“They’re burning me alive!” Michael gasped with pain. “What did the humans do to me?”
“They shot you.” The doctor spoke with unseemly relish. “Twice. With bullets the like of which I have never seen before. I don’t think they like you.”
Michael-Lan opened one eye and looked carefully at the doctor. It occurred to him that the human was speaking to him much the same way as he, Michael-Lan, spoke to Yahweh. “Get the bullets out. Now.”
“All right.” The doctor didn’t seem at all sympathetic but he got a long pair of probes from his bag and stuck them into the bullet hole in Michael’s shoulder. The probes slid in deep and he could feel their tips touching the chips of bone in the wound. As he had feared, or hoped he wasn’t quite sure which, the bullet had hit the bone in Michael’s shoulder and splintered it. The bullet had penetrated more than 20 centimeters and the wound path ended in a gaping cavity, one that showed every signs of burn as well as explosive damage. The doctor reflected that human bullets had improved a lot since one had killed him a few years earlier. He probed again and this time he found the end of a solid object. Once he had it, it was relatively easy to get a grip on it and pull it out. He dropped it into a dish where it landed with a dull-sounding clinking noise.
“It’s not iron or steel, something much denser and harder. Tungsten carbide probably. I’m going to have to lavage the wound.”
“What?” Michael’s voice was shaky. The pain from the surgery had distressed him more than he had let on.
“Lavage it. Wash the wound cavity out. There’s a dozen or more fragments of bullet jacket in there, and something that looks like the residue of an incendiary mixture. Hold still, this will hurt.”
The doctor worked for a few minutes then sat back. “Right, we started with your shoulder because that was the easiest one to deal with and it showed me what we face. Otherwise I would have been poking around blind. Now, the one in your chest. I ought to put you out for this, it’s going to be rough.”
Michael nodded weakly, if the hit in his shoulder was the easy one to repair, he didn’t want to be awake when the main event started. He felt a mask being out over his face and his doctor’s voice speaking quietly. “Lee-Ann, we’re going to put Michael-Lan to sleep now. Keep a careful eye on his breathing and make sure he doesn’t get too much of the anaesthetic.
“Very good Doctor Gunn.”
“David, please, or I’ll call you Nurse Nichols. Shannon, how is our patient doing?”
“He seems stable Doctor… Sorry, David. It’s hard to say, his reactions are different from ours. He’s sliding under now though.”
“Good, let’s get started. This could be risky ladies, we don’t know what the guys down there are using but it’s nothing like the bullets that finished us. We can’t be sure the wretched thing won’t go off when we pull it out.”
Shannon Lowney shuddered, the last thing she remembered from her life on Earth was the crazed man standing at the door of her clinic, firing at her. Then the blackness and waking up surrounded by the white light of Heaven, Michael-Lan standing by her to welcome her in.
Doctor David Gunn was probing the wound in Michael-Lan’s chest. It was similar to the one in his shoulder but deeper, the bullet had penetrated more than 30 centimeters and gone straight through his sternum. There were bone fragments all over the wound and he had to remove each one of them. “The sternum is broken right across, whatever this bullet was, it must have been designed to penetrate armor. Suction, Lee-Ann, normal blood is bad enough, this silver stuff is a real nuisance. Another major wound cavity, the bullet looks as if it combined explosive and incendiary fillings. Both lungs are damaged and leaking blood, we’ll have to over-fold to correct that. Metal fragments, at least a dozen of them.”
“I’m beginning to see why we screwed Satan over so badly.” Lee-Ann Nichols glanced around to make sure nobody had heard her comment. With Hell safely in human hands, being sent there wasn’t the threat it had been once. Now, it might almost be interpreted as a promise. But who knew if the Angels hadn’t already found a new punishment for humans who defied them. Anyway, the medical team who lived in Michael’s palace had a luxurious life compared with those in the slums surrounding The Eternal City. She had a thought, suddenly, of the films she had seen of the Second World War, and of human guns surrounding The Eternal City and pouring artillery fire into it.
