by Pike, JJ
While Evelyn lectured Betsy in her head, Betsy gave the girl—had he said her name was Brittany? no, Bryony—anyway, whatever this little cutie’s name was—a quick once-over. The arm, which was neatly splinted and bandaged, seemed to be her only injury. Betsy wasn’t sure she could carry the girl on her own. It was less than a week since she’d been shot and while she was in fantastic shape for someone who’d had a collapsed lung she knew her own limitations.
“Sean?” She shouted as loud as she could. “Nigel? Anyone? I need a hand.”
She brushed the hair from Bryony’s face. Someone had to be missing this darling. She couldn’t have been more than six years old. Where was her mom? Or dad? Was Hedwig her sister? “It’s alright, precious. We’re going to take good care of you. Then we’re going to find your mommy and daddy…” Gosh. I probably shouldn’t say something I can’t be absolutely sure of. Jim had mentioned that they’d been in one of those “camps.” It wasn’t going to be a “camp” in the “campground” sense of the word. If Jim had brought Bryony with him, what were the chances there was a mommy or daddy to find?
Bryony’s eyelashes fluttered, but she didn’t open her eyes.
“You sleep, sweetie. We’ll take care of you.” It was another mouth to feed, but Aggie wouldn’t mind.
Nigel pounded from the house to her side. “What’s up?”
Betsy didn’t even have to point.
He scooped Bryony up and took her inside the house. “We’re out of beds. We wouldn’t be, but it seems you told Sean to take an axe to the beautiful sleigh bed in the master bedroom.”
“I did. He’s going to make a stretcher,” said Betsy. “You can put her on the bench on the far side of the living room for now. She’s small enough.”
“Right.” Nigel eased Bryony onto the narrow bench, retrieved his medical bag, and set to work. He unwrapped the bandages around her splint and eased the wood off her arm.
The skin on her forearm was seven different shades of purple. All of them ugly. Betsy secretly sent psychic kisses to the little girl.
“Aggie and Fred are working on securing Midge to the sled.” Nigel could work and talk at the same time.
There was a joke in there about walking, talking, and chewing gum, but now wasn’t the time for levity, even though her heart was so full she wanted to dance around her front room. Jim was back. Paul had made it through surgery. Midge was awake. The young woman who’d brought Jim back to her said she had “supplies.”
“Sean is hacking your bed to pieces,” said Nigel. “It won’t take long to create a stretcher. It’s not my job to say who does what when, but if I’m understanding Aggie rightly we don’t have many animals. We’re going to need to do more than one run to get everyone from here to the mines.”
“You’re right.” All this excitement had pushed Betsy off track. “So, do we send them in order of ‘most difficult’ to transport or ‘least difficult’ to get across hostile terrain?”
“Aggie says there are two horses and an alpaca for people and a goat for stuff.”
“Goodness,” said Betsy. “That’s quite the picture.”
“This kid can go on horseback with an adult.”
“She can. Good thinking. Oh! There’s a motorbike, too. The young lady who came in with Paul said she’ll be right back.”
Aggie joined Betsy and Nigel by the bench.
Bryony had a couple of large splinters in her wrist, where the wood had jogged against her skin. Nigel removed them with his tweezers, cleaned her arm, and applied a topical antibiotic. Very sensible given where Bryony had come from.
The little girl groaned and twisted.
“You’re fine. It’s good. We’re going to make it all better,” said Betsy.
Aggie didn’t speak for a full minute. She watched Nigel work, her face impassive. Betsy could guess what she was thinking. Another human, another complication.
Aggie finally turned her back on Bryony. It was as if she couldn’t face the thought of having yet another mouth to feed.
“Or maybe she’s just tired, like you,” said Evelyn. “You do not know what’s in anyone else’s head. We’ve talked about this a million times. It does you no favors and it does them no favors. Do your work, Betsy, and let her do hers. Goodness sakes, I sound like a broken record.”
“Midge is talking. Like, whole sentences. It’s amazing. We were about ready to move her from her bed to the sled, but I don’t know if that’s the right way to go,” said Aggie.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” said Betsy.
“Midge has the greatest need for stability. Fred has said, like, ten times now that the swelling could come back at any time and trauma to the brain is impossibly complicated and prone to unexpected changes.”
“Correct.”
“I think we should carry her, not drag her.” Aggie’s insight into their situation—her ability to plan and think ahead—was astounding. Betsy wasn’t sure she’d ever met a teenager quite like her.
“Yeah,” said Nigel, “good thinking.”
“Sean said he was making a stretcher for Paul?”
Betsy nodded.
