by Marie Dry
“I know, we are looking for one.”
“It shouldn’t be that hard to find someone. Jobs are scarce these days, and they’d jump at the chance to work in a place like this.” All the nurses were well dressed and obviously received generous salaries.
“We have been looking for months. No qualified humans are available.”
He walked into the shelter again, and she followed him, worrying about finding someone who could help these poor women.
He finished treating the last few women, and Madison continued treatment as well.
“Why do you keep saying our training isn’t adequate?” His technology was more advanced than theirs, but these were modern times, many advances had been made in the medical profession.
He pressed his gadget against the neck of a young women who flinched back from him and looked like she would crawl up the wall to get away from him. He finished and turning his back on her, he fixed Madison with that creepy black gaze that had red tendrils bleeding into it whenever he looked at her. It didn’t happen with anyone else, she’d asked and everyone else said his eyes remained black when he talked to them. She wanted to ask him what made her so special, but she suspected she really didn’t want to know the answer.
“It used to be five years study to become a doctor, with two years internship. During your so-called golden age the internship was changed to four years. At least then the doctors were adequate from what I found in your antiquated archives.”
“That may be true, but things have changed. We have much better study methods and don’t need a full five years to learn everything. A lot of the procedures they taught then were antiquated and was done away with.”
“No, your civilization is collapsing. That is why doctors don’t have adequate training anymore. That is why I stopped the human doctors performing operations. The survival rate was ten percent with most of the operations not life threatening.”
Madison sank down on the examination table. She didn’t want to believe him, but one professor at the university had tried to tell them the same things. He’d called it the boiling frog theory and was ridiculed. He had said that when you put a frog in boiling water, it will jump out. Put it in there and gradually heat the water to boiling, and it will happily sit there and cook to death. Was this what was happening? She refused to believe it, couldn’t believe that their advanced society was collapsing. She’d helped so many people. Hadn’t lost one patient yet. Surely, if what he said were true, she would’ve found a case she didn’t know how to handle by now. A cold dread slithered down her spine.
“There used to be airplanes making flights between all your cities, even most of the very small cities. Why aren’t they flying anymore?”
“A lot of planes fell,” she said.
Even as she said it, she wondered why it didn’t bother her before. Why she just assumed it was impossible to fly from one side of the country to the other when she’d known it used to be common practice.
“Why didn’t they fix them?” he asked.
Madison stared at him, such a simple question, but it said so much. Why didn’t they fix the planes? Why did people stop flying?
“You had something called the internet and, when that fell, you replaced it with the TC. Everyone called it the height of advanced technology, but you cannot make a call to another continent. Something that was common practice a century ago.”
Madison balled her fists. She would’ve liked to refute what he was saying, but everything he said was a truth that hit her with the impact of a bullet.
He stared at her for a while, waiting for an answer, and then abruptly walked to the door. “We have to go to the orphanage.”
She followed him, barely taking notice of where they were going. She didn’t want to believe him. But the citizens in the Roman Empire never realized when that empire fell. Centuries later, they still talked as if they belonged to that empire.
They went to the side of the building and got into the shuttle. Madison really didn’t want to get into another vehicle with him, but she got in, turned to him, and gasped. He’d changed, turned into a human. He turned his head and looked at her, and his eyes briefly flashed red. Seeing those eyes do that was even more sinister when set in a human face.
“You will not tell anyone that we can appear human.”
She pressed her lips together. They could be everywhere. People should be warned. No way was she keeping this to herself.
His eyes flashed red. Blood red. “If you tell anyone, I will kill them, and I will continue to kill everyone who knows.”
“Why did you show me this? Are you going to the orphanage in disguise?”
“No, I will go into town while you wait in the shuttle.”
“Why would I meekly wait in the shuttle? Aren’t you scared I’ll follow you and let everyone know there’s an alien among them?”
Chapter 8
“You have seen the Battle at No Name Town on your primitive device. You know I will kill everyone if I need to.”
Madison glared at him, so angry it took a while to find her voice. She balled her shaking hands into tight fists and never had she wanted to hit anyone so badly. “You bastard, you can’t do that.”
“I can.”
“Who the hell do you think you are? This is our planet, humans should rule it. Why don’t you go back where you came from?”
“Earth belongs to The Zyrgin Empire. You will learn to accept this.”
“Never.” She turned away from him and stared out of the window. “You’re a monster, and someone is going to hunt you down one of these days.” She’d started to respect him, to appreciate the work he did with the shelter. The way he’d gotten the hospital enlarged and running so efficiently. Even his arrogance she could understand because his medical knowledge went far beyond anything any human knew. The human species must seem primitive to him. But to threaten to kill people just for knowing their secret. How many secrets did they have?
“How many of you green aliens are walking among humans in disguise. No wonder no one ever sees you. I’ve only seen that hologram and the four of you who work on the hospital.”
