At nine thirty on Saturday morning Dib was rushed into ER. He was in terrible condition; breathing shallowly, heart stuttering, face gone an ugly cheesy color from blood loss. Membrane followed his son from the door, but was shut out at the operating room by a nurse with a personality that rivaled his in forcefulness. Gaz was a few minutes behind her family; she had tailed the ambulance in her own car and did not immediately enter the building after she had found a parking space. Instead she fidgeted with her cell phone for a few minutes, pulling the antennae up and down.

It was far too late for second thoughts. She had already made the call she needed to.

It wasn't hard to find Membrane. He was at the observation window, watching as the doctors clustered and moved around Dib, hands folded tightly behind his back. Every few minutes he whirled away from the window restlessly, pacing up and down the hall, forehead furrowed. He gave the impression of a teacher watching a group of students very, very carefully, picking apart their moves all the while. Gaz stood at the end of the hall for a few moments and observed her father, gauging his mood. When he returned to the window she approached him.

The scientist started at her hand on his arm, and then accepted the cup of coffee she pressed into his hand with a grateful nod. He unbuttoned the collar with one hand, revealing a narrow chin and a mouth with deep grooves at the corners, and sipped at the steaming liquid. When the cup was empty he crumpled it in his hand, sighing gustily.

Gaz stood at his side, her head barely reaching his shoulder. She watched her brother with dark, calculating eyes.

Dib and Gaz, to make an understatement, had never been close. Even the small amount of company they shared had practically disappeared when Dib entered high skool and Gaz remained behind to finish her last year of middle skool. And yet… she didn't want to see him die. Gaz didn't enjoy her brother's company, she didn't appreciate his constant enthusiasm, but when it came to the quick of things her brother was a person she could trust, and he was extended the same courtesy by his sibling.

In spite of everything, she didn't want to see him die…

Membrane shifted his weight from foot to foot beside her, and then with a harsh sigh he began to pace again. Gaz let her head sink forward slightly and watched the doctors work through her eyelashes. She could blurrily see Dib, his head back, hair shaggy and wild, one arm marked and scored with red. How pathetic it was to see him this way. Like a bird that had hit a window and now, in the grips of death, clutched its claws and jerked its head. A crow, perhaps…

Membrane had buttoned up his collar again. His face was hidden now, all traces of vulnerability and stress gone. He reached out a hand and squeezed her shoulder gently. "Not to worry, daughter!" he said cheerfully. "Dib is in the hands of the best doctors that this medical facility has to offer! Although I would of course prefer to work on your brother myself, they'll take adequate care of his wound!"

Gaz rolled her eyes. "That's great, Dad." Oh, she wanted out of here, before her father really decided to bounce some ideas for family-building activities off of her…

"Look," she managed. "Before I came in I called a… friend… of Dib's. He should be here any second now. He probably won't know where to find us. I should go see if he's here."

Without waiting for an answer from her father she turned away and hurried down the hall to the elevator. Once the doors had closed, she allowed herself a sigh of relief. She loved Membrane as much as she loved anyone, but he was hard to deal with when he was stressed and thinking about things. When he was around his children too much, Membrane took an interest in them that was more scientific than paternal: Gaz and Dib became projects, lab animals of a sort, very intelligent animals that were nonetheless ungrateful when someone started trying to improve their lives.

The elevator doors opened at the first floor, and Gaz pushed out by an orderly with a cart full of samples and a worried-looking couple. And there, standing at the front desk with an irritated scowl, was her target.

Zim jumped when Gaz appeared at his shoulder, and then frowned at her angrily. He had hardly opened his mouth to yell at her before Gaz spoke.

"This morning my brother was in the bathroom cutting himself, Zim," Gaz snarled. "He was babbling something about alien implants and mind control earlier. I know that you had something to do with that, so don't bother denying it."

He didn't listen to her. "WHAT!" He pulled away from her, stood back and pointed dramatically. His fist quivered in her face. Gaz glared, unimpressed.

"Zim knows nothing, NOOOTHING of this which you speak! This CUTTING you speak of, it is only a product of the Dib's own weakness and delusion! Why did you call me here? I care not for what happens to-"

She couldn't stand his voice anymore. People were staring. "Shut up," Gaz said, her voice shaky with suppressed emotion. "Just SHUT UP."

She stepped forward and jabbed him in the center of his narrow chest. "You God damn LIAR, don't you even try that with me. I know my brother. He might be an annoying little twit most of the time, but he's STRONGER than that. Don't you DARE ever accuse him of… of just DOING something like that again." It's your fault and I know it, I know it, I can see it.

Zim drew back, putting a border of personal space between them. His mouth was drawn back from his pinkish teeth in an ugly snarl. "Don't. TOUCH. Me. You filthy human!"

His voice was loud enough to catch the attention of the twenty-something receptionist, who looked over at them with an expression of dull-eyed boredom. "If you two can't be quiet then I will have to ask you to leave," she droned, before turning back to the papers in front of her. Both Zim and Gaz glared daggers at her. The woman didn't notice.

"Don't you dare lie to me, Zim," she said, quieter now. "You did this to him. They're operating on him right now. YOU'RE going to come with me and see."

"Why do you even care?" he hissed. "It's no secret that you don't care for him. No one cares for Dib."

