Once Kinslow has cut through all the bandages, he pulls them out from beneath me and dumps them in a large bin set a few meters back from the chair. Mr. Dowling bends over to peer into the mess of my stomach. Dan-Dan peeled away the surrounding flesh and snapped off most of my ribs, leaving only stumps at the sides.
“What’s it like in there?” I ask Kinslow as he returns and studies the contents of my exposed stomach. When he doesn’t answer, I try raising my head to look.
“Don’t.” Kinslow stops me with a rare show of sympathy. “You don’t want to see this. Trust me.”
I lean back again and moan. It’s times like this that I wish I could cry.
Mr. Dowling reaches into the cavity and pulls something out. Maybe it’s my liver or a kidney. He nibbles on it, laughs, then tosses it at the bin. It misses and skids across the floor. The clown doesn’t seem to care. He roots around and looks for other organs to remove.
He works on my stomach for ages, yanking bits out, scraping other areas clean. Sometimes he sews stuff together.
In a few instances, he inserts tubes and wires, connecting whatever he thinks needs to be connected.
It doesn’t hurt as much as when Dan-Dan was breaking through my rib cage, but I’m far from comfortable. I jerk and wince a lot, occasionally cry out with genuine pain.
“Can’t you give me a bloody anaesthetic?” I snarl at Kinslow.
“They don’t work on zombies,” he says. Mr. Dowling mutters something and Kinslow nods. “Besides, you’re being born again here, and birth should be painful. It’s part of the charm.”
“Typical men,” I sneer. “My mum always said that if men had to give birth, painkillers would have been invented centuries earlier than they were.”
Mr. Dowling ignores my protestations and pushes on. I whimper, shriek and swear, but I might as well be whistling nursery rhymes for all the attention he pays.