What if they had infiltrated human society? How many of them came to earth? Enough to be everywhere? How could she trust anybody she hadn’t known since before the aliens came?
“You do not need to know anything about Zyrgin movements on Earth.”
“Does that mean that you are all over the place, but in disguise?”
“Cease this dangerous talk, human.”
His voice became so rough, she could barely make out the words. Obviously, she’d touched a nerve. And she didn’t dare tell anybody. Even Rachel.
How long had they been on earth before they made that dramatic announcement? “When did you land on Earth?”
“A few years ago?”
She tapped her fingers on the seatbelt that looked like metal and felt like material. “Exactly how many years ago?”
“You don’t need to know. You will spend the time to get to the town in quiet contemplation.”
She laughed at him. “You wish, Fr--I mean alien.” Her mama and brothers never managed to make her sit in quiet contemplation. “How many of these shuttles do you have?”
He ignored her question and she kept asking everything she could think of. Hoping to irritate him. They landed and she threw up on him again. This time accidentally on purpose.
They landed close enough to the town that she could see the buildings in the distance. She took deep breaths to try and settle her stomach. He got out and disappeared and she waited until she was sure he was gone before she tried to figure out the console. She gave up after pressing a few symbols set in the silver metal. Nothing happened. Even if she managed to open the engine she wouldn’t know what to look for.
He returned almost immediately and when he opened the door he was alien again. “We will walk to the orphanage,” he said.
She got out, glad for the fresh air. “Where did you go?”
/> “You do not need to know.”
The orphanage was at the edge of the town. The big old house that must have been built in the previous century was painted a bright yellow with a purple roof and a big garden with big trees. She’d never seen so many trees in one place. Come to think of it, when they flew over it, she’d noticed the whole town had an unusual number of trees, and that was unheard of. On the lawn of the orphanage, children of all sizes ran around, stood talking, and some sat under the beautiful big trees reading. If anyone had asked her, she would’ve said that orphans would wear old clothes and look thin and underfed. These children all had new quality clothes. Synthesized? None of them looked underfed.
“I can’t believe how many trees there are.”
“My leader’s...woman planted most of them. When we realized how few trees there were because of human stupidity, we planted more.”
Why the hesitation? What was he going to say about their leader’s woman? “You know what? I don’t want to hear anymore. For the rest of the day just don’t tell me any other horror that humans supposedly did.”
He walked up the steps and crossed the veranda to the front door. “It isn’t supposedly. Humans are destroying their own species.”
She held up her hand, palm up. “I said I don’t want to hear it.”
He held the door open for her. “Not hearing it will not make it less true. Come, they are waiting for us.”
The orphanage had its own little clinic as well with two cheerful young nurses. Viglar introduced her as the human who would try to help, with her limited skills. Madison took a deep breath, determined that this time she would not get mad. Except for exchanging sympathetic glances with the nurses, she kept quiet.
At least this time he’d introduced her.
They treated scrapes and a few illnesses, but mostly it was new arrivals suffering from neglect and malnutrition. How did she go through life and through medical school without realizing how much suffering existed in the world? “How many new arrivals do you get every month,” she asked the nurse.
“We get between five and twenty daily.”
“That many?” Madison put some of Viglar’s salve on a scrape, smiled at the solemn little girl, and handed her a sweet. “You can join your friends now. Your knee will be all right.” Viglar had given her the jar with the salve and told her to give back what she didn’t use. She had every intention to hide some of it so that she could try and isolate the properties it was made from.
She turned to call in the next patient and froze. Viglar, who’d scanned a small boy of perhaps five with his silver gadget, made the gadget disappear somehow. He reached into the bag of sweets she’d put next to him, took one, and thrust it at the little boy. “Now go away, small human.”
One of the nurses quickly left the room, her shoulders shaking. The child, who seemed younger than five when Viglar lifted him off the bed by grabbing the back of his shirt, ran outside screaming at the top of his lungs. “The monster alien didn’t hurt me, and he gave me sweets.”
Madison bit her lip and turned to the next little patient. It shocked her to see the condition of most of the children who the nurses told her were new arrivals. Obviously, some of them were doing better after Viglar’s regular care each month.
“More and more children arrive every day and most of them are malnourished,” the nurse, who’d come back in, murmured to Madison.
“It’s heartbreaking,” Madison agreed. “Some have bones broken that grew back wrong.” She went over to Vilgar. “Can we do anything for the children whose bones were not aligned correctly?”
“I have scheduled these cases to come to the hospital. I will deal with them. Human doctors would only harm them further.”
For once, she didn’t care about his insults. As long as he helped these children, he could say what he wanted about human doctors.
They were about to leave when the nurse brought in a little boy with an obviously broken leg. Madison shook her head and went to help. It seemed to be their day for extreme cases. At least she knew what to do for him. Madison took out the splint in her bag and some tape to set the leg. She smiled at him. “We will have you fixed in no time.” She handed him a sweet and his eyes widened, the tears drying up.
