Where Would You Be Now? Page 3
The convoy was racing straight for them.
She let the binoculars hang off their strap and cupped a hand to her mouth. “Incoming! Incoming!”
Someone at the clinic heard her and clanged the brass bell hanging off the front overhang.
They didn’t need it very often, but they had a routine for this, when strangers came barreling at the clinic compound in a way that didn’t suggest friendship. Those standing watch at the barricade stayed put, in case the invaders came on multiple fronts. A dozen others, whoever was on hand, grabbed weapons from the locker and came out to where the alarm had sounded.
Kath waited for her backup, shotgun in both hands, watching her targets come into range. The cars bounced and jutted over broken asphalt, while the motorcycles curved and weaved.
“Where the hell are they getting gas from?” Dennis asked. He’d climbed up on the barricade next to Kath.
Maggie was right behind him. “Don’t know, don’t care. What do they want?”
Kath said, “Better get down, in case they come in firing.”
The barricade had places to shelter: inside cabs, on shielded truck beds. All the invaders would see was their shotguns and rifles bristling out.
The caravan stopped at the edge of firing range. If one of the rifles fired at them now, it might or might not hit. A big man, white, wearing a leather jacket and cowboy hat, scrambled out of the driver’s side of one of the cars and marched forward a few paces. He didn’t seem to be armed.
Kath stood tall and shouted at him across the barrel of her shotgun. “Stop! Stop and show your hands!”
The man’s thick beard worked, as if he was biting his lip under it. He raised his hands. “Is this the clinic?” he shouted. “The one people talk about, that has doctors and medicine? Is that you?”
“What do you want!”
He gestured back. “We have wounded! We need help! We can trade for it! We have gas, guns, bullets—”
“Food?”
He paused a moment. “Yes!”
Kath looked at Maggie and Dennis.
“What kind of wounded?” Dennis shouted back. He stayed behind his shelter.
“Gunshot! Two men. God, please, help them!”
It could be a trick. Or the man could be honest. In the end, half the people here were doctors and nurses, and they recognized that kind of desperate plea.
The clinic had a process for this kind of situation, too.
Maggie and Dennis both emerged on top of the barricade, and Maggie called out. “Okay, here’s how it’s going to work. You bring the injured men inside, the vehicles stay out. Just the injured and two people each to carry them, no one else gets in, and you leave all your weapons outside. Got it?”
“Yes, okay, fine!”
And they checked, too. While the caravan pulled their injured out of the backs of the vehicles, Maggie and the clinic folk hauled open the gate, but only a couple of feet, just wide enough for two people to walk through. Two of the clinic’s biggest guys, Jim and Jorge, patted down everybody at the opening, even the injured. But they didn’t have anything, which gave these people an incremental point of trust.
The injured men were being carried chair style, one by two men, one by the man who’d greeted them and a woman. One of the injured seemed to be unconscious, but the other was making the guttural, deep-belly groans of someone moaning through clenched teeth. Every shadow on them looked like stains of blood.
“Okay, get ’em inside!” Maggie, Dennis, and a trail of clinic folk escorted them to the door of the clinic.
Jim stayed at the barrier. “Kath, go with them, stand watch inside, we’ll keep an eye out here.”
An odd quiet had fallen—the vehicles in the convoy had shut off their engines, turned off their headlights; those left behind waited quietly. Evening light had all but gone, so figures moved as shapes in the dark. Shotgun in hand, extra shells jangling in the pocket of her windbreaker, she trotted after the others.
Unlike the quiet at the barricade, inside the clinic was loud and brightly lit. Someone was herding the kids outside, to sleep in tents. Kath spotted Chloë and spared her a smile. She and her siblings looked like they might bolt at the sign of the injured men. Kath hurriedly told her, “It’ll be fine,” and hoped that was enough. Chloë nodded, and might even have been convinced.
Past the waiting room, the first exam room was noisy with shouted orders. Dennis and Melanie had taken the first of the injured men here, the one grunting with fierce pain. Maggie and Anita took the unconscious man to the second exam room. Both doors stayed open and Kath was able to keep an eye on them all. Dennis was shouting orders. Melanie was talking to the first patient in Spanish, telling him to lie back, to breathe, respire, respire, bien, bien. The man started crying, ayudame, ayudame! Help me, help me.
In the second room, Maggie and the gang’s spokesman were talking.
“We can barter,” he was explaining. “We have a whole warehouse, whatever you need. We have food. Just save them. Can you save them?”
The man laid out on the table had a great stain of blood covering his chest. It seemed centered on his right shoulder. A gunshot wound, not necessarily fatal. Likely he was in shock and needed support, fluid and oxygen, while the doctors cleaned the wound. But they’d need to get started on him right away. Anita and one of the nurses had cut away his shirt, inserted an IV and were peeling away cloth that had been stuffed into the wound.
After a deep breath, Maggie seemed to come to a decision. She explained, “We don’t need food as much as we need protection.” She looked him straight in the eye, unwavering. “We help you, you help keep us safe. You get the word out to your people, to anyone else—this is neutral ground. We stay safe, no matter what. No one attacks us, no one hurts us, no one hurts anyone while they’re here. Got it?”
“We protect you. And you help us and no one else. Just us.”
