I very profusely apologize to my readers for taking SO freaking long to update. As I said in the notes to my last chapter though, I do feel that a good break was well-deserved after completing the first act. On top of that, I had-and am still having-a difficult time developing an outline for this part of the story, although I'm happily turning the corner with that problem. Another thing that gave me a hard time was that I decided to have Jack and Ann be "treated" at the interstellar hospital which is the focus of the Sector 12 General Hospital books, a science fiction series written by Irish author James White. Unfortunately, the two or three books that I did read from the series, I read WAY back in high school, and belonged to the school library, meaning that I now only have sketchy memories and whatever information I can find on the Internet to base these next few chapters on. Last but definitely not least, my knowledge of medicine and nursing is woefully lacking-which is truly pathetic, considering that my mom's been a nurse my entire life and my sister is studying to be one! So I had to spend a lot of time doing research that made my head spin for this chapter and the upcoming one.
Anyhow, at least we can pick up where we left off once more after four months in limbo.
"Jack fell down/ and broke his crown/ and Jill came tumbling after…" Jack and Jill, Traditional nursery rhyme.
"It may be that occult transportations of human beings do occur…" Charles Fort, Lo, 1932.
"But the most likely outcome of contact with an extraterrestrial species would be absolute terror." Michael Crichton, Sphere, 1987.
The scent of antiseptics and latex replaced the smells of decaying leaves and monkey houses as the green and tan flood of light disappeared, and Ann found herself, still kneeling at Jack's side, in what she recognized as a hospital-more or less. But it was a hospital with technology more advanced and inexplicable than any she'd encountered in her life. She had no idea what to make of it.
Nor did her feebly grasping, uncomprehending mind know what to make of the extraordinary beings coming forward. There were three obvious humans-the man who called himself Dr. Schuler, a taller, muscular black woman with her slightly frizzy black hair in a ponytail, and a young Oriental man in glasses, all dressed in pale green surgical uniforms and forming a loose triangle with their fantastic companions.
Fantastic only began to describe these escapees from a Salvador Dali painting. There was one, stocky and about half Jack's height, resembling an animated teddy bear covered in short, curly, copper-red fur, with seven fingers on each hand. There was yet another one that looked like a rearing, six-foot caterpillar, with the tail and face of a storybook fox. It had four "arms," each bearing a hand with four digits, and stood on four thick, short, and padded legs, very much like the feet of a rhino. The creature's coat was thick and striped like that of a zebra, the stripes further accented by what appeared to be a red ochre dye. Another Barsoomesque creature looked very much like the zebra-striped one, yet was noticeably larger with a solid-colored tan coat, four retractable eyestalks, two dozen pairs of legs-and most curious of all, two separate mouths.
A shrill, piercing, glassy scream erupted from Ann's throat. As it had been so often over the previous five days, her first impulse was to flee, but the sheeting agony along her ribs and across her lower spine brought her up short. Not that it would've mattered anyway, with the rapid way in which the three people rushed forward to considerately yet securely restrain her.
"Mam, do not panic. I know you're anxious and upset, but you'll aggravate your injuries even more if you do so," Dr. Schuler levelly urged her.
Latching on to the only other beings that made sense besides Jack, all burgundy red and ash gray under the remorselessly revealing interior lighting, she squealed fearfully, agitatedly at the other three members of her species, "What the hell are these crazy things!"
The double-mouthed eyestalked beast leading, the three Martians-for that was the only way that Ann knew how to categorize them-came forward, hands half spread out with palms facing her, evidently to display that they intended no harm. Indeed, this occurred to a distant, objective part of Ann Darrow.
Nonetheless, a creature that is wounded, completely disoriented, has never seen anything like the potential helper, and standing by its critically wounded mate can't be relied upon to recognize-much less accept- altruistic intent, even if they be human. The approach of the Martians simply made Ann's panic and agitation steeper.
She found herself starting to feel lightheaded again. No, no, you're NOT going to faint. You're not going to do anything that-that-that girly ever again, especially when Jack needs you. Do you hear me Ann Darrow?
Girly? another part of her chided in astonishment. If Jack Sharkey was in my place, looking at these things, he'd tip backward too!
"Get away from us damn it! You monsters touch him and there'll be hell to pay!" she yelled out at them in wild, flaring fear, her slender disheveled form still partly arched over the even more worse for wear writer's. She'd always had a slight overbite, but although Ann wasn't aware of it, all of her front teeth were now bared in a stark grin of panicked dread. It helped induce the three entities-should she think of them as freakazoids, like that one hyena, Shenzi, probably would?- to draw back involuntarily, impressed by her ferocity, and she was privately pleased.
