Page 69 of Freak
“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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The injured man wasunconscious. 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 ifhe’dbeen pushed into the fire? What if he’d beenshot?
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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When two large headlightscharged 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.
