GWOT OB / GYN

[drewkitty]

GWOT OB/GYN

I was on my way out of the infirmary when it happened.

The midwife and I hadn't interacted much. Her resume had floated across my PC with all the other resumes I'd stolen from the Medical Department. It had all the right stuff on it - some nursing study, some clinic time, a couple years of a home business. Before the Firecracker, I'd have run a public records search to figure out how it had been shut down. Nowadays I didn't even have time to wonder about such things. She was a dependent, had a badge with the correct categories, and helped out in the exam room with the female symbol on the door and the stirrups.

So the sweeping right hook thrown at my face in the waiting area - in front of God and everyone, including Shane Shreve - took me by surprise.

I took the hit, which hurt, and grabbed her arms and spun her around as quickly as I've ever spun someone in my life.

Behind me a shotgun racked. I wondered briefly if this was it, if this was going to be the way that I was going to go.

"Sir!" Shreve complained plaintively. I had blocked his line of fire with the shotgun, the one that had been about to blow her in half, because Shreve couldn't tell the difference between social violence and deadly violence.

The infirmary guard drew her pepper spray and advanced on us both in a threatening manner. Realizing that she was about to spray her boss, yet that according to SOP this was both OK and expected, she decided to issue a verbal command.

"STOP RIGHT THERE!"

I held stock still. I also held the midwife's arms so strongly that she would have bruises tomorrow.

"Security personnel will stand down," I said firmly and quietly. "Shane, you will safe and sling your shotgun right now."

Then I read her name off her badge.

"Shannon, you can't expect to punch a security manager and have a good outcome. Can we talk about this outside, or do we have to have you restrained? I'd prefer not to suspend your badge access to the infirmary."

Or kick you out of the site on your ear, for that matter. But let's de-escalate things as much as we can.

"Let. Go. Of. Me."

I therefore let go. I would have a nice shiner on my right eye for a while. Then I felt the drip. She'd managed to split the skin over my eyebrow too.

Deliberately matching her tone, I said, "Outside. Right. Now."

While Shreve was still slinging his shotgun, the infirmary guard started shooing Shannon out the door to the outside.

"Page?" the guard asked me. In other words, should she call for backup and make this even more of a cluster fuck?

"No."
As Shreve started to follow, I growled "Stay! Here!" breaking another promise to myself to stop treating him like a dog.

Everyone stared as the two of us walked outside, I ironically gestured for her to precede me. Not for social precedence, or as a courtesy, but because the Security Department does not turn its back on a suspect.

We walked side by side about ten feet apart until we reached a fire ring - a half-buried half drum with a posted Hot Work Permit and a picnic table nearby. She braced her arms against it as I stepped to the other side.

"You let those women get raped!" she shouted at me. She was correct on the facts. Pointing this out probably wouldn't help.

"What did you want me to do?"

"Arrest them! You seem to arrest everyone else!"

"They are _Homeland_ contractors.. Unarrestable. If I did so, I would be sidewalked."

"Sidewalked?"

"Murdered. Taken into custody by Homeland and shot on the sidewalk without bothering to put me in an internment camp. The best I could do - the absolute best - was to kick them off campus. I barely managed that."

"You took a convoy of eight vehicles to confront seven people! What do you mean, 'barely managed?'"

"Shannon, the seven ..."

"Don't use my name!"

"I won't call you Doctor, because you're not one. Midwife is a function, not a job title. Infirmary assistance or dependent doesn't work either, you're more than both those things. I'm not going to call you by your last name, this is not a professional conversation. You don't have a callsign, not that you have ever shown any interest in leaving the perimeter.

"So, _Shannon_, the seven professional mercenaries I confronted were capable of wiping out that convoy - including me and including half my Security leadership - in about the time it takes for me to finish this sentence. One of them was juggling live grenades for God's sake! The only reason their self styled Colonel didn't go for it is the certainty that he would take one or more casualties, and the possibility that we would damage one of their custom vehicles. That's it. They're a lot more valuable to Homeland than we are. We are a problem to Homeland. We work for DOD. They _solve_ problems for Homeland. One possibility is that their visit was to provoke us into a confrontation that they would certainly - not possibly, not likely, CERTAINLY - win.

"If it was merely a question of my own death, as far as I'm concerned, I died on Day 3 at Stanford and the last four months have been an extended nightmare as my brain function fell to zero. If I could have died to neutralize those mercs and their present AND FUTURE threat to the site, it would have been a fair trade.

"And I would have taken that trade," I thundered. "But instead, I would have cheerfully sacrificed Brooke or Arturo, my left and right arms respectively - hell, both of them! - because those f... assholes have seen most of our defenses, they don't like us, and someday they _will_ be back.

"The trade on offer was all three of us, plus the Fire Captain, plus all the security personnel on the convoy and at the gate. That was a no go. And that was _after_ all of the rapes.

"I was lucky to kick them out. I had no way to keep them off the site before. They hadn't shown their hand. And they were buying sex, not raping. At first.

"I have already had this conversation with Janine. I am going to have this conversation with way too many people, starting with the SLE and working my way down to the little kid who asks me why Mommy cries all the time now. So let's get some practice with you.

"What the fuck did you do with all our misoprostol?
I brought back thirty doses from Bakersfield! It's _all_ gone!"

"What does that have to do with anything?"

"Shannon, I am going to have a conference with the VP-HR, the vet surgeon, the SLE and you. I am going to, in that conference, charge you with theft of life safety supplies. If that woman dies I am going to charge you in addition with murder."

