A scene cut from Alpha Max
This is a straightforward, if non-Euclidean, scene I cut from my fourth draft of Alpha Max. I thought it was fun, but it didn’t move the plot along much and I was able to cut it down to a couple of sentences in the sixth (and final) draft.
Setup: You don’t need to know much, except that an alien spaceship has appeared over the skies of Landon, Ontario, and that the protagonist, Max Tundra, has broken his big toe and is in the hospital getting it checked when the power cut out.
The hospital’s emergency generators kicked in, but the television showed nothing but static. The two nurses scrambled as machines from a dozen rooms started to complain louder than the patients. The orderly returned and said: “I’m gonna get you back to emergency. With any luck, they can set that toe before the shit hits the fan.”
“What’s happening?”
“The object blueshifted.”
“I see,” Max said. He’d studied at New Cambridge, where all his time was devoted to Ideologies, so apart from one high-school physics class, he had only a vague understanding of what that meant.
“It means the thing was moving at a relativistic speed towards us, so there’s a Doppler blueshift. The light waves shorten, so they look blue. If the object were moving away from us, it would redshift as the wavelength increased. I mean, I assume it’s a Doppler effect.” He thought for a moment. “Otherwise it would mean that thing has a massive gravitational pull, and it’s shortening the light waves because photons are falling into it. But then, we’d feel something like that. Buildings and cars would be pulled up into it.”
Max had many questions. How did the orderly know all this? Had he studied astrophysics before pushing patients around in a hospital? Instead, he asked: “Relativistic is the speed of light?”
“Yes. Or near that.”
“Then it is a spaceship!”
“Maybe?” the orderly said. He wheeled Max back to his bay, where the doctor was waiting. “Good luck,” the order said to Max, and then went to the next patient, probably so he could explain the double-slit experiment to someone getting their gall bladder removed.
“Okay, let’s set this toe of yours,” the doctor said. “I got a look at the pics before the power went out. It’s a straightforward fracture. I’m going to numb the area first though.”
The doctor jabbed his toe with a needle. Max grunted, and she said: “I’ll be back in a minute.”
The hospital was getting louder. Outside in the waiting area he could hear a commotion. And there were more patients in bays now. The nurse who’d treated him earlier was busy next door, trying to calm down an elderly nun who was yelling.
“They’re here! They’re here!” she shouted.
“It’s okay, Sister Mary. We’ll get you something to calm down,” the nurse said.
“Don’t lie to me! The Beast is coming! It’s finally happening!” the nun exclaimed.
Whatever machine they had Sister Mary hooked up to was reacting to her mood. It started bleeping animatedly, worriedly. She continued to rant biblically and added the charm of the occasional desperate deep breath and a moan. Max felt terrible for her. She was really frightened. And frightening. “Hail Mary, full of grace! They turned Father DiMarco into spaghetti and meatballs! And then they sent him back in a bag. I saw it, I saw – glarg.” She threw up. Voluminously.
Max wished the anaesthetic were in his brain, not his toe.
The nurse consulted with the doc, and she disappeared back into Sister Mary’s bay. “Ok, we’re going to give you something to help you relax.”
“No! I have to pray or they’ll lasagne me!” Sister Mary’s stomach was empty, Max could tell, from her dry heaving.
“Nooooooooo . . .” Her screaming trailed off into a sigh.
The nurse popped her head from behind the curtain a moment later and said, “Sorry about that.”
“Is she ok?”
“Oh, no. But she’ll be a bit calmer now.”
The doctor reappeared and said, “Ok, let’s set that toe and get you out of here. They’re bringing in accident victims and we need the space.” She didn’t waste any time, and because it was numb, Max didn’t feel a thing. There wasn’t even a satisfying crunch as she realigned the bone. She quickly “buddy” taped it with the toe next to it. “Now, the best thing to do is keep it elevated and ice it. Ibuprofen if you’re feeling pain. And if you see any redness or swelling, go see your doctor or come back here.”
“Okay,” Max said. “Got it.” The noise from the machines in Sister Mary’s bay cut short as though the power had gone again.
“Doctor!” the nurse screamed.
“Excuse me.” The doctor went next door again. “What the hell?”
“I don’t . . . I don’t understand,” the nurse stammered.
“Is this a joke, Pam? Where’s the fucking patient?”
“She was right there,” the nurse said.
“She’s not now.”
“I know!”
“What is it?” the doctor asked. Her voice was rising in tone as she repeated, “What is it?”
Max got up and pulled the curtain to the side. He couldn’t contain his curiosity, even though he was invading the poor nun’s privacy.
The bed wasn’t empty. Instead of a human being, it was filled with about 50 kilograms of what Max could only describe as multiple layers of sheet pasta, between layers of sauce and meat, and covered with cheese. If not for the lingering odor of vomit, Max thought the steam rising from it would smell delicious. The doctor gagged, and the moment passed.