"Mam, it's okay, they're not going to further harm your companion or hurt you either," the Negress nurse, wearing a badge with the name Michelle Osten printed on it, levelly replied, gesturing downward with the palms of her hands in an attempt to soothe the actress.
"Applesauce!" Ann defiantly shot back, as she tried to leap to her feet, only to be brought down cringing once more by the crimson, cringing agony from Nduli's double clawing. That was the least of her concerns right now though. Pointing at the double mouthed caterpillar thing with one graceful, blood-smeared hand as she pressed her side with the other, the memory of the colossal centipede too vivid in her mind, she snapped, "Last time I saw something that looked like that monster, it put its feelers right in my mouth while its pal was getting ready to inject poison into my heart!"
The creature's fur rippled in a different way than before, and Ann thought she actually heard it mutter, "I beg your pardon lady," but her deep trepidation masked it too much for her to positively tell for certain.
"Mam, calm down," Michelle earnestly, encouragingly continued. "Calm down, please. Notwithstanding what misfortunes you've experienced with similar-looking organisms, our fellow colleagues are rational, decent-hearted beings, all of them members of herbivore species at that. They aren't monsters or beasts, but are nurses and doctors just like us. We want to help you and save your…?." The sentence slid off into the air and floated in place like a feather.
Warily, she opened the locked trunk a little. "Boyfriend," Ann supplied, still unwilling to give them Jack's name just yet. "My boyfriend. And can I truly trust you-trust them?" she said, her query an intensifying, strained cry.
The sheer cumulative madness of the past four days finally came smashing down on her in all its entirety then, like a railroad car's worth of bricks, and she pressed her petite hands against her temples, tears starting to shine in her cobalt eyes as she despairingly gasped, "Can I even trust my senses anymore! Can I even trust myself that I'm still sane and tethered to reality, that I'm not utterly losing my mind? How do I know that I'm not going to suddenly wake up in a hospital myself, out of a two, three, four month long coma that came about after some piece of board or chunk of concrete fell off a building and bonked me on my pretty blond head?"
"Mam, for what it's worth to you, I can assure you that this is very real," Michelle said, tone smooth and reassuring. Ann wasn't buying it.
"Tell it to Sweeny, delirium among a host of deliriums!" the stage actress responded with pert, pointed skepticism. With a sudden air of meditative wryness, she softly whispered, "Heh, you know, my Uncle Steve was a heavy drinker, and he had the DTs with regularity. Well, I think this beats those rattlesnakes coming out of the closet, maggots under his skin, and dancing orange buffalo that he'd see to hell, if you ask me," she put forth, giving a mirthless little chuckle. "You don't have crazy visions by halves, do you Ann Darrow!" she giggled to herself.
"Mam, you are certainly not suffering hallucinations from excessive alcohol or drug abuse-and as doctors we should know. This is very much the here and now, despite what you may feel. Is there anything we can do to make you more confident of that?" Dr. Schuler politely asked. His talk was the spitting image of Indlovu's.
"If so, then you could answer my first question for starters: What are these things?" Ann weakly told him, an attack of the nerves making her body begin to vibrate. "Oh God, I truly can't take this anymore!" This was too much for anyone to expect her to be able to handle!
"Guess you'd best fill the poor lady in yourselves pals," the doctor said to them with a nod of his head.
The caterpillar thing with the two mouths spoke first. What came out of its topmost one was a strange combination of hoots, whistles, and trills, accompanied by the creature's fur shifting and flowing like a field of grass on a windy day. Several moments later, a surprised, bemused Ann heard a neutral, matter-of-fact male voice come from several discreet speakers in the room. The voice had a distinct crackling, electric, overall aspect to it, and Ann had the impression that some incredible piece of technology was somehow reading and translating the creature's spoken words, then broadcasting the results just to this particular room.
"I am Doctor Morroyap, a member of the Kelgian species," the double-mouthed caterpillar thing answered.
"I'm Nurse Lidivug-Hurog, a Nidian," the curly-haired teddy bear creature responded in the gently keening, childlike voice she'd heard through Rafiki's portal over a pleasant mixture of chuffs, trills, and hums. It seemed female.
"I'm Nurse Gwarb, a Dwerlan," the fox-faced rearing alien agitatedly informed her in that skirling tone over a native tongue that sounded very much like-well, like the cries of a fox.
