The God-send (thus far as it goes, more to come-- maybe)

"Sir, we have permeation through the first layer of dermal tissue."

"Suction," Millard Hanson kept his eye averred from the creature's own.

"Stop!" his grandmother's voice sounding within his ear.

"There's another sheathing plate beneath. I need the bone saw."

"We were taught to believe that the Great Spirit sees and hears everything, and that he never forgets, that hereafter he will give every man a spirit home according to his deserts; If he has been a good man, he will have a good home; if he has been a bad man, he will have a bad home"...

"Sir, are you alright?"

"Yes," he said as he looked down at the blood upon his hands. It was near as of his grandmother was haunting him now.

Grandma Crane was one of the people, that as a child, he had been forbidden to see. It was her son, his mother's oldest brother that had brought them together when Millard was eight years old. His father had always told him that the old woman was crazy, and was probably dead by now.

Crazy by white standards, assuredly.

"I wonder that sh... that it doesn't feel"...

"I wonder that I could get some god-damn suction where it might do some good," Millard snapped at his lead surgery nurse, Alma Persh. He shocked reaction had made it quite obvious that she had not expected something like that from him. She lowered the stainless steel nozzle into the opened body cavity as the strange black ichor continued to seep away from the fibrous matter that served as this... creature's, flesh.

"We are contented to let things remain as the Great Spirit made them."

Grandma Crane had made and sold Chief Joseph plaques, the only other tradition that she seemed to hold was more one of necessity than of clinging to the old ways. She made much of what she had in the old house trailer on the south knoll, nearly entirely surrounded by an immense bog that was a small inland lake. Her son, Millard's uncle Jake, had helped her along as well as he could, while still providing for his own family.

Grandma Crane had a goat she called Matilda, and a crow that would come to her door every morning to be fed and seemingly pass the day before it flew away in the evening. She called him Beggar Tom. She had told him about when she had first "met" him, one of several in a nest that had been abandon. She had tried to keep them all alive, but Tom was the only one that had survived.

"I could keep him alive and even managed to get him flying, but I couldn't really teach him how to be a crow. He does not go with the other crows, and I found him one morning a bit worse for wear. I do not think they accept him as a crow, but still I keep him alive. Now," she said, as if mildly begrudging the bird her act of kindness, "He has learned that I will keep him alive, so he comes here to be fed."

"My heart would suffer from his death."

"There's the fetus," his newly appointed assistant pointed out the obvious. "You said you had her here for how long now?"

"Years," was Millard's close, quick response, near like a retort.

"The gestational period is unknown?"

"Does it really matter?" Millard sighed as his eye glanced over towards the needle.

"We're losing her Doctor," Alma interjected into his own thoughts.

Grandma Crane had told him that she had married a good man, but a poor one. That he still had managed to provide enough for her and the children. It was Uncle Jake that told him that his mother had come to loath their poverty, through the years of being taunted by her peers and fellow classmates. He said that he had only met his father twice.

He never told his father that he knew them, that they had actually come to find him. Millard Hanson Sn could have made life even more difficult for them... It wasn't so much that he could as that he would, and that was the one missing part of the equation. He could not understand his father's abject contempt of them, his disgust.

Millard knew he could keep her alive... against her will. How well he had come to know her in those years of... captivity? That there was nothing that could be shared, as far as active conversation between them, the passive communication of her moods and reactions had become more than predictable. That these creatures were some wild and vile creatures that could not be reached, that they were presumed generally ignorant, evil and... god-less...

"It's them or us son, there is no middle ground."

"Then why didn't they attack me Colonel? I have no fort, no army. We both know my thirty-thirty isn't going do much damage against them."

"LOOK!" The Colonel's arm jerking towards the television screen where unedited and uncensored broadcasts from the military's own cameras had filmed the destruction of Madrid, Berlin, Paris...