“Focus, Lee-Ann. This guy is our meal-ticket remember. Without him, we’d be swabbing floors at best and screaming in Hell at worst.”
“Like the man who killed us.” Shannon spoke with quiet hate. John Salvi had died in prison and his Second Life body hadn’t been found yet, as far as they knew anyway. He was still somewhere in the Hell-Pit.
“I said focus.” Gunn snapped at them. “You’re lucky, the bastard who killed me is still alive, he’ll duck Hell completely. More of these metal fragments in the wound. We’ll have to lavage again and the lungs are still leaking. Michael’s a tough one, no doubt of that.”
“All the angels are.”
“True. Right, as far as I can see, the wound is clear and we’ve got leakage down to a minimum. No bubbles. Let’s get him sealed up. Get the extra sharp needles, penetrating this skin of his is a job all on its own.”
A few minutes cursing and swearing later, the bullet hole in Michael’s chest was sewn up. Gunn flexed his fingers and dabbed some iodine on the spots where he had jabbed himself. In a way it was quite a relief to see red blood again. “All right, he’s done. Now, lets take a look at the other one.”
“Do we have to? You know who he is?”
“Yeah. But treating those who need it is part of the job description. Who and what they are doesn’t enter the equation. It was people who disagreed with that who killed us, remember. Now, let’s see. Fragmentation damage, one eye gone, multiple broken bones, radiation burns…. radiation burns? What are our boys using down there? There’s been no word of them tossing a nuke.”
“Shush David. They might not know about them.” It was clear who Lee-Ann meant by “they”.
“Surely they must. We know Michael-Lan’s been to Vegas and they let a lot of them off around there in the fifties and sixties. Anyway, you’re right. Don’t tell them anything we don’t have to. Now back to Uriel-Lan. Other burns, white phosphorus poisoning, severe concussion, multiple penetrating bullet wounds. Oh my, we have our work cut out ladies. Clean up the theater and wheel him in.”
The Oval Office, The White House, Washington D.C.
“We’ve had a message from Pyongyang, Mister President. Kim Jong-Il has offered to join the Human Alliance and contribute a fair proportion of the North Korean Army to the H.E.A.”
“Has he now? What does he want?” President Obama was wary. His early optimism about international relations had become more clouded with experience.
“He wants a seat on the Council at Yamantau….”
“No way. The Council is the preserve of the nations that have been in this war since the beginning. The ones that put up a fight from the start. North Korea let our people do all the bleeding and dying, no way are they coming in and grabbing a seat now.”
“Prime Minister Putin said the same thing Sir. Only he added a few spectacular Russian obscenities. Very impressive vocabulary the Prime Minister has.” Hillary Clinton looked quite respectful. She’d memorized the more lurid language for use in the next row with her husband. “They want free oil, enough to run their military and civil economies and then some, free food for their entire population. They want military equipment to bring their armed forces up to the latest standards including F-22s and M1A4s. Not the B2 version, they want the 120mm gun tanks. The list of military equipment alone goes on for quite a few pages.
Obama sighed. Negotiating with the North Koreans was positively painful. “Who do we send?” His tone was almost despairing.
“I thought Joe Lieberman Sir.”
“Nice one. Do it. Now, what else?”
“Myanmar Sir. There’s a ceasefire in place and we’ve left the previous junta in charge of the northern third of the country. For a while anyway. They’re trying to contact Michael-Lan-Yahweh, they’re telling him they have a huge stockpile of drugs they have to get rid of before we capture it and burn the lot. So they’re offering it to him for whatever he wants to pay. Better a low price than none. But, there’s no reply as yet. We’re still hoping of course. If it doesn’t work, we’ll head north and finish taking over.”
“Thank you, Hillary. Janet, internal security?”
“We’re clearing up after the FBI’s screw-up. Judge Candlass made the right choice in my opinion but its made rolling up the network that much more difficult. One thing does amuse our people, commenting on the whole mess,
