Chapter Eleven

 

The noise started after they’d been walking about three minutes. It had been so faint at first that Anya had thought she was imagining it, but within minutes she realized that it was definitely not her imagination. People were yelling and chanting, although she had no idea what words they were actually saying. It was all in Zocronian, which she still had trouble understanding even under the best of circumstances. That’s why she and Kromin always spoke Universal together. There was no way she was going to be able to tell what all the yelling was about from this far away. Kromin, however, must have understood, because the expression on his face was slowly growing darker.

“Are they saying what I think they’re saying?” he asked, turning to the man who had come to fetch them from the bar.

The man nodded. “I’m afraid so. Half the town is rioting. It started about an hour ago with a handful of Zocronians and grew rapidly.”

“What are they rioting about?” Anya asked. She had seen how feisty Zocronians could be when they were angry. There had been many locals who hadn’t been happy when Chief Daxar decided to allow outsiders into Zocrone. It had been a small percentage of the population, but they had been quite vocal. From what the Zocronian messenger was saying, though, a much larger percentage of Zocronians were participating in the current riot, whatever it was about.

“They’re angry because of the rations,” the messenger explained. “They’re saying that Chief Daxar is being too strict. Some people claim that things aren’t so bad and he shouldn’t be imposing the rations. Others are saying that things wouldn’t be as bad as they are if the Chief had the guts to send supply ships out in the storms.”

“But the storms are way too strong for any spaceship to fly safely,” Anya said. “I mean, have they looked out the city dome in the last two weeks? It’s madness out there!” Anya could feel her blood boiling. How could people be so ridiculous? Chief Daxar was doing his best to protect everyone and make sure supplies didn’t run out before the storms did, and all the ungrateful masses could do was riot? She looked over at Kromin, expecting him to be as angry as she was, but he looked more resigned than furious.

He shrugged when he saw her looking at him with wide eyes. “It’s nothing new, Anya. Anytime things aren’t going well, people want to find someone to blame. Chief Daxar is the easiest target. He could do everything as perfectly as possible and it wouldn’t matter. If something goes wrong, even if it’s completely out of his control like the storms are, they’ll find a way to blame him.”

Anya looked over at the messenger, who shrugged as if to say “It’s true. What can you do?”

Their laidback attitude about the whole thing only made her angrier. How could anyone act like this was no big deal? The city should be supporting their Chief in hard times, not tearing him down. At least, that’s how Anya had always acted in her own life. There had been times when she had still been on the smuggling ship that she’d disagreed with decisions Nova had made. Sometimes, Nova’s decisions had made life quite difficult for Anya and the other crew members. But Anya had always supported Nova, because Nova was their captain, and Anya understood that sometimes knowing which decision to make wasn’t so easy. Anya had always known that Nova was doing her best. And Anya knew that Chief Daxar was doing his best. Couldn’t the Zocronians see that?

Apparently not. The closer they got to the hospital, the louder the screaming became. When the hospital itself came into view, Anya was surprised to see that the crowds were gathered outside of the building. This surprised her. Why would everyone be rioting here, instead of at city headquarters or some other government building.

Kromin also must have been surprised, and he asked the messenger about the riot’s unlikely location.

“Oh, don’t take it personally,” the man replied. “I don’t think they have anything against you, Doc. It’s just that Chief Daxar is in there with the monkey attack victim, and the crowds are determined to riot as closely to the Chief as they possibly can. They want to make sure he can’t ignore their screaming. As if anyone could really ignore them. They sound terrible.”

“The Chief’s in there?” Kromin asked, looking suddenly much more worried than he had been. “Shit, we’ve got to hurry!”

He took off running, grabbing Anya’s hand to pull her along with him. Getting to the hospital’s entrance wasn’t easy with such a thick crowd in their way, but Kromin managed to bulldoze a path through. He roared with anger and yelled at everyone to get out of his way, and no one appeared to want to argue with him. At the front of the hospital, Zocronians dressed in military garb were guarding the entrance. They let Kromin and Anya pass, but barred anyone else from going into the hospital. Kromin paused once he’d made it to the other side of the guards.

“Do you know who’s in there?” he asked one of the guards. But the guard just shook his head no.

“I don’t know who the wounded guy is. I just know that Chief Daxar is with him, and is waiting on you. I think it’s pretty bad, so you should probably hurry.”

Kromin rubbed his ridged forehead, the worry evident in his eyes. “Shit!” he said with a glance back at Anya. “Come on. We need to get in there now.”

He took off running toward the entrance, Anya close behind him.

“What’s wrong?” she panted out. “Do you know who it is?”

“I don’t know for certain,” Kromin called over his shoulder. “But if Daxar is in there with the victim then it’s probably either Jarmuk or Toryx. Those are two guys that Dax wouldn’t leave alone if they were seriously wounded.”

