Turning Point (Book 3): A Time To Live

by Wandrey, Mark

  In the corner of his vision he saw a man in camo lean over and look at him. “Jesus, let me get an IV in.”

  “Just jab him,” Alex said.

  Jab me, what?!

  The soldier looked pained but left for a second and returned. Jeremiah felt another pain in his arm. Relief flowed from the injection point outward. The pain didn’t disappear, but he didn’t care about it anymore. As the pain ceased its onslaught, he felt like he’d been submerged in the warm embrace of a goddess.

  Slowly, over what felt like ages, the fog cleared from his mind. He was in the small infirmary on his ship. Alex West and Alison McDill looked like they’d been through the ringer. He could hear the soldier who’d given him the delicious drugs nearby, no doubt helping somebody else. Why are we all in the infirmary? he wondered. Oh, the seals.

  “Is everyone okay?” he asked or, rather, croaked. His throat was dry. There was a water bottle on the table next to his bed. He reached for it with his right hand but found his arm wrapped with bandages to his elbow. “What the fuck happened to me?”

  “You don’t remember?” Alex asked.

  “I remember the seals, and you fighting them.” His brow furrowed as he tried to think. “But nothing after the elephant seal busted in.” He held up his left hand. It was bandaged too, but only past the wrist.

  Alex looked at Alison who looked back at him. They looked upset and uncertain. The situation wasn’t helped by the drugs flowing through Jeremiah’s body. He was forced to try and focus as a new fog grew, this one from the drugs. Maybe a little less of the good stuff next time? It reminded him of college and all the better parties.

  “How is he?” Wade Watts had walked over, a pair of oversized sunglasses covering his eyes. The overweight computer geek looked at Alex and Alison who didn’t reply. “You didn’t tell him?”

  “Not yet,” Alex said.

  “What happened to your eyes?” Jeremiah asked Wade.

  “You gotta tell him,” Wade insisted.

  “Is it related to my hands?”

  Neither of the other two said anything, so Wade did. “I found some high-voltage generators among the parts on the shelf. I won a science fair in high school by making a tesla coil. Accidentally set the gymnasium on fire, too. Anyway, the notes the military stole explained that you’d discovered the alien powerplant could channel energy, though your physicist didn’t know what kind of power or how to control it.” Wade laughed and shrugged. “The seal was kicking people’s asses.”

  “Patty Mize is dead,” Alison said. “Got knocked against a wall, broke her neck.”

  “Maria Merino also,” Alex added. “She got cornered up on deck along with three ship’s crew.”

  “Jesus,” Jeremiah said.

  “They were really hard to kill,” Alex said. He sported a few bandages as well.

  “So I slapped a sort of lightning gun together. It was all I could think of.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Yeah!” Wade exclaimed with a huge smile.

  “How did you direct it?”

  “I used a taser, if you can believe it.”

  “Brilliant!”

  “Yeah, except I missed. The seal came at me, and you helped me hold the gun. It was fucking huge. There wasn’t time to reload the taser, but I think it was fragged anyway. So, when the elephant seal attacked, you grabbed the gun and rammed it in the seal’s mouth.”

  Jeremiah looked at his hands. “Oh. How bad?”

  “We only have a navy corpsman,” Alex explained. “He restarted your heart.”

  “I was dead?”

  Alex nodded. “For about five minutes. The aftermath of the fight was kind of crazy. He doesn’t think you have any neurological damage, but your hands were…”

  Alison touched his shoulder, and he looked at her. “There isn’t much left of your hands. They’re trying to get a surgeon.”

  “Can they repair them?”

  “Jeremiah,” Alex said, “there isn’t enough left to fix.”

  Jeremiah stared at the bandages for a bit. The level of pain made more sense. They hadn’t said it, but the surgeon was probably coming to amputate. Well, I’m alive! Considering several people were dead, he was lucky. His father had always taught him to find something to hold onto when things seemed the worst. “Hey,” he said. They looked concerned. “Who’s going to wipe my ass for me?”

  The three stared at him, dumbfounded. Then Jeremiah chuckled, and they relaxed. “I’m the one with barbecued fingers,” he said. “Don’t be so damned morbid.”

