Chapter Twenty
F ully aware that pandemonium churned all around her, fully aware she was in danger, possibly mortal danger, Abigail tuned it out.
She forced even the occasional gunshots to the far reaches of her attention.
If she paid it any heed at all, fear might get both hands around her neck.
Before her was someone who needed help, help she could provide in some measure, so she turned her whole focus on him and let the world around her do what it would.
The man before her had fallen into the bonfire, had caught fire himself before he’d been pulled free, and was very badly burned.
At first, after he gulped down some of her cider, he’d been quiet, lying still and silent, but when she and the man who’d stayed to help—his name was Nacto, she remembered—peeled the burned shreds of his clothes from his back, he began to moan.
The night was noisy with trouble, but Abigail heard the plaintive sound rumbling under the riot, and she felt the vibration of it each time she touched him.
His injuries were beyond traditional healing methods, she knew that the instant she saw him, and smelled the tang of cooked meat hovering over him.
But she also knew there was no one else around who could do more right now than her.
Tasha Westby was out of town. David Draper, the other doctor at the clinic, lived close to Rolla since his divorce and didn’t spend much time in Signal Bend when he wasn’t working.
Elizabeth Morrow, the clinic nurse, had left the festival with her four littles before dinnertime. Abigail hadn’t seen Jill Sharpe, the clinic receptionist and med tech, all day. Jill had had a bad cough earlier in the week, at the last festival planning meeting; she’d likely stayed home today.
Signal Bend was bigger and more prosperous these days than Abigail had ever known it to be, but it was still a very small town.
There were no other medical professionals anywhere nearby.
They didn’t even have a vet in town anymore.
Doc Carver and his staff of six junior vets covered Phelps and Crawford counties and took care of everybody’s animals, from pets to livestock—including Abigail’s—but Doc ran Carver Mobile Veterinary Services and was based in Cuba.
What this man needed was an ambulance to the trauma center in Springfield.
Lying on the ground in the middle of a sudden war, most of the skin of his back burned away, infection vectors were everywhere.
But even if somebody had already called 911, it would be up to an hour before an ambulance arrived on the scene.
She and Nacto got the last of his kutte and shirt off, and she gently eased aloe, cooling and antibacterial, over the crisped meat of his back and neck, his shoulders and arms. The man gasped and quivered at the first few touches, then sighed. His wheezing moans quieted.
She coated the gauze in aloe, too, and Nacto helped her lay wide strips of it on his back. It might hurt him greatly to remove those in the hospital, aloe could become sticky when it dried, but she was sure that was better than keeping his tissues exposed to the dirt and ash and smoke around them.
“Somebody called 911, right?” she asked as she laid the last strip across his back.
His jeans and belt were scorched, but mostly intact, so she guessed that he’d landed on his back and been pulled free before the flames could catch good hold of the bottom half of his body.
If she was right, maybe he had a chance to survive this.
Nacto frowned at her. “We don’t call 911, hon. When a brother needs a hospital, we get ‘im there ourselves. Y’all have a clinic in town, right?”
Abigail gaped at him. “Yeah, we do. But not around the clock. It’s closed this weekend. And I don’t think they’re set up for hurt like this, anyway. Y’all don’t ever call for help? This man needs help now, and the nearest trauma hospital is most of an hour away!”
After a frustrated scan of the area, Nacto shook his head. “Fuck. I can get our van, it’s just up at the road, but it means I gotta leave you. You got a weapon?”
She had her rifle in the truck, but that would do her no good here.
She’d had no reason to keep it with her, she’d thought.
It was the Harvest Festival, full of safe activities for families.
For as long as the Harvest Festival had been an annual event—any of their seasonal activities—the Horde had not been a cause for trouble.
The Horde had been the reason the events were so safe.
More gunfire rang out, a quick barrage of fire. Not a handgun, then, but a rifle. Semi-automatic. “Go!” she asserted, letting that be her whole answer, and hoping Nacto would assume she was protected and get moving. This man could not hold on much longer without intense medical help.
Nacto leapt to his feet and ran toward the road, his own gun in his hand.
