It's dark all day and it glows all night
Factory smoke and acetylene light
I face the day with my head caved in
Looking like something that the cat brought in
The Police, Invisible Sun.
The city looks even more like a wasteland at night. In the moonlight you can see the
hollow silhouettes of buildings, places where people used to work, to live.
They're so dangerous we don't even get near them half the time; the blasts shook the
foundations so badly a sneeze has been known to send them crashing.
There are a few buildings left that are worth living in, but not many. We managed to
snag most of one for the clinic.
I can see a street gang roaming one of the side streets. They've learned by now to leave
me alone, but anyone who can't fight back is more than fair game. More than once I've
patched up their victims. Or had to pull the sheet over their faces.
The clinic's only a block away now; good thing. The cold's starting to creep in through
my threadbare coat. In the dark I can pick out the faint glow behind the doors.
"He's over here," Alex says. They've pulled me in at 3 a.m.; some kind of bar fight,
looks more like a riot, all the people milling around...
"Crazy, tonight, huh?" I delivered Alex years ago; she was one of the first mutants we
saw after the bomb hit. One of the cat-like traits she has as a result of her mutation was
an astoundingly quick physical and mental maturing. Though she still has much to learn,
she's one of my best assistants. "Mostly cuts and bruises, 'cept for the two who started it
all." She gestures at a man on a cot, human with a little wolf by the looks. "That's the
loser, there. We've patched him as well as we can, but..."
I walk over to the cot, and a woman, part fox by the looks, starts hovering over my
shoulder. He looks terrible. Nasty lung puncture, internal bleeding...twenty years ago, a
decade ago, he would have had a fairly good chance. Now we're so desperate for
resources and equipment we have to pull the plug on patients like these more often than I
like to admit.
Funny, I remember Dr. Sanchez saying, we were all so afraid H.M.O.'s
wouldn't let us give the best quality care...back when we had hospitals.
Somebody once asked me if I thought I had the right to play God. I asked her, "you ever
heard of triage?"
"No," she said. She had been human, once...
"Back five or ten years ago, if there was an accident or some kind of disaster, they'd have
to separate the patients-- letting the less injured ones wait, getting as quickly as you could
to the critical cases...and if they were too badly injured, letting them die. They couldn't
get to everyone, so they had to concentrate on the people they could save." I took
her by the shoulders, made her look around the clinic.
"Look, I'm sorry, but every day is triage here. I've got five IV machines. Three of them are guaranteed to work
at any given time...half the time our only antiseptics are crushed garlic and homemade whisky. The staff is overworked and undertrained and ninety percent of the time we
don't get a goddamned thing for what we do. You wanna talk about playing God? Talk to the people who decided putting the bombs on a hair trigger was a good idea. Talk to
the morons who thought monitoring systems that switched to full alert on their own
weren't a big problem. Talk to the bozo who decided not to check and see if the first
launch was accidental. We're living in the middle of Mutual Assured Destruction, and
you're bugging me about playing God? I'm just trying to keep some people
alive."
She turned to me very slowly. "Been a long night?"
We both laughed. What else could we do?
Sal and I had lost two eggs by then. If I wanted to play God, I would have kept them all
at the clinic.
Sometimes wish I had...
Focus on the patient. "What's his name?"
"Todd," the woman says.
"Just Todd?"
She nods. "He was a wolf hybrid."
"Looks like he put up a helluva fight..."
"Friggin' animal," she says under her breath.
"The winner?"
"He's the one ya oughta pull the plug on...drunk off his ass, and he still
managed to do all that..."
"Impressive," I tell her.
I look back down at what's left of the guy. "Give him twenty-four hours," I tell Alex. "If
his condition hasn't changed, pull the plug. If it gets worse, call me...you know the drill."
"Thanks," she says, and turns to the woman. "You saw he just came in," she says. "He
hasn't seen any other patients, and lo and behold, he says the same thing we've
been saying all along..."
"All right," the woman says sullenly. "But you better take damn good care of him."
"We will," I tell her, take Alex by the arm and steer her away. "What the hell was that
about?"
"The guy that won," she says. "C'mere, I'll show you."
Somewhere in the haze he can sense people, smell something...garlic? A
restaurant? He'd been in a bar...how'd he get into...something moves by him, he tries to
raise his arm--
He's been strapped down...shit.
"You know," a voice says calmly, "if you'd stop fighting like that, we could probably take
those things off..."
"Fuck off," he growls, and his mouth feels like it's got wool stuffed in it. "You wanna be
helpful, get me a drink..."
"You already had plenty," she shoots back, and he sinks back into the darkness...
"The amount of alcohol he had in his system, I'm surprised he isn't seeing creepy-
crawly spiders by now."
"Just a binge, or--"
"Looks like he's been doing his damnedest to drink himself to death."
I find his left hand, trapped under the restraints, grab his fingers. "Shit...I figured he
was dead."
"Well," she says dryly, "not for lack of trying..."
He stirs a little. "Raph?"
Bleary eyes open, meet mine..."Leo--"
"Raph, it's okay, it's okay..."
His right hand rips out of the restraints, up to my face...
"Take it easy, Raph, we're low on IVs..."
"...you...thought you..."
"Yeah, Raph, I thought you were gone too...it's okay..."
"Don' leave me..."
"I won't, I won't..." I turn to Alex. "You think we can find a messenger?"
"If we can't, I'll go myself, you're not that far out..."
"Thanks, Alex, it would mean a lot...did you need me for anything else?"
"Not really, mostly to show her we weren't playin' favorites...and I figured there might be
a chance..."
"Thank you, Alex. Take the tazer, the gangs were out tonight..."
She nods, and I turn back to Raph. He's sunk back into unconsciousness.
I grab a chair and sit down next to him, doing my best to keep my hand on his.
