by J. X. Evans
“Yeah…it kind of is, although I don’t know about the manufacturing one. We have not been able to do that ourselves, how could they? And every other gem we have artificially produced just does not hold a candle to the real ones, they get shattered after a couple of simple uses. And that gem ate a blast that could probably toss a moving train off its tracks.” Rob continued.
There was a knock at the kitchen’s door and before anyone could answer Orpheus had poked his head through the kitchen door and said in Greek “Guys? We appear to have a slight problem.”
16. TAKAMORI
He could not really complain in good conscience. The whole thing went better than expected. The tip of his long ponytail had landed on a puddle of filthy rain water when he fell on the floor, which was mildly disgusting, but he had been through worse. The police had called for an ambulance and they helped him sit back up, even gave him some water. They did a brief body search but fortunately they did not take off his boots which is where he had hidden his chain of gems, even though they were now bothering him somewhat as the hard sharp stones were being pressed against the skin of his toes through sweat soaked shocks. A squad of paramedics was nearby, because of the burning building and all that, and the response time was immediate. And as a result the patient was on first glance sure to survive, barring complications of course. Mark came to his senses almost immediately after the team of paramedics reached him, he could hardly play opossum on professionals who interact with grievously injured and unconscious people almost every single day. They performed advanced trauma life support on him and as far as Mark could tell they did a good job, it helped him review the basics. Mark had a pretty good idea of which were the steps to be taken, since every member of The Order receives more than adequate training concerning first aid and handling trauma in the academy. In fact they used to make them fix up a wounded homunculus after carrying it to safety while being shot at with heavy rubber bullets, and other colorful distractions.
They checked and evaluated him, asking him to move this or that and answer some basic questions like what his name was, or if he knew where he was, what day of the week was today and what year, and he answered feigning mild confusion. They gave him a bag of IV saline, even though he seemed to be hemodynamically stable, just to be safe. They removed his torn jacket and shirt and cleaned his wounds as best as possible, they stitched and dressed the claw wound on his torso and they tried to lower his pants to check for further injury. He tried to assure them that he was fine but they did not drop the matter. They dropped his pants instead. Afterwards they covered him with a thermal blanket, put him on a hard stretcher and loaded him up on a screaming ambulance, blue lights whirling round and round. Mark hoped that he would not have stolen the vehicle from someone who might have actually needed it, but what was already done could not be undone.
The ambulance started down the road at seemingly the speed of light, the strapped down equipment trembling from the vibrations traveling through the straining vehicle, syringes and bottles and weird instruments battling against their tightly closed drawers. A paramedic was measuring his blood pressure once again, only a god knew how he managed to read the indications and work the pump and the little metal valve between his fingers and listen for the low sounds from his brachial artery while standing upright battling the G forces of the nearly flying vehicle. A big policeman, heavy and wide at the shoulders with gorilla-like features and a grimace of someone that is being forced to literally eat shit right then and there was sitting on the corner of a slim bench opposite Mark, staring at him with persistence as if he would disappear in thin air if officer Kong would dare relax enough to even blink. His huge eyes seemed to bulge almost half way out of their sockets. Both his eyelids were so thin that one could only see them only if they really tried. They were not even the usual beautiful kind of big. They were the rare disturbing version of big. Tiny pinhead of a black lens surrounded by a thin layer of iris of an undetermined dark color, surrounded by acres and acres of white sclera, with little spear-like veins forcing their way through at the periphery.
After about a furious seven minute ride they reached the nearest hospital. The paramedics moved him carefully out of the ambulance and carried him inside the hospital’s emergency room where they left him. Officer Kong followed them closely all this time, like an ugly duckling to the mother duck, but sadly without any prospects or chances of turning into a majestic swan any time soon. Unfortunately though it seemed like he, unlike the pair of paramedics, had no intention of leaving him be.
The cop moved to stand above Mark’s head, giving him a toothy smile. “How are you feeling kid?” he asked in a not at all gorilla-like manner. “How did you get these wounds? Are you in some kind of trouble?”, his voice was actually pretty soft and measured, not at all brutish or gruff, which is what Mark had expected. And despite appearances he seemed to be able to use proper grammar and form simple sentences with relative ease… ‘I guess you really can’t judge a book by the cover’.
