Amasia

by Kali Altsoba

  Two arrivals aren’t even from today’s count of wounded. They have much older injuries, gnarled feet suppurating from poorly tended wounds. They jumped into the surgery queue anyway. Another moderately injured man hops onto a table unasked and sits there, grinning at the whole room.

  “Get the fuck off!”

  “Yes sir! Sorry sir.”

  “Wait your damn turn”

  “Get against the wall, like the others!”

  Most self-conducted arrivals sit down without being told, or lie on the floor along the tent-cavern sides. They groan quietly or remain stoically silent. One has an especially dismal look of deep pain and mortal suffering. He issues occasional suppressed howls, then falls silent and starts to look glassy eyed. An orderly pulls him away from the wall and takes him to a surgeon.

  Next comes a clutch of mental cases, misdirected down to the surgery by some medical dunce or maybe a practical joker far above. One is twisting and straining against a restraint jacket that binds his arms but leaves him free to walk unaided. He’s looking around in wild fear, shouting incoherent nothings. Others are unhurt but totally mute, robbed of sound. Aphasic, without raving or screaming, shuffling into the tent in silence with heads bent low, looking at nothing and no one. They’re ordered out by the stiff necked nurse doing final triage and taking IDs at the door. “This is a surgery! You sorry lot wait outside, or go back topside. Just leave!”

  They leave, although they have no place to go. Susannah helps sit them down outside, in long rows along the short passageway and on the chalk stairs leading up from the mess tent. The tousled, tightly restrained man fixes on her, shouts gibberish warnings at her.

  “They're coming for you all! The ghoul snakes and war bots and the Todts!”

  “No they’re not. Why don’t you just sit down and stop scaring everybody?”

  “He’s coming for you, Susannah Page!”

  She’s startled that he knows her name. She leans in to look more closely at his wild face. Under mad eyes and his too long and matted hair and beard she sees a man she used to know, just a kid really. They got drunk together once, on Glarus. Before the bot. Before she died. She can’t look at him. She goes back inside.

  Wounded keep arriving. They move between the guard files of mentally lame who sit in silence with blank stares on hard white steps, unable to purge themselves of pain. Insufficiently urgent in their suffering. Too hurt to shout about it like the broken mind of the bound man, who escapes his private prison island by soaring into occipital flights of fantastic visions. Only to find worse solitude in crowds of faces that look embarrassed for him, then turn away. Like Susannah.

  A few lightly injured are questioned harder by the terminal triage judge at the door who’s suspicious that they’ve got too quick, self-inflicted wounds. “Did you shoot that hand through a loaf of bread or carbon ration carton, so that I wouldn’t see any close up burns?” He asks it of a scared and trembling youth. That’s exactly what the kid did. He shot himself through hard pumpernickel. An old veteran, age 20, showed him how to do it. “You wait till last! Guards!”

  The boy sits with his head sunk in his lap, under guard by two burly MPs who look on him with sympathy but do their duty nonetheless. After he’s all fixed up they’ll take him to a brig, thence to a courts-martial. He’ll probably be executed.

  “What about you two sweethearts?” The incorruptible door judge demands an answer, swiveling on two men who look to be a couple of longstanding intimacy. They’re painfully stiff against the wall, even though a low bench is available. They’re leaving it for more seriously wounded. They have arm and upper body puncture wounds, but not of the first order kind. They respect triage, and hold back.

  “Looks like you and your lovely girly friend shared the same frag grenade,” the cynical, sneering male nurse mocks. “No doubt while holding hands on some comfy dugout cot and planning to evade any more fighting.” It’s a rare and ancient prejudice these days, but persistent for some. It’s much worse in Daura. It’s also untrue.

  They were targeted by a gerbil launcher while on patrol. A third man was killed by the same fragger. The angry bigot at the door marks them as suspicious, despite impeccable combat records in which they saw a helluva lot more fighting than he has. He’s never even been shot at, not once. The smaller man, a highly decorated old hand who’s been here from the first day, whispers an almost silent prayer to his partner. “Deliver me from death, but not immortality.” His lover pats him gently on the shoulder with his uninjured hand.

  So it goes. Men and women, gay and straight, black and white, shirkers and dutiful, malingerers, malcontents, honest soldiers. All wounded by indifference to their uniqueness by the enemy, some hurt again by suspicions of their own side. No one is above or beyond the doorway examiner’s taunting, damning questions. He thinks he’s seen it all, and expects the worst always. He’s not totally wrong. Self-inflicted wounds account for 3% of all cases on the Allied side. He’s doing First Triage duty because his superiors trust his cynicism to catch some of those.

  Severe cases are carried on fiber gurneys and stacked three high alongside the cutting tables. One man’s back is opened like a ration carton of mockmeat ripped with a combat knife. He shivers and cries and pulls away whenever anyone comes close, eyes bulging with pain and fear. He screams that he can’t bear for orderlies or nurses to touch him. Susannah winces with every footfall that jars him with pain as she helps wheel him to the front of the surgery line. She lays him directly on an ersatz operating table, then gratefully hurries off with an empty gurney.

