Part V: The Road to Veld
It started slow enough that Dr. Maru didn't notice. But by the second year of the war, she had become cold, and dangerous. Her initial deployment to the field hospitals to test her remedies was but a long forgotten dream. Now, her nightmares were saturated with violence. And soon enough all her worst thoughts rose unbidden to the forefront of her mind, and brought horrors to almost every battle of the war, thanks to the modern miracle of automobile transportation. So many dead, drowned on dry land.
By the third year in the war, her inventions, wielded by General Ludendorff, had taken perhaps a hundred thousand lives. Some of the corpses were just too mangled to tell. But enough soldiers had died screaming due to her gas weapons that the higher ups of the British and French governments had begun to notice her specifically. Even the Americans feared her, though their late entrance into the war was in Dr. Maru's opinion cowardly. The name they had designated her was scientifically inaccurate, and it annoyed her to no end: 'Doctor Poison'. Doctor Venom would've been more accurate. She was actually disappointed in them.
England, France, and the rest of the Allies were reluctant to publicize that so many of their military dead were by the mind of one person. When it was discovered this 'Doctor Poison' was a young woman, there was chaos throughout the ranks.
She knew that they knew her real name, after all, years ago before the war she presented at talks at St. Andrews University, as well as Cambridge and Dublin. She had even been invited to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in America, but her mother fell ill that month so Fritz Haber went in her stead. She was always well received. Even though her later inventions made her a widowmaker of sorts, she knew that many of her earlier inventions helped stave off unacceptable casualties.
It was ironic, she thought. That more people looked on her with horror because of her reputation than gasped in disgust before she located the American porcelain sculptor in Paris, before she had something resembling a face worth looking on again. But then again, people now looked on her with such fear that her immaculately crafted facial prosthetic hardly mattered anymore. Everyone. Everyone but Ludendorff was too afraid to meet her eye. He was the only one now, since Liesel went away.
Liesel, her best and only friend who lost her job to sit by her for days in the hospital after her mutilation. Liesel, the girl who first made her aware beyond the shadow of a doubt that she would never be intimate with a man, because Liesel helped her figure out who she truly was. Liesel, the woman who allowed Dr. Maru to hope of a better future for herself after the war began to slowly poison the girl Isabel used to be.
Liesel: her lover who left because she could no longer distinguish the difference between Doctor Isabel 'Poison' Maru and the monsters who slaughtered the civilians by the droves.
It was only after Liesel left Isabel's side in 1918 that Doctor Poison stopped differentiating between imminent dead men and civilians. And only once did she allow her poison to end the lives of non-combatant women, men, and children.