Anya felt a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach as she realized that Kromin was right. Daxar cared about all of the Zocronian citizens, but he wouldn’t have holed up in the hospital for just anyone. One of his best friends was in there, and not doing great from the sound of it.

Anya began to feel short of breath within a few seconds of running after Kromin, but she forced herself to keep up despite the burning in her lungs and legs. The hospital wasn’t that big, so Anya knew she wouldn’t have to keep up this pace for long. But still, following Kromin when he was moving at the speed of sound wasn’t easy even for short distances. His legs were quite a bit longer and more muscular than hers, and she had a feeling his lung capacity was at least twice as great. She managed not to fall too far behind, though, and she had a feeling Kromin was pacing himself for her sake. That was actually really sweet of him, considering one of his best friends might be bleeding out in the emergency room this very second.

When they reached the end of the hallway, Anya was relieved that Kromin chose to take the elevator pod instead of the stairs. She felt like she might have collapsed from exhaustion if she’d had to chase him up those stairs. The elevator pod arrived quickly, and Anya was still breathing quite heavily when she stepped in behind Kromin and watched him hit the button for the third floor, where the emergency operating rooms were located. Despite being out-of-breath, Anya still wanted to know what was going on. She managed to gasp out a question as the elevator pod’s door closed behind them.

“Do the monkeys normally attack? All the ones I have seen seem so docile.”

Kromin’s frown deepened as the elevator pod began zooming upwards. “They don’t attack that often. But they’ve been known to turn aggressive when something is agitating them. I think they can probably sense that something is wrong. They can see that the food and water supplies in Zocrone are dwindling, and they can see that the Zocronians themselves are agitated. I mean, you saw that crowd out there. People are upset.”

“Which is ridiculous! How can anyone expect Daxar to stop the storms?”

Kromin shrugged. “It’s how things go, you know that. When times are tough, people need someone to blame. Anyway, I’m not all that surprised that there was a monkey attack. I just hope it wasn’t too brutal.”

Anya said nothing as the elevator pod screeched to a halt and the door whished open. Kromin started running again, making his way toward the triage area. Anya knew that he didn’t have much hope that the monkey attack would turn out to be not a big deal. The messenger had made it clear that the situation was an emergency, and Chief Daxar himself was here. Whatever injuries they were about to encounter were bound to be serious. Anya braced herself and followed Kromin into triage.

The scene that greeted them was worse than she could have thought. Blood was everywhere in here. It wasn’t hard to find the room where the patient was located, because a trail of blood led right to it. As soon as they stepped inside, Anya felt her stomach turn.

It was Toryx, and he did not look good. He was laid out on one of the hospital beds with Nova and Daxar beside him, desperately trying to stop the bleeding. Toryx’s blue face had faded to an almost gray color, and even though Anya was not super familiar with Zocronian physiology, she knew that was a very bad sign.

Daxar looked up as they entered the room, a panicked look in his eyes. Anya had never seen the Chief looking panicked, and it was quite an unsettling sight.

“Shit,” Kromin said, already moving to Toryx’s side to assess the situation. “A monkey did this?”

Daxar grunted. “Yeah, I guess Toryx accidentally startled the thing? I’m not sure exactly what happened, but with the animals already on edge it didn’t take much to turn the monkey crazy. Toryx fought it off as best he could, but it was a big monkey and Toryx himself was caught quite off guard when the thing attacked the way it did.”

“Shit,” Kromin said again. Anya was already assessing how many wounds there were, and what kind of attention was needed. None of the wounds looked alarmingly deep, but the slashes were deep enough that they were going to need some disinfecting and some skinsealer. The only problem, of course, was that the hospital was completely out of skinsealer. Anya looked up at Kromin to see if he had come to the same conclusion as her. From the dark shadows crossing his eyes, she could tell that he had.

“Are you sure there’s none stashed anywhere else? Any old, backroom storage that you might have forgotten about or something?”

He knew what she was talking about even though she didn’t say the word “skinsealer.” He shook his head slowly, and more despair seemed to creep into his expression with every passing second.

“There’s none,” he said, his voice hoarse as he looked down at his suffering friend. “There’s not a single strip of skinsealer left on this planet.”

Daxar frowned at their conversation. “No more skinsealer? How is that possible?”

Kromin didn’t answer right away. He looked down at Toryx, then back at Anya, and finally, met Daxar’s eyes. “We’ve used our entire supply of it, and as you know we haven’t been able to get in shipments of anything for the last several weeks.”

The panic in Daxar’s eyes increased, but he managed to keep his voice steady as he looked down at Toryx. “So, what do we do then?”

