He sank to his knees. Blood was seeping out of the hole in his chest, and the gash on his forehead had mixed with sweat and ran into his eyes. He couldn’t run anymore. He felt the blood surging to the openings in his upper body. He was a young man, no older than twenty years of age, with dark hair and regal, brown eyes. Stocky, but fit. He had joined Washington’s rag tag army not two months ago in Philadelphia. He received an old musket and a sack of food for exchange for his enlistment. He had a good outlook, ready to “Teach the Brits a lesson!”. But now, lying on the cold ground of Germantown, Pennsylvania, he was just trying to stay out of the fight. To disappear.

Life in the militia wasn’t as wonderful as he had imagined it to be. His legs were sore from walking. He had only a thin coat. No uniform. His shoes had fallen apart in New York. The food was oftentimes rotten, and always stale or old. He wasn’t the war hero he imagined, but he wanted to serve his country. As he pulled himself up against the trunk of a tree, he thought about the life he had chosen. He was dizzy from losing blood, and he was cold. He just wanted to fall asleep, and leave this cold, foggy battle behind. His vision got cloudy, and he convinced himself to try to sleep. He was glad he did. He was floating in mid-air, completely weightless. Then he started bouncing, being jolted from side to side. He laboriously opened his heavy eye lids, and realized he was on the back of a horse before he passed out.

The soldier woke up in a cold room made of stone. There was a woman standing over him. She was wiping his forehead with water that made his cut hurt. There were also several men standing around his bed, their faces obscured by darkness and shadow. It seemed like the fog had permeated the little room, placing a dreary, ominous undertone on everything. A man wearing a black suit stepped forward. The suit was covered in specs of dirt, and his slightly ruffled, but otherwise neat white shirt was spotted with blood. He had long black hair, pulled back into a ponytail. His face was cleanly shaven. Something about him was cruel, unforgiving. He addressed the wounded soldier in a hushed tone. “My name is Doctor ????. I’m here to help you with the...”, he paused and chuckled to himself, “...situation you’ve found yourself in”. The Doctor walked over to a black bag, and discreetly pulled out a bundle of cloth, apparently filled with some assortment of objects. “You have a musket ball lodged in your rib cage. We’re going to take it out”, he said, with a tone of cruel pleasure. He rolled open the bundle to reveal a large set of shining medical instruments. There was one in particular that caught the soldier’s eye. A small knife with a handle covered in what appeared to be pieces of seashells. The small amount of light in the room made the handle shine in brilliant colors, reflecting the colors onto the Doctor’s face. The Doctor noticed the soldier looking at the knife. He picked it up, turning it over in his hands. “You like this one, don’t you?” he said. The soldier responded with a slight nod, unable to muster the strength to utter words. It hurt too much. “This is the instrument we’ll be using today, my unfortunate soldier.” he said with eyes sparkling like glass after the first frost. The Doctor rummaged in his bag for something, ultimately coming up with a set of leather straps, and some old rags. “Now, you’re going to need to cooperate with me on this. Don’t fight me. What I need to do is very... delicate.” the Doctor said as he began to tie the soldier down to the crude wooden table. “Will it hurt?”, the soldier managed to say in a pained, grunting voice. “I guess we’ll just have to see, won’t we?”, the Doctor said with a cruel smile, his eyes devouring the helpless man on the table. He picked up the knife the soldier had been admiring. “This is a surgeon’s blade.” he explained. “It’s quite sharp, and perfectly suited for it’s purpose.” He picked up the dirty, bloody rag, and placed it in the soldier’s mouth. The Doctor looked at the soldier, and said “Try not to bite down too hard. Don’t want to rip it. Only got a few of these left.” And with that, the Doctor ripped open the man’s shirt with impossible swiftness, and gently ran the blade down the man’s rib cage. It took a few moments for the realization of pain to reach the soldier’s brain in his sedated state. The scream didn’t seem to phase the Doctor in the least. He just kept cutting, and prying, pushing his hand into the man’s side. Blood ran down his hands, and on to the soldier’s body. It ran off the table, spilling to the floor in a warm scarlet stream. The Doctor wasn’t making precise, surgical cuts anymore, but slicing and digging with wild ferocity into the soldier’s side. The soldier looked on in shock, ribbons of pain spiraling through his body, hot and metallic against his nerves. The stream off the table had become a river, with the Doctor’s actions resembling that more common of a murderer than a surgeon. The soldier had lost too much blood. The last image his brain processed was that of a wild man, digging inside his chest cavity with a beautiful knife.