“Did you happen to pass by Valaritou-street today? The one with the shops? Did you see anything? Or were you maybe in that shop that burned down?” was he really fishing for a confession or something? Taking advantage of his temporarily lowered inhibitions and cognitive functions due to his ‘injury’ and blood loss? Not that it would be admissible but… that guy.
“I ‘m, tired” Mark said in a low kind of slurring voice, turning his head towards the wall, away from the cops face. The gorilla-man snorted, the air exiting his nose giving off a noise more fitting to a horse rather than a primate and went to stand against a pillar no further than two steps away from Mark’s bed, his previous expression of eating feces returning to his sour face.
No more than thirty seconds had passed when a couple of young doctors, if he could judge by the wrinkly white robes, scarcely any older than him approached the gurney…medical students, this was a university hospital after all. They took a look at him and asked a few questions to which Mark slurred the answers to briefly and vaguely while they were scribing on pieces of paper and checking boxes. Officer Kong had made satellite dishes of his large ears, listening to their conversation, probably hoping to catch something useful. A couple of minutes after the two students had departed, a surgeon arrived, holding the piece of paper that one of the students had filled. He poked him a bit with a pen around the area of his shoulder and lower, down the length of his arm, asking if he could feel this or that and urging him to move his fingers to determine whether or not there were any movement deficiencies. He seemed more or less happy with what he saw. He asked a couple of questions of his own and ordered a series of X-Rays, blood works, toxicological screening and a course of vast spectrum antibiotics to prepare for the infection that was almost sure to follow. Another student, kind of jittery, came by with a signal from the surgeon and took three latex gloves out of a box, and a packaged syringe from a drawer, the surgeon made to leave in a hurry.
Mark had to do something if he wanted to get out of the hospital without causing much trouble. He probably could wait for them to get the bullet out and then escape, but he would probably have to rearrange officer Kong’s ugly face into something a bit uglier and make a bit of a mess out of the hospital in the process. He could do that, he could probably even wait till morning so that he was almost completely healed and rested and then escape. But maybe he could manage it more peacefully and easily by getting a little bit of help.
“Doctor, a moment.” Mark slurred while grabbing the surgeon limply by the sleeve of his white robe. Officer Kong tensed like a rope as if Mark was about to kill the man right then and there. ‘Someone give the guy a banana or something to calm him down’, Mark was getting a tired of his presence.
“Yes?” the surgeon replied, turning to face Mark once more. In the meantime the student had put on two of the gloves and she was trying to tie the last one around Mark’s rolled up sleeve using some kind of weird knot.
“Can you inform doctor Adamis that I am here? I
am not feeling so good, I am a bit scared.” Mark asked. As the student was lightly caressing the skin on the inside of Mark’s elbow, above his veins, trying to find the right vessel and the right angle to insert the thin needle. Not that it needed much effort, a blind man could draw blood from his veins. They could be alternatively be used for toilet tubing.
“Doctor Orpheus Adamis, the professor of cardiology?! Is he monitoring you for something?” the surgeon furrowed his brows for a moment. While the student was carefully inserting the needle in Mark’s hand, seemingly not noticing anything around her, brows furrowed in concentration. Nevertheless, Mark felt the narrow piece of steal piercing his skin and the wall of his vein. ‘Sorry’ whispered the nervous student, more to herself than to him.
“It’s ok, I didn’t feel anything.” Mark turned to lie to the student and the girl nodded.
“The same, he is my physician, he has been monitoring me for years.” Mark said, careful not to move his arm in case the nervous student with the heavy hand amputated it by mistake.
“For what purpose has he been monitoring you if I may ask?” the surgeon demanded, clasping his hands behind his back. As the student, evidently proud of her accomplishment removed the large syringe, brimming with Mark’s blood and started filling seven little vials with different colored caps.