She pulsed with rage, barely keeping herself under control. "Maybe I don't, Zim," she spat. "But I know when to quit. My brother would never try to kill himself because of me. Now come ON."

He drew back, regarded her silently, his mouth working. Then he lowered his eyes. Gaz recognized it for submission.

She led him to the elevator and pressed the button for Dib's floor, then moved to stand and watch Zim with her back to the wall. The ride up was tense and silent, and mercifully brief. In her eyes Zim had gone from a mere nuisance to a creature that posed a threat, and she didn't want her back exposed to him. It was certain that he knew her thoughts on this, but the Invader didn't comment.

Membrane was still standing where she had left him. He had gone still and concentrated, staring in at Dib with his brow drawn tight. Gaz moved to stand by him again, uncomfortable but lending support to him in the only way she knew.

Zim drew closer to the observation window, fascinated by the bustling, clustering doctors and the vulnerable form of his enemy. His eyes spasmed when he saw them flutter excitedly about Dib's arm and remembered the probe.

"What are they doing?" Membrane muttered, drawing close by him. Zim turned his head to eye the scientist closely.

"They've found something!" The scientist pressed both gloved hands to the window, very hard. He was standing too close to Zim for the alien's comfort, and as he backed away slightly he found that Gaz was uncomfortably near as well.

"What did they find, Zim?" she breathed. Her eyes were raw and ugly.

There were many arguments, later, about what happened in that operating room. There seemed to be no general consensus that medical authorities, lawyers, and the police could come to; explosive tumors were put out of the equation immediately, and Membrane was a highly respected scientist with no odious ties to shady organizations. Dib's biology, while markedly different from a normal person's, was not bizarre enough to produce something like what had come out of his arm naturally. His father and his sister, later, could offer no explanation, and the strange green boy that Gaz had brought into the hospital could later not be found.

What happened was this:

The moment after the doctors managed to remove the foreign metal object from their young patient's arm, it exploded, peppering the room with razor-sharp bits of metal. Dib sustained numerous small but deep injuries, but was mercifully not killed; two of the personnel operating on him were not so lucky. One young nurse had a piece of shrapnel shoot directly through her eye into the brain beyond; she died quickly. An experienced doctor, a veteran of many successful operations, had his throat neatly pierced by a spinning knife-sharp shard and died with hardly a gurgle. The accompanying doctor and two other nurses sustained wounds that, although they were highly painful and certain to scar, would not be fatal. Dib remained mercifully unconscious throughout the ordeal.

Out in the hallway, after broadcasting the destruct signal from his pak, Zim whirled on Membrane and Gaz. The older scientist, astonished, was knocked out easily by one spider leg which cracked him neatly and at the precisely correct angle across the head. Gaz was not so easy.

The human girl whirled away from Zim as he rose up to attacking height on the legs. She moved with abnormal quickness and agility as she dodged the jabbing, slicing legs that Zim menaced her with, and managed to catch him at the edge of his crinkly red shirt.

It was hard to hold out against him in a narrow hall with no cover, but Gaz handled herself well. The fingers of one hand hooked into a claw and she tore at the alien's face with it, stumbling and stepping on her father's body as she did so. Her nails caught at the edge of his slightly protruding eyeball and she pinched deep into the gelatinous ball. Zim hissed, a horribly quiet noise like a tea kettle gone crazy, flailing and scuttling back as best he could. The eyeball literally tore out, dangling down his face by the optic nerve. Aqueous fluid leaked from the tears Gaz's fingernails had made on its surface.

Unbothered by the gore, Gaz twisted her hand and dragged her nails back down over Zim's face, scoring his face and cramming strips of his soft green skin under her nails.

The eye was the first and last real blow she struck. Zim twisted his paklegs around and caught her with them, and then rushed her hard into the wall.

The back of her head met plaster with a thunk. Startled by the impact, the girl loosened her death grip on his shirt, and Zim took the opportunity to grab a handful of purple hair and run her across the hallway, slamming her forehead into the wall this time.

He had run her back and forth twice more, until her body was limp and dragging, and only then was he certain that she was unconscious. Zim dropped her body gladly, panting like mad. The eye hurt like someone had dipped it in honey and then set it on an anthill that was also on fire. He whined, deep in his throat, as he gingerly picked it up and worked it back into the socket.

Troublesome human. It was more effort than she was worth, really.

He checked the observation window. The doctors were still going crazy, over their dead coworkers and Dib. He dropped to his knees and laboriously rolled Gaz onto her belly. Then he brushed her purple fringe away so the back of her neck was exposed.

From his pak he removed a familiar device; the same device he had tested on Dib that very morning. It wouldn't have done anything to the boy where it was; he had merely wanted to see that it burrowed properly. To really work this machine needed to be close to the brain.

He set it where her spine met her skull, and watched it burrow in. Then he moved to Membrane, pulled down the man's collar, and repeated the process.

Gaz was tough. Membrane hadn't been beat up much. He thought they would both wake up soon.

Covering his wounded eye with one hand, Zim looked up, checked down the hallway to make absolutely sure that no one was watching, and stole away.

END CHAPTER EIGHT

Eesh… I'm so sorry that this took so long. It was, obviously, a hard chapter to get out.

March 15, 2005