The corridor was deserted, save for him; his slow breathing was the only sound disturbing the eerie quiet. He thought he heard footsteps behind him, and before he could turn someone had pulled his hands behind his back and clapped a hand over his mouth. Sweet-smelling chloroform-soaked fabric was thrust roughly into his mouth, and he inhaled sharply, trying to pull his hands free.
"Sh, America, sh. It will all be over soon..."
He fell limp and let his eyes close.
...
A harsh light shone on his face. He could feel the cold steel table burn his naked flesh, and suppressed a shiver. The rest of the room was plain and cast into sharp shadows from the floodlights, and he screwed his eyes shut. Someone to his left murmured quietly, "I think the chloroform's worn off. Should we give him another dose?"
A thin voice snapped back from his right. "No. It will take too long. He'll probably struggle again. Just start marking everything out."
A chalky crayon drew thick lines across his body. "We've got to keep Social Security and Medicare. Medicaid, TARP, debt, the usual..."
Oh. Oh. So that was what this was. Budget cuts. Cuts. He swallowed dryly.
Something thin and metallic pressed against the skin of his forearm. "Cut." A high, reedy voice commanded. It sliced cleanly into his skin, spilling blood like a bursting balloon, gushing over his arms and dripping to the table with a sick ticking sound, like the marching step of a clock. The knife made a little incision and scraped out his flesh. "Enough!" The voice at his left sounded disgusted.
"Just a sliver more," the voice on the right cajoled. "Just a tiny bit, and we'll all be happy, right?" Scalpel still imbedded in his arm, they leaned across the table close enough that he could feel their body heat radiate off of them.
Finally, agonizingly slowly, they drew the blade out of his arm, picking out lumps of twitching muscle fiber with cold tongs and tucking his arm closer to his body. "Cut here and fill it in." The same cold voice seemed to be pointing at some part of him. Another slice, now at his chest. He recoiled in horror as they took the still warm and dripping bit of flesh and patted it down with the flat side of the knife into the hole. "Good. Sew it back up and we can move on." A needle poked thick thread through his skin, and he fought the instinct to rip the metal out of him.
"Here." Tiny slices of muscle and fat tissue were pulled out, slapping obscenely on the metal tray he presumed they were placed on. Small mutterings of protest were issued, though from which side he could not discern.
"Let's get it over with. Lots more. The Department of Justice..." Drawing a thin line over the flesh behind his ear, they cut out a wide patch of skin and let it fall to the table. Someone dropped the scalpel with a dull metallic clang and withdrew a new instrument. "Carefully, now." A wide, flat piece of metal began to saw back and forth, gently scraping the flesh off in one single layer. "Just a bit more." It too was deposited somewhere else.
The left voice took his hand, and he thought it might be in comfort. "Here. 3.8 percent." He let out a sigh of disappointment, one that went unnoticed. A grunt of annoyance. "Corps of Engineers. Just saw through it." Unable to jerk his hand away as they cut the nerves and tendons, he clenched his other hand in an attempt to refrain from screaming. "Careful, now."
Muscles removed as neatly as possible, they draped the flap of skin over the gaping hole in his hand before they moved on. "We won't have enough to go around...The General Services Administration? Here." One last cut on his upper thigh, and a long, thin sliver of muscle was drawn out.
"Start with the increases." Again, the commanding tone whose possessor he so wished to wring the neck of. Quick, cold fingers traced specific shapes across his body, and the knife followed them clumsily. "Add, add, add." Now cold muscles and layers of fat slopped against his skin messily and dripped runny blood down the sides of his body. They came to another incision.
Silence, for a moment.
"You and your debt!" The voice on his right raged. "We can't borrow this much from them! Soon we'll have nothing to give!"
The left shouted back even more vehemently. "We need to do this! There's no other way! They've already given us them now. There's no time to argue. He might faint from blood loss." He marveled at the veritable puddle of blood he lay in and how much still struggled sluggishly through his veins at the feeble, lurching command of his heart.
New, foreign tissue was inserted delicately into the gaping holes. He gagged and felt his throat convulse sickeningly at the feel of this new flesh rubbing abrasively against his own. They continued to fill in each wound with new muscle.
"And the finishing touch..." Something sharp jabbed into his neck, and he choked out a shriek before losing consciousness.
"Sh, America, sh, it will all be over soon..."
Firstly, no one is allowed to start yelling at me for my depiction of politics. That's one mud-slinging festival I'm not rolling my sleeves up for.
Um...there's no secondly. XP So yeah. This is what I think of now when I see people argue over budget cuts...surgeons arguing over America as he lies there naked and bloody on the operating table...pretty, right?