  “I’m sorry, Boss,” Alex said.

  Jeremiah started to hold up a finger, then remembered he didn’t have any, so he just waved his bandaged hand. “First off, there’s nothing to be sorry about. We got attacked by an act from fucking Sea World.” The pilot looked down. “I’m alive. I got rich using my brain, not my hands. We’ll figure something out. We have alien technology, maybe we can make some cool Terminator arms or something.”

  “You’re taking this really well,” Alison noted.

  “How else can I take it?” he asked. “Besides, the corpsman gave me some really good shit.” They all chuckled. “How about bringing me up to date?”

  “You sure you want to do that with that much morphine in you?” Alex asked.

  “You went to college, didn’t you?”

  Alex smiled and nodded. “I was at West Point, so the drugs were less of a thing.” Jeremiah shrugged. “Marine animals attacked the entire Flotilla. The attacks seemed coordinated and timed. There were hundreds of seals of all types, some not commonly found in this area, and dolphins and killer whales. The killers sank dozens of smaller boats.” He thought for a second. “Almost all of them. The seals got onto a lot of the small navy ships too. It was bad. Real bad.”

  “Coordinated?” Jeremiah asked, blinking. “My God, how is that possible?”

  “Nobody knows how any of this is possible. There are nine navy ships still responding and around thirty private ships. I think the captain said 30, anyway. We’ve come together in a tighter group. Since the weather is good, we’re close right now. We don’t know how long we can keep it up. There’s a low-pressure front due in 36 hours.”

  “What good does getting close do?”

  “Overlapping defenses,” Alex explained. “The navy ships can detect the larger whales. Most of the surviving ships have armed crew as well.”

  “We didn’t,” Jeremiah said. “How come we’re even alive?”

  “General Rose, the army guy who came in on those big transports? He’d taken over a couple ships and saw we were in deep shit. They came alongside and put a platoon on our deck. Just in time too.”

  “I’d shake his hand, if I could.” Jeremiah offered some more dark humor.

  “He’s got his hands full. His troops are distributed across all the civilian ships. The attacks have largely ceased, but they’re still probing defenses.”

  “This is like a bad 90’s monster movie,” Wade said. “There has to be an evil mastermind controlling them.”

  “Maybe aliens,” Alison said.

  “You might not be far from the truth,” Jeremiah said.

  Alex started to laugh, then stopped when he saw the expression on his boss’s face. “Wait, you’re serious?”

  “Did we or did we not find a dead alien fox on a spaceship?”

  Wade was staring off into space, his mouth hanging open. “Oh, shit.”

  “What?” Jeremiah asked.

  “I came on board the Ford with some others who’d evacuated with the general who rescued us. One of the survivors was a reporter, Kathy Clifford.”

  “I know her,” Alex said. “Hot.”

  “Right, her. Anyway, she’s still playing reporter. She’s got all kinds of recordings. Captain Gilchrist gave her access to the Ford’s media room for the Flotilla news thing she was doing.”

  “Is that who was sending those stories?” Jeremiah asked. “I thought they looked professionally done.”

 
“Right,” Wade agreed. “But she was also spying on everyone and everything. Says it’s what a reporter does. A real reporter anyway. She’s got gigabytes of images, conversations, even recorded radio traffic. She just kinda blends into the background.”

  The others nodded. It was an interesting story.

  “Anything else I should know while my brain is still working?” Jeremiah asked.

  “Just that there’s another military fleet. It came from the east coast. Started in Norfolk, went to Cape Canaveral, then through the Panama Canal. They picked up a bunch of scientists, including some from the CDC, and a NASA guy named…” he made a face as he tried to remember. “Beretta, Benini?”

  “Bennitti?” Jeremiah barked.

  “Yeah, him!”

  “Holy shit, Theodore made it!”

  “Is that the guy who hired you to investigate the asteroids that turned out to be alien ships?”

  “Bingo,” Jeremiah said. “I should have known, if anyone could figure out how to survive, it would be Theodore. He could fall into a truckload of manure and find a gold ring.”

  “Well, I was there when one of the people who’d come with us from Fort Hood, Chris Tucker, arrived with news. He’d overheard that the fleet has an alien and its ship.”