Kromin closed his eyes briefly, as though not seeing Daxar’s face or Toryx’s bloody body would make things easier. “I don’t know. Skinsealer is the standard method for closing up any severe wound. Since we don’t have any of the stuff, the best we can do is to try to wrap his wounds in bandages and apply tourniquets.”

“That’s not going to be enough!” Daxar said. “We’ve been doing that for the last half hour and things have only gotten worse.”

Nova cleared her throat then, and looked over at Anya. “Anya? Do you have any ideas?”

Anya felt all eyes on the room turn toward her. She had never been under so much pressure, and the fact that Kromin was counting on her to help only made her feel more nervous. She didn’t want to let him down. But what could she possibly do that Kromin couldn’t? No doubt, Kromin could bandage Toryx and apply tourniquets just as skillfully as Anya could. Probably even more skillfully. There was one thing, though…it didn’t work as well as skinsealer, but in the absence of skinsealer, the ancient technique would have to do.

“Stitches,” Anya said decisively. Daxar and Kromin looked at her like she was crazy.

“Stitches?” Kromin asked. “What the sludge is that?”

“Something we used to use on Earth all the time, back before the technology for skinsealer made it to our planet. Basically, you sew someone back together.”

“Sew?” Daxar asked, looking incredulous. “You’re going to just sew Toryx up like he’s some sort of piece of clothing?”

“Essentially, yes,” Anya said. “But I’ll need special supplies. You can’t just use any old thread. It has to be surgical quality sutures.”

Kromin still looked doubtful, although he appeared to be slightly more open to the idea than Daxar was. “And do you have any of these surgical quality sutures that you need?”

Anya nodded, getting excited. “I do. I always carry some in my travel med bag, just in case. I haven’t used it in forever, so I should still have a good stash.”

“And where is your travel med bag?” Nova asked, piping in.

“It’s down in the supply room. I left it there because I figured I wouldn’t need anything from it anytime soon. No flights are going out, so I wasn’t planning on the Starburst making any supply runs.”

“Daxar, go get her bag,” Kromin growled. “You know where the supply room is, right?”

Daxar nodded, unfazed by the fact that he was being ordered around. Daxar might be the Chief, but medical emergencies were still Kromin’s domain.

“I’ll get the bag,” Daxar said as he ran toward the door. “You all just do your best to keep the bleeding at bay.”

Nova shook her head sadly. “Easier said than done.”

“We have to try, Nova,” Anya said, even though she herself had never wanted so badly to devolve into a state of panic. Anya knew that the worst thing she could do as a doctor was lose her cool, but when a good friend was the one lying on the operating table, his life slowly slipping away, not panicking was a monumental task.

Kromin managed to maintain his calm better than everyone. He moved to Toryx’s side and began checking the bandages. He took a look at Toryx’s vitals, and administered some pain medication. Anya helped as best she could, but she found that her hands were shaking.

I haven’t done stitches in years. What if I mess up?

Stitches weren’t even taught in medical school anymore, as far as Anya knew. She had been one of the last rounds of medical students to be taught what was now considered a primitive, almost barbaric way of treating a person. Skinsealer was so prevalent throughout the Seven Galaxies that it was hard to fathom any doctor or hospital not having some at the ready. Of course, most places in the Seven Galaxies weren’t as remote as Zocrone. Kromin should have done a better job of keeping supplies stocked, but Anya didn’t need to rub that fact in. Kromin had learned his lesson, and Anya was sure he felt horribly guilty already. If his friend died today because there was no skinsealer, Kromin was never going to forgive himself.

I have to save Toryx, if only for Kromin’s sake. I don’t want Kromin to have to deal with this sort of loss. He cares so much about his friends. This would destroy him.

The thing about being a doctor, though, was that your decisions often had life or death consequences. If you couldn’t live with that, then it was probably time to start a new career. Still, there was a difference between losing a random patient and losing a best friend. Anya didn’t want to have to find out what I felt like to lose a friend on the operating table.

“Did you help carry him in?” Kromin asked Nova, breaking into Anya’s thoughts. Anya had a feeling that Kromin didn’t care one way or the other how Nova had helped. He was just trying to make conversation to keep his nerves steady. Nova seemed happy for the opportunity to talk, though.

“I helped carry him in, but I didn’t realize at first how badly he was doing. I let Daxar bring him in here to start cleaning up the wounds, while I started mopping up the blood trail Toryx had left in his wake. I had cleaned up everything all the way up to the triage hall when Daxar stuck his head out of this triage room and yelled at me to quit cleaning and come help him. That’s when I knew something was really wrong.”

Kromin shook his head sadly as he looked down at Toryx. “Really, really wrong I’d say. This is not good.”

“Anya’s a good doctor,” Nova said, looking hopefully over at Anya. “You’ll stitch him right up, won’t you?”

