Authors: Joyful Devastation
“Oh shit,” Theo said, moving closer
too. His mask slid back up and he grabbed her with his free hand. The ground
shook.
“Maybe disintegrating the ship we’re
standing in wasn’t such a good idea,” Gideon said, just before the world went
black.
Chapter Twelve
Three months later
“I’ve got the next patient in a
bed, Dr. Morgan,” the nurse said.
Bea nodded distractedly. “Thanks,
Jill. Just keep him comfortable until I can set his arm.” She didn’t move her hands
away from the little girl crying on the makeshift cot. The girl’s mother
pressed her lips together, holding back tears. She had her arms around her
daughter, keeping her from moving. A rogue Sitnam had grabbed her daughter and
torn up the girl’s thigh. Bea was trying to get the bleeding to stop so she
could stitch up the tear, but she was worried the alien might have nicked an
artery. “Almost there,” she assured the girl, wishing she could give her
something for the pain, but their drug supplies were perilously low.
And so is my mood,
Bea thought as she
worked. After they’d brought the alien ship down around them, Bea had woken up
in a field hospital just like this one, perfectly healthy. Theo and Gideon had
been there with her, alive and whole. None of them had severe injuries, which
was almost certainly a miracle, until she remembered how they’d healed right
after they’d made love on Terrene. Unfortunately, their relationship hadn’t
come through the event nearly as well.
Gideon and Theo had managed to stay
long enough to be sure she was okay, sleeping on the ground next to her for one
night, and then the military had come and taken them off. She hadn’t heard from
them since. She never had their cell phone numbers, not that the devices were
working, anyway. The world was a changed place with incredibly limited
technology. The day of the invasion and her one night on Terrene felt like a
fever-dream now.
I had one incredible
night and then they were gone,
she thought bitterly. She refused to dwell
on how devastated she’d been when they hadn’t come back for her. It was still
better to have loved, if only for a short time, than to never have experienced
that particular joy at all. She believed that with all her heart.
Even so, sometimes she was sure she’d
made it all up, except for the reality of the Sitnam. Their ships were all
gone, but rogue aliens roamed the woods. The few remaining were strong, lethal,
and desperate. It made rebuilding nearly impossible. No one knew when they
would strike. She still had her armor, but she could do more good as a doctor,
so she’d hid it. She was no soldier.
“Shh, it’s going to be okay,
sweetie,” she murmured as she leaned closer to the girl.
There!
She found the nicked artery and pinched it with her fingers,
praying the girl would hold still. “Jill! Could you bring me the sutures?”
The nurse hurried over with a tray.
“Right here, Dr. Morgan.”
Bea smiled absently, concentrating
on the girl. “I thought I told you to call me Bea?” she asked the nurse.
Jill shook her head. “No can do,
Dr. Morgan. It’s a form of respect, you see. We’d be dead without you doctors.
The ones who stayed,” she said, referring to the ones who’d chosen to work in
the devastation zone. There were a fair number of them, but not enough for all
the injured folk who continued to pour into their makeshift hospitals. Many
healthcare workers refused to work anywhere near suspected Sitnam survivor
enclaves. Unfortunately, those alien survivors were right in the midst of
people’s houses and towns. No one wanted to leave their homes and Bea wouldn’t
leave the people who needed her, even if she had to sleep on the ground in a
tent.
“Okay, it’s done,” Bea said to the
crying girl. “It’s going to be all better in a little while, I promise. The
worst of it’s over.” She leaned back, stretching her spine as she worked out
the kinks in her fingers. She smiled at the girl’s mother. “The stitches need
to stay in for seven to ten days. Look for swelling and redness, any discharge.
Some inflammation in the next day or so is normal. Come back in a week and we’ll
take out the sutures if the wound has healed enough.” She smiled tiredly when
the woman thanked her. “It’s fine.” She brushed off the woman’s offer of food. “I
have enough, it’s okay.”
