EnEmE: Fall Of Man (3 page)

Before I knew it, I was surrounded by a surgical team. An assistant pushed a syringe into an IV bag and within moments my world once again slowly went black.

I very slowly began to become aware of sounds, a pain in my side, screams, the sound of surgical tools scattering across the floor. When I finally came to and opened my eyes I realized I had awoken in a nightmare.

A burning, seething pain flared through my side.

I was on the floor, lying on my side. The gurney in my operating room had been overturned, and there was blood, some of it mine and some of it not, sprayed over the walls and pooling on the floor.

A surgical assistant lay slumped on the floor next to me. As if in answer of my mental question, her head lolled to the side and her wide, dead eyes looked into mine.

The pain screamed in my side again, matching the actual screaming from Doctor Banyan on the other side of the room, accompanied by the clatter of something striking steel.

I slowly looked up, past my open wound in my side and toward Banyan, who was crouched against the floor behind a stainless steel surgical tool cart, its contents spilled and scattered across the floor.

“AHHHRRAAHHHH!” he screamed unintelligibly.

I couldn’t make sense of the clatter at first. My eyes saw it, but my mind couldn’t understand it, and I had to stare and focus for what seemed like an eternity, my brain at a complete loss to figure out what I was staring at. And then it turned, just slightly enough for me to catch part of its profile.

It was a wrinkly, yellow, humanoid blob with big black eyes, minute nose and mouth, and long brown claws for fingernails that were scratching at the stainless tool cart that was serving as Banyan’s shield. It was the thing from my dreams. My eyes looked over it and I realized that the lower half was still covered in a gooey looking transparent sack of tissue with a cord trailing off of it. My eyes followed the cord and to my growing horror, it led to the gaping wound in my side. The creature and I were attached.

I was repulsed in disgust and the true horror of the situation began to sink in.

“I must be having a nightmare.” I realized.

Truly, I felt there was no alternative. I must be lost in a nightmare. One of those really shitty ones where you think you’ve woken up, but you just woke up in the dream and the nightmare continues when the killer with the machete bursts out of your closet. I found some measure of comfort in the realization that this was all a dream and that it was some mental manifestation of my guilt over my father’s death. It wouldn’t last long.

The wrinkled yellow thing trying to savage Dr. Banyan turned, looked right at me and slowly blinked.

“Yes, you are!” It said in a gravely, inhuman voice before swiftly turning back around and renewing his attack on the tool cart with a renewed fervour.

I noticed the cord attaching us was pulled taught, the reason that this creature hadn’t just moved around the cart or thrown it aside. It couldn’t reach. That was the searing pain in my side, the cord being pulled tight, likely pulling on the sack of organs inside my body. The creature tugged and an intense, burning pain radiated through my side.

The intensity reduced a few seconds later. Long enough for me to analyze and process the situation. The creature had gotten enough slack to get closer to Banyan and managed cut a long, bloody gash across the back of his left hand, causing him to let go of one side of his protective cart.

As the creature began moving toward Banyan’s other hand, I recognized what I had to do. Turning away from the horrible scene, I reached one arm out as long as I could, gripped my fingers into the hard linoleum floor as best I could, and pulled my body across the floor. My arm muscle strained, pulling my body weight and dragging my legs as well as the horrible creature attached to me. My side erupted in searing pain. I moaned. And I’d only moved an inch. That inch however was enough to pull the horrible yellow creature far enough that he could no longer attack Dr. Banyan.

The creature snarled in frustration and tugged back, making my internal organs part a macabre tug of war.

I reached again and pulled. This time I gained 6 inches, along with a searing pain that overshadowed all the previous pain I had felt. This time I screamed much louder. The bug-eyed alien turned and looked at me with frustration and a heavy dose of contempt, then turned and dug his claws into the linoleum and pulled back.

“Aaaah! You fuckin’ piece of shit!” I screamed.

Fuelled by my own abhorrence and anger, I gripped the floor and pulled again, dragging myself another foot away, while the creature from inside my own body was digging in its nails, trying to move in the other direction.

