The Fall #2
But there it was again. The steady thump, thump, thump of someone's fist. I didn’t even know if there was still an entry to this basement.
Making myself rise was harder than it had ever been in all my eternity. What even was the point? I should supplicate myself at Michael’s feet and hope he put in a good word with the Father.
I guess I couldn’t make it worse by helping whatever human was thumping. Getting to my feet, I made sure my wings were hidden. I climbed the stairs, though several were missing. Using my inhuman strength, I wrenched open the door.
In the doorway stood a woman covered in ash and debris, dirt crusted to every part of her, even her eyelashes. In her arms was a man, his face covered in burns. He was in civilian clothes, a large red cross on his arm. There was one on hers too.
“Are you the medic?” she shouted over the sound of mortar explosions.
Of a kind, I guess. “Yes.”
“The angel in the rubble?”
I frowned at her. “What?”
“That’s what they call you. The angel in the rubble. They believe you perform miracles, but I don’t believe in such things. They painted wings on the wall with spray paint.” She sneered the words. “But I need equipment and the hospital is gone.”
I frowned. “Gone?”
“They bombed it. Are you going to help me or not?”
Well, with such a plea, how could I say no?
I reached out and lifted the man into my arms. “Shut the door behind you.” I took the stairs quickly.
I wanted to be able to scan him with my power before the human saw me.
As I laid him on the metal table that might have belonged to a butcher shop at one point, I grimaced.
The damage was bad. I stopped the swelling in his brain, but I probably couldn’t restore his sight or hearing.
Wherever he’d been, the percussive explosion had shattered the fragile systems that kept those senses working.
The woman appeared far too quickly. “Turn on the generator,” I ordered, and she complied with only a small tensing of her jaw.
I triaged the man. Now I’d fixed his brain, I could work on his body. There was shrapnel in his shoulders and chest, and a bad gash on the back of his head. “What happened?”
“We are doctors, at the hospital. We were retrieving a patient from the back of an ambulance when there was an airstrike on the main building. I was blown into the back of the ambulance, and Bray got knocked by the blast. He landed on me. Protected me from the blast but got it right to the face.”
Her voice hitched, and I looked up. “And are you injured?”
She shook her head. “No, I’m fine.”
Blood leaked from her ears. I wanted to scan her, but I resisted. We saw death every day, especially the doctors. I knew there was more. “He is your… boyfriend?”
She shook her head. “No, nothing so permanent. This isn’t a place to make permanent attachments. We are…lovers.”
Ah. You couldn’t spell lovers without love, and I had no doubt that the woman before me cared for this man.
“Scrub your hands and you can help me patch him up.” I hooked him up to the small vital signs monitor that ran on batteries.
He needed x-rays. I needed to see if he was bleeding internally, but so far most of his wounds seemed to be above his chest.
We spent hours cleaning and stitching up the shrapnel.
The woman had hissed when I looked at his eyes.
There was nothing salvageable. Whatever had hit him in the face had decimated the delicate structure of his eyes.
I removed and cleaned what remained, and I stitched his lids closed.
The whole time, I talked through what I was doing; I had a feeling that the woman across from me would find that comforting.
I would be able to save some of his hearing, though he’d always have a profound hearing loss. But he was alive, which was more than tens of thousands of souls in this city could say.
Hours later, a blood bag and saline was hanging from a hook in the rafters, and the man was as fixed as I could make him without divine healing. I’d already skirted the edges of that edict tonight.
The woman had collapsed to the ground after she’d finished her last suture, and hadn’t roused as I lifted her toward the bed in the corner. It was normally where I rested, but I’d given it up to patients many times over the course of this war.
I didn’t need sleep. Not really.
I covered her, quickly checking her for wounds, but found her miraculously free from injury.
Some light hearing damage, but being inside the ambulance must have helped.
Going back to the man, I used just a trickle of my own power to heal some of the more concerning things.
Repairing his ears just a touch more than was probably acceptable, and stemming a little internal bleeding we might have missed.
He would live. That was all I could do.