"Hmm...ya couldn't just pour a finger or two a vodka in there, couldya?"
Joe's voice is flat. "No."
"Damn...hell with it then, ya got coffee?"
"Give him the orange juice," I tell Joe. "He'll drink it."
"Oh, great," Raph says, "he's awake..."
"You told me not to leave ya..."
"Yeah, but you weren't gonna tell me what to drink..."
"Oh yes I am..."
"Look," Raph says, appealing to Joe, "could you get a doctor in here?"
Joe frowns at me. "We haven't seen each other in six years," I explain.
"Ah." He turns back to Raph. "I'll do better than that. I'll give you a private audience
with the doctor who runs this place, all right?"
"Fine."
Joe gets up, smiles at me, and pulls the privacy curtain around the bed. "All yours,
Doc."
"So I just landed in the clinic, Dr. Sanchez was the only one who wanted my
help...and he needed it. I mean, I don't know how many people we lost, just in the first
days..."
"Hundreds," Raph says. "Hundreds." He lifts his glass up and takes another sip of orange
juice. His hand's still unsteady, and he spills a little onto the tray. "Shit..."
"It's all right."
"I was gravediggin'," he says. "It was cold at first, so I could wear a jacket, blend
in...after a while, we were just doin' mass graves, pourin' stuff into them to burn the
bodies down...there were so damn many, and we didn't have enough room, and we
wanted to kill all the bacteria and shit...and it never ended, ya know? After the first
wave, there was all the radiation sickness...months, months, all I did was dig and
drag...and light..."
He closes his eyes.
"There was one little girl," he says, his voice almost a whisper. "She wouldn't leave her
mother. The woman was almost decayin', there was nothing we could do...I took the
mother, and Al took the girl...Al was a nice guy, he'd been a sanitation guy before, we
hung out a lot...anyway. Al took her, 'cause she kept tryin' to run to her mama...so I got
the woman on the pile, doused her, lit the match..."
He takes in a deep breath.
"I don't know how she got away from him..."
And the picture roars to life in my head, like something out of the Holocaust, carcass on
carcass on carcass, and the stench and the flames...
And one living little girl...
"We found Al a couple days later on the shore. Threw him in with all the other
bodies...I'd been hittin' it pretty hard anyway, but after that..."
I put my hand on his again, and he grips it with something like his old strength.
Someone taps my shoulder, and I turn my head. Sal smiles at me.
I stand up, put my arm around her. "I've been meaning to tell you--"
Raph smiles at her and puts out a hand. "Hi."
"This is my wife, Sally--"
She takes his hand, shakes it. "Raphael. It is...an honor to meet you."
"Thank you," he says. "I'm honored to meet you as well."
"I have...to work," she says, touching my arm with her hand. "I will be back." I kiss her
forehead, and she disappears into the makeshift corner we use as an office.
"What was she?" Raph asks quietly.
"Salamander."
He takes a second look after her. "Sally the salamander, huh? She was a pet?"
I nod. "She understands very well...but her speaking skills've never been that great."
"Like most of 'em."
"Yeah." If they weren't born mutants, their growing brains often have trouble adjusting to
human language.
"So?"
I shrug my shoulders. "She started coming to the hospital, helping us out. Was a couple
days before we realized she couldn't talk...but after a while, she started gettin' the hang of
it. I started sittin' with her when we took breaks, teaching her stuff...and we just..." I
remember the first time I held her hand, how soft and dewy her skin was...
"You happy?"
"Yeah. Yeah...most of the time..."
"Happy as you can be when everybody you used to know..."
"Yeah." He reaches up and takes my hand. "So," he says, with a hint of a smile, "you
two tried for any little crossbreeds yet?"
The smile disappears when he sees the look on my face. "We've...we've had eggs."
"Aw, Leo..."
"We've had three live, for a while...never got to the point of hatching, but they were alive,
she could tell...and they just...they died..."
He pulls me down in his arms and lets me cry.
<<<<----->>>>
"Hey, your brother's found a friend."
"Really." I look up at Alex, not sure if this is good news or bad news.
"The rebels brought her in last night, she came in and gave 'em a whole spiel about her
daughter having been taken by the Emperor...practically hysterical, they said, but she got
her point across...they finally promised her they'd try to get her back, and she just
collapsed. They brought her in, and I worked on her half the night..."
"What was wrong?"
She sighs, hands last night's notes over to me. "What wasn't? She was exhausted,
dehydrated, underfed...she's got a terrible infection, either from the abortion--"
"Abortion? What did--"
"My guess is she tried douching with...I don't even want to know what, and when
that didn't work, she used--"
"Probably a coat hanger," I tell her, "from the way you described the wounds..."
She puts her hand up to her mouth.
"They used to do it back when it was illegal..."
"And she was raped," she continues grimly. "It was an old wound, wasn't sure if she'd
been raped repeatedly or it was a gang rape...but that could've done it, too, it never healed
fully..."
"How is she now?"
"She should be better than she is. It's all I can do to get her to respond...your brother was
walking around and he's been with her ever since. He seems to help."
"How's he doing?"
"We're gonna have to let him out pretty soon. He's gained a lot of strength on that
leg..."
"I'll have to start looking for a place for him." Away from the bars. If that's possible. I was hoping I could keep him here a little longer, but our resources are so low...
"Anyway, she's over here, she's about the worst of what we have now, so..."
I see the bed now, Raph sitting next to it, holding the woman's hand. "Look," he says,
"Leo's here now, they all call him 'Doc' here, you'll get used to it after a while..."
Her hair's snow-white, curly; she turns her face to me, and something about it looks
familiar. She raises her green eyes to mine, and recognition hits me.
My God... "April."
--end chapter one--
On to Chapter Two |
