by DJ Molles
He peeked sideways into the room where the steam belched out of. The roof and most of the wall had been torn away. An open fire blackened the sides of a large steel kettle. A woman with hands and face covered in red as though she worked in a dye factory wrung blood from sopping bandages and stuck them in the boiling water. A grayish froth had formed on the top of the water.
A scuffle from up ahead drew Perry’s attention back to the narrow hallway. At the end of it, the man bearing the cloths had stupidly tried to bar Stuber’s access to the room and promptly been shoved against the open doorway with Stuber’s palm mushing his face.
Stuber strode through, heedless of the man he’d just displaced.
The man was so shocked at the treatment that he didn’t even blink when Perry and Teran slid by him.
Stuber’s frame came to a halt just inside the room and Perry almost ran into him. He adjusted and sidestepped, looking past Stuber’s bulk.
Of all the rooms in this place, this room had faired best. It had four walls and a roof. It had, however, been perforated by innumerable high-caliber holes, which had chewed up the Surgeon that now sat derelict in the center of the room.
Now the Surgeon was simply an operating table, and upon it lay a man with a good portion of his guts hanging out. Over this man stood a woman with her back turned to them. Auburn hair drawn out of the way into a frazzled-looking bun.
“Derrick, do you have the bandages?” the woman said, turning as she spoke to look over her shoulder. She stopped speaking immediately, her mouth still hanging open, her eyes zeroing in on Stuber.
“Petra,” Stuber managed, his voice a husky croak.
“Franklin,” Petra uttered. Her mouth worked soundlessly for two syllables, and her eyes blinked rapidly, processing. And that was all the time she wasted. “Franklin! Get your ass over here and help me!”
Stuber jumped to. “Of course, my love.”
Petra spotted the man that Perry assumed was “Derrick,” still in the doorway with his armload of bandages. “Derrick! The bandages!” Then her eyes hit Perry and Teran. “Perry, Teran, I need your help too.”
Perry exchanged a glance with Teran, but they both started moving.
“Well,” Teran remarked. “Glad we didn’t have to see some sappy reunion. What do you need, Petra?”
“Hands,” Petra snapped. “I need hands. Clean ones. Use the alcohol in that basin.” She nodded towards a metal bowl on a small rolling cart scattered with bloody utensils.
Perry got his rhythm back and the three of them—Stuber included—hurriedly dipped their hands in alcohol that had turned pink with blood. A dozen tiny cuts that Perry hadn’t even known about smarted across his palms and fingers as he rubbed the high-test liquid across his hands. It evaporated rapidly.
They joined back with Petra over the wounded body, and it was at that point that Perry realized the man on the operating table was still conscious. Not exactly “with it,” but his eyes were open, his neck craned up, watching the spill of his intestines with cloudy interest.
“Clean hands,” Stuber announced. “Where do I put them?”
Petra looked down at her own hands, which were wrist-deep in the man’s abdominal cavity. “I’ve run out of hemostats. I’m pinching off a vessel with my right hand. Take it from me.”
The man on the table looked drowsily at Stuber. “Who are you?” His words came out mushy and faint.
“Try not to talk,” Petra commanded. “It moves your guts around when you do.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“He’s doped out of his mind,” Stuber noted as he slid his hands into the man’s stomach, right next to Petra’s.
“I’m mix and matching anesthetics. It’s the best I could do.”
Stuber smiled fondly at her, despite the gore in which both of their hands were planted. “You’re a wonder, my dear.”
Petra fixed her wayward husband with a stern look. “Kiss me. So I can believe you’re really here.”
The two leaned in and kissed passionately. Right over the top of a pile of guts. The man watched them curiously. He probably thought he was hallucinating.
When they broke apart, Stuber said, “I have the vein. You can let go.”
Teran watched all of this, a shade disturbed. “Wow. That’s…disconcerting.”
Perry was past being surprised by Stuber and Petra’s unique relationship. “Where do you need us?”