Blinking, Ann gazed back and forth between them, stupefied and confused as her mind scrabbled to even start to come to grips with the weird creatures, their weird species names, and bizarre titles, none of which really meant much of anything to her.
One part of her wanted to trust them. They seemed polite and peaceful enough.
The other wanted to promptly run like the wind and not look back.
Maybe, just like on Skull Island and in the Pridelands, the wisest action here was, as before, to simply follow the path of least resistance and go along with it. I wonder just how deep I'm going to fall down the rabbit hole before this insanity finally plays itself out, she thought, taking a deep, meditative breath as she regarded the far sides of her eyelids for several seconds. If it ever plays itself out! It wasn't exactly a downhill battle.
Meanwhile, the Oriental, his own badge revealing his name to be Aaron Zhong, had pulled out some type of communicating device out of his pocket and was proclaiming, "Emergency staff, this is a Code 2569! Yes, I know it's been a few blue moons," he added. "We have a critically wounded, unconscious adult male DBDG from that neck of the multiverse, and a mildly wounded, fully conscious and ambulatory adult female, also in classification DBDG. Still, we'll need two stretchers. Pull out all the stops with this one and pray a little for good measure!"
"At least we're dealing with the species we know the best, and this isn't one of those cases where we have no clue what the patient even is-not to mention how to diagnose and heal him like the Blind One or the Rollers," Dr. William Schuler muttered with wary optimism, kneeling down at the playwright's left shoulder and feeling under his blocky jaw for a pulse as Ann mincingly shuffled backward to accommodate the physician, hypnotized by both the Martian beasts and the gruesome, linear, red-yellow pointillist work she was involuntarily making on the cream linoleum floor with drops of her own blood and urine. Cocking his head, he then placed his ear close to Jack's lips. "He's still taking in air at least, and his windpipe isn't blocked or compromised."
"But oh God, is he in a bad state," Michelle choked out, squatting down to pick up Jack's limp legs by the calves and raising them off the blood-smeared floor, allowing what still remained in his body to flow down into his trunk and vital organs. "Severe hypovolameic shock, an evisceration, extensive deep lacerations…and a collapsed lung on top of that!"
Horribly severe, Ann thought, for she could plainly see now how Jack's fingernails and lips had taken on a lapis lazuli tint to them, and his normally russet skin was as pale and clammy with sweat as soaked wood ashes. A dreadful wheezing, sucking sound came from the deep quadruple fang marks in the left side of his ribcage, expanding far less noticeably than the right side at each straining breath.
"Definitely a Class III hemorrhage," Zhong pronounced. (A Class III hemorrhage is when an injured person has lost between 30 to 40 percent of their total blood volume. It would later be estimated that Jack had lost 37 percent.)
"Mam, do you know what caused these injuries to you and your boyfriend?" Dr. Schuler inquired of her.
"A leopard did it," she replied, bitterness welling up within her at the thought of Nduli and by extension Scar. "He intended to kill Jack by torture before dealing with me, from what I can figure out, then do the same to me I suppose. I took my licks when I got in his way."
"Well, you're a very brave woman then mam, and we'll try very hard to make sure th-"
Abruptly, there was a rapid series of pounding footfalls off to Ann Darrow's right, and, head swiveling, she saw another small group of humans and Martian creatures rushing down a corridor at them. There was another Dwerlan, its stripes forming a different pattern than Nurse Gwarb's and accented with a light caramel dye. Two more humans were in the convoy, along with something that looked to her like a cross between a giant pear and one of the Indian rhinos at the Central Park Zoo, except it was 2 tons in weight, had no mouth, lidless eyes, and knuckle-walked like Kong on six thick tentacles, a being that resembled an anthropomorphic, three-legged cock pheasant, but didn't have the long tail feathers, and a female being that certainly seemed like a human brunette in umpteen ways-yet had some vague, intangible quality about her that gave Ann the impression this wasn't exactly the case.
What gave her the biggest shock though, were the pair of conveyances meant to transport her and Jack to surgery. During the time when the Great War had been raging in Europe, Ann had seen pictures in the paper-and newsreel footage at what few movies she could afford to attend or someone would graciously treat her to-of injured soldiers being carted off the battlefield in canvas stretchers held between two people.
Those were what she'd expected to see. These "stretchers" though, were more like great elliptical litters, with padded restraints and snap-down, transparent canopies. One of them, which she assumed was meant for Jack, had a sort of short vertical pole from which a transparent plastic bag hung, filled with a solution that she figured was saline and meant to be administered through a catheter. Weirdly, it was contained in a bag and not a glass bottle. On the other side, what Ann recognized to be a tank of oxygen was fastened to the gurney. There was also a large pillow at its foot, surrounded by plastic-wrapped packages.