She stood up and hurried to the
next patient, not thinking about the lie she’d just told. Truth was, she didn’t
have enough to eat. She’d lost twenty pounds in the last three months. She
looked great, perfectly skinny, like a supermodel, as long as no one looked at
the bags under her eyes.
“What have we got here?” she asked,
leaning over the patient.
“I think it’s a minor closed
fracture,” Jill said.
The man on the cot looked like he
wanted to chew nails. The poor man probably couldn’t afford a broken arm, especially
not now, but accidents happened.
Bea smiled at him reassuringly,
even as she began to gently palpate his forearm with her hands. “We’ll need to
immobilize it, but it should heal well in a few weeks.”
“No x-ray?” he croaked, wincing
when she moved his wrist.
She shook her head. “We’re low on
energy. We need to save the machine for more dire injuries. And this is a minor
fracture.” She ran her hands up his arm. He winced. “Can you feel this?” She
pinched his fingertips.
He nodded. “Yeah.”
“No loss of sensation. Can you move
your hand?”
“Yes, but I don’t want to. It hurts
like hell,” he said.
“That’s fine,” Bea murmured. When
she turned to call Jill, the nurse was already there with a SAM splint, forming
the pliable aluminum and foam into the proper shape to immobilize the fracture.
“You’re a lifesaver, Jill. Thanks.”
The nurse smiled and hurried off,
trying to keep ahead of the work. Bea could’ve told her to conserve her energy,
but the woman was still young.
Too young
to be doing this terrible job
, she thought.
“Give her a break, doc,” the man on
the cot said, surprisingly. “She’s just trying to do her job.”
Bea looked at the man’s weathered
face. “You’ve seen combat.”
He nodded. “Yeah. Iraq. Patch me up
and let me get out of here. I’ve got a family to look after.” He glanced
around. “And you’ve got worse off patients.”
She sighed and molded the splint to
his arm. “Leave this on until the bone’s healed or you’ll break it again.”
He chuckled. “You bet, doc.”
Bea gave him a look, but he just
kept smiling. She rolled her eyes and let his arm go. “It’s going to keep
swelling, unless you keep it elevated as much as you can. Don’t mess with it.”
“I know the drill, doctor.”
She was about to reply when a
commotion at the tent’s entrance interrupted her. She turned to look, then nearly
fell down as all the blood rushed out of her head. She sat down on the cot as
her brain stuttered to a halt.
“You okay there, doc?” her patient
said, patting her back.
She shook her head weakly, heart
pounding. Theo, large as life, stood not ten feet away from her.
“Bea!” he yelled, looking around.
He looked great. Tall and strong and… angry? He wore army fatigues, but carried
no weapons. She trembled violently, sucking in air. What was he doing here?
When his eyes landed on hers, they flashed silver behind the brown, just like
she’d remembered. He began to make his way between the cots.
“Doc, I don’t know who this guy is,
but he looks pissed off. Maybe you should run out the back,” her patient said,
only half-joking.
She shook her head again. “Theo won’t
hurt me,” she murmured, tipping her head up as he got closer. Damn him. He
looked good, almost too good, and she knew she looked like crap. He’d haunted
her dreams for the past three months.
He stopped right in front of her
and stared like he’d seen a ghost. “We’ve been searching for you for months,
Bea,” he said. His voice cracked on the last few words.
She frowned. “I’ve been right here,”
she murmured, still shaking. Her patient patted her back some more and she
flashed him a quick smile.
Theo shook his head. “No, no you
haven’t. I searched this place, twice already.
Twice
.”
She shook her head. “That makes no
sense. I haven’t been anywhere else.