“Swap out Midge’s sled for Paul’s stretcher. That way, Midge can be carried, not dragged. We don’t want her head bumping around when we go over a rock or into a small depression in the ground. She needs to be as close to still as we can manage. Paul can stand a bit of jiggling, I think. Not a lot, of course, but more than Midge.” Aggie was so clinical about it. You wouldn’t think she was talking about her critically injured siblings. Her ability to detach was stunning.
Betsy put a little pin in the thought that she needed to take Aggie aside, later when things had calmed down, and tell her how impressed she’d been.
“What do you think? Stretcher for Midge and sled for Paul?”
“Good. Very good,” said Nigel. “That’s all the patients, right? Midge, Paul, and this one…what’s her name?”
“Bryony.”
“Okay.” Betsy wanted to repeat what she’d heard, just to be sure she’d gotten it right and they hadn’t missed anything. “So, Bryony goes on horseback with some able-bodied person yet to be named. Paul is pulled behind the horse and Midge is carried on a stretcher. I think that’s excellent.”
“Fred and I should carry Midge’s stretcher. We’re the strongest.” Nigel stood and tidied his supplies back into his magical medical bag. Given how many injuries they’d already sustained, Betsy wanted a ton of those and another dozen more Nigels.
“I’ll go and tell Sean that he’s to take the stretcher into Midge’s room.” Aggie took off. Not quite running, but not walking either. What a sensible young woman she was.
“Betsy?” Petra was ashen. “Could you come and make sure Paul’s okay?”
“This one’s stable, right?” She brushed Bryony’s hair again. “Or do you want to stay with her a while longer?”
Nigel nodded. “She’s fine. I’ll go check on Midge. You see what’s happening with Paul.”
“Hurry,” said Petra.
Jim was sitting in the corner, his arms folded over the back of the chair to create a kind of pillow and his head resting on top of his arms. With any luck he was asleep.
Mimi was at Paul’s side. The frown said it all. Something had changed.
Paul’s breathing was labored. Shallow. Betsy folded the sheet down, laid her fingers on his belly, and tapped lightly. It was taut. Not good.
“Petra, go and ask Nigel to join us, please.”
“What’s wrong?” Petra was trembling.
“If you want to help your brother, get Nigel.”
Petra ran as hard as she could, screaming Nigel’s name. Not what Betsy had wanted, but there was no way to keep Petra calm. In this instance, she didn’t want calm, she wanted fast. “Mimi, do you know where my stethoscope went to?” It wasn’t on the tray where she’d left it.
“Oh, I was listening for the baby. I hope you don’t mind.” Mimi plunked to the table and back, bringing Betsy’s st
ethoscope with her.
Betsy grabbed a sterile wipe from the tray which the indefatigable Nigel had kindly restocked and wiped down her scope. She placed it on Paul’s drum-like stomach.
“What have we got?” Nigel hadn’t even broken a sweat.
“Reduced bowel sounds.”
“Are you thinking air or blood?”
Neither would be good, but air might turn out to be the lesser of two evils.
“What is it?” Petra had Paul’s hand in hers. “His temperature has risen, hasn’t it? Does he have poisoning? Is he septic? You can die from that, can’t you?”
“He hasn’t had time to develop sepsis,” said Betsy. “If you’re going to stay, I need you to calm yourself.”
“Is it Nefash?” said Jim.
Betsy hadn’t heard him get up or creep across the kitchen to the table. Once he was beside her, she could smell him. He needed a good shower and a toothbrush, but she would never allow that to show. “What’s that? Nefash, you say?”
“It’s the name the guards in the camp gave to the sickness. It’s conjecture, of course, but they thought that there was a form of necrotizing fasciitis on the loose.”
“What made them think that? It’s very unlikely.” Betsy kept one eye on Paul and the other on Jim.
“Blisters. Cuts. Sores that wouldn’t heal. Skin falling off the flesh. Highly contagious. Rapid spread…”
“I’m going to stop you right there. Necrotizing fasciitis isn’t highly contagious. Even if you had a patient in the hospital who required immediate surgery, you wouldn’t give other patients on the ward prophylactic antibiotics.”
Jim shrugged. “It was just a name they gave it. What is it, if not flesh-eating bacteria?”
Nigel held up his hands. “Two separate issues. There’s the disease you saw while you were in the camp. We don’t know what that was. But Paul has an immediate, post-operative situation which is very likely not connected to your time in the camp.”
“He was next to the Sickies,” said Jim. “Not with them. Not like Bryony.”
Betsy’s turn to hold up her hand. “Can we get caught up on the situation at the camp once we stabilize Paul?”
Jim didn’t fight back. Neither did he smile or wink or do any of his usual cute little gestures to let her know he was on her side, no matter what disaster befell them.
“Give it ten more minutes?” said Betsy.
“Without a scan…” Nigel left the inference nice and vague so Petra wouldn’t dissolve further.