"What?"

"She's bleeding to death as we speak. We both know uterine massage is crap for trauma. But you used up all our fucking misoprostol on abortions. I know it, you know it. Now, when we need it, to save a life, we don't have any!

"According to this morning's master count, we have thirty six pregnant women on this campus, who have reported their pregnancy to the infirmary and are now on supplemental diet. I can count, you can count. Dr. Rize - a clinical psychologist and a courtesy doctorate - reliably informs me that over sixty women have sought her help who are _actually_ pregnant, and conflicted. My eyes tell me that the site total is probably closer to a hundred. Echo 18 Sundries sold out of condoms on the third day I opened.

"When you used up our misoprostol, how many of those pregnant women did _you_ kill?"

Under these conditions - poor nutrition, no prenatal care, a modern population with narrow hips suddenly deprived of Cesarean - about one in six. That was a number big enough for me to notice - about twice the number we'd probably lost to the merc raid. Call it sixteen.

"Do you have a problem with abortion? I cannot believe I am being lectured on death by a killer."

"I am a big believer in abortion. Retroactive abortion, sixty or so trimesters postpartum, is just fine by me. But you didn't discuss your use of the stuff. You just used it. And you bribed the pharmacy tech to do it. With your body.

"You pitiful fool," I raged. "Four pregnant women have committed suicide, another death is possibly self inflicted. They should have been first in line for drug induced miscarriage. And if I'd had my way, that is the _only_ use we would have used of any misoprostol except for OB/GYN trauma and postpartum bleeding control.

"I am angriest at myself, Shannon. I dropped a stitch. I didn't run the numbers, I didn't follow up, and Janine didn't think of it because - bluntly - she's fixed. And I'm male, and also an idiot. At least four women killed themselves when we could have saved their lives."

Shannon had started out full of righteous anger. She was now stricken. WIth her training and experience, she was running the numbers and weighing the facts. As I'd _assumed_ that she'd been doing all along, and I hadn't followed up.

"My question for you is this - how many of the women you decided to give our precious, precious drugs to actually _needed_ to abort, so badly that the other choice was self murder? How many of those could have used other methods?

"We don't have any pregnancy tests. We need at least a thousand. They're impossible to obtain now. The US doesn't make them and we are under multinational embargo for the China War. You'd know better than I would about how to rough up a rabbit, but what I vaguely remember is that it's one test per rabbit and the rabbit isn't edible afterwards.

"What I thought you were doing was charting, doing basic medical record keeping, taking some primary care off our our overloaded VET, and teaching people alternative methods and how to take ovulation temperatures. Then I asked Dr. Rize and she gave me a puzzled, 'Huh?' and told me what you've been doing instead.

"We can all hold hands and sing Kumbaya and to pledge to throw all the men in a volcano when Homeland's not going to sidewalk us all if we miss another DoD coding deadline. And not before.

"I am going to give you a choice. There's two versions of this meeting.

"Version one is where you agree to cooperate with me in saving as many women's lives as possible. Hate my fucking guts, everyone else does. Try to stab me in the back politically, everyone else does that too. But the next time you raise a hand to me, I might not be fast enough to keep Shane Shreve from putting a bayonet - or eight pieces of buckshot - through your liver and lights. He hates women, you know. One of his caretakers in the group home raped him with a broomstick. So keep your hands to yourself and what brain you have focused on saving as many lives as we can.

"Version two is the version where you stay full of shit, and I have to kill you right here, right now, to save my life from your concealed pistol."

"I don't have gun!" she blurted.

"Yes, Shannon, you do. Registered to you, authorized for carry, and in this pocket right here." I tapped my leg. "Who do you think keeps the firearms records?!?"

"So, what's it gonna be? Accept that your well meaning stupidity killed people we could have saved, and promise me to do better, and convince me that you mean it ... or stay on your moral high horse and be safely dead in a few minutes?"

As she considered, I figured out a way to cheat.

I took her pistol out and put it on the table.

She looked at it like it was a snake.

"Go ahead, Shannon. Shoot me. You punched me, and it hurts. But that's just pain, and disrespect, and endangering my authority over this site - the authority that saved your life earlier, at least twice by my count.

"I won't even try to draw. My holster is fastened. I'm not a quick draw artist anyway. You can pick it up and shoot me with it before I could fire."

She looked at me, at the gun, at me again.

"You. Are. Fucking. Crazy."

"What was your first dozen or so clues?"

"Pocket the fucking gun, Shannon, or shoot me with it. I really don't care which. And the next time you kill someone, at least choose to do it on purpose."

She picked it up and pointed it at me.

In my ear, my radio broke squelch.

"H5, Echo 18, emergency traffic."

I used my off hand to click my radio mike twice. Twice for no. Twice for cancel. Don't shoot the midwife while she's making up her mind.

"Alert One, I say again Alert One. This is a security emergency for perimeter intrusion, Post #8. Reaction team will draw weapons and report to staging areas. React react react."

"Hurry up, Shannon, we have other problems."

She scowled and pushed the pistol into her blouse.

The entire time it had been on safe. But I felt no particular need to tell her that.

"Thank you. Schedule a different meeting. You, me, the vet surgeon. This evening. We're going to have the OB GYN, prenatal and reproductive health conversation that we should have had about six weeks ago."

I turned away and started walking.

"Echo 18, H5, ring down."

"One motorcycle, two riders, wire cutters and at least one rifle. Headed for the Hidden Valley."

Shit. The bomb shed.