dentist.
Inside the doors was an antechamber. Blocking us from entering further were two large steel doors. To the side of them was an intercom. Dana pressed the talk button.
"Yes?" a tinny woman's voice came from the speaker.
"This is Dana Devastation. I'm here with my guest to see the doctor."
"One moment, please."
I held my breath. Nothing happened. Dana seemed unconcerned. She had her arms crossed and was drumming her fingers on her biceps. There then came a massive clank from the door, like a giant lock being released. The two doors opened to reveal a stereotypical doctor's waiting room. It was a complete contrast to the antechamber we were just in. The walls were painted a soothing blue color. Chairs lined the walls with tables in front of them which even had magazines. What got me the most was how bright it was. We'd just come in from the dark, but the office felt like it was midday. I looked over and realized the windows were showing bright sunshine. They showed trees with birds chirping in them. It was a view that didn't exist in the industrial district we were in.
They weren't windows, they were screens displaying a facade of the outside.
Dana walked up to the nurse's counter. I trailed behind her. I did a double-take when the nurse looked up from the document she was reading. She was a robot. She had blonde human hair and wore an old-style nurses outfit, but her skin was blue steel. Her face was a smooth oval with two red glowing orbs for eyes. Her mouth was a speaker shaped like an orange wedge. I guess it was supposed to look like a smile.
It was such a retro design that I expected it to move in jerky motions. Instead it had a fluid grace, almost human, as it moved around. It pulled a clipboard from a stack and slid it across the desk.
"All new patients must fill out this form, please. Once you return it to me the doctor will deal with you."
"Okay, I guess." I said.
I took the clipboard and sat down in a chair. Dana came over and handed me a pen, which I had neglected to take. I thanked her. Instead of trying to cram in between the armrests of the chairs Dana lounged on a couch. She picked up a fashion magazine and flipped through it.
"It seems weird. Having to fill out forms for a criminal doctor," I said.
"It's just like going to a real doctor, from what I hear," Dana replied.
"Except he's not taking insurance. I kind of got the impression that this was a cash-only type of operation."
"It is. He just wants stuff like medical history, injuries. That crap," she flipped a page in her magazine.
"My injury is that I got shot. Didn't you already tell him that when you set this up?"
"Fill out the paperwork. If he wants it, then give it to him. It's not hurting anything."
"...there's a spot here for super villain name. I should just leave that blank, right?"
"Are you a super villain?"
"No."
"Then I would leave it blank."
The form was very basic for the most part, but then also very specialized in some parts. A lot of it was based around powers: origin of powers, source of powers, type of mutations, etc. I ended up leaving a lot of it blank. There was an entire page dedicated to STDs to check off broken down into terrestrial, extra-terrestrial and inter-dimensional. I read through it, but curious and horrified. None of it applied to me. I hoped.
"Dana...does Beth have any STDs I should know about?"
"You would know better than me, cowboy," Dana said from behind her magazine.
Finally I reached the last page and signed my name. I flipped back to the front page to review it. With how little applied to me it looked like I hadn't written anything. The nurse-bot could've handed me a Post-it note and I could've written on it Luke- gunshot victim.
I walked back to the nurses' station and handed the clipboard back. The nurse-bot thanked me and put it into a folder.
"The doctor will be with you shortly," she said. It. It said.
I walked back to my chair. The moment I sat down a fairly loud chime broke through the muzak playing. Dana looked up from her magazine.
"The doctor will see you now," the nurse-bot said.
Dana and I stood up. We walked through the door the nurse-bot gestured to. Through that was an examination room. I'd seen ones just like it a dozen times growing up. I didn't know it if I was supposed to hop up and sit on the table. The nurse-bot hadn't followed us in. Dana leaned against a counter so I did the same.
Even though the nurse-bot told us the doctor would be seeing us, the wait was nearly ten minutes. We would have been better served if we'd been allowed to remain in the waiting room. At least then we'd have magazines to read and chairs to sit in. I was actually fine waiting in the exam room. It was Dana who was having the problem. She adjusted herself numerous times during the wait. She let out huge sighs of impatience more than twice the number of adjustments. Eventually she started going through the drawers and cupboards. There was nothing interesting to find: bandages, gauze, tongue depressors. She was amused when she discovered a speculum. She cackled and clacked it open and closed at me.