  “A live alien?” Jeremiah asked. Wade nodded. Jeremiah blinked, his drug fogged mind working. Was it an invasion then? “Amazing.” Everyone nodded in agreement. “What’s the plan?”

  “Unknown,” Alex admitted. “The surviving military is talking about it. I suspect the whole Flotilla will get underway, maybe move everyone onto a few of the biggest ships for safety.”

  Fewer and fewer of us, Jeremiah thought. He drifted a bit, and when he could concentrate again, the pain had started to return. The only one in the infirmary he recognized was his surviving physicist, Jack Coldwell, and the corpsman. It looked like Jack hadn’t come out of it untouched either. He was getting some stitches in his head.

  “You okay, Jack?”

  The much older scientist only moved his eyes as the needle was in a very precarious location. “Hey, Jeremiah. Yeah, I’ll be okay. When they were shooting the seals, a ricochet bounced off a tool bench. This is from a piece of shrapnel. Looks worse than it is. I waited until the important cases, like you, were dealt with.”

  “Real shit show, right, old friend?”

  “Without a doubt.”

  “Hold still please,” the corpsman said. He appeared to be in his early thirties and was extremely businesslike in his bedside manner.

  Jeremiah watched the stitches go in, waiting until the corpsman was done before he inquired about more drugs. However, before the man was finished, a pair of navy people came in. One was a woman in her forties, the other a man in his fifties. The man had a caduceus logo sewn onto the epaulettes of his blue camo light jacket. The woman rolled in a big cart similar to the ones mechanics took on jobs. It had all manner of military jargon stenciled on it, along with another caduceus logo.

  “Is Jeremiah Osborne here?” the doctor asked. Jeremiah raised his mostly bandaged, right arm. “Sir, I’m Lieutenant Commander Peterson. I’m the surgeon off the Reagan.”

  “I thought the Reagan sank.”

  “It did, sir. I happened to be taking out an appendix on the Ford when my ship went down.” He didn’t look happy. Jeremiah wondered if doctors went down with their ships, like captains did. “I am here to see about your injuries.”

  “Help yourself,” Jeremiah said, waving his hands. “I’d like a side order of drugs to go with the exam, please.”

  “Corpsman, can I see his chart?”

  “Of course, sir.” The man left Jack’s head half stitched and quickly retrieved a clipboard and handed it to the doctor. “Permission to continue with my other patient?” Dr. Peterson nodded, and the corpsman returned to the abused looking physicist.

  The doctor examined the chart for a minute while the woman, obviously a nurse or similar, parked the two big roller bags. Dr. Peterson clucked a couple times as he flipped pages, then addressed the corpsman again. “No issues with the Demerol?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Good. Well, Mr. Osborne. I’m going to give you a little more painkiller, but not much. I need to unwrap your hands to get a better look, and you need to be conscious for the exam.” Jeremiah saw the nurse unfolding the portable cases to reveal some impressive machines.

  “Is that an x-ray?” he wondered.

  “Yes. I had it and my PA, my physician’s assistant, with me on the Ford. Some of their permanent gear wasn’t installed yet.” He gestured at the bandages. “Do I have your permission to proceed?”

  “Oh, sure.” Jeremiah looked at the bandages. “This is going to hurt, isn’t it?”

  “If the corpsman’s report is competent, yes.”

  Jeremiah glanced at the young man. He was tying the last of Jack’s stitches and expertly cutting the excess with a pair of scissors. If he was aggrieved at having his competence questioned, he showed no signs of it. Jeremiah sighed and made himself more comfortable. “Okay, let’s get this over with.”

  “Do you want a screen?” the PA asked.

  “A what?”

  She rolled her eyes. “A screen to block your view of the injuries.”

  Jeremiah shrugged. “Doesn’t do me much good to deny what happened.”

  “Very well,” she said and prepared a syringe.

  The doctor had been correct. It hurt. A lot. Jeremiah concentrated on breathing. That was about all he could do. The PA glanced up at him a couple of times while she unwrapped the bandages, but only slowed when she noticed he was sweating and breathing fast. “Doctor?”

