Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

“The ambulance arrives,” he said, opening his door and stepping down to the ground. He went around to the other side and helped Katata and her children down, wiping his hands on his pantlegs when he was done, then he reached up for Donna, but she took one look at the slimy seat and scooted out the driver’s side. It was hardly worth the effort. Her entire right side was already wet with the aliens’ slime, her white T-shirt practically transparent from her shoulder to the middle of her chest except where streaks of orange sap from the bushes Trent had cut by the stream had stained it. It was clear that she wasn’t wearing a bra.

A tall, gangly Asian guy met them at the door. “I’m Doctor Chen,” he said in heavily accented English. He wasn’t dressed like a doctor—his blue jeans, red flannel shirt, and hiking boots made him look more like a logger or a construction worker—but he had a stethoscope draped around his neck and a little fanny pack with a red cross on it.

Trent made the introductions. “I’m Trent. This is Donna, Katata, Talana, and Dixit. Talana’s the one with the hurt… whatever.”

Dr. Chen looked apprehensively at the aliens. It was hard to tell what the aliens thought of him. If they were scared, they didn’t show it, but they didn’t say anything, either. They just stood there, Katata holding the baby in one tentacle and draping the other over Talana’s shoulder.

“Come inside, and we have see,” Chen said.

The building might have had a log exterior, but the inside was clean and bright, with smooth white walls and a tile floor. The emergency room took up at least a third of its space, and there was a hallway leading to several smaller rooms beyond it. The emergency room had two exam tables with crinkly paper sheets covering the cushions, and curtains on rails that could be pulled around them for privacy, just like in any other hospital.

An Asian woman dressed in drab green scrubs ran some kind of high-tech instrument on the far end of the room. She looked up when she saw people entering, did a theatrical double-take, then waved “hello” and went back to her work.

“Please sit patient on table,” Dr. Chen said. When Katata didn’t respond, he motioned setting Talana down, and she did. He reached out and gingerly touched the alien child’s slimy right tentacle at the bruised spot just above where it was cradling it with its left. Talana shivered under his touch, but whether it was from pain or from the idea of being prodded by a curious alien was hard to say.

“Where does it hurt?” Chen asked.

Katata spoke to the child, and the child responded by pointing with the tip of its uninjured tentacle. Both tentacles were maybe three inches thick at the shoulder and tapered to about the size of a person’s little finger at the tip. The injury was about two-thirds of the way down the right one, where it was maybe an inch thick.

Chen brushed his fingers gently along Talana’s skin. Ta-lana quivered again, then winced when he got to the injury. Trent wondered what the doctor could do for what was essentially a snake with a broken back, how he could even tell what was wrong, but Dr. Chen acted like he knew what he was doing. He reached for Talana’s other tentacle and felt the same spot there, squeezing fairly hard to feel the underlying structure. “There are bones,” he said. “Like vertebrae.” He flexed the uninjured tentacle in an arc, then tightened it into a loop about eight inches in diameter, getting a feel for how it normally moved. Then he put his hand inside the loop and said, “Squeeze.” He clenched the fingers of his other hand to show what he wanted.

Talana tightened the tentacle around his hand, the slimy skin sliding noiselessly, like a velvet rope being drawn into a knot. The knot slid down the length of the tentacle a few inches until it was narrow enough for a good grip, then Talana squeezed.

Chen nodded appreciatively. “Very good. Strong. Harder, please.” He flexed his free fingers again, and Talana obliged.

“Ah! Okay, stop now. Stop!” He tugged his hand free and shook it, and Talana jerked the tentacle back as if it had touched something hot.

“Toca,” the child said.

“You okay,” Chen replied. “You do just what I ask.” He took the other tentacle and draped the end of it over the same hand. “Now do again.”

Talana tried to wrap the tentacle around his hand, but the end of it slid less than halfway around before Talana cried out in pain and stopped.

“Okay,” Chen said, lowering his hand. “No need to try again.” He turned toward the woman across the room and said something to her in what sounded like Chinese, of which the only word Trent could understand was “X-ray.”

She looked up from her equipment and replied in Chinese, then came around her workbench and wheeled the mobile x-ray unit away from its parking spot against the wall. It looked like the bottom half of a refrigerator with a computer keyboard and monitor set at an angle on top, with a hinged arm holding an oblong plastic emitter overhead. Trent looked at the arm, then at the arms of the woman pushing the unit toward the alien child. Both were built on pretty much the same principle, which made him wonder if an alien x-ray machine would have a flexible arm.

Dr. Chen took a wide black film tray from the machine’s cabinet and set it on a cart beside the exam table, then draped Talana’s injured tentacle across the flat surface near one end of the tray. He covered the rest of the tray with a heavy metal plate, apparently to keep the entire piece of film beneath it from being exposed at once, then positioned the business end of the x-ray machine over the tentacle while the technician worked at the keyboard to set up the shot.

“Okay, everyone but patient go into other room,” he said when they were ready.

Trent and Donna moved away, but Katata didn’t.

“You too,” Chen said, waving her after Trent and Donna, but she said “Ti” and stayed put.

“That means ‘No,’ ” Donna told him.

“I assume.” He thought it over, obviously wondering how he was going to get the idea of minimizing exposure across to a worried alien mother, then he said, “Okay. Take baby. Let mother stay.” He gently lifted Dixit from Katata’s tentacles and handed the baby to Donna, who made a face, but she took it from him and held it against her already-slimy side. Dixit wrapped its tentacle around her waist and rested its head against her right breast. Katata looked at Donna and her baby, then at Talana, then at the x-ray machine.

“It’s all right,” Donna said. “We’ll be just over there.” She pointed down the hallway toward the patient rooms.

Katata clearly didn’t understand what was going on, but she stayed by her injured child while Trent and Donna moved away with the baby. They paused at the door and watched as the doctor handed her a lead apron and showed her how to put it around herself, then did the same for Talana and himself. The technician put on her own apron, then turned to make sure Trent and Donna were clear.

She said something in Chinese, waving them on out of the room.

“Nothin’ like a language barrier to add to the excitement,” Trent said as they dutifully walked down the hallway. He peered into the dark rooms as they passed. The two on the left were typical patient rooms, with beds and curtains and even televisions bolted to the walls at the end of the beds. “They’ve got TV here?” he asked incredulously.

“Probably just for showing videos,” Donna said.

“Oh. Yeah, that makes sense.”

The rooms on the other side of the hallway were offices. The one in back was lit, so they went in and sat in the chairs there, careful not to slime anything. The alien baby looked around at the desk and the shelves of books and the piles of papers on the desk, then reached out for one of the papers. Its tentacle was fast; it had the paper before Donna could stop it.