“Lemuel, I’m not a doctor, so I can’t give you a detailed picture. What I can do is this. We’ll do everything in our power to cure her. More than that, I can’t say.”
Chapter Sixty Two
I-270/Old Georgetown Road interchange, Bethesda, Maryland
“Get out of the fucking way Sir.” The nurse pushed past Colonel Paschal and joined the scrum of medical personnel working on Maion. She was carrying large transparent packages that had just arrived on the HH-60M Medevac helicopter that was now sitting on the road a few dozen yards back. Volume expanders he guessed to himself, possibly the new oxygen transport therapeutics. I-270 hadn’t seen this level of medical activity since a Greyhound bus had rolled over before the war.
“You’ll have to forgive Grace Sir. She tends to get very focussed.” The man standing beside Paschal was the copilot of the Medevac chopper.
“It’s OK, she said ‘Sir’. That makes all the difference Lieutenant
… Rawlings. What’s going on? That was volume expander wasn’t it?”
“Sort of. It’s one we developed for use on daemons. Lot of them were really badly chewed up in Iraq and it turned out we knew nothing much about their blood chemistry. So we use that stuff, it works regardless of blood groups. Johns Hopkins did a quick test on some angelic blood and it seems to be OK for them too, so Mac and I got orders to fly a few gallons of the stuff down.”
“A quick test. Is that all?”
“All we had time for Sir, word is, if we didn’t get that stuff down here fast, she isn’t going to make it.” Paschal made ‘shusshing’ motions with his hand and pointed at Lemuel. “Sorry, Sir, didn’t realize.”
Paschal looked at Lemuel-Lan who was staring at the scene around Maion with stunned incredulity. There were at least a dozen doctors around her now with as many nurses helping out, the whole scene illuminated by the blue, red and white lights on the emergency vehicles.. To Paschal’s eyes, helping out was a misnomer since the nurses seemed to be doing most of the heavy work. One of the doctors detached from the group and ran over to Lemuel.
“You, angel, what’s your blood group?” Lemuel started and looked down at the figure addressing him. “Hurry up, we’ve got an emergency here.”
“What’s a blood group?” Leemuel was bewildered.
The doctor twisted his lips. “What color is your blood?”
“Silver.”
“Hers is white. We can’t take the chance.” The doctor turned to the team around Maion and made a ‘negate that’ gesture. One of the other doctors acknowledged and another bag of volume expander was opened. The doctor was about to go back when he saw Paschal looking at him.
“The wild primary colors in daemon blood? They’re daemon equivalent of blood groups. We can transfuse green to green or yellow to yellow but not green to yellow. I was hoping Lofty here would be white blood but he isn’t. Tough on his girl that.”
“Is she going to make it?” Paschal said the words softly but he saw Lemuel start and cautiously look around.
The doctor pushed his lower lip out. “She’s got a better chance that she had a few minutes ago. Now we’ve got the volume expander into her, her heart’s got something to pump around. Odds still aren’t good but we’ve pulled people back from worse. I hear Yahweh had this done to her?”
“That’s right. Or so we’ve been told. We haven’t had a chance to do an interrogation yet.”
“Damn. She’s a mess. We’ve given her morphine to kill the pain but it isn’t working very well. Either angels have a major resistance to opiates or… ” the doctors voice wandered off for a second and his eyes suddenly got suspicious. “As soon as she’s got enough of her own blood to live on, we’ll run a full panel on her.”
“Look between her toes Doc.” Malloy’s voice cut across the conversation. “That’s where women tend to shoot up.”
“Our local cop with the howitzer. Malloy, what are you still doing here?”
“Orders from dispatch. Stay here and assist as needed. Reed’s over there stuffing trash into bags.” Paschal turned back to the doctor but he had already gone, heading back to the team effort.
“Colonel Paschal Sir. Message from Bethesda. They’re setting up an emergency ward on the grounds. A big tent, the patient’s too large to get through the doors. Bethesda say it’ll be as well-equipped as any intensive care unit as long as it doesn’t rain. They’ve got jury-rigged power lines all over the grass.”
Paschal nodded. Over by Maion, the medical team suddenly gave a loud cheer and the work pace slackened. Lemuel saw the reaction and looked over at Paschal, unable to ask the question he wanted to. “Don’t worry Lemuel, that’s good news. At a guess, I’d say they’ve stabilized her for movement. The Doctor will tell you more.”
It was the same doctor who had come across earlier. This time he was considerably more relaxed. “Colonel, I’m Doctor Zinder, Dan Zinder. Sorry I was abrupt earlier, but things were pretty close for a while there.”
“No problem. This is Lemuel-Lan, your patient’s mate.”
“Lemuel-Lan. OK, situation. Your mate has lost a lot of blood and has severe internal injuries. We’ve stopped the internal bleeding for a while at any rate and we’ve bulked out her blood supply. That’s a holding action, we’re not quite sure what to do next about her blood loss. Normally we’d give her a blood transfusion but we don’t have any stocks of angelic blood. Johns Hopkins is looking at using daemonic blood and we’re checking to see if any colors are compatible with white. Now, her wings. Each wing has been broken in five places, twice on the inner bone, twice on the outer, one on the joint between the two. We’ve splinted the straightforward breaks but the joints are a very complex injury, one we have no experience with. Our big worry in the short term is marrow getting loose from those broken bones and entering her bloodstream. If that happens and it forms a clot, its all over. Longer term, it looks to me as if the breaks were intended to permanently cripple her ability to fly. I’ve got a call in to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast, they’ve got more experience in ruined joints there than anybody. If anybody can fix her, they can.”
Doctor Zinder stopped as the HH-60 spooled up its engines and started to take off. Over by Maion, the staff surrounding her were bracing themselves. “One, two lift” and they transferred Maion on to a load pallet. The HH60 moved overhead, cables hanging from its slung-load hook. They were fastened to the corners of the pallet and the HH-60 started to lift to take the strain. Three nurses jumped onto the pallet as well, Paschal recognized one of them as ‘Grace’.
“Doctor, riding the pallet like that is.. “
“Against regulations and they aren’t wearing safety harnesses either. But we absolutely need them on there to make sure nothing goes horribly wrong in mid-transit. Anyway, ever tried stopping a Navy nurse from looking after a patient?”
The HH-60 climbed away and turned south-east for the Bethesda hospital, Lemuel’s eyes following the helicopter as it set off. Paschal thought for a second and then made his decision. “Lemuel, we have to drive around by road, It’ll take us ten or twenty minutes. You can fly there much faster, just follow the helicopter. Try not to break anything when you land.”
Lemuel’s expression was disbelieving. “You will trust me?”
“Of course we trust you. You’ve got your mate to worry about, that’ll come first for you. Now move.” Paschal watched Lemuel take off. I wish I could do that. he thought, then he got on the link to the F-22s still circling overhead. Trust, but verify.
Angelic Treatment Ward, Bethesda Naval Hospital, Bethesda, MD
“It’s a bit like a bat.” Doctor Zinder was looking at the X-ray on the computer screen. “Feathered of course and there’s no leading edge claw. There are three bones running back from the leading edge, not two. Otherwise, very similar. That joint, it’s complex and it’s crushed. Doctor Mackay?”
The reply came over the computer in the harsh accent of northern Ireland. “We know those injuries. The wing breaks, triangular with the shatter pattern downwards. I’d say the wing was held across two blocks and struck by a heavy bar over the space between. The joint the same. Very much like the IRA used to do. We’ll need better X-rays than this though. I’ll get my team ready to come over.”