“She was right,” Max whispered. “They lasagne-d her.”
“It’s not possible,” the doctor said as she retched again, and Pam the nurse tried to comfort her. “It’s impossible.”
“Yet it’s right there,” Max said. “We all see it.”
“There’s no code for this,” Pam the nurse said.
“That’s good,” Max said. “I would be worried if you had a system for letting everyone know that a patient had turned into a bed full of pasta. Do you think she felt anything?”
The doctor moaned at this thought.
“Well, the sedative should have kicked in,” the nurse said. “So, maybe not too much?”
“I imagine being turned into a giant lasagne would be quite painful. Depending on how spicy it was, obviously,” Max mused.
The commotion in the front of the emergency room resumed, and the voice on the public address system said, “Code Orange. Code Orange.”
“Orange?” Max asked. He was actively resisting the urge to sample the lasagne. It was a powerful compulsion, but he knew it was wrong.
“MCI – a mass casualty incident.”
“Ah. Probably something to do with the alien spacecraft,” Max said.
“Or the power outage. It could just be the traffic lights failed and there are a lot of collisions,” Pam said.
“Come on, Sarah,” the nurse said to the doctor. “You have to snap out of it.”
The doctor, whose name was Sarah apparently, nodded. “Okay. Let’s, uh, cover up the . . . bed. Cover it and we can deal with what happened here later.”
“Can I help?” Max asked.
“Yes,” Pam snapped. “Clear out and let us work.”
Two emergency medical technicians were wheeling in a young man who had severe lacerations all over his body, or at least that was what Max guessed. It looked like he’d gone through the windscreen of his flyer – he was covered in blood-soaked bandages, and one of the EMTs was trying to keep pressure on the patient’s thigh.
The young man was conscious, and he was ranting. “I’m the lizard king! I’m the lizard king! Riders on the storm!” Blood seeped from the bandages. It looked very bad, and the doctor and nurse sprang into action, even if it was obvious the fellow played in a Doors cover band.
Max slipped on his sandals and tried to get out of the way. They stopped the gurney just inside the doorway as they tried to staunch the bleeding. “I’m the lizar . . .” The musician fell quiet, and it was obvious he’d died.
“There’s dozens more coming,” one of the EMTs said to the doc.
“Okay. If we had more time, we could save him, but I’m announcing time of death,” the doctor said. Her voice was quavering a little.
They moved the gurney into Max’s old care bay, and Max thought it was time to go. He’d never been around while people died before. He was shaken. The doctor went to work on another new arrival, and Max started limping for the door. That was when he heard the hissing sound from his old bay.
Despite his instincts, he hobbled back to it. He put a finger on the curtain and moved it back a few centimeters to take a look. Lying where the young man had been, amidst the blood-soaked bandages and bedding, was a giant lizard. Not a crocodile or alligator. Its scales were less pronounced, and its head was smaller. The heavy skin folds around the neck area and the way the creature’s head protruded reminded Max of an uncircumcised penis. The long forked tongue teasing the air was a thing of nightmares.
Max let the curtain slip back into place and made his best speed for the doorway.
He felt obligated to warn Pam and his doctor, so he stopped where they were treating the badly injured woman the EMTs had just brought in. “The poor man who just died is a Komodo dragon now,” he said. It sounded insane.
“What’s that?” Pam asked.
“It’s a kind of giant lizard. It’s quiet now, but I think it could be a problem.”
“Please, Mr. Tundra we don’t have time –”
A scream pierced the air as the Komodo flopped off the gurney and waddled at high speed through the door to the waiting room.
“What the f–” Max could hear, amongst the screams.
There was wailing, panic. He went to the doorway and looked through the glass to the waiting area. An alarm went off, which drove the Komodo into a frenzy. A police officer was present, trying to help one of the victims of the flyer collision. She pulled her revolver out of her holster and shot the lizard before it grabbed a child. The shot rang out and was followed by three more. Then a fifth. Then a sixth.
There was a moment of silence, broken by more screams of terror, as clearly the Komodo was not yet dead. The police officer reloaded as quickly as she could as the beast turned its attention away from the child and focused on her, the source of its pain and anguish. It charged her, and Max was impressed by the rozzer. She slipped in the bullets, closed the chamber, and calmly aimed. Two more shots caught it in the brainpan, and it slid to a halt at her feet.
The room erupted in cheers, though many were quiet with shock. It really was turning into a strange day.
It became truly non-Euclidean as Max spotted a new arrival. Walking through the emergency room doors was a man who looked just like him. Almost exactly, except he was wearing a unitard made of silver lamé.
“Dr. Maximilian Tundra?” Max’s doppelganger shouted. “I’m looking for Dr. Maximilian Tundra!”
Photos by alleksana and Tom Fisk from Pexels
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