You
left
me
. You and Gideon.” Then
remembered the two times she’d made house calls. Each one had taken a week. “House
calls. God,” she murmured, hand at her throat. “I had to go to a patient’s
house, twice. Two months ago. Then again last month, in June. But everyone here
had my name. I don’t understand.” She couldn’t decide if she was angry or
happy. She’d tried to find them, too, but the lack of drugs wasn’t the only
difficulty facing those in the devastated zones. Communication was almost
nonexistent. She clenched her fists, willing herself not to cry. Looking up at
him, his confusion was clear as day. She decided to be happy and smiled
tremulously.
“God, Bea.” He ran his hand through
his hair, then abruptly leaned down and snatched her up into a hug. “What
happened to us?”
She snorted, even as she hugged him
back. “There was no us. We’d only known each other for a day.”
He set her back a little. “That’s
not true and you know it.”
She looked away, a bit unsettled by
the intensity of his stare. “I tried to find you, and Gideon, too. No one had
ever heard of you.” She rubbed a hand over her forearms. Sometimes her skin
itched.
He sighed explosively. “We found a
mole in our military, working with the surviving Sitnam.”
“What?” She whipped her head around
to stare at him.
“After the Disintegration,” he
said, saying the term everyone used for what had happened to the ships with
extra emphasis, “Gideon and I were drafted. Sort of. The military found out
what we’d done, somehow.” He looked at her apologetically. “We were cops. We
had to help. It’s what we do. We kept your name out of it because things were
really fucking weird there.” He looked around, clearly worried about people
listening, then put out his hand. “Would you come outside with me?”
Bea considered. She had patients,
but she was also due a break. “Okay.” She followed him outside, ignoring the
looks she got from her fellow doctors. Jill, her nurse, raised her eyebrows and
gave her a thumbs-up. Bea blushed and led him to the edge of the hospital’s
makeshift parking lot.
When Theo stopped, she almost ran
into him. He caught her before she fell. “God, you’re skinny. You’re not eating
enough,” he said, frowning.
Bea brushed him off. “What
happened?”
“The military lost most of its
flight capabilities. And a lot of other infrastructure. The Sitnam attacked
very carefully before setting down in eastern Pennsylvania.” He sighed. “Gideon
was interrogated. For weeks. I was questioned for a while, too.”
Bea shuddered, imagining what had
happened.
“Yeah,” Theo said as if he could
read her mind. “It took me a long time to convince them he was human.”
“But he’s not—” she began to say. Theo
cut her off.
“He is now,” he ground out. “The
only way I could convince them to let him go is by swearing we’d snuck onto a
ship and used their tech against them.”
Bea thought about what they’d done
to the Sitnam on Earth. What they’d done
together.
She
understood, suddenly, why they
hadn’t tried harder to find her. “You were afraid they’d grab me.”
He nodded. “Yes.” He looked away. “And
also, Gideon was acting… odd. After the interrogations. He was angry at me.”
Bea’s heart seized up. None of this
was good. And how did Gideon feel about her? She was afraid she already knew
the answer. “And me?”
Theo turned, as if he couldn’t bear
the look on her face. She could tell by the clenched muscles in his back that he
didn’t like what he was going to say.
“He told me to go away, that I
never really was bi. That I should get far away from him. That he didn’t care
about me.” He laughed harshly. “We’d been partners for
years.
I could
tell he was lying.”
“Why though? Why did he lie?” Bea
twisted her hands together. Did that mean Gideon regretted what they’d done?
“The mole. I didn’t realize until
later that Gideon knew about the mole and was protecting us.”
Bea gaped. “That makes no sense.
Why would he do that? Why not expose him? Why not tell you who it was so you
could help?”
Theo turned around and pulled her
into his arms. “Yeah. That’s exactly what I’d like to know, too, but I can’t
ask Gideon because he’s
gone.
”
Bea gripped his arms. “What do you
mean, gone?”
He rested his forehead on her
shoulder. “He disappeared. Everyone I questioned had no idea where he’d gone.
And after not being able to find you, either, I went a little crazy.”
“What did you do?” Bea asked. Worry
moved like a trapped worm in her stomach.