"Why don't you play on your phone or something?" I finally asked.
She blushed, actually blushed, "I got stuck on a level of this game and accidentally crushed it this afternoon. I have to buy a new one tomorrow."
"Do you have to do that often?"
"Not a lot. Once a month, maybe."
"That sounds like it's costly."
"I got insurance. It's more of a pain in the ass. But you should see the looks on the faces of the employees when I bring in my damaged phones. They think they've seen it all. Last time the employee had to pry my SIM card out with a pair of needle-nosed pliers."
"Heh."
"What?" Dana asked.
"Sorry, it's just...I thought you'd have a special phone. Like an unbreakable one built for you by a mad scientist or something."
"You would think that. Except all of them are concerned with building doomsday devices or sex-bots. There have been attempts, but they were always kind of shitty, half-baked efforts. They weren't easily mass produced, setting them up with a carrier was a bitch and not one of them was compatible with the app store."
"Fair enough."
We lapsed back into silence. I didn't have any more phone discussion left in me. Her reasons made sense, kind of, but here we were at a villains-only doctor. I took it for granted that they had their own complete secret society with all their own stuff, separate from normal people.
Before I could think any more on it the door on the far side of the room opened. The doctor stepped through it. Briefly I caught a glimpse of the rest of the building behind him. It was an industrial hall. There was a giant Tesla coil firing way in the back, the cracks of electricity were as loud as thunder claps. Between that were the shrieks of monkeys as they rattled their cages. The door shut and instantly all the sounds stopped like they were never there. I seemed to be the only one who cared.
The doctor examined my clipboard. He was a thin, tall man with a pointed chin. He had curly hair which was red on top with gray on the sides. He wore one of those old-timey headbands with the mirror attached to it. His scrubs were completely black. Over them he wore what at first looked to be a dirty medical jacket. It used to be white, but hadn't been washed to remove the grime so it was more gray now. I looked closer and noticed that the arms were too long. They hung down nearly to his knees, but had slits up the sleeves to his elbow so he could move his arms. Various, apparently needless, straps hung off him.
It wasn't a medical coat, it was a straight-jacket! He'd converted it. There was no solid front and it had buttons down it. He'd even sewn a pocket on the left breast and held pens in it. On the right breast I could see the faint stencil which read Happy Hills Mental Institution.
My eyes widened and my mouth went dry. Neither Dana nor the doctor noticed my now scared state. The doctor was a mental patient! Not just that he was from the crazy house made for the violently insane patients and the ones with powers. The place hadn’t been operational for more than a decade. Back when I was in high school something happened one night and there was an explosion. It killed a lot of people. None of the guards there made it out alive. Then the patients got out and more people died. After that the National Guard was called in. They managed to round up most of the escaped patients pretty quick.
They never caught all.
The city never rebuilt the hospital. It was left to rot on the hill; a mostly burned out skeleton of a building surrounded by fences warning people to stay away. Kids were always getting busted sneaking in there on dares. These were always the younger kids who weren't alive when the explosion happened. They knew it as an urban legend; they didn't know the fear of being in the city while it was in lockdown. They probably only heard of the house-to-house searches the military conducted to find the escapees. The news had been filled with stories of people being attacked by super-powered lunatics and being murdered in horrific ways. Since we all knew that they hadn't all been captured rumors grew that they wandered around the city, ticking time bombs which could go off at any moment.
Here I was standing right next to one of them. And he was supposed to take care of me. Suddenly I felt less like a patient and more like an animal taken to the vet to be put down.
He slipped a cuff around my forearm and squeezed a rubber bulb. He checked the dial on a hose and frowned.
"Hnm, blood pressure is a tad high," he said.
"I'm a bit nervous," I replied.
"That's fine. I see a lot of that when people come into the doctor's office. We call it ‘white coat hypertension.’ Don't worry. Everything is going to be fine, just fine."
"Yeah, fine."
"I don't know, doctor," Dana said, "he doesn't look okay. He looks...sweaty. And pale."
"You do look very tense, Luke."
"Of course I'm tense! My doctor is a mental patient!" I blurted.
