by David Archer
I drove out onto the grass, so that my car would not be in the way, and jumped out. I saw people stumbling around, some of them obviously in shock, and ran toward the first one I could get to. It was a girl in her early teens, and there was a gash in her left arm. Blood was dripping from her fingers as I caught up to her.
“Hey,” I said, “let me help you. Come on, you’ve been hurt, you need to come over here and let the paramedics look at you.”
She turned her face to look at me, and suddenly started to scream. I thought that my face had frightened her, but she reached out with both hands to grab my shoulders and clutched me to her, screaming and crying. I wrapped my arms around her and started walking her toward the nearest ambulance. “Shh,” I said, “come on, it’s going to be okay.”
The ambulance I was approaching suddenly slammed its back doors and raced away. I veered toward the next one in the line, just as a female paramedic climbed out of the passenger seat.
“Hey! Hey, over here!” I shouted at the paramedic, and she looked my way. I pointed at the girl’s arm, but the paramedic shook her head and ran toward the building instead.
For a moment I was shocked, and then it dawned on me that she was running toward people who were even more seriously injured. She was doing her job, and it was up to me to do whatever I could for this poor girl. I continued to the ambulance, and another paramedic came out of the back doors.
“Hey! I know you got work to do, but give me something to help this girl!”
The guy looked at me for a moment, then jumped back inside the ambulance. He came out again seconds later and shoved a small, zippered bag in my hand. “Clean the wound, put the salve on it, and wrap it up,” he said, and then he grabbed a bigger bag and took off running.
I set the girl down on the rear bumper of the ambulance, where it was big enough to use as a bench. It took a moment to untangle myself from her, and then I began looking her over. The gash in her arm wasn’t her only injury, but it was the most serious.
I opened the bag he had given me and found a bottle marked “Saline Wound Cleanser,” and popped open its cap. The instructions on the bottle were plain, to simply rinse the wound with it. I squeezed the bottle to squirt the solution into the gash, and some of the blood rinsed away.
I capped the bottle again and found a large roll of gauze and some scissors. I cut off a piece and wiped the gash down, then reached back in the bag for the large tube of antibiotic ointment I had seen. I squeezed some into the gash and wrapped another piece of gauze around it, then pulled out one of the half-dozen individually wrapped bandages and tore it open. A minute later, with the clips holding the bandage together, I thought that it looked pretty good.
A woman came walking toward us, and I looked up to realize that she was also bleeding. There was a gaping wound on her right cheek, and I quickly had her sit beside the girl. I looked her over, just to see if she had other injuries that might be more serious, and saw that she had blood on her right hand. It was clenched into a fist, I thought, so I turned it over to try to see where the blood was coming from and realized that she was missing three of her fingers.
I rinsed it quickly, but didn’t even bother to wipe it off. I put ointment on each of the stubs that were sticking out from her knuckles, shoved gauze in between them and over them, and then started wrapping. All she had left on that hand was her thumb and her pinky, and I did the best I could for her.
With her hand wrapped up, I looked at her face again. Once more I squirted the saline and wiped away the blood, then applied the antibiotic ointment. I stood there for a moment, trying to figure out how to bandage the wound, then just started wrapping the bandage from the crown of her head to under her chin. It was just long enough to hold the gauze in place, but it was what I could do.
“Here’s another one for you,” said a voice, and I spun around to see Detective Pennington. He was holding a boy of about ten years old in his arms, and I saw that the boy was covered in blood from his belly up.
I jumped into the ambulance and found a blanket, then climbed out and spread it on the ground. “Here,” I said, “lay him down here.” He put the boy down and I saw that most of the blood was coming from a large cut on the right side of his face that extended down onto his neck. As I watched, blood squirted out in a thin stream from near his throat, and a second later it did it again.
“That’s arterial,” I said. I got down close and rinsed the wound off to see how bad it was, and realized that there was a small nick in what had to be his carotid artery. It squirted again, and again, and I realized that he was in danger of bleeding to death as I watched.
I looked up at Pennington to ask him to grab one of the paramedics, but he was already running back toward the house. Whatever happened with this boy had to happen quickly, and it was going to be on me. I put my hand over the cut, but the blood just squirted out around it, and if I applied enough pressure to stop it, I was pretty sure I would be choking the poor kid to death, anyway.
The cut itself looked small, but deep, and I remember learning back in high school that the carotid is actually kind of deep inside the neck. I tried pinching the hole together, but it was only a couple of seconds before I realized the blood was simply building up under the skin. There was a knot developing, and I was pretty sure that wasn’t a good thing. I needed to find some way to close that hole, but I couldn’t actually get to it.
Think, Cassie, think! In the few seconds I had been there with this kid, I was sure I had seen at least half a pint of blood come squirting out. If I didn’t do something soon, he was a goner.
Un-freaking-acceptable! I wracked my brain, trying to think of what I could do to keep this kid from dying, and suddenly Dex was beside me. He must have gotten there a moment earlier, because he was squeezing his hands into a pair of rubber gloves that he must’ve grabbed from the ambulance.
