Extraction
Sometimes, difficult decisions need to be made. And, sometimes, they are made for us.
This flash fiction tale is a Level 3 entry for Bradley Ramsey’s Power Up Prompt #28
Extraction
The monolithic Shed Medical Clinic and Hospital towered over downtown Tyberton due to its resting at the top of Harroway Hill—the highest summit in the city center. The complex had been augmented and updated over the decades, but the pyramid at its highest point remained an iconic, if odd, historic landmark.
The general citizenry knew not why the Adel family who built the hospital all those ages ago insisted on the Egyptian finial. They could not have known the family’s ties to the ancient land with its surgical secrets of Saqqara imbued by visitors from a distant galaxy. Nor could they have imagined what went on in the hospital’s unknown basement level.
But Dr. Omar Adel knew it all too well. It had been passed down, generation by generation: the gift they had been given and the duty it demanded. But even they did not know why the ancient aliens had offered it to them. That remained a mystery—even to the Adel family.
But the duty remained.
Irrevocable.
Eternal.
Descendants of Shed, the ancient Egyptian god who protected against chaotic forces.
Forces that were brewing.
Growing.
And Dr. Adel stood as the one with the unique resource to cut it down to size. For he held the Scalpel of Sight. The blade that cut through facades as easily as flesh and allowed Adel to see the truth inside his fellow man.
This is why he tirelessly made the rounds while, deep in his pocket, his fist grasped the scalpel. He simply had to get close enough to a patient for the scalpel to sense them. It would tell Adel what he needed to know.
He would feel its vibrations.
Its heat.
It would come alive in his fist with a burning buzz if the person was one of the diseased.
It used to be a rare event.
But things had changed.
Dr. Abel did not know why.
He did not know that another alien race had sent an undetectable contagion to Earth; one that accelerated and amplified the villainy of man which spread, like a virulent disease, across the globe. A disease which has never been able to be cured throughout history; it can only be cut out like a tumor, piece by piece. And the Abel family’s legacy—like similar families around the world—was to extract as much of the evil as possible.
Dr. Abel’s scalpel would burn in his hand and, in his mind, he would see the diseased person’s crimes whether they’d already happened or were yet to happen.
The murders, the rapes, the abuse…
All of it.
It never failed to sicken Dr. Adel, but he had forced himself through necessity to master a poker face as the numbers steadily increased. Still, some things caused him to scurry to the restroom to dry heave.
And so, while he normally upheld the Hippocratic Oath to do no patient harm, his obligation to keep others safe from harm from the monsters of our own species more and more often tipped the scales and made him take over certain cases; those patients the scalpel revealed as diseased would end up getting taken down to the basement while under anesthesia to become organized operation room fatalities. Because tumors needed to be removed to keep a body healthy, and the greater body of humanity as whole far outweighed the body of the foul individual being extracted from the picture.
It was precision surgery.
And it was being carried out across the globe.
But would Adel and his international crew be able to stop the pandemic?
Only time would tell.
In the meantime, he felt the call of the scalpel burning in his hand once again…