The man hands her a rolled bandage. “You have several fractures, I have to arrange the bones before securing them to a stick and wrapping your fingers. I have a vial of morphine in the first aid kit, but it may not be enough. I suggest you bite this.”
The woman refuses resolutely both. She has no way to know if the doctor is human or not, and the idea that one is touching her uncovered skin puts her already in turmoil.
No injections, nothing in my mouth.
Let’s do it as quickly as possible and in the meantime think about a reliable test that can be done with the available resources…
The doctor calls one of the surviving soldiers, a tall, muscular man. “Hawk, please keep her arm still.”
The woman, however, seems reluctant to cooperate, she retracts instinctively.
Meanwhile a bright spot appears on the dark horizon, it moves up for a while, then descends and disappears again.
“It must be Brimley”, says Ironside. “But better to be ready. How many weapons do we have?”
“Three assault rifles, in the hangar there is an armored vehicle that mounts a turret with a heavy machine gun. Inside it there should be some explosive and ammunition. There’s nothing else”, Macready answers.
“The fuel, ouch!”, says Moore. Her voice cracks with a stab of pain, as the doctor touches her hand trying to understand how to proceed to fix the fractures.
Macready approaches, crouching down next to the woman, Ironside is behind him.
“Fuel”, she says in an exasperated tone. “Try to find some polystyrene and dissolve it in the fuel, you will get a kind of rough napalm.”
“Polystyrene…”, says the Major. “I don’t think there is any in the hangar, nor in the outside cabins.”
“Listen”, Moore keeps saying. “Polystyrene or polyurethane foam panels are used as thermal and acoustic insulation in the walls of prefabricated buildings and in some cars. Check it, there should be some.”
“I’ll handle this”, replies Ironside. He calls a couple of soldiers to follow him.
Macready greets him with a nod, before consulting the doctor. “What’s the situation here?”
“Not good, sir. It’s not easy to set the bones in place without x-raying, especially a long time after the trauma. Now that the hand is swollen it becomes downright painful, even more so if you don’t stay still. She refused morphine.”
“Winners don’t use drugs”, Macready echoes in a low voice, as he turns to Moore, watching her with his ice-colored eyes. “Do you trust me?”, he asks.
She looks back at him, eyes bright with unshed tears. “I don’t know who I can trust”, her answer followed by a disheartened half-smile.
He smiles too. “How could I blame you… All right”, continues the man, taking her wounded arm gently, and making sure to touch the fabric and not the skin. “Calm down, take a deep breath. You’ll be fine soon.”
She stiffens at his touch, then she perceives the flush raising to her face. She nods.
Macready glances an eloquent look at the doctor.
“Bite the bullet, Dr. Moore. On three, OK? One…”
The sound of cracking bones arrives before the two, followed by a flash of unexpectedly sharp burning pain.
Moore lets out a strangled cry, trying instinctively to pull her arm away. But the hand of Macready is an iron grip and, in the following seconds, other twinges of pain follow the doctor’s work.
Suddenly Macready feels the woman’s arm relax. He looks on her face, alarmed.
“She fainted. Luckily”, the doctor comments.
The Major gently encircles her back with one arm, drawing her to keep her steady.
“Matt, take advantage of it now, fix the bones of her hand and take a look at that nail before she wakes up. Hurry!”
The doctor works rapidly, finishing the series of traction and manipulations to align the bones and straighten her fingers. “I have no way to intervene as I should with this broken nail. It should be removed, but I don’t have the proper surgical instruments.”
“Don’t waste time Matt, pull it off, we have more urgent things to think about.”
The sergeant doctor operates in a hurry using a small knife to remove the nail from the underlying skin. Finally, using his teeth, he rips the nail from its root and then he spits it off. After he has cleaned and disinfected the zone, he splints and bandages the wounded limb.
“Well, I can’t do any better for now. Not with a meager first-aid kit.”
“I’m afraid we’ll have to make do with this, at least for now.”
That said, Macready raises the woman in his arms, carrying her toward the armored vehicle that one of the marines brought out of the hangar. The interior is air-conditioned. The Major gently rests the body of the scientist on one of the interior seats, putting her hands on her womb.
“That’s it, this is the safest place right now.”
Macready’s voice is barely a whisper.
“Thanks”, she murmurs.
The man realizes only now that she is awaken and is watching him, and can’t help but wonder if she was conscious earlier too.
“Just doing my duty”, he lies, doing as to turn around and get out of the armored vehicle. She stops him, holding it with her other hand.
“Wait… Listen, we have to take a test. Now anyone could be one of those creatures, and we need to know who’s who, before the rescue team gets here. The more time we waste, the more opportunities it will have to kill us one by one.”
Meanwhile Ironside and the small team of survivors has retrieved some explosives. The soldiers broke through a bulkhead in one of the outside cabins, finding the insulation panels, light yellow stuff four centimeters thick. Following the instructions of the scientist they have dissolved the material in the fuel taken from the cars, getting a thick and dense mixture, with which they have filled several one gallon tanks.
Ironside gives orders to the soldiers, who set the incendiary canisters on the ground at regular intervals to create a kind of barrier.
The truck driven by Brimley slowly approaches while the soldiers take place to keep aim at the explosives. Ironside’s plan is simple. If anything goes wrong, the soldiers will shoot at the nearest canister to the threat, limiting the danger immediately.
The vehicle arrives slowly, almost on the alert. Albeit from afar, Brimley has seen what happened to the other cars on the way back from the site of the Boeing crash and even he isn’t sure of who or what awaits him at the base.
The truck stops about two meters from one of the canisters, casting long shadows with the high beam headlights.
One of the marines, with his assault rifle raised, approaches the truck, while staying at a safe distance.
“Brimley, I’m Hawk, come down, slowly and with your hands in plain view.”
A few moments of silence go by.
“Brimley, can you hear me?”
The truck door opens slowly. A figure comes out, dropping to the ground. Its shape is indistinct, overshadowed by the truck’s high beams.
“Come here slowly, move aside, where we can see you well.”
No response, the man simply stands there, hidden in the shadow zone.
Hawk raises his gun, but the cone of light projected from the lamp under the barrel can’t scratch the darkness around the soldier, it seems to be absorbed.
“Brimley don’t be a moron, come on, now!”
“I didn’t do anything!” The voice of the soldier sounds frightened and uncertain. “What the hell is going on?”
“Don’t worry, Keith, is just a precaution”, Macready intervenes. “We just want to be sure we have no surprises.”