SHE | alex karev

chapter sixty eight

"I always wanted to try out being a redhead, so I just thought... now's the time."

Alex frowned. "Well, what's wrong with your own hair?"

"It's peach fuzz chemo hair. I really wanted to put my patients at ease, make them feel comfortable," Izzie claimed, satisfied with herself.

Billie leant into her friends and whispered. "She looks like a Stepford wife. You gotta tell her."

"She can't handle it, just don't stare," Meredith whispered back through her tight smile.

They did stare though. At least until Bailey, who had now climbed up to the position of a general surgery attending, walked up to them, slipping into her white lab coat.

"MVC! Who do I have?"

All of the residents, minus Billie, immediately began shouting at her to be chosen. The brunette simply crossed her arms over her chest and watched her friends bicker.

"I'm not your Chief resident anymore. Figure it out!" Bailey said, so the residents, instead, began bickering to each other.

Billie rolled her eyes and skipped past her friends. "I'll do it."

"Fine, let's go."

☆

"Jodie Crowley, sixty-year-old driver who lost consciousness and hit a parked car. Vital signs stable, complains of abdominal pain," the paramedic explained as they rolled a stretcher into the ER, alongside a man with a cast on his shoulder.

"It wasn't a parked car," the man said. "It was them. They hit us."

"Uh, sir, who are you?" Billie asked.

"Who am I?" he asked warily. "Who are you?"

"He's my son," the woman on the stretcher said.

"Oh, why don't I take you to the waiting room then?" Billie suggested.

"No!" Jodie exclaimed immediately. "He needs to stay with me. He's a paranoid schizophrenic."

Bailey's eyes widened, but she had no choice but to sigh and accept. "Okay."

They rolled the stretcher into the trauma room and placed Jodie on the gurney in order to start working on her. The woman's son walked into the room, seeming as though he felt unsafe, judging by his hyper-vigilance.

He leant into his mother. "Listen to me, mother. They're tryna get to me through you. You have to believe me."

"Tom, they're not real," she said. "Look at me. Look at me, honey."

"Did you feel dizzy or light-headed before the crash?" Bailey asked Jodie.

"No, I felt fine."

"Okay, abdominal tenderness. I feel a mass," Billie revealed after palpating the woman's abdomen.

"I— I've had it for quite a while. Maybe that's what caused me to black out."

"I've been warning her, they're trying to hurt her, but she won't believe me," the son said eerily.

"Tom, look at me," Jodie called shakily. "You know I wouldn't lie to you."

"No, no!" he yelled. "You have to believe me. Someone has to believe me—aliens have impregnated my mother."

Billie and Bailey frowned at each other. However, when Bailey lifted the woman's shirt, they understood the motive of concern: on the woman's abdomen, a giant mass pulsed intermittently.