Euthanasia

It was George Stein's second offense. The first time, the dragons were almost immediately isolated and destroyed. No one got hurt, and George was sentenced to six weeks in a penal center. At the end of his sentence, before he was released, he signed a contract, promising to stay on his repression medication, U7FR1.

This time it had happened while he was standing in a check-out line at the grocery store. A tall, well-groomed businessman with a briefcase broke in front of him.


"Hey," George yelled. The dragons manifested. The business-man was lying on top of an overturned candy rack, screaming and pawing at his own face. His nose and an ear were gone. A few feet away, near the exit, another dragon was feeding on an hysterical child.


When George came to, he was in a red room, strapped down in a chair. He couldn't move his arms or legs. A man, standing directly in front of him, punched him hard in the face.


"Nice to see you, George," said the man. A few drops of blood trickled from George's nose onto his shirt. "Someone got killed this time," the man continued. "And a guy had his fucking face ripped off. Who knows, he might die, too."


"Killed?" repeated George.


"A four year-old girl. We got the dragons, though. One wasn't too bad. The other one was a mean son of a bitch. He got my man across the leg before we took care of him. We've got you on injection now, J7U6."


George began to remember. A face devoid of a nose and an ear. A screaming child.


"What is it with you wackjobs?" the man went on, flipping through the pages of a file. He held up a copy of the contract George had signed. "When you were released before, you promised to stay on your medication." He shook the contract in George's face. "Remember?"


George could see the child. The dragon had her by the leg, gnawing.


"You know, a lot of money goes into researching people like you." The man began flipping through pages again, then put the file down on a table. "Waste of resources, I think."


What was going to happen now, George wondered. What were they going to do to him?


"Most people do what they're supposed to," continued the man. "I don't know, maybe it's all that New Age shit that leaked into this country." The man began to pace, occasionally glancing in George's direction. "Then again, there have always been people like you. People who believe in all that yin and yang crap." The man came over, slapped George across the face. "Hey, asshole, you listening?"


"They're wrong," George blurted. "I'm wrong."


"Yeah, you feel like that now, but in a couple of days that'll pass. And then people'll start showing up dead again. Take a pill. It's simple. Everyone takes something. 99.3% of the population takes repressives. You don't even have to pay for it. It's government-issued. Just take your repressives like everyone else, and everything goes fine. You don't have any discipline, George, that's your problem. You don't have any will power."


"Not this time. Not anymore."


The man ignored him. "Let me spell it out for you, George." He spoke slowly, emphasizing each syllable. "Re-pres-sion is nec-es-sar-y."


"I know it is," George blurted. "I try but-- I can't help it."


The interrogator spat on the floor and grabbed George's file from off the table. "I've got to go for a minute. I'll be back, though, George. Don't worry, I'll be back."


George was left alone in the red room. Why did he keep doing this, putting himself and others through this ordeal? Why couldn't he just take his repressives? Year after year, he continued succumbing to the most ridiculous rationalizations: This time it'll be different. This time I'll be able to handle the feelings.


He had tried to go to Repressives Anonymous meetings, where he and people like him could discuss the problem. He had been warned that things would only get worse. He got a sponsor, a guy who had taken his repressives every day for seven years. George only called him twice, though; and he never attended the meetings regularly.


He began thinking about the incidents he had gotten away with. He remembered the weekend when he and Bernard Fritz, a fellow student at The Egalitarian State University, had isolated themselves in the Adirondacks in order to go through withdrawal together.


"You start out taking one pill," Bernard screamed, "and in ten years, you're taking five. Whatever you repress, it gets stronger. The more you push it down, the more it's gonna wanna come out."


"At some point," he went on, "repressives won't work anymore. We'll become immune. The whole thing's gonna backfire on the government, man. Widespread manifestation's gonna begin. That's how it'll all end, dragons runnin' loose all over the country. Everybody killed by everybody else's anger."


On the fourth day of their Adirondacks experiment, a dragon manifested from one of George's nostrils and attacked Bernard. When George came to, the dragon was gone. Bernard's body was mutilated. When the authorities investigated, George claimed that a vagrant had manifested the dragon that killed Bernard. He, he told them, had managed to defend himself. Unable to refute his story, the police had no choice but to accept it; and the case went cold.