“He’s bleeding,” I said needlessly, “his throat…”
“I see,” Dex said. “This happened to a friend of mine in the Army, I’m gonna do what they did then. You’ve got two carotid arteries, so I’m just going to press on this one. I’ll have to let up every minute or so for a couple seconds, to let blood flow, but we have to get him to a hospital fast.”
Dex felt the boy’s throat, and suddenly grabbed it hard and squeezed with his thumb and forefinger. I watched closely, looking for any sign that the blood was pooling up inside again, but I didn’t see it. He held it tight for a minute, then let up for about three seconds, enough for two quick squirts, and then closed it off again.
It was at that moment that the paramedics came back to the ambulance, each of them holding another child. The man who had given me the bag looked down at the boy and Dex, then yelled, “Get him inside here, and don’t let go!”
I started to try to pick the boy up, but Dex snatched him up with his left arm while keeping his right hand pinched on his throat. He got up and stepped toward the ambulance, then looked back at me.
“Do what you can,” he said. “I’ll be back as soon as possible.”
The paramedic, the man, helped Dex get the boy inside and then yelled something at me. I looked up at him, and he threw me two more of the red zipper bags, like the one he had given me at first. He grabbed the teenage girl I had helped and pulled her inside, then the woman, and the doors slammed as the ambulance raced away.
I picked up the bags, including the first one, and looked around. I spotted a couple more kids standing together, both of them bloody, and went toward them.
Rinse, wipe, salve, wrap. Those were extremely simple instructions, but simple is exactly what I needed at that moment. My mind was having a hard time dealing with what I was seeing, especially when I happened to glance in the direction that showed me three immobile forms covered with blankets. One of them was pretty small.
“How many have you taken care of?”
I looked up at the voice that had spoken and saw a young man in a paramedic uniform. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe seve
n, eight.”
“Well, you’re doing a hell of a job,” he said. He stood there and looked at me for a moment, and then just turned and walked away. I started to call after him, ask him what to do next, but he was obviously intent on wherever he was going.
I turned back to the man whose leg I was wrapping. He had a piece of wood stuck in it, debris from the building, but I didn’t dare pull it out. For all I knew, it might be the only thing keeping him from bleeding out.
“Who was that?” I heard, and looked up at another paramedic. He was looking in the direction the other man had gone, and I turned around to see what he was staring at. The guy who had told me I was doing a good job was getting into some kind of a work van, not an ambulance, and simply turned around and drove away as I stared.
I looked back at the paramedic standing over me. “Isn’t he with you guys?”
He shook his head. “Nope. Never saw him before. I noticed he was talking to you, and I thought maybe you knew him.”
I got to my feet. “Take over here,” I commanded, and then I jogged as quickly as I could to where Pennington was standing with a bunch of people. He saw me coming and held up a hand to tell them to wait a moment, then stepped away from them and met me partway.
“Cassie? What’s the matter?”
“The son of a bitch was here,” I said. “Tall guy, mid twenties, brown hair and eyes. He was wearing a paramedic uniform, but he’s not one from around here. Walked right up to me and told me what a good job I was doing. Son of a bitch!”
Pennington stared at me. “You really think it was him?”
“Hell, yes,” I said. “He stopped and talked to me, then walked away and got into a van, not an ambulance, and then he just drove off. He must’ve come in during all the confusion, and the paramedic jacket would make him just about invisible.”
“Did you get a look at the van?”
I stopped and thought. “It was blue, a late-model one. Not a real big one, and I think it was a Chevy. It was some kind of work van, with this weird logo on the side. I didn’t really get a good look at it.”
Pennington grabbed his phone and dialed a number, telling someone to relay a message to the helicopter that was circling overhead to go look for that vehicle. I kicked myself for not realizing sooner who it must have been, for not getting a license plate number or a better look at the logo.
He got off the phone and looked at me again. “So many roads around here,” he said, “the guy could go in just about any direction. If he gets into traffic, he’ll be harder to spot, but the chopper has the best chance. Good job, Cassie.”
I looked around for a moment, and the sheer impact of it all finally hit me. Tears started to run down my cheek. “But why! Why, Jim? This place isn’t connected to me, why put a bomb here?”
He looked at me for a moment, and there was compassion in his face. “This is why,” he said. “Look what it’s doing to you.”
I stood there, weeping and staring at him, and understood what he was saying. It didn’t matter that New Beginnings wasn’t part of the Outreach, or that I didn’t work there. The people it serves were the same people I serve, the abused and displaced women and children who need help to get out of a bad situation.
By striking at them, he was striking at me.
FIFTEEN
Dex came back an hour later, along with the same ambulance that had taken him away. He saw me sitting on the grass with some of the women and children who hadn’t been badly hurt, and came quickly toward me.
