They came to a halt by the alien fence and waited for the alien guards to confirm their identity. Once they were satisfied that they had the right person, the aliens took the young man away, leaving Robin and Constable Jasper to their own devices. Robin watched the gate swing closed behind them and then ordered Jasper to take them back to the station. He had a bottle of brandy he’d picked up from one of the abandoned houses in his locker. If he drank it all, perhaps he would get drunk and forget about the rest of the world. Or perhaps he’d just wake up with a hangover and have to go back on duty anyway.
And tell me, he thought, rather sourly. Bitter self-hatred welled up within him. How many had died because he had chosen to collaborate with the aliens? Each of his justifications felt less and less logical every time he thought about them. What exactly do you deserve?
“I can’t do much for the wound,” Fatima admitted. “The best I can do is separate it properly and bandage it up.”
“You mean amputate my arm,” the man in front of her said. He’d taken an alien bullet that had punched right through his upper arm, shattering his bone to dust. His arm now hung limply from what remained of his flesh, bound up with cloth to prevent it from tearing loose and falling to the floor. “There’s nothing else you can do?”
Fatima shook her head. The resistance had gathered what medical supplies they could, but London had been short on medical supplies and equipment ever since the invasion. There were wounded that would have made a full recovery — if they had the right equipment — who would almost certainly be cripples for the rest of their lives. The man who’d lost an arm was hardly the worst of them. She honestly didn’t know how some of them had held on to their lives. Determination to hurt the aliens before they died, perhaps.
“I’m afraid not,” she said, as she started to wash her hands. The NHS had a poor reputation for keeping hospitals clean, but none of the ones she’d worked in had been anything like as bad as the abandoned house they’d turned into a medical centre. It had taken her hours to clean the place to a minimum standard and even then she had a feeling that it was still alarmingly unhealthy. “We don’t have prosthetics we could use to give you a new arm, or replace the shattered bone. Even if we did have, I’m not sure you could recover after that level of trauma.”
The man nodded, scowling down at the floor. He’d been given a large dose of painkillers, but they clearly hadn’t been enough to keep the pain from making it harder for him to think. Fatima wasn’t too surprised. Taking too many of the painkillers would have been bad for his health too.
“And if I chose to stay like this?” He asked, finally. “I could…”
“You wouldn’t recover any function in your lower arm or your hand,” Fatima said, flatly. She didn’t really blame him for refusing to realise the truth. Humans hated losing parts of their bodies. Trauma victims never fully recovered. “You would be left with a useless dangling piece of flesh - one that would have to be bound to your body at all times. My best advice is to have it taken off, which would at least prevent the wound from becoming infected.”
“Take it off, them,” he said, finally. He smiled, although Fatima could see the pain written over his face. “I guess there’s no hope of a proper rest afterwards?”
“Probably not,” she said, as she prepared the local anaesthetic. He should have been put out completely, but she preferred to avoid doing that if possible. They had had to abandon two other makeshift hospitals and unconscious patients were difficult to move. “Just lie back and let me get on with it.”
An hour later, she headed downstairs and washed her hands under the shower. The small apartment had been abandoned, according to Abdul and his men, which made it an ideal place for a resistance cell. Fatima hoped that they were right, if only because she didn’t want to have to abandon her patients. Most of the wounded resistance fighters were scattered over London, but the seriously wounded fighters were kept near her. She was their doctor, after all.
She sat down on the sofa and closed her eyes, fighting back tears. As a medical student, and then as a doctor, she’d taken pride in her work. She’d saved lives. Men and women who would have died a century ago had lived because of her — and the medical knowledge of hundreds of years. Now… she hated doing a bad job, but the truth was that there were limits to what she could do without proper equipment and supplies. Many of her patients needed a real hospital, not a makeshift set of beds which they might need to flee at any time. She’d asked if they could find a way to slip a patient into a real hospital, but Abdul had vetoed the idea. The aliens had insisted that the NHS doctors check their patients details and if they stumbled across a resistance fighter…
Fatima shook her head, wondering — again — what had happened to her family. There’d been no announcement of their fate on the BBC, just a terrible silence that was somehow far more terrifying than anything else. Anything could have happened to them — the aliens could have killed them, or enslaved them, or simply dumped them in a detention camp outside the city. After the bloody slaughter the aliens had unleashed, few dared to ask them — or to demand that the prisoners be returned to their families. For all she knew, they could have been shipped to Africa and dumped there.
The only thing keeping her from crying was the knowledge that her patients needed her — for all the good she could do for them. She had to watch many of them die because she didn’t have the equipment to save them — and as they died, a little of herself died as well. If they hadn’t needed her, she would have volunteered to drive the next truck loaded with explosives into the alien base. And that would be the end of her.
“Hey,” a soft voice said, “are you all right?”
Fatima glanced up to see Lucas, a young man who’d been serving the resistance as a runner, ever since his family had been caught up in the invasion and killed. He’d wanted to join the fighters, but his knowledge of the area made him far more useful as a runner. Or so he’d been told. Privately, Fatima suspected that Lucas wouldn’t have made a good fighter. He only wanted to hurt the aliens and didn’t care if he got hurt himself.
And he was attracted to her. She found him attractive too, and attentive, but how could she afford more emotional ties with anyone? Her family was gone, perhaps dead… anyone else she invited into her heart might go the same way. She didn’t dare take the chance.
“Just tired,” she said, pulling herself to her feet. She should have a rest, but there was no way she could sleep long enough for it to do her any good. “And yourself?”
“I got told to bring you a warning,” Lucas said. “The aliens did a sweep through a few blocks a mile or so away. They may have caught someone who knows about this place.”
Fatima swallowed a curse. Her stepmother would have slapped her if she’d realised that Fatima even knew such a word. The aliens had the services of the police — and the police knew how to get suspects to talk and implicate more people. If they knew who they’d bagged, they might uncover the makeshift medical centre. Abdul had made it clear that no one — even himself — was to know everything, but the aliens might uncover more than one cell if they managed to capture the medical centre.