The doctor looked surprised, then he looked down at his chest and read the stenciling. He laughed.
"That. I always forget that. No, I'm not a mental patient."
"That's a relief."
"I mean, I was. But I'm not anymore. I'm not in a hospital therefore I'm not a patient."
"But you were a mental patient. You were at Happy Hills, right?"
"Yes. Terrible place. Awful food. Glad to be rid of it. I am glad Gomez blew it all up and gave us our freedom. But don't worry, just relax. Before I was committed I was a doctor. So I was a doctor, then a patient, now I'm a doctor again." He pointed to a diploma on the wall. It was singed by fire.
"Okay."
"I don't think you believe me."
"I do."
"You have to trust me. That is the most important part of the doctor/patient relationship: trust."
"It's hard for me to trust someone who just admitted they broke out of a mental institution."
"Geez, you're so uptight," Dana said.
"No, it's a perfectly valid complaint, Miss Destruction. I can assure you, young man, that I am fine. I am no longer crazy. I take all the right pills. Every day. I think. I mean, there are days when I forget. Today was not one of those days. I don't think. It doesn't matter because I feel great! Now what are we doing?!"
Hesitantly I brought him up to speed on the exact situation since the chart hadn't really allowed me to go into detail.
"I'm not even sure exactly why I'm here. I had a really good doctor and I think I'm healing very well."
"You could be healing much better. I want you to do this for me: lift your arms over your head."
I managed to easily lift my right arm. My left arm hitched and as I pushed it further I experienced extreme pain, which was evident on my face.
"See?" the doctor said, "You can't. By 'healing well' you'll only be able to do that for the rest of your life because of the tissue damage. Only slightly inconvenient. So you're here to be healed. There's the chest wound, it also sounds like you'll probably want me to give you back your normal voice."
"It would be nice to speak without this rasp. It kind of hurts," I said.
"I can do that for you. From your X-rays I noticed that you're missing a tooth..."
"Wait, X-Rays? You haven't done anything!"
"Oh, I bathe the whole office in X-rays whenever someone comes into the office. I feel it saves time."
"But you left us waiting here for ten minutes," I said.
"Yes, well, I was on the toilet. Sorry about that. It did give me a chance to study the photos I took of you two."
"You'll be deleting the ones of me once I leave, right?" Dana asked. She cracked her knuckles.
"What do you care?" I asked.
"They're just pictures of your bones," the doctor said.
"Really?" Dana asked.
"Yes."
"Really?"
"...I'll delete them immediately," the doctor said.
"Thank you."
"Anyway, you want me to slap a new tooth in there while we're at it?"
"Are you certified to do that?" I asked.
"I may not have one of those fancy dental degrees, but it can't be that hard. All parts of the body are basically the same."
"I don't think that's true," I said.
"Look, I've done it before, it's not hard. Besides, last week I put the Unforgiving Tree back together. He's made completely out of wood. When he came to me he was toothpicks and kindling. He left my office a happy, murderous Ent. Medicine is easy, no matter the practice, no matter the species. So let me jam a tooth back into your head. I guarantee it'll be less painful than having a 'real' dentist do it."
"Okay," I said.
"Good. Perfect. Now do you want anything special in your tooth?"
"What? Like a diamond? No! Just a normal tooth."
"That's so boring! You have an opportunity to jazz it up! I could put in a tooth with a cyanide capsule, huh? That's a favorite. Classic as all hell. Or I could put one in with a two-way radio. You'd never have to worry about wearing a stupid looking Bluetooth headset again. Oooh, I know! Let me put a tooth in your mouth with a laser. That would be cool."
I tongued the empty socket where my tooth used to be, "but my missing tooth isn't in the front. Wyatt caught me on the jaw and knocked out one of the big ones in the back, by my cheek. I don't think a laser will work well."
"Sure it will. It's a laser. It will definitely go through your cheek."
"I don't want a laser going through my cheek."
"You're such a pansy about pain," Dana said.
"We all don't have super-healing powers like you. Besides, when would I ever use it? I'd probably activate it while I was asleep and burn my apartment down."
"You could've used it in your fight with Wyatt. You know, shot him in the fist when he was pummeling your face."