Betsy knew he knew that she knew what was what. Evelyn wasn’t always right. Sometimes you met someone and you knew exactly what they were thinking. In Nigel’s case, for example, she’d had the same training as him (kind of) so she was able to infer what the next steps would be. If they’d been in a hospital they’d have rushed him down to the imaging department and scanned his belly for a bleed or clot or obstruction. None of that was available. They were going to palpate the site and watch for more swelling. She didn’t want to go in again if she didn’t have to. They’d done their best to keep the site sterile, but they were in her kitchen, not an operating theater. The more they messed with his belly, the higher his chance of contracting some opportunistic infection.
Nigel held up Paul’s urine bag. “Have we been charting this?”
They hadn’t. They’d done major surgery flying by the seat of their pants. She’d cut some major corners. “We’ll start now.”
It was simple. Fluids in and fluids out. Paul should have a relatively regular flow of urine exiting his body.
“Ten minutes?” she said.
They didn’t have to wait ten minutes. The trickle of blood that seeped into the yellow bag told a tale of woe.
Nigel held it at an angle so Petra wouldn’t see it, but Betsy couldn’t miss it.
“If you could clear the kitchen, please?” Her charge nurse voice wasn’t one that brooked much opposition.
Mimi put her arm around Petra and led her out of the room.
Betsy touched Jim in the crook of his arm; an old, familiar gesture that would normally have garnered a smile. “You too, my love. We need to clear the room.”
Jim remained in his chair, immobilized.
They didn’t have time to argue. She and Nigel needed to open Paul’s belly, find the bleeder, and close him back up again, pronto.
“Darling?” She put her hand on Jim’s shoulder, firmer this time, the gesture of a nurse rather than a wife.
Jim slid off the chair into a heap on the floor.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Bill had known he was going to die ever since he’d crawled onto that subway car, bleeding like a stuck pig, unable to tighten his tourniquet. If it hadn’t been for Alice, he’d have been a hunk of flesh disintegrating with the rats and fish.
What he hadn’t banked on was dying under a blanket in someone’s barn in rural Massachusetts at the hands of a bunch of pissed off bikers.
No way he and Alice were going to stay hidden with the dogs making such a racket. Alice tried to shush them for the umpteenth time, but Mouse took that as encouragement to launch himself at her again, shaking the blanket with his teeth. It would have been cute if it hadn’t been an invitation to a bunch of psychopaths to come find them and shoot them up.
It was only when the little wiener dog landed on his chest that Bill realized he had no sensation in his arm. Bliss. His prayers had been granted. He could do things—moving, helping, being a useful human being again—with his good arm and not die of pain because of the missing one.
“Do you have a gun?” he said.
“You’re awake.” Alice squeezed his hand. Mouse pounced on it, mouthing at their fingers. “How are you feeling?”
They were both whispering.
“I feel like a million bucks.”
“That’s the drugs talking.”
“Works for me,” he said.
“There’s a bag above your head. There’s a .45 in there, if you think you can handle that?”
“I could handle the howitzer those army dudes were lugging around.” He snickered. “Who carries a howitzer around? I mean, seriously. When are you going to use firepower like that?”
“I think they already did,” she said.
“Are you serious?”
“There was shelling. You slept through it. I was so grateful.”
Man. The noise had made it into his dreams, but she was right, he hadn’t stirred. How’d he made it into the barn? Had she carried him? Was Alice Everlee that much of a badass? He didn’t remember getting into the van, so there was every chance she’d gotten him in and out of their vehicle more than once. He let go of his wife’s hand and felt over his head. The bag was stocked to the brim. His fingers ran over the sweet, cool metal. He selected a gun by touch. The grip felt good in his palm. He laid it on his chest, finger close to but not on the trigger, and waited.
“They’re moving around,” said Alice. “The bikers. I’ve heard shots from the west and south.”
“Bring it.” He was ready to fight. It wasn’t time to die just yet.
In the distance he could hear gunfire. Not volleys, just the occasional round. If there’d been a gunfight it was winding down.
“How long do we wait?” he said.
“Until the fighting stops and we’re sure they’ve moved on.”
Bill shifted in the straw. Not feeling anything was terrific. If his choices were “injuring myself because I no longer feel pain” and “pain” he knew which one he’d pick.
The radio crackled in the bag.
“Alice Everlee? Sergeant Pottinger. Come in please. Over.”
Alice didn’t answer the call. “Okay. Wait’s over. We’re out of here.” She threw off the blanket and dusted herself down.
“Come in please.”
She reached down and offered Bill a hand. He put his gun to one side and grasped her hand. He could feel some pressure, but still no pain. It was as if he’d been anesthetized but allowed to wake.
&
nbsp; “Where are we going?”
“Wherever they’re not,” she said.
“Is it that easy? We got rid of our escort?”