Mark panicked slightly, “I suffer from,” he said, gaining a pained expression, stalling for time to think of something to say “…Takamori.” What, the hell, was that? He thought to himself, managing to stop the palm of his open hand from smashing his stupid forehead to smithereens… He managed it, but only barely.
“What the hell is that?” The surgeon asked in a scoffing yet slightly amused manner, as if reading Mark’s stupid thoughts. At least it did not seem to be some actual rare disease, or if it was, at least the doctor did not know of it.
“It’s a rare congenital disease, very rare, very few in the world have it *cough*, some Japanese doctor discovered it and gave it his name, it is more usual in Japan actually. Something to do with pulmonary hypertension and sudden arrhythmias and something about calcium levels in heart cells and it makes your irises violet.” Mark said, hoping he had not taken it too far, crossing his fingers under the blanket that was still wrapped around him. The surgeon seemed almost as baffled as officer Kong, the first probably from the meaning of the words he had just heard, and the second simply by the mention of words like ‘Japanese’ or ‘arrhythmia’ or ‘and’. The surgeon took a step closer, staring into Mark’s eyes. He cleaned his hands with a sanitizing gel and took his contact lenses off, an experience Mark would be happy enough if he never had to go through again. There is something very weird and uncomfortable about someone else’s fingers slowly approaching your soft, naked, vulnerable eyeballs.
The surgeon seemed dazed. “Well…that is a first.” he said, still looking as if he could not believe his own eyes. Somehow, most likely via some unseen magical power, every medical student and resident in the general area found their learning senses to be tingling, and the disturbance to be radiating from Mark’s gurney, to which they set course for, like mosquitoes drawn to a lonely bright lamp in the middle of a moonless night; And no less annoying for him than it would be for the person standing under that lamp.
The surgeon looked at his papers, “You said that you did not have any known diseases when the students took your history.”
“Oh, I was kind of dazed and you know how it is. Leave with it all your life, sometimes you forget it’s there.”
“That’s a first as well. But I am happy to see that you do not let your whole existence revolve around it.”
“Yeah, that’s me. I let my life revolve around nothing.”… That came out sounding weird.
“Aha, I will give him a call.” The surgeon said, taking his cell phone from his pocket while trying to get out of the way of the hungry mass of medical-student-zombies that were looking from Mark to their respective smartphones, searching for the disease. Mark’s brow glistened with sweat just a little bit. But thanks to a peculiar yet favorable change in Mark’s luck, the internet search provided no information or answers for the thirsty students, yet some chose to partially quench their thirst by reading about the life of the samurai Saigo Takamori in his Wikipedia page.
The students tried to ask him more questions but Mark stated extreme exhaustion, which was not difficult at all since he really did feel tired, and soon enough they left him alone. Moments later a nurse came by to transport him to the X-Ray room, he seemed tired too, or it could be the big black circles under his eyes that gave him the impression of being tired, maybe some old ancestor of his had slept with a raccoon. He was also carrying a white shirt which she gave to him to wear. Before they left, Mark put his contact lenses back on. He certainly did not enjoy the tedium of having to perform the chore every single day, yet he felt kind of exposed without them.
The nurse rolled him to a spacious elevator, big enough for two gurneys and their gurney-drivers and was obviously designed with that purpose in mind. Mark had never been inside a hospital before, none that he could remember at least, only on the infirmary in the Order’s HQ while he was under training. The place did not seem too bad though, it had a weird kind of smell and a lot of people moving about, most of them drenched in anxiety about one thing or another, doctors and patients alike giving the place a congested feeling. What nudged Mark most though was the fact that there were quite a few patients laid out on the hallways, sleeping on gurneys and camp beds, some trembling with fever, some clenched in pain without any kind of privacy and quiet. The hospital would have probably been overcrowded, or underfunded, or most likely both but still, it was not a nice picture. And he was taking up space and man-hours. ‘Like I need more reasons to feel a shittier today.’
After maneuvering through almost a billion similar looking hallways, and turning left and right seemingly at random whenever they happened across an intersection they reached a sign reading department of Actinology. Mark was prioritized, since he was a trauma patient, and he got rushed into a room, skipping the line of grumpy coughing grandpas waiting outside of it, holding pieces of papers with printed numbers on them.