Petra withdrew her hands from the man’s stomach. “I need you both to hold the organs out of the way while I work.” She puffed a strand of hair out of her face. “Derrick, bandages, please.”
Derrick dutifully began sopping up the blood with a handful of cloth, clearing the area so that Petra could see to work.
She shook her head as she grabbed a device from one of the broken arms of the Surgeon. “Everything’s gone to shit. This guy’s two pints from running dry, and I ran out of SanguinEx three patients ago.”
“You need triage,” Stuber remarked. “This guy should have been left to die.” Then to the man: “No offense.”
“But I don’t want to die,” the man asserted.
“Sure you don’t. But it’s probably going to happen anyways.”
“Not helping, Franklin,” Petra snapped, hunching over the wound with the device, which began to emit a low whine. “But you’re right. Once I have him stabilized—if I can get him stabilized—you need to go out there and start triaging.”
“I can do that,” Stuber nodded.
Petra pointed to the organs around Stuber’s hands. “Perry, Teran. Pull those organs away so I can get to that bleeder.”
Teran looked a little green, but she leaned in with Perry and they dutifully pushed their fingers into the warm, slick innards, pulling them apart to expose the vein Stuber had pinched in his fingers. Petra hunched closer and began to work.
“Where did you come from?” Petra said without looking up. “And where did you go?”
“There’s a lot to tell there,” Stuber replied. “It’s a bit more involved than you probably think it is. But let’s just skip to the end. The things that came out of the sky and leveled this city? Well, we kind of set them loose.”
Petra paused in her work, glancing up at Stuber.
He bobbled his head. “Well…not us, per se. Not really. Nevermind. I’ll fill you in on the details later. The long and short of it is, as soon as I realized that we’d kickstarted an apocalypse, I immediately raced home to find you.”
Petra’s expression was frozen, like she wasn’t quite sure how much of this tall tale to believe. She began working again. “That’s very chivalrous of you, dear.”
“You know me. I’m a model gentlemen. Anyways, we got to Oksidado right as that thing was ripping it to shreds. I went into your house, but you’d already fled.”
“I didn’t flee,” Petra said, as though the implication was beneath her. “I left Oksidado for Karapalida at first light yesterday morning. I’d heard it’d been wrecked by something. I still haven’t seen these things that you’re talking about falling out of the sky, but I’ve certainly heard enough about them. What are they?”
“Very angry robots.”
“Why are they angry?”
“I think they were just designed to be that way.”
“You didn’t make them angry?”
“No, I didn’t do shit. Except try to help Shortstack over here.”
Perry glared at Stuber’s betrayal. Stuber shrugged as if to say Well, it’s true.
The good doctor gave Perry a sidelong glance. “You always struck me as trouble.”
“Me?” Perry couldn’t help feel a little wounded. “Like, good trouble or bad trouble?”
“Neither. You just seem like the type of person that can’t help stirring the pot.”
“That’s accurate,” Teran quipped.
“I’m done with the vein,” Petra announced and straightened. “You can let go now, dear. Perry, Teran, you can let go as well.” She used her slightly-less-bloody wri
st to wipe a bead of sweat from her brow. “So what happens now?”
Perry, Teran, and Stuber all exchanged a look.
Petra swept a finger across all of them. “That’s what I’m talking about. Trouble.”
“Welllllll…” Stuber sighed.
Perry decided to just come out with it. “Petra, we have someone who needs medical help.”
“Right. Bring them in. I’ll get to them as soon as I can.”
“That’s kind of the problem. We can’t just bring her in here.”
Petra exchanged the tool in her hand for a different, crueler-looking contraption. “And why is that?”
Perry looked to Derrick, who he didn’t know and was suspicious of. Petra caught the look and nodded.
“Derrick, take the bloody bandages to the boiler, please. I’ll need more.”
Derrick complied without comment.
When he’d left the room, Perry leaned in and spoke in low tones. “She’s a demigod.”
“Fuck the demigods,” groaned the man on the table.