“AAAAAAH!” We both screamed at the same time, me in pain and the creature in frustration.

With that, the beautiful figure of Dr. Kiebler burst into the O.R.

“Jace!” she exclaimed, before stumbling back, aghast at the scene.

I’d given Dr. Banyan enough room to cautiously begin creeping out from behind his hiding place.

The creature wheezed and swiped its claws at Kiebler, nowhere near close enough to her to be a real threat. The action did have the effect of helping Dr. Banyan find his courage. His brow furrowed with anger and disgust as he glared at the creature. He quickly bent over, grabbing a large pointed surgical scalpel. He turned and drove the scalpel directly through the creature’s chest.

“AAAAAAAAA!” The creature screamed, while swinging its long talons at Dr. Banyan, which he easily stepped back and away from.

The yellow creature began writhing and convulsing on the floor, black ooze bubbled from its mouth. We all took a second to look at it, and each other. Then a dark black fluid began to quickly run from the creature, through the cord connecting us, toward me. We all looked at each other in panic, not knowing what, if any, danger this presented. I hurriedly scrambled my hands along the linoleum and caught a firm grip on a bone saw resting on the floor nearby. The black fluid had already reached my end of the cord and begun entering my body, but that didn’t stop me from chopping off the cord, letting the majority of the black ooze splutter and spray across the operating room floor.

A few minutes later we had righted the gurney and Dr. Banyan was stitching up the hole in my side.

“What the fuck is happening?!” exclaimed Kiebler, watching in amazement.

“That was worse than the time my grandpappy saw the Bunyip!” Dr. Banyan exclaimed with a half chuckle, managing to maintain his humorous demeanour despite our present situation.

“
I’m so sorry Jace, I’m so sorry, how could I have known? That was. What the hell.” Kiebler was becoming hysterical.

“It’s okay; it’s not your fault,” I managed to mutter.

“We’re all a bit out of our element I think, love.” Banyan offered with an easy grin and a smile. “The one thing I know is that nothing on God’s Earth that can be blamed for this sorry mess. You just stick with us, love, and we’ll be able to sort out this mess.”

Kiebler seemed to ease a bit, and I took the opportunity to introduce them. My psychiatrist and my Emergency Surgeon, who at the moment were probably the two people in the world I was closest to.

“It’s a pleasha’ to meet you, Dr. Kiebler.” Banyan said, extending his bandaged hand for a shake.

“Thank you,” She stuttered, still in shock, processing the events of the day. “Just call me Allison.”

“Well, I hate ta be the one to dredge up the obvious reality of the situation, but we need ta report this ta someone,” said Banyan.

All three of us exited the Emergency O.R. into a hallway of silence.

The building was quiet. There wasn’t a person in sight.

We worked our way down one flight of stairs, across a lobby where we found the admissions desk strangely abandoned, and then out the large sliding glass doors of the Emergency entrance.

The first thing I felt as I walked out the door was the oppressive California heat, hitting us like a wall. The first thing I saw was groups of men and women, marching like soldiers, armed with rifles, herding frightened citizens into groups. I noticed that one group all wore medical scrubs and laid flat and lifeless on the ground.

It was surreal. I couldn’t believe it. The California sun seemed to beat down on us, brighter and more sweltering than usual. The three of us, Kiebler, Banyan and myself, stood in awe. Regular citizens carrying shiny, silver rifles, marched, pushing people into a herd. Some were arguing and emotionally pleading with their own family members or loved ones who continued to stare, unmoved and silent. People were being pulled out of their cars and dragged down the street, forced to huddle in packs or literally lifted and tossed into the backs of military trucks. I tried to convince myself none of this ever happened.

“I’m sleeping,” I exclaimed out loud. “I’ve got to wake up.”

“If you’re sleepin’, mate, I hope you bloody wake up soon,” responded Banyan. “If your mind is responsible for this bleedin’ nightmare, you betta wake up soon.”

