Vegas: Invasion2
"To die; to sleep; No more; and, by a sleep to say we end The heartache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wish'd."
3 hours after invasion.
"Good God, man, I told you to not to kill him!" Carson scolds in outrage as he watches John half dragging, half carrying the lifeless body of Todd the Wraith into the hospital room. The doctor is appalled but more concerned about John as he looks like he didn't quite win the battle.
John drops the body onto the floor, almost collapsing himself but he finds his footing. "Sorry," he rasps. "Couldn't be helped." His gaze darts to the bed where Moira is reclining, but she doesn't look like his Moira anymore. She is a woman aged decades in mere seconds and is dying from it. "Is she-"
"Barely holding on!" Carson shakes his head and wheels over a strange-looking contraption of wires and electrodes and a heart defibrillator. "We'll have to improvise. Help me get it into the chair here." He hauls one side, John the other and both men hoist the dead Wraith into a wheelchair. The head lolls, tongue protruding and Carson rights it with a grimace. "All right, then. Can you stand long enough to keep it steady?"
"Yes," John replies, although he feels dizzy and sick and hurts all over. But he shoves all that aside and glances at Moira again. He holds the Wraith upright in the wheelchair as Carson works, applying electrodes to the exposed brain stem and inserting clamps along the ridges of the spine. He cuts into the head and inserts more wires with long, long needles to penetrate areas of the brain that are necessary.
Carson works quickly, like some mad scientist out of a horror movie, like a Doctor Frankenstein trying to bring life to a dead body. He frowns, curses under his breath and uses a scalpel to cut into some soft tissue. Blood oozes like black glue. He adjusts the machines, flicking them on. The lights flutter then grow steady as the backup power is still running, for now. He shakes his head, watching a small monitor. The body jerks and startles John who almost yelps and loses hold of the body. "It…it won't work."
"What?" John's question comes slowly, as if out of a fog. He can't believe after all of this, after all he has endured that he has failed to save Moira. "I thought you could use the enzyme sac."
"I'm sorry, John, it doesn't work that way. I don't have enough power here. I can't trigger the autonomic nervous system artificially to make it mimic a feeding and then a restoring reversal. It…it needs to be natural." He meets the anguished gaze of the other man. "It needs to feed."
The two men stare at each other as the awful implication sinks in on them. To save one life another must be taken. And they are running out of time.
"It can feed on me," John decides.
"No. It would kill you in that state you're in and you wouldn't supply enough to save Moira. We need a…"
"Volunteer," John finishes for him. He knows what he has to do. The grim necessity propels him as he glances at Moira and sees the heart monitor is nearly flat lining now. He frees the Wraith. "Give me a minute."
"John! You can't! You can't mean to…" Carson's words fall away as John's gaze is unrelentingly grim and determined. He watches the injured man leave the room, limping. Carson looks at Moira and steels himself. He readies the machines.
John doesn't have time to pick and choose. To find someone who is already dying or someone who even might deserve this kind of fate. As fate would have it the first person he encounters is someone he knows. His stomach tenses but he forces an acknowledging smile as she approaches, concern on her pretty face.
"John? Oh my God…John! You need to see a doctor immediately!"
"I am. Come with me, Molly, please. I need your help."
"Of course, John! What happened to you!" the nurse asks, concerned as he takes her arm and guides her quickly to a room. She is worried about him and hopes that if she does help him he just might take her out for that dinner he had kept promising to do and never did.
"I'm sorry, Molly," John says gruffly, shutting the door and almost shoving her towards the wheelchair.
She sees what is in the wheelchair and screams.
There is a man.
Moira is jerked out of her miasma by a scream. She stares dully, dimly recognizing the man as he drags a woman towards a wheelchair and holds here there. She struggles in his grasp.
"Do it," the man says, his voice gruff and curt.
There is another man in a white coat that is turning buttons on a machine. A whine emits and the thing in the wheelchair jerks to life. Moira's eyes widen with clarity as she recognizes the Wraith, its arm extending, the sucker extending and latching onto the screaming woman's chest. Moira's sight and mind sharpen with fear.
She sees John holding a woman as she is fed upon by a Wraith! The expression on his handsome face is one of grim resolve, more terrifying than what is happening to the woman. Moira whimpers in recognition, in fear, in utter disbelief at what she is witnessing. The nurse's life fades as her years are taken, taken. Moira closes her eyes, unable to watch, her mind refusing what her eyes had shown her. She struggles to speak, to breath but her heart is racing, racing now and she can feel each gasp, each heartbeat as the woman expires near her.
Moira loses the battle herself and slides into blackness.
"I should be able to reverse it and save this woman as well, I think, I think," Carson stammers but he knows it is a lie and he stares at what had once been a lovely woman and is now a barely breathing aged woman. John gently sets hers onto the floor. He knows it is a lie as well but if Moira is restored to him he can live with that, he can live with anything as long as his Moira is alive and well and with him.
He turns to see Moira unconscious, eyes closed. Chest unmoving.
"NO!" John bellows, freeing the woman to rush to Moira. The flat line beep is ominous, horrible. John grabs Moira's arms and shakes her, as if he could shake her back to life. "Moira! Moira! Moira!" he shouts, and the heart monitor flutters with a resumption of life but it is weak, so weak and fragile.
"John! Hold her steady and attach the arm! I can reverse the feeding process and restore her but it has to be now!" Carson orders. He shoves the wheelchair to Moira's bed. He switches the machine to standby, and then restarts it as he half lifts the Wraith to lean over Moira's body. "I can get the autonomic nervous system to mimic the feeding but make it a reversal if I change the frequencies in the brain stem and the—
"Just do it, doc!" John pleads, hauling Moira somewhat upright in the bed.
"Hold onto her, John! Don't let go!"
John grabs the arm and presses it to her chest. "Moira, hold on! Moira, can you hear me? Moira!"
His voice breaks over her name and he grunts, feeling the arm jerking to false life in his hands. He feels the energy rushing along it, feels the emptying of the enzyme sac and he closes his eyes and prays that this will work, this will work, this will work…