But the most mind-boggling thing of all, something she just could not manage to get her head around, was that no one at all, human or extraterrestrial, was actively supporting them. Each one was merely being pulled along and steered by two staff members.
"My God, they're floating in midair!" Ann shouted in astonishment. "How can they possibly do that?"
"That they are," Nurse Lidivug responded through the translator, nodding. "Anti-gravity superconductor technology is an amazing thing, isn't it?"
"You bet it's amazing. And like something out of the Wizard of Oz!" Ann marveled. My God in Heaven, what sort of place is this? And that teddy-bear thing takes it as just a matter of course!
On arriving, staring at a frozen Ann and Jack with its great lidless snake eyes, the knuckle-walking pear-rhino creature extended one of its tentacles to reveal a cluster of eight digits, using one of them to jab a green button on the front edge of the litter. Scarcely trusting her eyes, Ann gaped as the gurney descended with a soothing, mechanical hum, then came to rest. I can't believe this!
A human paramedic, bearded and wearing spectacles, pressed a sort of release mechanism at the junction between the clear canopy and stretcher, causing the former to purposefully recede backward. The new Dwerlan, meanwhile, brought what Ann figured to be Jack's intended litter, the one with the saline, down to the floor in the same manner, as the pheasantlike being opened it up in its turn.
Suddenly, as if the playwright somehow unconsciously sensed that it was wiser to get it over with here in the open rather than in the confines of the floating gurney, his belly and throat heaved in an almighty spasm. Knowing precisely what was coming, Lidivug seized Jack's head between her seven-fingered hands and turned it to the left as the dying writer vomited, a white-beige burst laced with bright red forming a clotted fan as it sheeted out upon the floor. Champagne bubbles gleamed and spangled among the expelled blood, further pointing to an unambiguous lung injury.
It transfixed Ann with disgusted, despairing horror as the Nidian and Doctor Schuler carefully but speedily picked Jack's inert form off the floor, heedless of the blood, and deposited him in the stretcher, Lidivug slinging the writer's legs up onto the pillow. Doctor Zhong took a plastic cap off a needle at the end of the IV line and smoothly inserted it into a vein in Jack's left forearm, affixing it in place with a piece of surgical tape as the life-saving saline began to enter his drained body. Michelle tore open one of the several packages that contained a large square of sterile gauze, and the bearded Danish paramedic, his nametag reading Jerome Droscher, snatched it up, pressing it hard against the shredded side of the playwright's scalp.
The woman who Ann sensed was a facsimile of a female human, her nametag announcing her identity to be Aflan Suyla, gestured at the vaudeville actress to get into her own gurney. But Ann Darrow hesitated. She felt rooted to the floor all of a sudden, as if her legs had been transformed into granite while she kept staring at Jack in his litter. An oxygen mask now embraced his Mayanesque face, and Jerome forcefully pressed a black button on the stretcher, bringing it back up to its previous waist-high floating position. Except for the pheasant thing, everyone was pressing a pad of gauze down on where the bleeding was particularly awful.
She wanted so badly to stay with him and help him, more than anything else in the world-well, so to speak. How could she leave her Jack of Hearts at death's door and totally vulnerable, at the mercy of these alien, terrifying, unknown monsters? Would she ever see him alive again? This was ten, twenty times more difficult a decision for her than when she'd first set her graceful right foot on the Venture's gangplank almost seven weeks ago. Like a frenzied chimpanzee does, hair bristling, the desperate, paranoid little voice in her mind and soul was bouncing up and down as it veritably shrieked, He's going away, he's going away, he's going away, EVERYBODY GOES AWAY!
Loyal sentimentality and pragmatic sensibility. The members of this dichotomy are vastly powerful forces, particularly when they are actively at war within the person faced with crisis, and to claim to know which one shall trump the other in an occasion of stress is arrogance. Yet when push comes to shove, self-preservation is admittedly also the first, golden imperative for every living being.
"Please get in the gurney mam," Aflan gently yet neutrally commanded in fluent English. "We'll do everything possible to save your friend. You have to worry about your own wellbeing now."
Ann's blinkers met Aflan's mysterious green-gray ones for a second or so before longingly turning to travel down the hallway with Jack's retreating stretcher, then veering down to her own. Her love, in a double sense of the word, was doomed-but yet it wasn't doomed. She was right.