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~oOo~
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T he injured man was unconscious. With nothing more she could do for him but try to make sure no more hurt happened to him, Abigail knelt at his side like a sentry. Without his care to focus so tightly on, she considered the strange, awful scene before her.
The bonfire still raged, lighting the night in wavering red glow, but the chaos around it was drawing to its painful end.
For the most part, the people she saw were shadows against the firelight, but she saw little active fighting in those shadows.
Some wandered as if they were lost. Some held their heads or other parts of their body as if protecting injury.
Many, though, crouched in clusters around the bonfire field, in groups that she thought probably looked a lot like her own crouched cluster had looked from a distance: small groups trying to help injured people.
Mel was in that quieting disaster somewhere. Probably he was one of the shadows crouched around somebody badly injured—shot, or burned, or beaten. He was a natural helper, so he was certainly doing his part and more to return the night to its calm.
It occurred to her right then that Mel might not be a helper in one of those clusters. What if he’d been badly hurt? What if he’d been pushed into the fire? What if he’d been shot ?
As the notion landed directly on her chest, Abigail surged to her feet. “Mel!” she cried, knowing he likely couldn’t hear over the fire.
All she wanted now was to run in the direction Mel had run from her, to find him and make sure he was safe and well.
If he needed help, she needed to help him.
But she couldn’t leave this man here, so grievously wounded, all alone on the ground.
Reluctantly, as if her knees were rusted solid, she forced herself back down to the man’s side.
She didn’t really believe in god, not in the regular Christian way.
She believed the world was full of mystery, and she wouldn’t be surprised if she someday learned it had a creator, but she didn’t feel she knew it to be true.
The idea of the world forming itself without a creator, perfecting itself over eons of trial and error, seemed just as mysterious and even more wondrous to her, but she didn’t feel she knew that to be true, either.
She’d be much more surprised to learn that a creator was paying attention, granting boons and inflicting punishments, which was why she tended to be more interested in pantheistic practices of old.
She could imagine a large group of gods, each with their own interests and responsibilities, each fallible and inconstant, more easily than a single, omniscient and omnipotent, entity controlling it all.
But anything was possible, and she preferred to keep her mind and heart open to possibility.
At any rate, she didn’t really pray, and certainly she didn’t petition. Her inclinations were toward gratitude and for things like a beautiful sunrise or the peaceful song of a nightbird.
On this night, however, waiting with a possibly fatally injured man for help, watching the remnants of a bitter, violent fight among men who called themselves family, wondering where the first and only love of her life was among the indistinct forms moving through the firelight, Abigail sent up a prayer to anyone or anything who might hear and heed.
Please let him be safe. Please let him be safe. Please let him be safe.
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~oOo~
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W hen two large headlights charged straight for her, Abigail leapt to her feet again and, on instinct, stepped in front of the man’s prone body.
She held her hands up, but the headlights didn’t slow.
Before she could brace for impact, a dark van skidded to a stop, throwing bits of grass and dirt up.
Both front doors flew open; Nacto jumped from the passenger side, and another man, unfamiliar to her but obviously another Montana patch, jumped from the driver’s side. They ran to the back of the van and ran back carrying something that looked like a large bedroll.
At the injured man’s side, the unfamiliar patch unfurled the bedroll thing, which became a kind of military-style stretcher.
The man woke and cried out in agony when his brothers lifted him from the ground and laid him prone on the stretcher.
“We got you, Mane,” the patch said. “We got you.”
Mane . Abigail had a fleeting sense that she should know that as a name, know the man attached to it, but this was not the time to search her memory.
This was the time to hand responsibility over to people who knew him. She’d done all she could for him. Now she needed to find her own man.
“Make sure nothing touches his back.” Holding out the half-empty bottle of cider to Nacto, she added, “If he can, let him swallow more of this. It’s the only real pain relief we’ve got, I think. That’s all I can do, I’m sorry. I need to find Mel.”
The look Nacto gave her as he took the bottle from her hand made something pop in her chest, and worry flooded through her.
“I’m sorry, hon. Mel’s down.”