He gulped and almost looked away. He’d never seen such damage done to a body. He’d seen bullet scars before, he had a couple himself. And whip scars and knife scars and the faded marks of bone-splitting bludgeons, but never all on the same body.
The tattoos were also unnerving, a tangled mass of poorly executed and extremely violent imagery in a naïve, amateur style that reminded Stanton of Russian prison tattoos. The disfiguring scribbles were punctuated with official-looking numberings and what appeared to be some form of medical record, listed under the woman’s right breast. There was also a series of messy Caesarean scars at the bottom of her stomach.
He took the nightdress from his bag and leant forward to lift the woman’s shoulders from the pillow and put the gown over her head.
Then, quite suddenly, the woman’s left hand shot upwards and took hold of his throat in a vice-like grip, a grip Stanton recognized as practised and one that would collapse his larynx in seconds. He resisted the instinctive urge to grab at the wrist of the attacking arm, fully aware that in a tug of war the advantage lay with her. She had her grip established and he had only seconds left.
Her eyes were open.
He was sure she’d been unconscious. She was deeply fevered and her body was wasting away and yet some primeval survival instinct had jerked her from unconsciousness at the feel of an alien touch and lent her incredible strength.
‘Nobody rapes me,’ she snarled in English.
The pain in Stanton’s throat was intense. He could feel the various cartilages in his larynx collapsing; his voicebox was about to be forced into his trachea. He’d never known a grip like it, and this was a woman, and a sick one at that.
He had no choice. His hands had been on her shoulders. He let go, drew both his hands back and then chopped them into either side of her neck.
The grip didn’t slacken at all. Not a millimetre.
It was incredible.
He’d held back on the blow certainly, but only very slightly, because he didn’t want to actually kill her. She was now very close to killing him.
He double-chopped her again. And again. Her neck was like steel cable. It was as if he was karate-chopping a lamppost.
His head was swimming. He was starting to black out. This was ridiculous. Impossible. Ten seconds earlier he had been about to remove a helpless woman from her hospital bed. Now the same woman was squeezing the last breath of life out of him.
He remembered the multi-tool with which he’d cut the straps on her gown. He’d put it on the cabinet beside her bed. He flailed an arm towards where he thought it would be and found it. The scissor function was still extended. He swung it round and plunged it deep into the woman’s extended arm.
It gave him less than a second. He felt a momentary slackening. She hadn’t let go but there was the tiniest fall in pressure. Her eyes had widened too. He did not believe that she was fully conscious but the stab in her arm had brought her a little closer to the surface.
He hit her again.
The eyes flamed for a moment. Then they closed.
She slipped back into unconsciousness.
And as she did so, slowly the vice opened.
Stanton had no time to dwell either on the agony in his throat or the appalling shock of this woman’s savagery. She had nearly killed him, from a prone position on a hospital bed, weakened by infection and with one arm completely disabled. Tattoos or not, it seemed perhaps that those other Companions knew what they were doing when they chose her after all.
She seemed genuinely unconscious now but nonetheless Stanton was wary. He thought about administering a sedative but not knowing what drugs were already in her body decided he couldn’t risk it. But he kept a needle ready just in case. He tore a length of sheet and bandaged the scissor wound he’d made, then he wrestled the nightdress on to her naked body and finally placed a lady’s bed cap on her head.
It was a strange moment because with the cap on her head and the white ruff at her collar, this snarling savage was transformed into a picture of innocence and calm. Apart from one or two small scars, her face was unmarked and seeing it framed in white linen was a revelation. She looked gentle. Stanton could hardly recall the skinny, sinewy, scarred and disfigured warrior’s body that lay beneath her gown.
He gathered her up in his arms and, stepping over the prostrate guards, crossed to the door and took a look outside. The corridor was empty. That was all the luck he needed. As long as he could get from this room unseen he felt confident he could brazen out the rest. He marched out of the room and towards the lift. He looked neither right nor left and held his head high. A nurse appeared in front of him. Instantly he barked an order.
‘This patient is dehydrated and has fallen into a faint. Fortunately I was on an inspection round or she would be prostrate on the floor right now. But we will speak about that later. For the moment there is a wheelchair by the lift. Bring it immediately.’
It was agony for him to speak after the damage that the woman had done to his larynx. Perhaps his rasping voice was even more intimidating because the nurse jumped to attention and almost saluted. It wasn’t her job to enforce security or to ask questions. Quite the opposite. Her job, which had been drummed into her since first she began her training, was to obey doctors. She scurried off at once, although in fact Stanton was walking so purposefully that despite her panicky desire to please they arrived at the wheelchair at the same time.
‘Thank you, nurse, that will be all,’ he said, gently lowering the woman into the chair.
While in the lift, he pulled off the surgeon’s gown and stuffed it into a cavity under the seat of the wheelchair. Now he was a fond husband collecting his wife from hospital. When the lift doors opened on the ground floor he wheeled the chair confidently towards the front doors.
‘Soon have you home, my dear,’ he said as he passed the reception area.
Then straight through the front doors and out into the open air. There was a wheelchair ramp to the left of the stone stairs and moments later Stanton was putting his fellow Chronation into the Mercedes.
45
THE WOMAN’S WOUNDS had been nothing like as life-threatening as Stanton’s own had been. He had been shot in the stomach; she had been shot in the arm and the upper chest, towards the shoulder, missing the heart and the lungs. Nonetheless, blood infection is equally serious whatever the size of wound that causes it, and Stanton’s new roommate’s arm was horribly swollen. He could only hope that it hadn’t taken too deep a hold and would respond to antibiotics. The idea of performing an amputation in a hotel room was pretty daunting, even one which had such a newfangled convenience as an en-suite bathroom.
To his relief, the woman responded to treatment, and once Stanton had cleaned her wounds and begun a course of antibiotics, she very quickly started to show signs of recovery. By the end of the first night her fever had begun to subside and her sleep was less disturbed.
He bathed her, attended to her bodily needs and fed her as best he could, spooning tiny amounts of thin soup into her mouth when her consciousness seemed closest to the surface. He wondered about trying to set up some kind of intravenous drip of sugar solution. He felt he had the skills to jerry-rig one but decided against it as it would have looked very strange to the maids and waiting staff who visited the room. Hotels don’t like people dying on their premises and Stanton did not want to alert the management to how serious his ‘sister’s’ condition had been when he brought her in.
He tended her for four whole days before she regained her consciousness and her strength began to return. In that time he could only speculate on the character and nature of this other version of himself and on the cosmic strangeness of their mutual situation.