Sarah followed next to Steven as they hurriedly made their way towards the bed that Zoey had prepared. Adam gently placed the woman on the cot, careful not to agitate her wound. Her large chest was heaving slowly in haggard breaths.
“We need to get her out of this suit so we can get to the cut.” Adam ordered, as he began to reach for the scissors in Sarah’s hands.
“In your dreams!” Sarah declared. “Zoey, escort the boys out of the room while we take care of her.”
“W-wait! But-!” Steven started to interject, but his sister was too fast for him. She grabbed both of the startled men by the arms and shoved them out of the room, closing the door in their faces before turning around to assist Sarah.
“Oh, come on!” Adam’s voice rang out from the other side of the door. “It’s not like we haven’t all seen tons of naked women in the past couple months!”
“Hold these,” Sarah ignored Adam and instructed Zoey, giving her most of the items in her hands before she wielded the scissors to carefully cut the woman’s skintight suit away from her body, exposing her toned midriff. Both Sarah and Zoey let out a gasp of surprise at what they saw. It wasn’t the wound – which didn’t seem as deep as Sarah had feared – but what was around it. The woman’s skin was pale blue.
“Oh my god… she’s already dead!” Zoey began to fret. “Except… wait… something’s not right…” Not only was the woman’s skin-tone unusual, but she also didn’t have a belly button.
“What in the…?” Sarah breathed. But there was no time to think about all that now; they had to stop the bleeding first. Refocusing on her task, Sarah disinfected the cut and blotted up the excess, orange blood – the color of which she was only now truly noticing for the first time.
Though she was a biologist and not a doctor, Sarah had taken some medical training several years prior when doing some camp counseling over the summer. She prayed that she could still remember how to do this. She took a deep breath and began to suture the wound as best she could with slightly trembling fingers. Eventually, she completed what she considered to be a pretty decent stitching and the woman seemed to stabilize, though she hadn’t regained consciousness.
Sarah put down the last of her tools as she applied an adhesive bandage to the cut and let out a relieved sigh that she had been holding in. She glanced at Zoey and they both gulped as she moved her hands up to the woman’s tinted helmet. It didn’t seem to come off at first, but then Zoey pressed a small button on the side, which resulted in the entire helmet suddenly dissolving away and into the neckline of the suit. They gaped at the woman’s peacefully resting face.
“G-guys…?” Sarah called out. “Maybe come in here after all…”
***
That evening, the group gathered in the kitchen to eat dinner together, as was usual. Their conversation, however, was far from it.
“So what are we going to do about this… um… ‘woman’?” Adam spoke up.
“I guess we’ll at least have to wait for her to wake up before we figure anything out.” Sarah shrugged. They had spent the last couple months watching aliens take over an entire city, so it was not incredibly shocking to have discovered another one – albeit of an apparently different species. Or at least they assumed the woman was an extraterrestrial. She had several human-like features, but many that were distinctly not of this earth.
“She kinda’ reminds me of a void elf from World of Warcraft…” Steven said absent mindedly while prodding at his canned corn.
“Mmm… yeah I can see it.” Adam nodded in agreement.
“Wh-huh?” Sarah said in confusion. Zoey put a hand on her shoulder and shook her head, saying,
“It’s from a video game.”
“Ah.”
Sarah wasn’t too familiar with the game in question, but she definitely agreed that the woman looked like something out of a fantasy story. Beyond just having light blue skin, she also had long, white hair, two eyes that were slightly larger than a human’s, ears with two pointed ends, and flat nostrils instead of a nose.
The fact that she clearly had mammaries (or what Sarah assumed to be breasts) made her question all that she thought she knew about evolution and the common ancestry of humans. Her most striking features, however, were her extremely long white eyebrows that curled up in the air like antennae. At a glance she would be mistaken for a gorgeous, graceful human woman, but she was, without a doubt, an alien.
“Good thing she’s at least able to breathe our air.” Sarah sighed. “Who knows what might have happened otherwise after we took off her helmet.”
“I knew something was different about her when she tried to speak to me after I saved her,” Steven said. “I didn’t recognize the language.”
“After YOU saved HER?” Zoey gave him an incredulous look. “You do realize we were watching the whole thing on the monitors, right?”
“It was all a blur, honestly.” He shrugged.
“What were you even thinking!? You could have been captured! Did you even think about how that would affect us? Affect me!?”
“Listen, when I hear someone in trouble, it’s my instinct to go help.”
“Mhm.” Zoey eyed him over skeptically. “I assume I know what ‘instincts’ you are referring to. So it’s just a coincidence that she happens to be a total babe?”
“I can’t control the winds of fate. We’re all just slaves to destiny…” Steven said wistfully while giving his sister a dramatic look. She punched him in the arm.
“If you ever do something like that again, you’re going to WISH they had taken you away.” She glared at him and shoved a spoonful of spinach into her mouth. “Blughh… I’ll never get used to this…” She mournfully swallowed the offending green mush. She gulped down the rest of her bottled water as if trying to drown herself to avoid having to eat any more vegetables.
“Hey, careful with how much of that you drink,” Adam cautioned. “As Steven confirmed earlier, our water barrels are running pretty low due to the lack of rain. We need to be a bit more frugal in our water usage for the time being.”
“Ah, right…” Zoey said sheepishly.
“Don’t worry so much,” said Steven, trying to reassure his sister. “It looked like some rain clouds were finally rolling in overhead just as I was getting back. We’ll be able to replenish our water reserves in no time!”
The rest of the group didn’t seem too sure, however, and they continued to eat in silence for a few more minutes until Adam once again broke the awkward silence.
“So…” He spoke slowly. “What about… alien viruses and stuff? Shouldn’t we be quarantining her or something?”
“Mnn, thash a common mishconshepshun,” Zoey said through a mouthful of greens while shaking her head. She took a labored gulp and continued. “Bacteria and viruses that evolved on Earth alongside humans are able to infect us for that exact reason. Pathogenesis requires that the bacteria or virus be able to interface with the host’s cells, which is the product of millions of years of coevolution. Furthermore -”
“Ok, let me stop you right there,” Steven groaned, putting his hand up to his sister’s blabbering mouth. “We get it. You’re smart. It’s good to know we’re safe from killer alien diseases, at least.”