Between Darkness and Dawn

10.

They went into the room quietly, thanking Fritz and sending him off to rest while Alejandro went across to the bed and gazed down at Carmen. He had a lot of personal questions he would liked to have asked Cody, about the girl and why she was on his bed, but he decided they could wait and focused on the matter at hand. “What symptoms has she had?” He asked as he lifted the leg of her jeans to inspect the wounds on her ankle. They were, indeed, a very nasty colour. But he could see that, at some point, Cody had taken a knife to the girls delicate skin and tried to remove what he could of whatever poison might by lying at the surface. It had obviously been a nasty job, since it was evident that Cody cared for her, and so Alejandro kept quiet and listened as his friend rhymed off her symptoms.

“At first she said it just hurt when she tried to walk and then after I’d had a look at it, I thought it was better she didn’t walk on it. She slept a lot…but she kept saying she had headaches and she was really tired. But that’s about it. She was freezing cold and shivering a lot.” He described everything she had complained about in the hope that she had told him everything. But the look on Alejandro’s face wasn’t positive enough for his liking when he stood back and thought to himself. Alejandro thought it was best to wake her up so he could take a closer look at the wound itself and maybe see about extracting the poison. He was certain that there would be poison, but he just wasn’t sure what to give her if she got worse. He had never had a poison case before but it wasn’t like they had a whole lot of options. The nearest doctor was about three days away and they couldn’t afford to wait that long. He disappeared from the room to get his ‘bag of tricks’ as he liked to call it and gave Cody a few minutes to think to himself. Cody didn’t feel so confident any more.

Alejandro was tall, maybe six foot three, with short black hair and jet black eyes that didn’t seem to have a definite difference between the iris and the pupil. Despite Cody having woken her and explained that he was a doctor, she really couldn’t think of him that way. If it hadn’t have been for the utter professionalism with which he walked in and set his black bag down on the bedside table, looking her over, she would have thought he was just another one of Cody’s guys. The scruffy clothes were the only thing to ruin the image of the so called doctor. “Nice to see you awake.” He smiled as he bent over to open his bag, rummaging around until he lifted out a syringe and a cotton swab.

“What are you going to do with that?” Carmen asked, her voice small and frightened.

“I’m just going to take a blood sample from the wound. It looks like a snake bite and I would just like to make sure there is no poison or if there is, it will allow me to examine it and classify the actual poison to give you a remedy that will work effectively.” He explained. Everyone agreed that it was a good idea and he proceeded to take a sample, tutting at the result as he ran the cotton swab gently over the puncture mark and tutted again. She didn’t think that sounded very good, in her opinion, but when she asked what it meant, he just gazed at her in confusion. Cody was no help. When she turned her eyes onto him, he just stood there, beside the bed, arms folded, with a hand to his mouth as he chewed a fingernail nervously. She felt very little confidence in either of them being of any use. Finally Alejandro had taken a blood sample from the wound, then from her arm, he had bandaged the wound on her ankle to stop it from getting infected and given her a strong painkiller for through the night. “How do you know I’ll need it?” She asked as he packed up his things and headed out.

“Trust me, you’ll need it. Bite marks like this don’t like being tested on and after the initial shock and recovery, they will fight back at you with excruciating pain. So, to make sure you get the rest you need, I’ve given you it now. It should take just a few minutes to kick in, then…” He smiled as he stood at the bedroom door. “…dreamland.” He finished. Carmen could see the strange look he sent across the room to Cody as he left the room and it made her worry.