Petrogypsies
Page 25
“You the vet?” I asked the one in the blue jeans as we walked back along the deck.
He nodded. “Paco Benitez.”
“Great. Think we can move any faster?”
All the critters had made the trip on the Pertwee’s deck, since there wasn’t much point in stuffing them down in one of the empty holds.
Lady Jane was strapped down in the center of a circle made up of Sprocket, Big Red, a mud mixer named Candygirl, and a fuel tanker name of Bloat. We had come prepared to make a well all on our own in case the Sisters tried playing hardball with us.
For the last hour, she had been spasming uncontrollably, so we didn’t try to go in through her mouth, but instead climbed a ladder we had bolted to her side and dropped through the hole on her back into Sabrina’s room. The sphincter that surrounded her topside hole flexed and trembled, but was held open by a couple of thick iron barrel hoops that we had found in a cargo hold, welded together, and installed in the opening.
We had to force open the flesh curtain that separated Sabrina’s room from Lady Jane’s central hallway. Her floor shivered and danced like we had our own private earthquake going. Lady Jane’s internal bio-illumination warts flared and dimmed erratically. Her walls sweated a clear, foul-smelling liquid. A thin, high scream whistled through her body constantly, seeming to grow louder each moment.
The obstruction had pushed up the floor about four yards behind the rear of Lady Jane’s head.
Doctor Benitez sucked his breath in when he spotted the waist-high lump. “Madre! I have never seen one that large.”
“I have,” Sabrina said grimly. She and Star hadn’t slept for a day and a half. They sat leaning against the hallway’s wall. They looked like hell and their cigars were both out, just ashy stumps stuck in their mouths.
“I remember,” Star said. She pulled out the stump of cigar, stared at it for a second, then put it back in her mouth. “Casing Critter name of Wonder Bunny, right? She died. You bring some petrocaine or carbocodone, Doctor?”
Benitez nodded. “Petrocaine. Titrated with benzodiazepine to relax the muscles.” He dropped the saddle-bag to his feet and started opening the straps. He pulled out half a dozen plastic quart jugs. “She must be jammed up all the way back to her crushing-gullet.”
Lady Jane screamed, the sound echoing flatly inside her hallway. The doctor and the military guy jumped, but none of the rest of us did. We’d heard it too often today. He motioned for the military guy to give him the other knapsack. “I cannot safely cut it out here. It’s obviously too big. I will need X-rays and a general anaesthetic with extensive life-support equipment.” He pulled open the knapsack and yanked out an air pistol. “We must get her to the hospital immediately. Let us relieve her pain first.”
He slapped a compressed air cartridge into the gun, then used a length of rubber tube to connect the gun to one of the plastic jugs. He punched a six-inch-long, 2-gauge needle onto the end of the gun. He motioned us to step back and started shooting painkiller into Lady Jane.
He injected her with the petrocaine and benzodiazepine all around the actual obstruction. Used up two quarts that way. Just a little bit of that would have put a human into a wheelchair, or a coffin, but Lady Jane’s spasms merely began to slow and weaken. Then he tracked all the way up her hallway to her gullet, switching to a flexible titanium needle about two feet in length to get into the areas he needed to, deeper in her flesh. A dozen bottles littered the hallway before he called it quits.
“Quickly, now,” he said. “She will be without pain for ninety minutes at most.” He looked at the guy in the uniform. “Tonio, you know the way. I stay in here. I am going to do a preliminary series of accordion-pleat cuts to try to relieve the immediate pressure on underlying organs. This is too close to her primary heart.”
***
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