Another time, while having sex on the fourth day of withdrawal with a woman he met at a bar, a dragon had manifested from his penis. He could picture the woman, her abdomen gaping and mauled, her innards looking like ground beef.


The interrogator was back. "Miss me, George?"


George grunted. He hadn't even known the woman's name.


"Yeah, well, remember I was telling you about the J7U6? It's a neat drug. It doesn't work like a normal repressive. You've been off your stuff for what, four days?"


George didn't reply, and the man approached him, punched him again in the nose. "You're right," the man continued, "no point in me asking questions I already know the answers to. Four days, right?"


George nodded. He felt the anger rising, the adrenaline beginning to pump. His heart was beating faster.


"See, if I gave you a normal repressive, it would probably hold you for another two days. But the J7U6, it just suspends things for a little while. You're probably coming around about now, aren't you?"


It was as if a tourniquet had been removed. George felt an urge to sink his teeth into the interrogator's flesh. "Fuck you," George said.


"Oh yeah, you're one pissed son of a bitch, George. That's good. I want you to be pissed."


"I could kill you. I'll rip--"


The man leaned over, slapped George across the face. "I want you real pissed."


"Piece of shit," George groaned.


A heavy door slammed shut, and George was alone again in the red room. The interrogator began speaking through an intercom, his voice garbled in static. "You're a coward, George. You don't have any guts."


George strained against his bindings, clenched his fists, digging his fingernails into his palms.


The dragon appeared in front of him. It whipped its tail against one of the walls, chipping the red paint. "There you go, George," said the interrogator, "say hello to your baby." Another dragon appeared. It spat several times. Wads of black phlegm landed on the red walls and floor.


George writhed in his seat, trying to free himself. One of the dragons spat on George's leg. The phlegm ate through the fabric of his pants, smoldered into his genitals. The other dragon spat in George's face.


"Let me out," George screamed. "I promise--" One of the dragons clawed his torso. George's intestines fell out of his abdomen and landed on his lap.


"That's gotta hurt," said the interrogator. The other dragon slashed George across the head, splitting open his skull, and exposing his brain. George's body convulsed in the chair.


The dragons converged. Blood flowed from George's body in belching waves. One of the dragons buried his mouth in George's gaping skull, emerging with his pink brain gripped between its teeth.


The interrogator let the dragons feed for a few minutes before turning on the gas. As the beasts inhaled the fumes into their lungs, they grew increasingly unsteady. They collapsed onto the floor and curled into fetal positions. As they took their last breaths, they disappeared.


The interrogator and a younger man, his intern, entered the red room.


"I've never seen them turn on the host like that," said the intern.


"If they're contained and no one else is around, then ... well, you can see for yourself."


"Damn," said the intern. George's skeleton had been torn apart. Pieces of flesh were scattered around the room like shrapnel. Blood was everywhere. George's disengaged forearms were still strapped to the arms of the chair. "Isn't there some other way?"


"Listen," said the interrogator, "think of the victims. Could be you, your mother. These people get what they deserve."


The two men walked out of the room, leaving the door open.


The cleaners arrived a few minutes later. They gathered up George's flesh and bones and sent them to the crematorium. They threw out the splintered table and the mangled chair. They scrubbed the walls, mopped and polished the floor, coated the room with another layer of red paint.


"Another one down," the interrogator said later, after he and the intern had a few drinks at a bar. "Sure got what was coming to him," he added. He wasn't sure about the intern. He was going to have to watch him closely, he decided.


"Damn straight," the intern quipped, trying to conceal his uncertainty. He felt like a hypocrite. What's wrong with me, he thought. He was at the top of his class. And here he was, playing with fire. He had not taken his repressive in two days. "Listen, I'm gonna head home. I need to start outlining this paper that's due pretty soon. But I'll be in early tomorrow."


"Uh-huh," said the interrogator.


The intern got back to his apartment, took his prescribed dose of LI86T, and crawled into bed. Maybe I'll go to some RA meetings, he thought. No, he decided, I'll handle it myself. I'll just make myself take the pills. It's as simple as that.


He finally fell asleep. Throughout the night he tossed and turned, dreamt of human limbs stripped to the bone, dragons roaring on the outskirts of town.

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