A Twisted Tail

soldier to scientist

INSPECTION

The merman watched the male climb and mess with things in the silver structures overhead. A thud reverberated through his water drawing his attention to something new. An opening was slowly getting wider between him and the female. He crept towards it sniffing the current. It wreaked of illness and death. He looked down at the female with concern. Was she dead? He circled the port debating whether he would go through or not. This whole thing felt like a deep sea light fish trap. Its glowing light, tricking unsuspecting fish and mers alike. But his concern for her grew as he could hear the proof of life pulsing through the water. Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Bracing himself against the spinning current and the stench of her waters he darted through the hole and dove fast, aiming straight for her. He wrapped his arms around her and started to carry her in an outward spiral, letting the swirling water do most of the work as he made his way back to the opening and his side where everything was cleaner and calmer. He carefully pulled her through and drifted with her to the bottom as far as he could get away from the staring eyes of the white creatures. There he held her and explored the wounds all over her body. He traced each angry looking puckered line with his fingers. The gills on her neck opened and closed softly in time with her breath. Her fin was grotesque, It was bits of them and bits of his own kind. Females were rare in his world so he did not have much to compare her to, but he did not think she would be considered desirable in her state. But being a female on its own was enough. He grumbled as he thought about how much danger she was in around the white creatures, and how much danger she would be in surrounded by the open ocean. He swept her tendrils back from her face, marveling at their texture and the way they swayed in the water. At the end of each finger she had flat soft surfaces where he had short, sharp claws. Between them a webbing that was starting to smell putrid in some places, was a sickly gray or light sand color. He rubbed away at the dying patches until they flaked away leaving only the raw healthy bits. She was lacking in the protective coating his body was covered in and it concerned him. He pulled her close and cradled her, staring at her face, waiting for her to wake up. This time he could help her, maybe even prevent them from hurting her again.

SURGEON AND SOLDIER

A GI Bill could only get you so far, and Noah knew that better than anyone else. He worked 2 jobs while putting himself through medical school after he got out of the military. He had been in the special forces which meant he was sent to places to do things that ‘never happened’. These Clandestine operations often exposed him to things that could never be unseen or forgotten. It drastically changed him as a person. Being a doctor and a surgeon was never on his list of things to accomplish in life until his time in the military was up and he felt the need to do some good in the world to balance out all the bad. Medical school was the path he found himself on as he narrowed down his list of possible long term careers, choosing based on the opportunities to have the most impact. He had intended on joining Doctors without Borders but an entirely different opportunity presented itself that required his specific combination of skills. Surgeon and Soldier. He was suspicious as anyone would be when he was first approached. But they presented him with a unique situation to help people in need that he found hard to resist. It involved human trafficking, major corporations, government cover-ups, and in his words mad-science.

He flipped through the woman's file, which he was holding in his hand, just in case the director had questions. Elise Davis, 29, a female with no living relatives and very few friends whom she rarely saw, as she was always working. Her job was a remote one, so it was easy enough to make her disappear.

At that very moment he felt a sick sense of pride, that he wished he could carve out and cauterize, over a creation he had a part in making. He watched her floating at the bottom of the tank with the newly discovered species known as a mermaid. Or in this one's case, a merman. He stood there unflinchingly and coldly as he observed the two in the tank. Inside he was roiling with anxiety over the woman's well-being until the merman started to care for her. At least it seemed like it was. It wasn’t trying to eat her at least. He was ashamed that this experiment to put them in the same tank was his idea, but it was the lesser of two evils. After weeks of Post-op studies on the woman, the others were ready to terminate her. He presented them with this as an alternative.

“The objective is to get humans on the bottom of the ocean, long term, without having to come up. A part of that is going to be living among the… locals” He had said while casting a sidelong glance at the merman. He had refocused them on the long-term goal. Their goal, at least. He was trying to get the one survivor out of this butcher shop and into a witness protection program until enough evidence and witnesses were gathered. But after what she went through, extraction was not looking viable anytime soon.