Clutching the sweet, he looked at her with wild brown eyes out of a face white with fear. “Are you going to chop off my leg? Pete said that’s the only way I’ll live.”
Madison had brothers, so she wasn’t shocked. “Is Pete your friend?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I think your friend was teasing you. I will set your leg and it will heal quite well. Before you know it, you’ll be running around again.”
He smiled, though he didn’t look one hundred percent reassured.
“What is your name?”
“I’m Josh.”
“Well, Josh, my name is Madison, and I will give you something for the pain, and then we’ll fix your leg. Okay?”
“Uh...miss, I mean nurse--” He threw a frightened look at Viglar, but continued in a reedy, but determined little voice. “I’d like the monster alien to fix my leg.”
Again, having brothers, she had a good idea what was going on here, why the little guy was determined to brave the scary alien, even though he was afraid Viglar would hurt him. “How about I start and, when Dr. Viglar is done with his patient, he comes and help?”
He seemed to think it over and then nodded.
She looked at the nurse. “Please lay him on the bed.” She prepared a shot to dull the pain and laid out the splint and tape next to his leg. It would mold automatically to the leg and force the bones to heal in the correct alignment.
“Human, what are you doing?” Viglar asked in that irate way he had when he thought they were being extremely stupid. She fought down the panic. She knew this. She worked on dozens of broken bones. There was no fear of losing the little boy.
She forced a reassuring smile for the little boy and walked up to Viglar. “Stop scaring him. I’m going to set his leg. First, I’m going to give him something, so that he doesn’t feel pain. Now would you please stop making him nervous.”
“He should be nervous of you. Why would you set the bone without knowing exactly what the break looks like?”
“Why do you call her, human?” Josh asked.
She put her hands on her hips. Never mind ample hips, she’d like to be seven foot tall so she could look down at him. And maybe hammer him a bit. “And how do you suppose I do that?” They had a scanner at the hospital, but it was in for repairs. She could feel it had been a clean break, had done this many times without the scanner.
Without answering her, he went to Josh and passed the silver thingie over the broken leg.
“What is that?” the little guy asked in a teary voice. He watched Viglar’s gadget with fascination. “Why do you call her, human? That’s a strange thing to call someone.”
“She is my human. This instrument helps me to see exactly what is wrong with your leg. You will be quiet, little human.”
The boy giggled, but then sobered, scared again. “Is it bad?”
“Yes.”
Madison closed her eyes and resisted the temptation to kick the insensitive alien until he learned some emotion and tact. She went to the side of the bed and smiled at Josh. “But we can fix it. We have really good medicine, the latest alien technology, and before you know it, you will run around again.”
Viglar swiped her splint and tape off the bed with a contemptuous scowl, and her smile became fixed. Those were hard to come by.
He produced a bigger silver gadget from she knew not where and unfolded it until it fitted over the child’s leg. The way it expanded into a type of cast big enough to fit the boy’s leg fascinated her.
“Wow,” the little boy said and Madison suppressed a sigh. Men, no matter the age, were all the same.
As she, the child, and the nurse watched with rapt attention, Viglar pressed invisible buttons on the silver gadget, and it emitted a hum
. In front of her eyes, the swelling went away and the leg returned to normal color. Viglar smiled that awful smile at the child. “Here is your sweet. You are healed. Go away.”
When Josh ran out, clutching his sweet, Viglar turned to Madison. “As you can see, there is no need for your barbaric treatments.”
Madison wanted to yell at him, to tell him that her methods were not barbaric, and that she went to medical school for two backbreaking years and had earned her title. But she kept thinking about those planes falling and not getting fixed. About all the equipment at the hospital that stop working after years of being fixed and then being taken away and one day just not coming back because it couldn’t be fixed anymore. Were they really at the stage where they could not maintain what they had or build new equipment?
“I will train you,” he said.
Chapter 9
“What?” All kinds of thoughts raced through her mind.
“Your training is inadequate. You will report to me at six every morning, and I will train you until you are adequate. I doubt any humans are capable of being more,” he said.
“Oh, joy,” she said with all the sarcasm she could manage. Her heart beat like crazy. With his training, she could keep her promise. She wouldn’t ever lose a patient. Ana could rest in peace. Maybe even forgive her. She’d learned a lot from the books he gave her to study, but if he trained her in better methods and maybe some of his equipment she would be able to save so many lives.
***
Hours later, Madison was about ready to drop, but the damn alien looked like he could work another twenty-four hours without problems. At last the infirmary emptied out.
“We will go now, human.”
“My name is Madison,” she said without heat.
She couldn’t work up the energy to take him on for rudeness. More than the physical tiredness was the revelations she had to face that day. Things she would’ve been better off not knowing. Now she kept thinking of equipment that should work, that should’ve been fixed. Things like the mammogram machines that were available when she was a child that was just not there anymore. And the list was growing.