Anya wanted to make excuses for why she might not be able to help Toryx. She was nervous that things were going to go badly and that everyone was getting their hopes up too much. But one look at Kromin’s face told her that she had to stay strong and confident. She had never seen Kromin look so worried.

“I’ll stitch him right up,” Anya agreed. “Besides, Toryx is a fighter. He’ll come through this. Do you really think he’s going to let himself die at the hands of a monkey? He’ll recover and then go strangle that monkey for daring to mess with him.”

Kromin laughed, as Anya had hoped he would. But the laugh sounded forced and halfhearted. Toryx was a fighter, yes. But even someone as tough as Toryx could only survive so long while bleeding out as much as Toryx was bleeding right now.

Thankfully, Daxar burst back into the room at that moment, carrying Anya’s travel med bag. “Is this what you need?”

“Yes!” Anya reached for the bag, which she had never been so happy to see in her life. She opened it wide and started to shuffle through its contents, hoping she still had sutures in here. She hadn’t used this bag in so long that she wasn’t sure what it still had in it, but to her relief she found a large spool of sutures, a surgical needle, and even a small package of skinsealer.

“Look!” Anya said, pulling the skinsealer out and waving it in Daxar’s face “It’s not much, but it’ll be enough to seal up a couple of wounds. Get started on the worst of the gashes while I sterilize my surgical needles.”

Kromin looked relieved that he at least had something to do, and his air of doctorial authority returned. “Okay. Dax and Nova, you should wait outside. The less people contaminating the operating room, the better. We’ll let you know as soon as we have news, I promise.”

Anya had expected Nova and Daxar to protest at being kicked out, but they almost looked relieved. They scurried into the hallway as Anya began prepping her needles and Kromin moved to cover the worst of Toryx’s wounds with the limited amount of skinsealer that Anya had discovered in her med bag. Neither one of them spoke, but Anya felt a peaceful feeling, like just having Kromin’s presence there was enough to encourage her.

We work well together. She smiled at the thought. Even though things had been shaky between them personally at the beginning, Anya was realizing that Kromin had always been a good partner when it came to medical procedures. They seemed to know how to support each other without having to say a word, and Anya knew that kind of partnership was rare.

Right now, she could use all the support she could get. She had managed to calm the shaking in her hands, which was a good thing, since sewing stitches with shaky hands would have been a disaster. But her heart was still pounding, and she knew they had a long ways to go before Toryx was truly out of danger. All she could do was try her best, and hope for the best.

She looked up to see that Kromin had finished up with the skinsealer, and was now applying an IV of fluids to Toryx’s arm. Toryx looked even grayer than before, and his heart rate was dropping rapidly. Anya tried not to let herself think about it.

Just focus on one stitch at a time. You can do this, one stitch at a time.

“Is there anything else I can do?” Kromin asked as soon as the IV was in place. Anya took a deep breath and shook her head no.

“I think I’ve got everything I need. Just stand by and help me monitor his vitals while I work. This is going to take a while, and he’s already not doing well.”

Kromin nodded, and Anya didn’t waste any more time in getting to work. She liked being able to lose herself in the task at hand, and the more stitches she sewed, the calmer she became. Every stitch brought her one step closer to finishing this task, and hopefully to saving Toryx.

Anya did not look up at Kromin as she worked. She was nervous what he thought of her work, and she figured it was better to wait until it was all said and done to worry about getting his opinion.

Her fiancé’s opinion. Anya swallowed hard at that thought, hardly able to contain her excitement, even in the midst of such serious circumstances. How was it possible that Kromin already cared enough about her that he wanted to marry her? They had been enemies only a few weeks ago.

Or had they? They had acted like enemies, true. But Anya had a feeling that deep down inside, they had both known that they were meant for something more. Their differences had never been strong enough to keep them apart, and those differences made them stronger together. They complimented each other perfectly. Where Anya was weak, Kromin was strong. And where Kromin needed to admit that things needed to be changed, Anya had convinced him to let go and make those changes.

Right now, Anya had another chance to show Kromin that she could help him in ways that no one else could. If she could make these stitches work, if she could save Toryx, then it would only solidify Kromin’s positive view of her. And Anya was finding that Kromin’s opinion of her mattered more than anything else ever could. He completed her, and she wanted to prove to him that she completed him too.

With renewed vigor, she continued her work on Toryx. She could not fail in this. She would not fail. For her sake, for Kromin’s, and for Toryx’s, Anya would make these stitches work.

Her skills as a human doctor might be different from anything anyone in this community had ever seen, but when all was said and done, she was going to prove that she was valuable here.

And then, she was going to go home and celebrate with Kromin. She had a feeling he would be on board with that plan.