Chapter #5Anatomy by: Yote   When you open your eyes, you're standing in a vast library. Huge, mahogany bookshelves of textbooks rise to the ceiling and seemingly stretch away all the way to the vanishing point, the infinite shelves only ending when they become obscured in the dim murkiness of the library. There re is a strong, pleasant smell of wood polish and old paper.
Dotted here and there are posed anatomical statues, human figures with their skin stripped away, displaying their purple-red musculature, their internal organs, venous system, skeleton, or nervous system. They look unbelievably lifelike - anatomy has certainly come a long way from the plastic models of old. If you didn't know any better, you could swear some of them moved. The audience of dissected humans and the deep silence of the library is unsettling.
Next to you, there is a desk, on which a book has been left open. Next to the desk, there is a computer terminal. The screen glows amber. It was from this terminal that the alert had been sent. Whoever had accessed the terminal had been part way through typing a message too, though had been unable to finish or send it. It just reads 'HEL'. Taking a step closer to the terminal, your foot brushes against something on the thick, crimson carpet. An arm lays on the ground. Curious, you pick it up, glancing round for the model to which it belongs. None of the ones close to you seem to match the pale complexion of the limb you hold in your hand.
Suddenly the arm twitches, the fingers gripping your arm fiercely. You yelp in surprise, prying it away and throwing it. The arm wriggles and thrashes on the ground. Backing away, you trip over something else. It is a shoe, complete with a foot.
At least they can't have gotten far. Approaching the intersection between shelves, you round the corner into the next aisle to find the place strewn with books, as though they had been pulled from the shelves and thrown. A severed human hand crawls slowly across the carpet like a spider. A little further on you discover a small chunk of flesh. Then a torn, tattered shirt. Another foot... A pair of jeans... A knee... A thigh...
Following the trail, the silence gives way to human voices until rounding a final corner, you almost fall over two figures (well... 1.5 really) on the ground. It is the girl you served only a minute ago, the medical student, her arms and legs cleanly severed and her clothes gone. Naked and helpless, she desperately tries to squirm away from the man crouched over her and the scalpel in his hand. You recognize him immediately as one of the pre-med students that frequents the cafe, though usually he isn't nude and rambling like a madman while foam bubbles from the corners of his mouth. He swings the scalpel down, cutting a long, deep line from between her breasts down to her navel. Thrusting his hands into the cut and inside her abdominal cavity, he continues to rant. "anterolateral...oblique...linea alba...no time no time...pulmonary trunk...pericardium...NO TIME!"
He raises the scalpel again. Grabbing a heavy textbook, you heft it at him. It strikes him across the head and he scrambles away on all fours, hissing at you like an animal.
"Go on, get out of here, ya creep!" you yell, throwing a Twelfth Edition Gray's Anatomy. "Fucking med students! Learn to unwind already!" Your barrage forces him back. He cowers behind a bookcase while you stoop to check on the shaking, limbless girl on the ground.  | Members who added to this interactive story also contributed to these: |
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