  “I noticed. Mr. Osborne, please breath slower. You’re hyperventilating.”

  “No shit,” Jeremiah hissed as a piece of gauze came away with a flap of skin. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  “Almost done,” she said.

  Despite his words, he looked away. The ceiling was constructed of acoustic tile. Let’s see, five tiles from back to front. Ah, God! One, two, three…eight side to side…Fuck! Oh, God.

  “I understand you were hurt saving some people’s lives.”

  “W-what?” Jeremiah asked, the words barely penetrating the agony.

  “How were you hurt?” the PA repeated.

  “I don’t precisely remember,” he said.

  “He shoved a bloody lightning gun into an elephant seal’s mouth and pulled the trigger,” Jack explained.

  “That’ll do it, I suppose,” Dr. Peterson said.

  “All done, Doctor,” the PA said.

  “I need a drink,” Jeremiah gasped.

  “Not with Demerol in you,” the doctor said, coming closer.

  The PA had put a sanitary board across Jeremiah’s chest and covered it with a drape and tools. The bloody bandages were in a bucket on the floor. Dr. Peterson put on sterile gloves and gently took Jeremiah’s right arm just below the elbow and lifted it. Jeremiah looked for the first time, then wished he hadn’t.

  When he was a child, a neighbor’s tool shed had burned to the ground. He had gone over to help them clean up the mess. Inside, they found the reason. A raccoon had chewed through a power cord and started the fire. Half the animal’s body was outside the burned structure. Jeremiah’s hand looked like the part that hadn’t gotten out.

  His left hand looked slightly better. The flesh was broken in places, and some bloody red muscle and white bone were visible. A tear rolled down his cheek.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Osborne. There’s no way we can save either hand.”

  “I know,” he replied.

  “Both elbows look good, and I’m reasonably confident we can keep enough musculature on your lower right arm for a prosthetic attachment.” He went on to describe what they could do with the facilities they had. “While more advanced facilities might be available somewhere, time is of the essence. Damage of this degree has to be mitigated. Infection will be almost impossible to avoid.”

  “What do we do?” />
  “I want to take you over to the Ford, immediately, so we can amputate and save what we can.”

  “A-amputate,” he said with a catch in his voice. “I see. Very well.”

  “I’ll let the helicopter pilot know. Captain Gilchrist has okayed the procedure, given the important role you played in the Flotilla’s long-term survival.”

  “Do you have to put the bandages on again?”

  The PA moved over. “We have a special burn covering for cases like this. It’s a wet bandage with topical pain killer. They won’t feel great, but they’ll be easier to remove than the others were. The corpsman did a good job with what he had available.” The corpsman was standing by the door with his medical bag over his shoulder, waiting.

  “Okay,” Jeremiah said. “Let’s go then. Jack, please let my people know?”

  “Of course, Jeremiah,” he answered.

  Rewrapping his hands wasn’t as bad as unwrapping them had been. It was easier, too, because he was still trying to come to grips with the fact that he was soon going to be handless. Why both of them? he asked himself over and over.

  When they finished, they crossed his wounded limbs over his chest and secured them with more bandages. A pair of his own men came in and locked their arms together to make a sort of chair for him to sit in, so they could carry him to the flight deck. He would have complained he could walk, but he knew otherwise. His whole body wasn’t responding correctly. He didn’t know if it was the drugs, the wounds, or the shock of what was about to happen.

  Up on deck, one of the navy versions of the Blackhawk, a Seahawk, waited, its rotor idling. Most of his surviving staff were there as well. As he came into view, applause broke out. He couldn’t help himself; he started to cry. It didn’t help that Alex West came to attention and saluted him.

  “Well done,” Alex yelled over the increasing sound of the helicopter.

  “Don’t let anyone drink my scotch!” he yelled back to the pilot, who laughed and nodded. Wade Watts also tossed Jeremiah a half-assed salute before he was loaded into the chopper.

  He was in good enough shape to be strapped into a seat, so he was spared the indignity of a gurney. Dr. Peterson and his assistant were helped aboard by the helicopter’s copilot, and they strapped in as well. The copilot even showed Jeremiah some pity and put a headset on him, setting the mic to vox.