And the vaudeville actress still remembered the parting words of her beloved Manfred Jettweiler, urging and encouraging that she had to look out for herself now. Plus, she'd read enough magazine articles about botched big-game hunts to know that with big cats, even superficial claw wounds are almost certain to result in rapid infection.
Jack was in the best circumstances he could be, with excellent and apparently trustworthy surgeons who'd take sterling care of him. The rest was up to the Lord alone.
Still, as Ann, her own lips compressed, spine and torn flesh throbbing while she gingerly, mincingly reclined on the stretcher and felt a curious sensation, similar to riding a Ferris wheel, as the device rose four feet into the air, she ardently yelled out to Michelle Osten, tearing down the hallway on Doctor Zhong's heels, "Whatever you do, don't let Jack die! Don't you dare let him die!"
The Negress nurse flashed around for a few moments. Just like Rafiki, her eyes and demeanor seemed unaccountably, guitar-string tense as she ran past.
"Mam, for the sake of everyone and existence itself, we CAN'T let him die!"
"What?" Ann said to both herself and the nurse, eyes wide with puzzlement. She wanted to ask more, but by that time, Michelle was already around a hallway corner and gone. "For the sake of everyone? What in the world was she even talking about?" Ann asked of Aflan, blinking in abject confusion and mounting unease.
"It's best that you don't know, believe me," the woman who wasn't quite a woman panted out, steering the litter from behind as the pear-rhino thing led it along. "Believe me."
"And if it comes to pass…then the answer is likely not to matter anymore," Nurse Gwarb added.
Ann Darrow gritted her teeth with frustration and hurt. "Not matter? Please, why is everybody keeping secrets from me?" she implored.
But then the extraordinary beings that coexisted and healed together in this mad, mad hospital pelted her with a barrage of questions themselves, sabotaging Ann's train of thought as the Dwerlan jotted down her responses on the run. The actress knew full well that they were doing this in large measure to be evasive, and it made her distinctly sore. But she soon allowed herself to be distracted and fall into the rhythm of the queries.
"Mam, what is your full name?"
"Ann Marquadt Darrow."
"What is Jack's full name, if you know it?"
"Jack Goralski Driscoll."
"Okay, good. Did he speak to you at any time after the mauling?"
"Oh, absolutely."
"Very encouraging," Gwarb said, more to herself than her patient. "How old are you Ann?"
"Twenty-nine. And yes," she added, "I know that I seem older, but I'm being square with you all about my age."
"Date of birth?"
"September 16th, 1904."
"Wait a moment, 1904?…Holy bananas, that means you come-or maybe more like originate-from 1933!"
"What was that baboon doing?"
"Oh boy, she'sgoing to be suffering major cultural and temporal shock over here in our particular part of the multiverse," the crazy pear-rhino thing sighed to a woman nurse, its translated voice seeming to indicate femininity. Due to the way the rooster comb on "her" head noticeably vibrated and quivered in distinct patterns, Ann deduced with astonishment that the being was using the fleshy outgrowth to communicate in lieu of a mouth!
"To say nothing of our technology."
"Whatever that is, or what your machines are like, I think I'm already experiencing it," Ann replied miserably, brain reeling and groping in futility as they turned a corner and guided her own litter into a sort of elevator. Aflan brutally jabbed the button that would take the blond actress up into a whole different sort of theater.
She was surprised at how swift and how smooth the ride was. It's not every day, after all, that you get to ride an elevator that operates on anti-gravity principles.
As a note, Barsoom is the name that the inhabitants of Mars call their planet in the Martian Chronicles series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of the Tarzan books. Science fiction writing was also kind of in its toddler years in the '30s, and authors seldom went much farther out into space than Neptune for the scenarios in their tales-demonstrating a particular affinity of course, for the Red Planet. So it's very likely that Ann would use that concept as a frame of reference in regards to any extraterrestial being.
Also, I need to come clean with my fans. I want to say first of all, that I am extremely appreciative of each and every review you take the time out of your day to write. However, I am also here on this site to become a more accomplished writer. At the risk of being mistaken for being ungrateful, many of the reviews I am getting are not all that in-depth. It's not enough for me now just to know that my writing is good or pleasing or awesome, I want to know HOW and WHY is it good or pleasing or awesome! I want to know if something made you feel strongly, if something made you laugh, what you didn't know before, what made you scared, what you thought was sweet, what descriptions you found to be beautiful-or maybe too much.
In short, I'd like to know some more details from you reviewers, so I can know how to write even BETTER and get a better grasp of/share the enjoyment each chapter brings to YOU!