“Be quiet,” Petra ordered. “You’re hallucinating.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
She looked back to Perry. “You’re right. You can’t bring her in here. Not many people are feeling very friendly towards the demigods.”
“Can we take you to her?”
Petra shook her head. “I can’t leave my patients. There’s too much to do. I haven’t slept in thirty-six hours. What’s wrong with her?”
“She got gut shot by one of those…robots. Which are called Guardians, by the way.”
“Funny name for something intent on killing everyone. How close is she to dying?”
“I don’t know. Close-ish?”
“Why are you even trying to help her? All the demigods abandoned us. That’s kind of why everyone’s pissed at them.”
“They did, but she didn’t. She’s a friend.”
“Forgive me if I’m doubtful.”
“Petra,” Perry’s voice grew earnest. “She got wounded trying to save you in Oksidado.”
“I wasn’t even there.”
“Granted, but she thought that you were. And she put her life on the line to try to get you out.”
Petra considered this in silence while she made some sort of adjustments to the contraption in her hand. “Fine. I’ll treat her. But you have to get her to me. I can’t go to her.”
Perry’s heart sunk. “I’m not sure how that’s possible.”
Teran shifted. “We could disguise her.”
“She’s seven feet tall,” Perry grunted. “There’s no disguising that.”
Teran thought for a moment. “Petra, do you know where we could get a wheelchair?”
Petra actually laughed as she bent back over her patient. “Any working wheelchair has a poor, crippled bastard sitting in it.”
Perry had realized what Teran was thinking about and nodded. “What about a wheelbarrow? Or a cart? Something she can lay down in to disguise how tall she is?”
Petra shrugged lightly as she began to use the contraption to simultaneously rinse and vacuum the wound sight. It made an unpleasant slurping noise. “That you can probably find plenty of. Not a whole lot of people trying to do work at the moment. I’d check the market area.”
Perry drew back, looking for something to clean his hands off on. He didn’t want to use the bandages. Realizing there wasn’t anything else, he just wiped them on his pants. “Alright. That’s the plan then. We grab a cart or something and get her here on that.”
Petra raised her head and nodded to a closed door on the other side of the room, a smattering of bullet holes leaking in shafts of light. “When you get her here, take her to that back door and knock three times. Even disguised, try not to let anyone get a good look at her.”
“Will do.” Perry looked at Teran and Stuber. “You guys ready?”
Stuber drew back. “Shortstack…I’m not leaving my wife.”
Perry’s jaw dropped. “But we need you! We can’t haul her ass all the way through Karapalida!”
Stuber rolled his eyes. “Is that all I am to you? A beast of burden?”
“Sometimes, yes!”
“Well, I’m not leaving my wife. I found her, and she’s still alive, and I sure as shit am not letting her out of my sight when there’s angry robots roaming the world looking to wipe out every living thing.” A flash of regret swept across Stuber’s features. “I’m sorry, Perry. Everything I’ve done, I’ve done to get back here. Now that I’m here, I can’t leave.”
Perry felt his shock turning to dread. Stuber wasn’t going to leave her at all? His mind started to vault through the unknown future, and in each thing he pictured, he had to remove the image of Stuber there helping him, and suddenly it all seemed much more difficult. Was he serious about this?
He started to argue, but Teran grabbed his arm—her fingers were still sticky with blood. “It’s fine, Perry. We’ll figure it out. One thing at a time. Let’s get Mala first, and then we’ll hash out the details.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
STRANGE HAPPENINGS
“You can’t be serious.” Mala stared at the rusty cart. Even though her face was starkly pale from blood loss, she still balked at the idea of being wheeled around.
“Oh, for Primus’s sake!” Perry thrust a hand at the cart that they’d pilfered from the market. It still had the stinking juices from a pile of rotted produce. “I’m as serious as you bleeding to death.”
Mala’s gaze shifted around unsteadily. She was clearly suffering from her wound. But eventually she managed to summon a haughty look and fix it on Perry. “You want me to be carted around…in a filthy farmer’s cart.”
