Chapter 30 #2
And the impact stirs up so much concrete dust and the dirt of centuries banked up in those untroubled rooms beneath the roof that even though it’s raining harder than I’ve ever seen it there is, for a moment, a dust cloud before the rain dampens it down.
And it’s blurry because of that dust cloud and it’s blurry because of the rain and it’s blurry because I’m running.
Because if the roof didn’t flip and land on Cat there’s still hope.
Hope dies last. And while it’s there it’s powering me forwards into the wreckage.
And I can’t find her, I can’t see her, and it’s not just the rain in my eyes.
I can’t catch a glimpse of her and it’s quiet after the cataclysmic thump and all I can hear is the distant sound of the babies, still crying, and my voice shouting for Cat, shouting itself hoarse, ripping my vocal cords raw as I beg her to call back so I can find her as I scramble over the rubble she has fallen into.
I don’t find her.
Digger does, working by smell despite the rain.
I must have been tearing at the rubble, trying to move things to find her but I don’t remember that, all I know is that when I get to where Digger is my hands are raw and the bandaged one is throbbing badly again, and my knees are torn and bleeding, and when I see Cat I start wrenching at the concrete lying across her chest and when I stop, unable to move it, it’s easier to look at the rain pinking and thinning the bloodstains my fingers are leaving on the concrete than it is to look at her face, so still and white and not itchy or twitchy – or moving one bit.
And then I make myself look at her, because she is Cat and my world and the rain is still falling and Digger is still whimpering and pawing at her and so the world is carrying on so she must be alive, and if she is alive there’s hope, but the realisation doesn’t fill me with joy as much as anger, but I still don’t know why that was but fury swept into me, the white hot kind that is so pure and unrefined it destroys everything in its path, and I grabbed the concrete slab again and strained so hard it felt like all the muscles in my body were going to rip clean of whatever tethered them to my bones, like my tendons were going to snap and my heart burst at the same moment, and then there was a rough grunting noise and a broken scrape as the immovable slab shifted and tilted and stayed tilted enough that it remained where it was and I dared myself to let go and drag her broken body clear.
And as I did so she coughed a pink bubble that burst in spatters round her mouth and her head lolled sideways away from me and she coughed again and then went as still as the concrete slab, and I thought she was dead again, but I stared at her neck and saw the tiny telltale bounce of her skin over the big vein.
And so I did the thing that First Aid and Safety for Dummies was very clear you shouldn’t do until the emergency services arrive, which was move her.
Because the emergency services hadn’t been coming for centuries.
Because I was all the emergency services left in the world, I lifted her broken body and ran for the Bunker trying not to stumble, trying not to fall, trying not to drop her and hurt her again.
I was expecting her to scream in pain or tell me to stop because I was breaking her even more with each step, but she didn’t say anything, and her eyes stayed shut even as her open mouth dribbled more pinkness down her chin.
The fury stayed with me. I was furious, I was on a mission nothing could have stopped, and then there was a crump and a thump behind me and the ground bucked again and I looked back and saw nothing, and that did stop me in my tracks because a moment ago there had been a whole broken concrete tower where nothing now was.
The half of the roof that had hinged down and slammed into the stalk of the mushroom tower had dealt it a final fatal blow, only delayed by moments, only delayed in fact enough to let me and my fury rip Cat free and get us both out of its way.
If I hadn’t moved her we’d both have been flattened by the weight of all the rest of that downbound concrete fly-swatting us into oblivion.
And then the babies would have starved.
And Storm and Freya probably would never have known.
Though maybe Digger would have survived.
And either way we’d have just been gone as if we’d never been in the first place, a pointless flash of lightning in the greater darkness, a momentary stutter on the road to oblivion.
And no one would ever have known and no one would have thought that it was sad.
Gone faster and more pointlessly than a mayfly.
Because even if it does only live for a day, a mayfly leaves the next generation of mayflies to each live their precious one day when their time comes.
And who knows how mayflies see time anyway?
Maybe their day stretches ahead of them and seems impossibly long and full of possibilities, the end of that one day so distant from their now they can’t imagine it until they hit middle age at noon or begin to feel old at dusk.
I wasn’t thinking thoughts like that then.
Those thoughts come later, in loneliness, when you lie in the night and talk to yourself in your head.
Then, I was running on shock and the fury that had flooded into me in place of fear.
I didn’t have time to let fear freeze my brain and stop me doing anything useful.
I needed to do everything I could to keep Cat alive.
I needed to get her inside and safe so I could see what problems I was going to have to solve for her next.
I put her on the kitchen table because it was big and the light was better than the bedroom and also, if she was going to bleed, it would be easier to clean, and she would be angry if I spoiled her precious bedding by getting it covered in blood.
Though even as I gently placed her on the hard surface I did wonder if she’d live long enough to be cross.
Then the sight of her leg somehow banished that dark future possibility to the very back of my mind as the front of it lurched in shock back into the present.
The leg was snapped below the knee, halfway to the shin, and stuck out to one side at an angle whose wrongness made me weak and nauseous.
This was the point where I nearly got everything wrong.
It was when I started crying, drowning in a sea of sadness and fear when I should have been clear headed and swimming strongly enough for both of us.
I know I was feeling horror at the thought that Cat was broken and dying, that I was going to lose my only-one and be alone, that the worst fear that had stalked both of our lives was about to happen.
I was letting myself be paralysed by the horror of it.
And I know that in that moment of letting myself be washed away by the emotion of it all and so nearly losing everything, Digger saved me.
Digger saved us all.
On the edge of my consciousness, I realised I’d noticed her distress, tearing in and out of the Bunker, looking at me, then bounding outside.
Then waiting a beat before running back in to look at me and whine her low moaning at me.
Finally she had enough and barrelled all the way in and bit me.
I mean, I thought she was biting me, and the shock of it put a stop into my sobbing, just enough to make me stop and stare at her as she tried to drag me to the door.
The dog was trying to get my attention, to make me notice the even more relentless wails of unhappiness coming from the other bunker across the brambles.
The babies were wide awake, alone and clearly very hungry and distressed.
And Digger was outraged by the fact that I was ignoring them.
Somehow that broke the spell that had me frozen, suddenly having two things to worry about instead of just one.
Cat’s injury, her survival was such a huge fear for me that my brain had just jammed and couldn’t move in the face of it.
I knew that I didn’t know enough medicine to save her if her wounds were as bad as they looked, and so I went small, stuck and useless in the face of that immense ignorance.
Because I couldn’t trust myself to do the one big thing I might have to do, I stopped doing even the little things that I could.
And Digger snapped me out of it by reminding me of the babies.
And because I could do something about them – milk the goats, feed them, change their nappies – my thinking unfroze itself, maybe because knowing I had to do something for them stopped me looking at the one big terrible thing and made me make the first decision: which was to prioritise what needed to happen in what order, because clearly both were important – caring for Cat and keeping the babies alive – but one was much, much more urgent.
So, without knowing I was doing it I found myself again, doing, not frozen and sobbing.
The babies could take care of the crying for the time being.
I had stuff to take care of. I needed to triage.