REPO! THE GENETIC OPERA: ET IN ARCÆDIA EGO

Chapter I:  "Plaga Medicus"

Written by Abri Isgrig and Diane N. Tran


Dr. Juan Guerrero read that headline splashed across the front page of a discarded copy of the magazine, Vanity and Vein:

WHO IS THE PLAGUE DOCTOR?

The infamous Repo Man — an urban legend, a figment of the mind's eye, a ghoul, a boogeyman — was sketched upon the cover, with a pair of hollow, soulless eyes and a long, vulturine beak and a dramatic, flowing cape.  It was amusing really, as it looked nothing like him.  Artists are a strange and imaginative lot, but not very smart.

Guerrero tossed the magazine into the gutter, studying it roll along with the other trash the wind carried.   He turned on his holographic watch:

It was time.  Would she come?

Turning the corner, a woman, fresh and beautiful, pranced down the half-lit alleyway with a man at her arm, gleefully laughing at the world as she did so.  Who she was and why she was here was unimportant.  She skipped a payment to GeneCo on her heart and, by contract, had to pay the price of said penalty.  He watched her escort — her client, no doubt — press her against the building wall in a lustful promise, and Guerrero made his move.

He stepped out of the depths of the shadows, under the guise of the Repo Man, and cracked a heavy walking-stick across the spine of the man and he knocked him to the ground.  He unsheathed a ready blade from his staff and slit the woman's throat, as her body slumped over her companion.  The man scrabbled to his feet at the sight of the Corpse and turned to find himself affront a harbinger of Judgment:

The Plague Doctor.

He trembled before the creature, as it pressed a solitary finger under its beak and whispered:

"Shhhhhhh..."

The Plague Doctor permitted the man to flee.  His time of Judgment will come eventually, as he knelt down before his target and got to work.  He ignored what little fabric clothed her, slicing through the warm flesh.  He snapped the sternum clean and pulled the ribcage ajar.  His talons circled around the once-beating muscle and extracted it out, bagging it in a refrigerated case for delivery.

He craned his head up at when he heard the faint sound of applause next to him and, there, sitting cross-legged on the closed lid of a dumpster was the GeneCop-turned-Graverobber, Christopher Chance.

"Nice work, buddy, very nice," marvelled the white-haired Graverobber with a smirk.  "No wonder you're the best Repo Man of the Four.  You take organ repossession and turn it into an art form."

"What part of 'stop following me' don't you understand?" sneered the Plague Doctor in an icy voice that seemed unlike him.

"Whoa, look who woke up on the wrong side of the dissection bed."   Chance jumped from his seat, biting into a withered apple and tossing it aside, and sauntered over to admire the Corpse at the assassin's feet.   "You done with her?"

"I got what I needed.  And if I find you tailing me again," he tapped the bloody blade of his scalpel against the right glass eyepiece of his mask and continued, "you lose an eye."

"Hey, what's with you?  You're not acting like yourself."  The Graverobber frowned and glanced up and down his friend's costume:  "Well, so to speak."

"Get your shit and go."

As the Repo Man tapped a button on his holographic watch to signal the clean-up crew, the Graverobber pulled an empty syringe out of his satchel from his belt.  He plunged the needle deep through the nasal cavity of the fallen woman, punching though the tough cartilage and sensitive bone, and anchored its tip into the epiphysis.  He pulled the piston out, sucking in the glowing, glandular ooze into the glass vial.  Chance pulled the needle to value at his prize, adoring its splendour in its freshest and purest form, with a simper:

Zydrate.

The Graverobber turned to meet his comrade-in-arms, but he was abandoned with only the Dead for company.

The Plague Doctor had gone.