The Bride Wore Black Leather

Where his head should have been there was only a brightly shining star. Next to him, a woman squatted on her bed, held in a tightly reinforced strait jacket chained to the wall. Her eyes were simply evil. She laughed softly, continuously, waiting for the moment when someone would be stupid enough to release her. Something that might have been a man or a woman, once, lay in a pool of its own blood, bulky pieces of alien tech protruding through its cracked and broken skin.
    Many of the patients had extra organs, or added alien attributes, their bodies changed and adapted so they could survive on some other, alien world. Useless here, of course. They hadn’t asked for what had been done to them. Abducted, changed, then dumped when the experiment didn’t work out. I wanted to get my hands on the creatures that could do such things and make them suffer for their sins. I looked sharply at Julien, filling my voice with anger so he wouldn’t hear anything else.
    “This isn’t right! It would be kinder to let these poor bastards die.”
    Julien nodded, understanding things I couldn’t say out loud, even to him. “The doctors do help people here. Though I have to say, I didn’t know things were this bad . . .”
    “But you’re the man who knows everything,” I said.
    “It’s part of the job to know that places like this exist . . . but even I can’t keep up with the details.”
    “You don’t have to,” said Dr. Benway, coming over to join us. “There’s a limit to the burdens anyone can be expected to carry.” She gestured sharply to Burke and Rabette to carry John Doe X 47 back to his bed. “Being sent here isn’t a death sentence, Mr. Taylor. We can help a surprising number of the people who come through our doors. But sometimes the best we can offer is to contain them, keep them comfortable, and hope that someone somewhere is working on something new. New things are discovered, or arrive, in the Nightside every day. So no, it wouldn’t be kinder to kill them all. Every day we keep them alive in spite of what’s been done to them is a victory. You can’t give up hope, Mr. Taylor. Hospitals run on hope.”
    I nodded slowly. “And miracles do happen, even in the Nightside.”
    “Perhaps especially in the Nightside,” said Julien Advent.
    A handful of burly-looking nurses came bursting through the doorway; some of them carrying really big guns. They relaxed a little as they saw that the crisis was over, put the guns in the Ward locker, and moved immediately to see to the patients. Benway relaxed a little, too.
    “The security doors must have opened. Let’s go to my office and talk.”
    She gestured for Burke and Rabette, and they came back, reluctantly. Benway surprised them with a brief smile.
    “Everybody runs, the first time. Not everyone comes back. Now, make sure the patients are settled and don’t be stingy with the tranqs. Stay here till everything’s back to normal, and I don’t want to hear any whining about overtime. The job is the job.”
    Burke and Rabette nodded quickly and went back to work. Benway looked after them almost fondly.
    “They’re young. They’ll adapt. Or they’ll leave the Hospice and move into some less nerve-racking job, like bomb disposal.”
    •  •  •
    Dr. Benway led us back through the corridors of the Hospice, her hands in her coat pockets, looking a lot more human. She smiled at Julien and actually nodded to me. Hospice personnel hurried past us, back to the wards and patients they’d been forced to abandon during the emergency. Patients were wheeled past on trolleys, or in wheel-chairs, or helped along by nurses and the cat-faced robots. They all nodded respectfully to Dr. Benway and ignored Julien and me. Benway sighed, deeply.
    “I really wasn’t going to talk to you, Julien. I was going to leave you sitting around in the waiting area until you got the message and left of your own accord. But now that you, and especially Mr. Taylor here, have saved the day, the Hospice in general, and the patients of Ward 12A in particular, I can’t really say no, can I?” Julien started to say something, but she talked right over him. “We can’t talk here. Too many security cameras and far too many eyes and ears. We’ll talk in my office.”
    She stopped abruptly and pushed back one sleeve to reveal a chunky bracelet of some shimmering metal, studded with read-outs and controls. She punched in a quick series of numbers, and next thing I knew we