  One blonde woman holds onto her partly extruded guts, hands clasped across an inverted mess kit that never held tripe like this before. A thick coat of battle dressing was applied into her midsection and over the bowl as she held it tightly in place, a look of abject terror on her face. A field medic did it, right after she was zipped open by a jagged chunk of frag grenade. The foam has spread into every perforation, then hardened inside her and over the bowl. The hard foam, not the bowl, holds her intestines in place while also stopping all internal bleeding.

  She doesn’t need to hold the bowl anymore. If she let go it would stay there, rigid over exposed guts that look like a student’s anatomy doll, gray and visible but hard as plastic. She can’t let go. She clasps the filthy thing to her unzippered belly, fearing to let its awful contents tumble out as they started to do out there in Dark Territory, when a Todt suddenly stood up 20 paces away and threw the frag right at her. Her wild, terrorized eyes give her the look of an Amasian blacktailed rabbit cornered against a desert rock by a caramel coyote.

  Susannah knows exactly how she feels. She helps slide the woman slowly and carefully down the tent wall to a spot pointed out by a busy orderly. There she must wait with her absurd bowl of foam and guts. Susannah lays a small towel across her rigid hands, to hide the bowl.

  She aids a soundless man whose throat was opened by a slicing piece of shell casing. Bad luck that he stood up, turning to look over the parapet at exactly that moment. Real dumb luck. The shrapnel that severed his windpipe isn’t even meant to harm or kill. It’s an inert part in a shell casing that routes electromagnetism to contain white plasma, until its release in a lethal blossom of fire. The casing and any shrapnel it makes is incidental to the miniature sun that appears. Yet here he is, blood bubbling and gurgling from a random gash as he labors for every breath. He sucks air through a tracheotomy hole below the gaping wound. He’s soaked in his own blood and sweat. He looks deranged as well as wounded, his eyes more wild even than the gutted woman’s.

  A redheaded nurse who holds his elbow is nearly as colorless in look. She’s close to fainting from stress exhaustion after a bad night spent in combat triage, and an hour with the burbling man. She’s also missing her voice, speaking only with hand gestures. Small eyes dart back and forth, like a cornered mouse looking wildly for an exit hole while facing a hissing cat. There’s actually nothing at all wrong with her throat. It’s her mind that’s wound
ed, by proxy.

  Finally, the worst off arrive, slowly carried at funeral pace from so far above. Burn cases mostly. Susannah is aghast. Some of those laid out along the walls look past all reasonable hope or her care or any caring. As they hump in the living corpses, all in deep suspend, wads of blackened flesh separate from legs or bellies like overcooked marshmallow skin at a child’s summer party.

  “Crispy critters,” mutters the surly cook, still put out at this gross and arbitrary misuse of his kitchen. Susannah gives him a lethal look. She wants to stick her knife in him. She looks over to Lee, whose head is bent over one end of a meters long surgical table where four patients are being worked on, end-to end. He’s covered in blood to his elbows and all down the front of his scrubs. He looks to be in his element. He looks as happy as she’s ever seen him.

  ***

  It has been barely a half-hour since Susannah was commandeered for stretcher duty by Lee. Since she descended the chalk stair and entered the realm of suffering she now thinks of as Purgatorium, cruel foyer of the cursed Vale of Hinnom where dead emperors sacrifice children unto fire. Already the mess tent is transformed into an unrecognizable world. Wounds and sounds of low moaning Susannah knows well from trench life, long before today, even if there’s more of both per square meter in Lee Jin’s surgery than on the surface. Of all the Temples of Pain she has seen or visited in this war there’s something here she hasn’t felt much of before this hour: hope.

  There’s even tranquility amidst the bustle and the detritus of trauma. Doctors, medics and nurses are working very fast, but not in a panic. There’s also a little kindness now and then, and some limitation set to suffering this side of Death. Or so she thinks as she watches Lee’s doctors hustle about the little medical city he set up. He directs mercy and relief like he’s conducting a classic space opera, with a sweep of one arm to start the string section and another to sound the horns.

  “Orderly, get two kitchen helpers and slop out that table.”

  “With what, sir?”

  “There’s hot wash water in the second tureen. Mark it so, and keep it coming. I want every table hot washed after each operation. Assign one man to keep that tureen on the boil.”

  “Yes sir! You four, follow me.”

  “Nurse, prep this patient for amputation. She’s up next.”

  “This burn can wait.”

  “Careful with that leg, the bone’s broken through.”

  “Violin section, left.”

  “Oboes, front and center.”

  “Timpanists all set, sir.”

  “Stay those drums!”

  “Enough damned drums!”

  “Tenors ready, aye ready, sir!”

  Bomb

  Susannah does whatever she’s told with a fixed, rigid smile. The kind of smile she sees all the nurses wear. Well, all the good ones. She finds it’s easier. It helps keep her from crying or screaming. Like right now, as she and the skinny cook’s helper search unconscious burn cases for IDs. She was told to do it by the cynical triage judge, who’s still sitting throne in the doorway.

