Xenophobia by Peter Cawdron

Author:Peter Cawdron
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Published: 2013-07-24T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10: Water

Night fell. Dark shadows crept across the floor. Moonlight shone through the gaping hole in the roof above the shattered upper floor.

Bower hadn’t heard anyone walking around or talking since the shooting, at least no one human. The alien creature moved around sporadically, but seemed to be giving her a wide berth, and that was fine with her.

Elvis gave her something to focus on. He hadn’t regained consciousness, and she was worried about him. There was no way of knowing just how much blood he’d lost. The shock of a major amputation would have killed most people, but Elvis was a fighter. Bower’s medical training kicked in and she set about caring for him.

Hah, what a joke, she thought, caring for a severe trauma case with no medical equipment while locked in a cellar with a murderous alien. Only it wasn’t a cellar, was it? The windows had been sealed from the outside with steel plates, but she could see through the cracks into the moonlit street outside. And it wasn’t a murderous alien, at least not in her case, not yet anyway.

Bower felt she had to stake out some territory. She didn’t feel comfortable remaining in plain sight beneath the gaping hole in the upper floor, but she didn’t want to chance upon the alien either. She dragged a mattress from the center of the floor, dragging it across beneath one of the steel plates blocking the windows. A thin strand of light pierced the cracks between the plates. Somehow, having a faint glimpse of the outside world gave her hope.

Two of the mattresses near the bottom of the pile were still in their original plastic wrapping. Bower smiled, lost in thought. This would be the closest she’d come to anything sterile. She moved those two as well, leaving the rest of the mattresses where they lay.

Bower tore the protective sheeting off one of the mattresses and reversed the plastic, reasoning that these strips of plastic and cloth taken from a sealed mattress were the closest thing she’d get to fresh bandages and dressings.

Elvis was more difficult to move than the mattresses. Bower pulled him over to the darkened window by grabbing him under his armpits and dragging his legs. She laid him on the plastic she’d turned inside out, with the mattress beneath him, all the while aware she was being watched by otherworldly eyes.

In the half-light, she got her first good look at his arm. The tourniquet was tight, much tighter than she remembered, but that was good. Not only would the tourniquet stem the flow of blood and compress the nerve channels, it would stop the spread of bacteria back into his body. Looking at Elvis, there wasn’t much that could be done for him outside of arranging a medi-evac, and that wasn’t going to happen.

Even if she could get a medi-evac, there wasn’t much that could be done for him in-country. In any other circumstance, he would have been sent to a specialist US military hospital, either stateside or in Germany.

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