Perry looked skyward with an exasperated sigh, and couldn’t help but think of the night sky that he would see later, and the stars, and the streaks of light from more Guardians coming to crash down on earth and destroy them all.
“Mala,” he grated out. “Get in the fucking cart.”
Teran was less restrained. Blush-faced and sweating, she clenched the side of the skiff and pointed to the cart that sat on the dusty ground outside of Karapalida. “We hauled this piece of shit for two miles, just to try to save you from bleeding out. Now, you’re going to get your pompous, self-righteous ass inside that cart, right now, or—”
“Or what?” Mala challenged.
Teran grew suddenly cold. “Or we’re going to leave you to die out here.”
Mala swayed on her feet—which, coincidentally, Perry couldn’t believe she was still standing on, as the floor of the skiff looked like someone had drained out a large animal on it. But gradually, the seriousness of her condition must have overcome her momentary pride.
“Right,” Mala murmured. “In we go.”
The seven-foot-tall woman slumped onto the cart as though plopping on a comfortable chair. She seemed more insolent than wounded. But Perry supposed that might just be how Mala dealt with her burgeoning mortality. It must be quite strange to be someone who believed they were going to live well into their mid-hundreds, and then to be required to face death relatively early.
He understood, academically, that this might be difficult for her. But he didn’t have much pity for her. Peons like him and Teran had been facing death all their lives.
With unrequited anger, Teran thrust a filthy tarpaulin over Mala. “There,” she snapped, as the fabric settled down. “You’re a dead body. Now shut the fuck up and don’t move.”
“It’s hot,” Mala complained.
“You’re half-dead,” Perry shot back. “You’re not thinking clearly. Shut your mouth and let us do your thinking for you.”
And so Mala shut her mouth and laid very still, and together Teran and Perry carted her two miles back and into Karapalida.
No one on the street seemed to give them much mind. Perhaps they would have drawn more predatory attention if they looked like they had anything to their name, but they had no obvious items of value, their clothing was filthy, and the contents of
the cart quite obviously had the shape of a shrouded body.
Bodies were commonplace. What Legatus Mordicus had said came back to Perry, and he took note of it as they wound their way through the rubble strewn city. In amongst the shattered mudbrick and the tattered pennants, there were limbs. A hand here. A booted foot there. Some small, as though from a child. Others large and callused. All different skin tones, but all of them, no matter the melanin, washed out and bloodless.
“Mordicus was right,” Perry murmured as he and Teran struggled to get the rickety cart through a pile of rubble. “This place is going to stink in another day or so.”
Teran looked around them, her nose wrinkling. “I’m starting to smell it now.”
“Do you think they’re going to come back?”
“I think that’s their job—exterminate life.” Teran lifted one side of the cart over a particularly large chunk of mudbrick. “I don’t know how they’re tracking us down, but I get the sense that the more people gather, the more the Guardians are going to show up.”
Perry nodded, agreeing with her. “If I were trying to exterminate everyone, I’d certainly go for target rich environments first.”
“We need to figure out a way to stop them.”
Perry felt a pull in his chest as the clinic came into view again. “I know. We’re trying. We’ll figure something out.”
“You think so?”
He frowned. “I have to, Teran. Because what else is there? Just let everyone die?”
“It might be out of your hands.”
“It’s always been out of my hands. But I’m still gonna try.”
“Primus help me,” came a groan from the cart. The dirty tarpaulin stirred. “Are you two going to get me to a fucking doctor or what?”
Teran kicked the side of the cart. “We’re working on it! Stop talking!”
A few people, sifting through a pile of destruction, cast a strange glance at them.
“People are looking at us,” Teran hissed. “You have to stay quiet.”
Mala responded, but quieter. “Teran…I’m about to die. Please hurry.”
They didn’t say anything else to Mala, but they picked up the pace as best they could, and swung wide around the front of the clinic. There didn’t seem to be much of a line now. More of just a jumble of wounded, all clamoring to get in and be seen. Others that had apparently waited too long already were staggering off to try to find help elsewhere.
