“I am Lemuel-Lan-Michael. This is my mate, Maion-Lan-Lemuel-Lan-Michael. Please, you must help her. Just look what Yahweh did to her. Michael says humans are her only hope.”
“You get those names Jim? What does dispatch say?”
“I think they’re speechless. Oh, the Army is coming.”
“Please help her.” Lemuel was pleading, tears rolling from his eyes.
Malloy nodded and looked at the angel on the ground. She was indeed female and was as beautiful as Lemuel was handsome. In fact, she was just about the most beautiful thing Malloy had ever seen. Or would have been if she hadn’t been beaten so badly. “You say Yahweh did this?” He couldn’t believe it.
“It was done on his orders. Because a female he smiled on was jealous of her.”
“Damn. Jim, get back to dispatch. Tell them we’ll need some sort of transporter and a medical team. We’ve got an emergency here.”
“That’s all right Officer, we’ll handle it from here.” An Army Colonel had appeared at the scene. “This is ours now.”
“Sucks to be you, Sir. We got here first, this is a Prince George County PD collar. And these are our prisoners.”
Colonel Paschal sighed. He was beginning to see why Prince George County PD had the reputation it did. “And you are, officer?”
” Peter J. Malloy, Badge number 744, service number 10743.”
“Well, Peter J Mallow, badge number 744, this area is under Federal jurisdiction and these are foreign military personnel engaged in hostile activities against the United States and, by the way, the human race.”
“Hosile activities?” Malloy’s voice was openly derisive. His family had been big on State’s rights and the iniquities of the Federal Government. “Look at them. Lemuel there has been as good as gold. I’ve had more trouble busting little old ladies. And his mate is so badly smashed up, she needs emergency care right now. She’s not hostiling anybody. We’ve got the EMS on their way, have you.”
“Hostiling isn’t a word.” Paschal sighed again, then looked at the female angel. That was when he realized just how urgent getting her to a medical facility was. “And an EMS team won’t do much good. We need to get her to Bethesda at least. I can get a tank transporter here to move her.”
Malloy twisted his mouth in a semi-grin. He was having a lot of fun baiting this Army officer even though he knew it would probably bite him in the ass in the long run. “I’ll do you a deal. You take Maion there to Bethesda right away, we’ll take Lemuel to Central Booking and get him signed in. How’s that?”
“Malloy, if you look behind me, you will note that I have half a dozen armored cars here. They’re armed with 20mm cannon. Now, I have seen that pistol of yours and I note that the dirt on the back of your uniform suggests you fell flat on your ass when you fired it. So, let’s just assume that the balance of firepower is in my favor. So, I’ll suggest a deal. We get Lemuel and Maion, we’ll record you as being first-on-scene and them as being your collar. Fair enough? Oh, and I’ll make sure your watch commander knows that you had the situation well in hand when we got here.”
Molloy smiled at the Colonel. “That sounds right fair Colonel.”
“Good, now take a hike before we have a falling-out.”
I-270/Old Georgetown Road interchange, Bethesda, Maryland
The number of humans surrounding Lemuel was growing faster than he could count. All that mattered to him was that some of them had made a straight line for Maion and started to deal with her more obvious injuries. Lemuel knelt quietly on the blacktop, listening to what they said. He understood very little of what they were saying but he did comprehend the tones they were using to say it and that frightened him. Those tones were getting steadily more urgent and the actions of the people treating Maion were becoming more and more frantic.
“What is happening?” The words burst out from him.
The one Lemuel had heard called Colonel Paschal turned around. “She is your mate?”
“She is… Colonel.”
“That makes you next of kin I guess. The doctors here are deeply concerned. They’ll tell you all about it in due course but the short version is that your mate has numerous badly broken bones, severe internal injuries and a lot of superficial ones. We’ve got a vehicle coming, it’ll be here in a few minutes and that will take her to the best local hospital we can find. That’s a place called Bethesda up the road. At the moment, they are trying to stabilize her so she can be moved. They’re not certain they can do that.”
“What will happen if they can’t…. stabilize.… her?” Lemuel saw the sympathetic look on Paschal’s face and knew the answer without being told.
“Lemuel, I’m not a doctor, so I can’t give you a detailed picture. What I can do is this. We’ll do everything in our power to cure her. More than that, I can’t say.”
Chapter Sixty Two
I-270/Old Georgetown Road interchange, Bethesda, Maryland
“Get out of the fucking way Sir.” The nurse pushed past Colonel Paschal and joined the scrum of medical personnel working on Maion. She was carrying large transparent packages that had just arrived on the HH-60M Medevac helicopter that was now sitting on the road a few dozen yards back. Volume expanders he guessed to himself, possibly the new oxygen transport therapeutics. I-270 hadn’t seen this level of medical activity since a Greyhound bus had rolled over before the war.
“You’ll have to forgive Grace Sir. She tends to get very focussed.” The man standing beside Paschal was the copilot of the Medevac chopper.
“It’s OK, she said ‘Sir’. That makes all the difference Lieutenant
… Rawlings. What’s going on? That was volume expander wasn’t it?”
“Sort of. It’s one we developed for use on daemons. Lot of them were really badly chewed up in Iraq and it turned out we knew nothing much about their blood chemistry. So we use that stuff, it works regardless of blood groups. Johns Hopkins did a quick test on some angelic blood and it seems to be OK for them too, so Mac and I got orders to fly a few gallons of the stuff down.”
“A quick test. Is that all?”
“All we had time for Sir, word is, if we didn’t get that stuff down here fast, she isn’t going to make it.” Paschal made ‘shusshing’ motions with his hand and pointed at Lemuel. “Sorry, Sir, didn’t realize.”
Paschal looked at Lemuel-Lan who was staring at the scene around Maion with stunned incredulity. There were at least a dozen doctors around her now with as many nurses helping out, the whole scene illuminated by the blue, red and white lights on the emergency vehicles.. To Paschal’s eyes, helping out was a misnomer since the nurses seemed to be doing most of the heavy work. One of the doctors detached from the group and ran over to Lemuel.
“You, angel, what’s your blood group?” Lemuel started and looked down at the figure addressing him. “Hurry up, we’ve got an emergency here.”
“What’s a blood group?” Leemuel was bewildered.
The doctor twisted his lips. “What color is your blood?”
“Silver.”
“Hers is white. We can’t take the chance.” The doctor turned to the team around Maion and made a ‘negate that’ gesture. One of the other doctors acknowledged and another bag of volume expander was opened. The doctor was about to go back when he saw Paschal looking at him.
“The wild primary colors in daemon blood? They’re daemon equivalent of blood groups. We can transfuse green to green or yellow to yellow but not green to yellow. I was hoping Lofty here would be white blood but he isn’t. Tough on his girl that.”
“Is she going to make it?” Paschal said the words softly but he saw Lemuel start and cautiously look around.
The doctor pushed his lower lip out. “She’s got a better chance that she had a few minutes ago. Now we’ve got the volume expander into her, her heart’s got something to pump around. Odds still aren’t good but we’ve pulled people back from worse. I hear Yahweh had this done to her?”
“That’s right. Or so we’ve been told. We haven’t had a chance to do an interrogation yet.”
“Damn. She’s a mess. We’ve given her morphine to kill the pain but it isn’t working very well. Either angels have a major resistance to opiates or… ” the doctors voice wandered off for a second and his eyes suddenly got suspicious. “As soon as she’s got enough of her own blood to live on, we’ll run a full panel on her.”