Chapter 11 - Endgame
Dr. Stephen Franklin had been Chief of Staff at Babylon Memorial for four years, and in all his time he'd never seen a day like this one, and he prayed to never see another one like it ever again. He had five ERs and three operating rooms and just barely enough staff to keep them all open as his hospital filled with more shooting victims than he'd ever seen in his life.
"I want this hospital closed. NOW!" He exclaimed, pointing a wild finger at his reception desk. "Reroute all incoming traffic, tell them we're full. And start calling around to surrounding communities – Minbar, Agamemnon, whatever – see if we can Medflight some of our non-criticals."
"Unit 14 just called. Two DOAs – one of them is Police Chief Kosh." Franklin cursed. "And one critical victim, male, 45, gunshot wound to the chest and besides that, he's had one hell of a beating. About two minutes out – they say he's BPD."
Franklin shook his head. "Why weren't they with the rest?"
"Don't know, Sir." Dr. Lillian Hobbes enjoyed her work here, she really did – and sometimes she thought she could handle the stress better than her superior, but for the time being, that was between her and a fencepost. "He's already crashed once. Won't survive a trip anywhere else."
"All right, all right, fine. Clear Exam 2 and move your least critical emergency patient there. Someone who doesn't require surgery."
"And then what?"
"Then we'll improvise." Franklin stopped to put on a fresh gown and gloves as he ducked into ER 2. "How is she?"
The attending – name? Franklin didn't know right now, and didn't really care – looked up. "Stable," he said, and Franklin let out a sigh of relief.
"Good. I don't need to know how hard the city would come down on this hospital's funding if we let the Commander of the BPD and the Chief of Police die on our watch. Get her upstairs to a room. A nice room," he clarified. "I think her boyfriend's in chairs; make sure he knows, and send him up right away." He ducked out.
"Dr. Franklin. Unit 14—"
"On my way." Again, new gloves, new scrubs, and he rushed toward the ambulance bay just as the flashing lights came into view.
"We lost the pulse about twenty seconds ago," an EMT reported.
"Fuck. Commander Ivanova pulled through; she'll have a shitfit if he dies. He's lost a lot of blood."
"You don't need to tell me that."
"Breath sounds?"
"Gone the way of the pulse. Looks like a DOA if I ever saw one."
Franklin shook his head. "Not if I have anything to say about it." He rushed beside the stretcher, leading them into ER 4 where a team was waiting. "Who's the woman?"
"Don't know, but there were five more where she came from. I think this guy holds the key, unless you can get one of those Shadows to cough up the info."
"Get her something to wear. Scrubs or something." The ER team had already set to work on Sheridan, shocking his chest once, then twice. Franklin rushed the EMTs and the woman out of the room and pulled the doors closed.
"We have a pulse. It's weak, but it's there," Dr. Hobbes relayed, and Franklin nodded as he joined her near Sheridan's head.
"All right. Get me four units of O-neg, and type and cross for the rest. I want to preserve that universal donor blood if we can." He looked down at the officer before him and shook his head, muttering under his breath. "Jesus Christ, buddy. How the hell are you still alive?" He let out a long breath. "See if you can find something to ID him. And for the love of God, somebody call up and get me an OR. We'll take him up as soon as he's stable enough to travel."
Marcus smiled as Susan's eyes opened. He stood at her side, holding her right hand between both of his. "Hi." He squeezed her hand; leaned down to kiss it. "How are you feeling?"
"Like I was run over by a truck. But you should see the other guy." She tried to laugh at her own joke, but winced at the pain it caused. Then a hint of worry crossed her features. "How is the other guy?"
"Which one?"
"Well." She hesitated. "Both."
"Michael Garibaldi has a single, very clean gunshot wound to the left leg, just enough to pull him off his feet, almost like someone planned it that way." Marcus beamed momentarily in pride. "He has been properly Mirandized and is with the rest of his cohorts, handcuffed to a bed in a locked ward for recovery until they are healthy enough for a jail cell."
"And Sheridan?"
A pause. "He came in just as they were moving you upstairs. I passed by just in time to hear someone calling for an ID. It… didn't sound good."
"I knew it. I just knew if he went in there, he'd get himself killed."
Marcus chose to ignore this for now. Instead he said, "Chief Kosh is dead."
Susan blinked. "What?"
"He went down to Z'ha'dum to try to rescue Sheridan. He knew the rest of you wouldn't get there in time."
"I thought he'd never leave that office." She shook her head. "Morden?"
"Dead."
"There's justice in that, at least."
They were silent for a long moment. Marcus traced the lines on Susan's palm, studying the grooves and indents intently. "I thought I'd lost you for sure."
"You're the one who told that psychopath to go ahead and shoot me," she returned with a light smile.
"Susan." His eyes registered genuine emotion, and she felt subdued by his expression. "I mean it. I…" He interlocked his fingers with hers then and looked into her eyes with every ounce of sincerity he possessed. "Will you marry me?"
This wasn't Paris. There was no Eiffel Tower backdrop, no four-poster bed, and she couldn't say for certain that she wasn't hallucinating the whole thing, from the amount of pain killers they were probably pumping her full of. But if it was real, if there was any chance it was real, she wasn't going to walk away. "Of course." He leaned forward, kissed her hand. "Of course I'll marry you. So long as you promise to never, ever, ever tell anyone to go ahead and shoot me ever again."
Delenn waited. She waited because she had nowhere else to go. She sat outside the operating room in a cold, hard chair, dressed in green surgeon's scrubs. She dozed a bit, but mostly she thought a lot. She thought about her father. She thought about Anna. She thought about the other girls and hoped, prayed, they had been taken to safety and returned to their families. And she thought about John Sheridan.
If he survived, what would he do? He had no reason to stay here in Babylon if the Shadows had been defeated. Would he return to whatever quieter life he had left behind to come here? Or would he stay?
Moreover, if he didn't survive – which seemed much more likely at this point – would anyone remember him? His part in today's events had turned out to be minimal. In the final analysis, he really hadn't done anything – his mission had blown up in his face when he'd been discovered, and doubly so because the Vorlons, to everyone's surprise, had moved first.
It's always the quiet ones, her father used to say.
She was pulled from her thoughts as a surgeon exited the operating room, pulling off his gloves as he did so.
"Excuse me," she spoke up, getting to her feet. "Can you tell me how he is?"
The surgeon hesitated. "Are you family?"
"Yes." Barely a pause to consider this word before it was out. "I'm the only family he has."
More hesitation from the surgeon. "We managed to stop the internal bleeding, but we had to remove his spleen. He'll be in traction for at least a month for breaks to both legs, and at present his mouth is wired shut as a first step to repairing a broken jaw. He'll likely need reconstructive surgery – they did a number on his face, but that's the least of his problems. He is damn lucky to be alive, and there's still no guarantee that he didn't sustain any brain damage; we won't know anything about that until when and if he wakes up."
"But he will survive?"
"Truth be told I have no idea how he did it – but yes. Prognosis is good." He nodded at her and then walked away.
Alone again, Delenn looked over her shoulder into the operating room. John Sheridan was being lifted off the table and onto a stetcher, likely for transport to a room. A minute later, nurses pushed him into the hall. Delenn only hesitated a moment before joining them. The nurses didn't question her presence as she reached out and took John's left hand – the one she knew to be stronger, the one that didn't have an IV stuck in it. She squeezed.
She swore she felt him squeeze back.
Author's Note 11/20/10: TBC. Although most plotlines are resolved here, there is an epilogue that ties everything together, which should follow soon.