A cute middle aged doctor with shoulder length auburn hair walked in, her unbuttoned robe waving in the air behind her. She moved in a brisk pace to help him get in the proper position, handling him like some kind of mannequin figure and speaking to him as if in loud, short, comprehensible orders to finally place him with his wounded shoulder pressed against a some target-thingy, designed for the x-rays to be shot at after they had passed through him. He moved only lightly and she repositioned him fast and precisely once again, strictly told him not to move, more detached than annoyed, in the way of someone used to performing a dull routine. She seemed cold as ice, not even the thought of a smile passed from her thin hard pressed lips, maybe because she was tired from taking uninspired photos of body parts all day long and knew that she still had many more patients waiting outside. Or maybe because she did not much like the company of suspected criminals. Or maybe because the sight of officer Kong’s gloomy face could ruin even the best of moods on the best of days…Mark preferred to believe that it was the last one. She span and walked out even quicker than she had walked in, the low heels of her shoes tapping rapidly on the floor, the heavy lead door shutting firm behind her with a thud, so that not even one of the ionizing rays could escape the room and happen across some innocent bystander cell’s precious double stranded helix of DNA. There was a sound generated by the machine targeting Mark’s shoulder. Mark imagined the daft cousin of an intergalactic laser canon preparing to fire and then something going terribly wrong with it along the way. ‘Underwhelming’. The door opened again almost instantly and the nurse entered to place him on the gurney once more and move him to the surgery room.
Mark was taken into the surgery room not ten minutes after his departure from the X-Ray room. It was a pretty standard room, like what he had always imagined it to be. The smell
of bleach evident in the air, a standard surgical table, and big strong lights overhead, machines pushed against walls here and there, tubes and tools, sparkling clean, in a tray next to the table. The same surgeon from before and two other residents, all of them dressed in blue surgeon’s scrubs walked through the door, hands raised up so they would not touch any unclean surface by mistake, infect Mark’s wounds with deadly hospital bacteria. Not that any bacteria would be able to do anything against a Knight’s immune system no matter how much they tried. If people’s immune systems were superheroes, his would be Superman and no bacteria ever seemed to carry around any kryptonite. The surgeons started working on his shoulder after studying his X-Ray film to see how many bullet fragments there were and approximately where they were lodged inside his body. They started by injecting the injured area with a measure of local anesthetic and a drug for constricting the arteries, useful for less blood loss and for the anesthesia to work better. Though the dosage of the anesthetic should have probably been a bit higher than the one suggested in medical textbooks if they wanted Mark’s nerve endings to get a full vacation from their never-ending job of receiving signals from his environment and transferring them, in the form of electrical charges to the big guy, Brain. He still felt numb enough though as to not start screaming and moving during the procedure.
One of the residents did almost all the work, under the watchful eye of his teacher, explaining to him every step of the procedure before the surgeon would let him perform it. Before they began, they had asked Mark if he wanted them to cover the area with something so that he would not see the procedure, but Mark asked them not to. In his short career as an active member of The Order he had seen his fair share of blood and open wounds, he had gutted and brained monsters, and he had been covered in slime and spit and other less delightful excrements. He had been relatively fine with all that, not elated or anything mind you, but he had faced each situation calmly enough. For some reason the surgery…bothered him. The image of his opened up skin, pulled back and held open wide by metal tools and the couple of men staring purposefully in the red mass of muscles and tendons and bone and nerves and blood vessels, calmly searching for the pieces of the broken bullet, trying to assemble it in a tray like a 3D jigsaw puzzle so that they were certain they had left nothing inside before they decided to close him up with sutures. That image was…something. Maybe because it was his own body opened up and being worked on, maybe because the way the surgeons worked reminded him of Rob when he was repairing Betsy, only with less care and emotion, or maybe it was something else entirely. Maybe he would know if he was ever forced to perform something similar on someone else in the future. He was not in any kind of a hurry though.