"Very helpful. I'd still have a gaping wound in my cheek, like someone gave me a Glasgow smile. It'd be much harder to fix. I can go to a normal doctor to fix that, I don't have to see some crazy doctor for skin grafts," I gestured towards the doctor.
"Psycho Surgeon, actually," he said.
"Pardon?"
"My name is the Psycho Surgeon. The Crazy Doctor is a completely different guy. Easy mistake to make, really. Though I figured you would have seen my name on the door when you arrived."
"There was nothing on the door."
"Right, right, right. That was the old place. When I moved out here I finally stopped advertising. It made it way too easy for the police to find me. So we got the chest, the neck, and the tooth. Unfortunately since you used that fancy conventional medicine instead of coming to me first I won't be able to do much for the scars. One last thing before we get started is whether or not you want me to do anything about your nose."
I felt my nose. My thumb traced over the new crook Wyatt had given me when he broke it. The doctors set pretty well and it healed okay, all things considered. But still...I didn't want to be reminded of that asshole every time I looked in the mirror.
"I am getting kind of concerned about the cost of all this..."
"Don't worry about it," Dana said, "Beth said to get it all taken care of. Money no object. She would have even covered the laser tooth if you weren't such a baby. She knows how much the Pyscho's services cost and is willing to pay."
"Though I will offer a discount if you let me keep some of those pictures to sell," the Psycho Surgeon chimed in.
"Absolutely not."
"Fine then."
"Okay," I said, "fix my nose while I'm out."
"I'll have to re-break it before I can. If that's fine with you.
"Yes, just get to it."
I expected the doctor to get a tank of gas or a needle to put me under. What I didn't expect him to do was punch me in the face. It was a good, solid hit right in the nose. Blood gushed out. I fell backward onto the examination table with my hands clutched to my face. It hurt. A lot. But not as much as when Wyatt punched me. My nose was definitely not broken.
"Jesus Christ," I shouted.
"Good, God, Psycho, why didn't you put him out first?!" Dana said.
"I was trying. Looks like I'm not as strong as I used to be. Time was, I could knock a man out with one punch. Granted, I was on a strength serum I'd invented. I should really make more of that. Maybe it would also help me with my erectile difficulties."
"There had to be an easier way," I said.
"Unfortunately not. The, uh, staff here at Psycho Surgeon's Health Care Center have been programmed to keep the narcotics safely locked away until necessary. It's so that someone, me, doesn't use them for, um, recreational purposes."
"And you didn't think that an actual patient coming in for a scheduled visit would necessitate the unlocking of them?" Dana asked.
"Not really, no. Slipped my mind. Speaking of, I really should go get some of my nurses to assist me. Also to get me, I mean, the patient some drugs. It won't take but a little bit to get the girls up and running."
"What should I do about Luke? He's bleeding all over the place. Give me some gauze."
"I wouldn't do that."
"Why not?" Dana and I asked in unison.
"He still needs his nose broken to fix it. Pack it now and that's a waste of gauze. I'll be back."
The Psycho Surgeon walked back into the room with the screaming monkeys.
"Can you get me a paper towel or something? I'm bleeding everywhere."
Dana grabbed a handful and gave them to me. I held them to my face while we waited for the Psycho Surgeon to return. By the time he came back my nose had stopped bleeding, though the wad of paper towels was completely soaked through.
"I'll take that for you," he grabbed the paper towels and shoved them into one of his pockets, "and now you'll feel a slight pinch."
With his free hand he stabbed me in the chest with a large hypodermic needle. I didn't get a chance to protest before he depressed the plunger. There was a brief spike of fire in my veins which quickly turned to a warm, comfortable numbness. If I was still capable of being startled after the shot I would have been at how quickly I was losing feeling in every part of my body.
"Am I gonna' be awake for alla this?" I slurred. It took all my strength to move my tongue to make words.
"No, you'll be quite asleep and happily dreaming. It takes but a moment to get to you. Did you feel that?"
"Feel what?"
"Excellent. We can at least start. Miss Devastation, I need your help."
"I'm not that good with healing, I'm more of a destroyer."
"Which is exactly what I need right now. I imagine you can easily break this young man's nose for me."
"What?" I asked.
The last thing I clearly remembered was turning to Dana and seeing her knuckles.
