With some odd device, he bent and ran it up Claire’s body, then down. He looked at whatever was displayed on the screen and nodded. All this played out in a kind of twitchy slow-motion, like how the time between hitting a rock with your bike tire, and hitting the road with an arm plays out.
“Eighty-Three?” she asked, for lack of anything else to ask. “What the hell... how did you... what... just happened?”
His voice clicked before he spoke. “Time for that later. Right now you need safety.”
She blinked, her eyes hardly focusing. A strange smell enveloped Claire’s senses, and suddenly she felt light, in a way she hadn’t since undergraduate parties. It was like her body was floating in a sea of helium, and she felt like the voice, just pitching up and down, all around.
“What the hell is going on?” she said – or thought she said. Really all that came out was something like “murmf gortle,” but her unlikely hero seemed to get the point. “A nerve agent,” he said simply. “It will numb your pain but will not confuse you. We have it in case of injury.”
She felt herself begin to descend, but stuck out a hand, grasping the face of the creature who had her in his arms. “No,” she croaked, “can’t leave... can’t leave Fury behind, he...”
“Lives?” the static asked. “After such an encounter? If so, he is much stronger than I thought. He was infested with a parasite which led the monstrosity to him. He was likely replaced only seconds before the purple creature showed itself.”
Something about his detached, completely reasonable, obnoxiously even voice made Claire laugh. Or maybe that was the gas. Either way, she started chuckling. He cocked his head. “Funny?”
She couldn’t stop herself. It had to be the gas.
“It’s just,” she kind of chortle-choked, then snorted some. Real glorious. “You’re so even and sound like nothing’s going on, when you just killed that monster and Fury is laid out, and...”
Her vision went all wiggly again.
It must be the gas.
“I cannot speak any other way,” his voice was static still, but had a slight inflection. It was over-pronounced to an almost comical degree. It was like he had listened to someone else talk about how to speak like a real-life person. That of course, just made the whole thing even more ridiculous, which of course got her laughing even harder.
Her sides ached, partly from being whacked with a tree, but also partly from how she could not stop laughing.
“Wait here,” Eighty-Three said, and sat her on something cold and metallic. She felt her skin prickle a little, and realized that at some point, she stopped being a bear.
Claire watched, still laughing, as he glided to where Fury lay, and scanned him with the same whirligig-looking device. Two rotors on top turned around and around, to go along with the strange beeping coming from the handheld scanner. “What’s that?” Claire managed, in between increasingly painful fits of laughter. “Looks like something out of Ghostbusters.” She tried to quote a line from the movie, but in her addled state, only managed to say “Dr. Venkman,” before she gave up.
“Unbelievable,” the flat voice announced. “How can he live?”
Claire was still rocking back and forth, teetering dangerously close to falling into whatever it was she was sitting upon the edge of, but Eighty-Three was staring at whatever he was holding. He shook it a couple of times, and then tried the scan again. It was met with the same set of bleeps and boops as before, and just like seconds ago, he shook his head.
“It makes no sense. He should not be able to survive such an encounter. How can this be?”
He was completely absorbed in whatever he was doing, so much so that Claire’s continual calls for his attention went unanswered. He was still scanning, still staring. Finally he stood up and looked from Fury to his little scanner one more time before shrugging. “Machines do not lie,” he announced. “Usually.”
Even though the big bear probably weighed four hundred pounds, Eighty-Three just pulled him up and slung his prone body over his shoulder before slowly gliding back toward Claire. “He is alive,” that robotic voice announced. “Unbelievably, he is still alive. Something in this creature has kept him alive.”
“Where are we going?” Claire asked, looking over at Fury’s unconscious body and still inexplicably laughing, though it didn’t feel as good as it had moments before. She was starting to hate the laughs and wish they’d stop. “Who are you?”
“That,” Eighty-Three said, “is a very good question.”