We stared, aghast at the situation unfolding in front of us. It was like Auschwitz with a bright, smiling sun.

As we stared, dumbfounded, a cargo truck pulled up and half a dozen armored soldiers hopped out. Armored soldier unlike any kind of armored soldiers I’d ever seen before.

They were covered head-to-toe in shiny silver armor, with green mirrored visors covering their faces, and large futuristic-looking silver rifles. They looked around, assessing the situation.  One seemed to direct the group and point in different directions. One of the points was directly at us. We shrunk back against the brick wall, trying to become invisible against the hot brick, but to no avail. The group immediately dispersed into teams of two, and one team headed directly toward us at a brisk pace.

We all froze as they approached, at least our feet did.

“What’s goin' on here, mates?” blurted Banyan. “Those are some bleedin’ crazy suits ya got there!”

The pace of the two armoured soldiers slowed to a walk about 10 feet away. With their rifles drawn at waist height, they ignored Banyan and seemed to examine the scene, looking at the building and examining our rag-tag group. Their green helmet screens seemed to scan us up and down as if they’d never seen a person before. They hunched and examined us. What they were looking for I don’t know, but it started to feel like when someone’s dog won’t stop sniffing you until it becomes irritating. One armoured mystery man seemed to have taken a particular interest in me, examining me and slowly standing until that green mirrored visor was an inch from my nose, as if we were staring into each other’s eyes.

“This one’s clear.” A metallic, robotic sounding voice came from the audio speakers under the side of each jaw.

The two armoured soldiers looked at each other, then there was a dull hiss, the sound of an airlock depressurizing, and the green visors on their helmets lifted over their heads revealing two stern and serious looking men. One was a black man with short cropped, so short that it almost wasn’t there, hair. He seemed slightly older than the average foot soldier should be and appeared to have the age that made me wonder if he was a general or something. The other was white. He looked a few years younger, but equally serious. Oddly, his helmet also contained his long flowing blonde hair and scraggly sideburns that would have fit the image of a hippie more than a soldier.

“What’s going on here?” asked Kiebler.

The soldiers looked at each other again for a moment, and then the younger one seemed to look sideways at me for a split second before speaking.

“There’s been a threat to the general populace that needs to be contained,” said the younger soldier.

“We’re here to make sure there is minimal damage to property and resolve the situation,” said the elder soldier. “Because of the nature of the danger we are particularly interested in medical facilities.”

“What? Was there some kind of bleedin’ monkey virus outbreak?” said Banyan.

The two soldiers looked at each other again and then the elder spoke.

“We’re particularly interested in anything strange happening in the hospital today,” said the ebony skinned soldier. “Can you tell me anything that happened today in this hospital?” His direct gaze almost commanded me to speak.

All three of us looked at each other. We held each other’s gaze, hesitated, and then took turns spilling the beans. We each described what happened and a few short minutes later the two soldiers had been fully informed of the day’s events, including the creature that had come out of me.

“So you’re a surgical physician that can perform appendectomies and you were able to remove a creature from this man?” said the older soldier.

Something felt wrong. Their wording being used by these guys seemed strange. Something in the pit of my gut told me to shout out, to tell Banyan to deny it, say it was all a joke. To my regret I resisted the urge.

“That’s right, mate,” said Banyan before I could follow my urge to warn him.

Banyan spoke with a slight grin, as if he was happy the soldier believed him.

With that both soldiers rushed forward.

“Detain the prisoner!” barked the black soldier to his junior officer.

The younger soldier pulled a set of cuffs out from some hidden place in his armour. He quickly swept around Banyan, cuffed him, and struck the back of Banyan’s knees with his armoured shin, sending the elderly surgeon to his knees on the ground before stepping back and away from his cuffed prisoner.

I tried to scuttle forward and protest, but it all happened very quickly.

I managed a “Hey!”

It was too little, too late. The senior soldier’s rifle began to glow and charge with energy. A blue ball of light grew at its muzzle. The high-tech weapon made a humming sound as it charged.

And then Banyan’s head was vaporized into a red mist.