I turned off the generator. I needed to conserve the fuel, and the monitor and IV pump ran on batteries that I recharged using solar panels hidden in the ruins.
Sitting down on the overturned milk crate that doubled as a chair, a side table, and well, a crate, I watched my new patients.
The war above me was getting out of hand, and I prayed that it would end soon.
Leaning my head back against the rough stone wall, I closed my eyes and let myself drift into meditative sleep.
“Nora!”
The shout jolted me awake. As quickly as I was on my feet, the woman was there as well, her hands wrapping around the patient’s. Bray, she said his name was. He was part of the Doctors Without Borders program.
“I’m here, Bray,” she shouted. “You’re safe.”
He lifted his hand to his face, grabbing at the bandages around his eyes. I gripped his free hand, pulling it down.
“You are okay, Bray. Unfortunately, your eyes were damaged in the blast. The bandages will prevent infection.” I spoke confidently, both out loud, and gently inside his mind.
I hoped his confusion would muddle the fact I was talking inside his head.
“You’ve also sustained a head injury, and we are unsure of how extensive the damage is.
Please, be still,” I told him, pushing calming energy toward him.
I didn’t have morphine, but I could hold back his pain.
The woman, Nora, kissed his cheeks. “It’s okay, Bray. We’re okay.”
Then she cried. She’d held it together so well up to this point, it almost surprised me.
She laid her head on an uninjured portion of his chest and cried large, fat tears.
Bray shook his hand free from mine, and lifted it to her head, cupping the back of her skull with a gentle tenderness.
He loved her too. It was all there, in their casual embrace.
Was this not the real plan? Finding love that grows beneath the rubble?
I cleared my throat and left, giving them a moment alone.
Walking up the stairs, I stepped outside of the bunker for the first time since I’d delivered the nephilim child into the world.
There was hardly anything left of the city. There were no voices, no cars, nothing but destruction. Turning, I looked at the graffiti on the walls. There, just like the woman had said, was a spray painted wing amongst the rest of the graffiti. My calling card, apparently.
I almost laughed at the irony of it. Sometimes the humans refused to believe, but other times their souls knew even if their mind resisted.
Warzones stripped you down. They stripped you of your basic needs, your moral compass, your ability for complex emotions. Everything was peeled back until your only thought was survival. But not Nora and Bray.
Despite the fact her hospital had been reduced to a heaping pile on concrete and glass, Nora was still a doctor.
Every day she moved out into the streets of the city–a backpack with a giant red cross on it filled with some of my supplies–and looked for the injured.
The needy. It was an ordained path, a soul deep knowing. I almost envied her conviction.
I left with her, following along behind her partly because she interested me, and partly to keep her safe.
She was openly defying both sides of the conflict.
When we found a young man in the colors of the insurgent army, she treated his leg wound.
They didn’t speak the same language, although I spoke all languages and I knew he was thanking her profusely.
In his soul, I knew he was young, scared, and he just wanted to go home.
She sent him on his way and moved onto the next patient.
A father who’d sent his children away. An elderly woman who was too old to be moved from her home.
We treated them all slowly and surely. If she found someone too injured for field medicine, she’d tilt her chin at me and I’d pick them up and carry them back to my clinic like I was the ambulance and not an Archangel of Heaven’s legions.
She always seemed angry; either at me or the circumstances, I couldn’t be sure.
Back at the clinic, we would work together to patch them up, or we would set their soul free.
We were no place for suffering. But already, my little clinic was cramped with people.
I was never meant to be a hospital. I was a last ditch plea for a miracle.
After that I sent them on their way to the human hospital.
But it is gone now.
Despite the head injury, and losing two of his senses, her lover, Bray, didn’t sit around and feel sorry for himself.
He learned to navigate the clinic with a broom handle.
He sat by patients and sterilized instruments.
It was only because I could see into his very soul that I knew he was grieving.
He kept his mood light for Nora, but he wasn’t fooling either of us.
He was mourning the man he’d been before, and late at night, when he thought we were asleep, he would cry softly, hissing as the tears hit his healing wounds.