The Doctor looked down at the now deceased soldier. “Well,” he said calmly, “that didn’t take too long.” The Doctor plunged his hand into the gaping, bloody hole he had created in the soldier’s side, determined to find something. The Doctor wrapped his hand around something inside the man’s chest cavity, and with the sound of roots being ripped from the earth, the Doctor pulled the soldier’s heart out of his chest. One of the men emerged from the shadows, opening a black bag as he stepped forward. The Doctor casually dropped the glistening heart, still covered in blood, into the bag. Neither man showed any emotion, just like they were bagging some small creature they had found in a hunting snare. “We’re done here”, the Doctor said. He looked towards the men in the shadows, almost unrecognizable in the dark, bitterly cold room. The Doctor looked out on the Germantown battlefield, scanning the fog for any sign of movement. Satisfied that there was none, the Doctor seemingly glided over to what was left of the soldier on the makeshift operating table. With a growl of hatred and disgust, the Doctor picked the soldier off the table with one hand, clutching him by the neck so tightly his sockets seemed to bulge. Studying the soldier’s face only for a moment, he threw the soldier across the room with impossible strength. The lifeless soldier slid to a stop in the doorway, his mortal wounds reopened, he began to slowly bleed fresh blood on the dirt floor. Straightening his suit with his bloody hands, the Doctor turned to the shadows of men in the corner. He addressed himself to no one in particular. “Our process is far too slow. All this for one heart is a waste of the resources given to us. We aren’t meeting demand, and God knows that it won’t be me to take the disciplinary action, but you. So I suggest you find other methods for our noble work”. With that, the Doctor gathered his bloody instruments, and with the shadow men, exited the small stone house, stepping over the soldier’s cold body with contempt. The cold, foggy atmosphere of the abandoned battlefield should have produced little plumes of steam from their mouths and nostrils, but as they walked further from the house, not a single cloud was formed. Similarly, the Doctor seemed at no discomfort, even being clothed in only a suit. The Doctor turned back to face the little stone house. At one time, the house may have been a quaint, simple place to live, but today there was blood on it’s walls. Fog seeped in through every crack in the wall, every seemingly shut place. Frost formed spider webs on the house’s windows, and ivy had grown into a skeletal cage around the sunken roof. The sleeting, abominably cold rain and snow began to pour. Looking at the house with cold, grey eyes from atop a small hill, the Doctor removed something from his jacket. Slowly raising his arm towards the small house, he whispered something just under his breath. At that moment, the roof of the small house caught on fire, leaping into the air, seemingly with vengeance towards the falling, driving snow and sleet. The fire had the appearance of liquid winding around the stone, burning and melting it. A flare up indicated that the fire had reached the body inside. Moments passed. A clap of thunder sounded, with characteristics more like an agonized scream. The sky opened, and ashes began to fall, swirling and mixing with the falling snow. The ashes drifted over to the Doctor, and began to build up in a concentrated area. More ashes fell, floated, and joined, until an ashy shape began to form. It was the soldier. He was wearing clothes suited for a war hero, a well dressed soldier. But they were old, torn, covered in dirt and ash, more suited to be worn in a grave. His uniform was black and grey, and looked like it belonged to someone who had been in the cold Germantown soil for a long time. A flowing cloak seemed to form out of the ashes still floating around him. He looked constantly in shadow, a cold sadness was behind his face. He looked at the Doctor with blank eyes. The Doctor looked at what stood before him with his piercing, almost luminescent eyes.“Welcome to my army. The finest you’ll ever serve in, no doubt”. And with that, they all disappeared with a flash of smoke.