  “Don’t need a name, but gotta have a number.”

  “She doesn’t have either! We looked all over.”

  “Gotta write it down. Find something, private!”

  If some poor bastard doesn’t have a readable ID, or she can’t find a unit tattoo under his crisped skin, she tags his left big toe. At least, she tags his toe if he still has toes. Burn cases without any toes get temporary surgery disks laid beside their head on a gray pillow. Each disk Susannah and the skinny cook’s helper print out states prosaically that this particular lump of human charcoal is Burn Case # 1 ... Burn Case #5 ... Burn Case #12. And so on.

  One big girl thrashes and screams and swears at everyone attending her, like a drunken marine. Which sorta fits her, ‘cause she is a drunken marine. She was happily getting loopy in a funk hole when a stray shell penetrated the roof, killing three of her mates and mangling her foot and calf real bad. She smells hard and strong. Of too much trench hooch and sour sex just for exercise.

  Four orderlies hold the beefy girl down while a large, matronly surgeon cuts off her smashed and mangled foot. The large breasted, grossly overweight doctor sweats profusely in the mess tent heat. Beads of salty water form on her brow before running in visible rivulets down her cheeks to collect in her stiff collar. It’s stained and wet looking. So is her surgical gown. She keeps sawing away while chattering to the cussing marine. “You swear all you like, dear. It’s good for you.”

  “Fucking hell! Stop! You bitch!”

  “I’ll be done in a mike or two.”

  “It hurts! Give me more suspend right now!”

  “I’m sorry, dear. We’re all out.”

  “Oooooohhh! It fucking hurts!”

  “My, my, such a mouth,” the rotund doctor coos back at her, like a fat turtle dove. “Your mother wouldn’t be happy to hear you talk like that, I’m sure.”

  “Fuck you! You’re not my mother.”

  “You’re right. I’m not.” She keeps right on cutting and cooing and soothing, as if she is.

  “I’m sure she’s very nice.”

  “Fuck my mother!”

  “My heavens!”

  “Hurry up, you bitch! It really hurts!”

  “That’s right. Swear at me if you want.”

  “I just did. It didn’t help.”

  “Shout then, yell as loud as you want.”

  “Ayeeeee!!”

  “There you are! Did it help?”

  “Fuck no.”

  “Well, the bad is all gone now. Into the disposal with the nasty thing!” An orderly carries the foot to the corner Organic Waste Disposal Unit #3.

  Slurp.

  Grind.

  Crunch.

  “Now, let’s seal that right up.” She folds a skin flap over the stump, adds another layer of bioprinted skin, and orgo glues it tight. It looks like a wallet.

  “I think I’m gonna throw up…”

  “Don’t you dare, marine!” Suddenly, the maternal tone is gone.

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “You hold it in!”

  “About the swearing, too.”

  “Yeah, I know kid. I know.” It’s back.

  “Really sorry, sir.”

  “OK, we’re square kid.”

  An orderly tells the butch marine as he wheels her away: “You’ll have a new and better foot down there in no time.”

  “Really?”

  “Girl, you’ll be back in the fight with all your bitch friends real soon.”

  “Tell the doc I said thanks, will ya?”

  They take the now sober marine to be fitted with a temporary prosthetic. She’ll be back in the trench with her unit inside a week. She’ll control the temporary foot via a muscle memory download from the med dot already implanted in her frontal lobe, and a smaller foot-specific dot they’ll inject into her left motor cortex. The new dot will dissolve in six months, plenty of time to replace her prosthetic with a flesh-and-bone foot grown in an ACU limb factory, once they map a grow tank to her DNA and medical records. But for now, it’ll be a fake foot, to get her back into the fight. ACU Marine Corps needs every bitch marine it can get, or keep.

  ***

  For Susannah, five hours in the makeshift surgery passes as in a dream. Later, her memories dim, partly from getting so terribly drunk immediately afterward in order to forget, and in part from suppression by a post trauma pill Lee gives her. He makes her take it after he sees her turn green, and slump to the floor in front of a waste disposal unit. She’s sitting there alongside the exhausted skinny cook’s helper. The booze and pill turn the day into a blur, but they still don’t let her forget the thing that made her faint. Not ever.

  The lad is in bad shape when they bring him in, carried in a scoop stretcher. He was wounded two days earlier but they only found him when the Enthusiastics’ raided deep into DT and overran a small crater he crawled into, lying out there alone in scratchy sand and
his own blood, in his own pus and piss, for two days and nights. They lost two more guys humping him to where the bearers took over.

  He’s febrile and delirious. His left arm is split open from just below the elbow to his wrist. He’s drugged, but not well. The medics and surgery are out of suspend solution, and the primitive morphine the doctors are giving to the latest wounded doesn’t mask all their pain. The boy is semiconscious, jerking spasmodically as two bearers carry him to a table drenched in the blood of the man operated on just before him, then carted off to a recovery ward. Lee waves off two table washers.