I got to my feet. “The little boy,” I said. “Did he…”
“He’s going to be fine,” Dex said, and the relief hit me so hard that he had to catch me to keep me from falling to the ground again. “When we got to the hospital, they sprayed me down with disinfectant and told me to hold on until they got him in the OR. My hand is still cramping, but it worked.”
I held onto him and tried to get myself back under control. “If you hadn’t been there,” I said, “I would’ve lost him.”
“Maybe,” he said. “If I know you, though, you would’ve thought of something. I heard five different paramedics talking about you back at the hospital, how you were doing so much all on your own. I didn’t know you had medical training.”
I leaned back and looked up at him. “Medical training? My medical training consisted of having a first-aid bag shoved into my hand an hour and a half ago. One of the paramedics just told me to do what I could, because they had too much for them to handle.”
“And you did a helluva job.”
That reminded me of my visitor. I told Dex about it, and his face took on a look of near rage. “He was that close to you? Dear God, I should have been here, I should have…”
“Stop that,” I said. “You were busy saving a life, that was more important. It was just weird, the way he looked at me. I swear, when I think about it now, it was like he knew me, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen the guy before.”
Things were under control by this point. The fire department had gotten the fire out, and the most seriously wounded were in the hospital. Only three people had died, which the Fire Chief considered a miracle considering the size of the blast.
Unfortunately, one of them was a six-year-old boy. The other two were actually staff members, a cook and one of the counselors. I had actually known him; his name was Mitch, and he’d only been in the job for a few months.
Pennington found us a moment later, and I grabbed the opportunity to tell him what a hero Dex had been. The detective shook his hand, then turned back to me.
“Cassie,” he said, “I’m gonna need you to come to the station. You need to work with an artist, see if we can get sketch of this guy.”
“Okay,” I said. “You want me to go now?”
“Yeah, the sooner the better. Dex, it was good to meet you. You got yourself a hell of a woman.”
Dex grinned at him. “What? You think I don’t know that?”
I poked him in the ribs, and then he walked me to my car. We were just about to it when he stopped and looked at me.
“Cassie? Where is your phone?”
I looked at him for a moment, then felt my pocket. “Oh, I put it in my purse. It’s in the car.” I started to take another step, but he pulled me back.
“Wait here a minute,” he said.
He walked over to my car and walked around it, just looking at it from different angles for a moment. He leaned down and looked inside through the window, then got down on the ground and looked up underneath it.
He lay there for a long minute or so, and then he took out his own phone and turned on its flashlight app. I watched as he carefully reached up under the car and shined the light on something, and then he was sliding back away from it over the grass.
He got to his feet and walked over to me. “Do you have your key?”
I shook my head. “That’s in my purse, too.”
He let out a sigh. “Okay. Wait here.” He turned around and went back over to the car, reached out carefully and took hold of the door handle and pulled. My heart was in my throat, but the door came open without incident. He reached inside and carefully picked up my purse, then carried it back over to me. I grabbed my phone and swiped it to make it come to life, and there were three alerts from the motion camera gizmos.
“There is what looks like a bomb stuck up under the floorboard by the transmission,” Dex said.
I was staring at the screen on my phone. There, nice and clear, was a picture of a man’s face, and I knew it was the same guy who had spoken to me. It was the opening frame of a video, and I tapped it with my thumb to make it play. It showed him sliding up under the car, first getting his hand which was holding something about the size of a loaf of bread, but then his face came just into view. He was reaching up under the car and staring at what he was doing, but as he went to slide back out, he actually turned and looked straight into the camera for a split second.
“We got him,” I said, and I turned the phone around to show
it to Dex. I looked around for Pennington and spotted him some distance away.
“Go show him,” Dex said. “He needs to see that right now.”
I nodded and started walking toward the detective. I was looking at my phone as I walked, not really paying much attention to anything else, and then I just shoved the phone in front of Pennington’s face.
He looked at the screen. “What’s this?”
“Dex put these little cameras all over my car,” I said. “Just in case he were to try again to plant a bomb, you know? Well, he did, while the rest of us were all busy trying to deal with his last one.”
Pennington looked at the screen again, then raised his eyes and looked past me. “What the hell does he think he’s doing?” he asked suddenly, and I spun around to see what he was talking about.
Dex was up underneath my car, and as I watched, he slid out on his back, holding something in his hands.
Pennington and I both started running toward him at the same time, yelling for him to stop and get away from it. He sat up quickly, waving his hands and telling us to stop, and then he put his finger to his lips. Pennington grabbed my arm and jerked me to a halt, and I saw that his eyes were wide as he stared at Dex.
Dex got to his feet, then bent down and gently picked up what must have been the explosive device. He walked very slowly and very carefully to a big vacant spot a good hundred yards away from my car or anything else, then set it down and started backing away. When he had twenty feet between himself and it, he turned around and started jogging toward us.
“What the ever loving hell did you think you were doing?” I asked, smacking him on the chest when he got close enough. “You could have killed yourself!”
