Chapter 6 - Excision

Smith raced down the corridor to surgery with Martin ducking under the stair above, grazing his head in the process. Bloody small rooms and lintels, he thought, just as he rammed his forehead into the consulting room door frame header. Martin stumbled into his surgery rubbing his head, after whacking it on the door for the hundredth time. He saw Smith, or whoever he really was, leaning over Donna Noble.

Donna was writhing, clutching her hand, and wailing in a sharp voice. "Will you two…AH… stop… OOOH… arguing? Christ!… Help me!"

"Where does it hurt? Martin asked. "On a scale of one to ten…"

She turned scared eyes to his. "It hurts a HELL OF A LOT DOC!" she yelled. "And you can stuff your numbers! Just HELP ME! NOW?"

Smith played the light of his sonic screwdriver once more over Donna and his face blanched as he looked at the output screen. "The uhm… thing is trying to move. I suspect the being in her hand was an accident! More likely it needs to be in the abdomen or thorax, that is, if it's normal host has an abdomen or a thorax! It's looking for room to grow!"

Smith grabbed at Martin's arm and thrust him to the examination couch. "You have to operate now," he hissed into his ear, as Donna moaned a lot more. "No time to waste."

"Right," Martin answered and he went into overdrive. Gloves flew onto his fingers, he strapped the grossly swollen arm to an IV board, then doused the member with Betasept from a bottle and scrubbed away with a surgical swab. He looked down at Donna who squirmed as he scrubbed. "This might hurt."

She looked up through gritted teeth. "I don't… bloody… care," she managed to get out. Then she started panting. "Just make it fast! This thing feels like it's trying to burrow up my arm!"

Smith put his hands about her infested arm and squeezed. "Not if I can help it!" He bared his teeth. "You just go right ahead, Martin! But first, pop the top off the cylinder, that one," he nodded with his chin to the strange device of tubing and wires he had brought into surgery.

Martin did as instructed after puzzling out the strange clamp-on top. "Done. Now what?"

"Take a liter of isopropyl alcohol and pour it in." Smith tightened his grip. "And hurry, would you? This thing is gathering strength!"

Martin turned to the patient who lay quivering with pent-up tension on the couch. "Anesthetic?"

"No time! I don't care! Do it!" the woman screamed. "Before it gets worse!"

Martin blew air from his nose as he picked up the scalpel, fitted with a curved #10 blade. "I need to warn you…" he started to say.

"No time, Martin!" yelled Smith.

"Get on with it!" Donna screamed as the thing in her arm suffused her entire body in fire. She'd once stuck a finger in a light socket with the current on and touched a faucet by accident, and it felt like that. No a hundred times worse, she knew, and she felt control and consciousness slipping away. "Hurry… please?" She whimpered at the last.

Martin felt the familiar signs of a panic attack start, even before he made the incision. Sweat broke out on his brow, armpits and groin, palms of his hands and soles of his feet as saliva pooled in his mouth. He made the incision from the little finger to the ring finger in one stroke through the skin, seven centimeters long, two centimeters behind her knuckles. Blood and lymph began to flow, as some yellowish matter oozed from the wound. Then nausea hit him with full force, burning bile rushing up his gullet, and he somehow managed to gulp it back down as the room spun about his whirling head.

The edges of the wound gaped open now, like some obscene mouth, as he glimpsed something gray, slimy, and moving inside. "What the Devil?" Martin asked aloud.

"I'd not touch that with your hand, doc!" shouted Smith.

Martin ignored the irritating man as he jammed a retractor into the wound, opened the instrument wide, and inserted his fingers into the opening as Donna screamed aloud.

Whatever it was wiggled and seemed to fight him, but he managed to sink his thumb and the tips of two fingers into the mass and pulled. It came out reluctantly; a pulsing and squirming mass of amorphous gray flesh, coated in a thick coating of yellow mucous, and it seemed to ooze out of his grip as he extracted it.

Mercifully, Donna passed out at the ultimate moment, lying boneless there like a puppet with the strings cut.

Smith released Donna's forearm and cradled the strange apparatus of tubing. "Here, doc! In here," he urged.

Martin shoehorned the thing into the Perspex tube, followed by Smith pouring more alcohol in, then slammed the lid shut with a snap.

Smith pressed a few buttons on the control panel, machinery started whirring and liquid starting flowing over the entity inside.

"Well done, Martin!" shouted Smith as he clapped him on the back.

Martin turned a distressed face to Smith and said, "Excuse me," as he bent over the office bin and vomited heartily.

Author's notes:

Betasept – An iodine based antiseptic used to scrub the skin and to clean it of external germs.

Perspex – A commercial name for a brand of Plexiglas, a transparent plastic.