“No. We help everyone or it doesn’t work. We’re not a commodity. We’re here for everyone.”
“Can’t promise that.”
Maggie bit her lip in a moment of thought. Then she put up her hands and stepped back from the table. After glancing at her and each other in a moment of hesitation, Anita and the other nurse stepped from the table, hands up like hers, blood on latex gloves.
The guy and the woman with him started forward, fists raised as if they could beat her into saving the man’s life. Kath stepped in front of him, shotgun raised, warding them off. The standoff persisted for a handful of heartbeats.
The lead thug grinned. “You ever even shot anyone, kid?”
“Yes, I have.” No hesitation, no hint of bluffing. She didn’t need to bluff. Her tone convinced him; his smile fell, and he backed off.
Everyone watched him now, the one who would decide. His gang would listen to him. But Maggie and the other doctors were the ones who could fix things.
“Okay. Fine. This whole place is off limits. I’ll spread the word.”
“And you’ll make sure we stay safe.”
“As much as anyone can stay safe.”
Maggie and the others closed back to the table in a flurry of action. Low-voiced commands and bits of information passed back and forth. In moments an impromptu surgery was underway.
Maggie said, “You all should probably wait outside.”
A spike of tension followed, both strangers poised to lunge forward again. As if the doctors would really do something nefarious if they weren’t supervised. Kath reasserted herself and the shotgun.
The clinic director made a calming gesture. “My people need room and quiet to work, it’s better if you wait.” She added, “One of you can stay to watch. Her—”
She nodded to the woman with the leather jacket and wary gaze looking past too much eye makeup. And where had she found a stash of useable eyeliner? “Why her?” the man asked.
“Because she’s quiet.”
“Cynthia?”
She nodded. “Yeah, okay.”
“There are c
hairs in the waiting room,” Kath said, trying to sound neutral, if not friendly. Nodding, he went out.
Dennis had managed to kick out both of the gang members in his room. His patient was sedated now, finally quiet. The medical team was busy with gauze, alcohol, forceps, removing bullets from legs. Melanie glanced up once and gave Kath a thin smile. Kath smiled back, unsure who was comforting whom.
She stayed in the corridor, keeping watch over both rooms and the waiting room. There, the gang members had settled down. Too tired to argue anymore, maybe. One of them had even fallen asleep.
The clinic treatment rooms were made for routine outpatient care, not trauma. But Maggie, Dennis, and the others made do. By morning the two injured men were bandaged, sedated, and recovering quietly. Splashes of blood and red-stained gauze littered the floors, and a whole tray of scalpels and forceps and other instruments lay piled on a tray by the autoclave in the back supply room. The medicals were trying to clean up, wiping down surfaces, peeling off latex gloves. Wiping faces on sleeves and looking out, shell-shocked.
Maggie made a trip to the back supply room. When the woman, Cynthia, followed, Kath quietly moved in behind her. Just to keep an eye on her.
Cynthia glared a moment. “Can you close the door? Just for a minute.”
Kath looked at Maggie. Confused, Maggie nodded. Kath shut the door and waited, hands ready on her weapon.
Then Cynthia said, whispering, “Can you help me not get pregnant?”
Maggie froze a moment, processing. The woman pursed her lips and seemed to be holding her breath. When Maggie didn’t answer right away, Cynthia tried again. “I mean if I wanted an IUD or something, could you do that?”
“Yes, we can do that. We’ll have to do a pregnancy test first—are you pregnant?”
Cynthia’s eyes widened. She looked terrified. “Oh God I hope not, I don’t want to be, that’s why I was asking—”
“But you might be,” Maggie asked, and Cynthia ducked her face to hide spilling tears. Maggie touched her shoulder. “Come on, let’s check. Not a big deal. Kath, come in back and help me clear off that table.”
They went to the back exam room where they’d been stockpiling canned food. Kath had to shift boxes so Cynthia had somewhere to sit, while Maggie dug around one of the cupboards. Cynthia talked. Rambled.
“Adam, the big guy who does all the talking … he’s taking care of me. He’s promised to take care of me.”
“You could take care of yourself,” Maggie muttered.
“Don’t judge me,” Cynthia said through gritted teeth. “Fucking that man is keeping me alive right now. I can’t not do it, I can’t force him to wear condoms, and I do not want to have a baby in the mess.”
Maggie looked away.
Cynthia continued. “My … my sister got pregnant. I’d managed to keep her with me all this time, I’d promised to take care of her. But seven months in she got sick. Massive headache, vomiting, cramping. Then seizures.”
“Sounds like eclampsia,” Maggie said. “It’s a thing that happens sometimes. We might have been able to help her, but maybe not.”
“I couldn’t save her. The baby killed her, and it isn’t supposed to be like that, I don’t want to go through that. There’d be no one to help me.”
The whole thing took maybe half an hour. Maggie had Cynthia go back to the bathroom to pee in a cup. The test came back negative, and Cynthia started crying again. Maggie coaxed her to undress and pulled out the stirrups on the table. “Kath, why don’t you see how they’re doing up front?”
Kath ducked out.
Both injured men were stable. Dennis was in the waiting room, talking to the gang’s leader, Adam.
“They shouldn’t be moved for at least a couple of days. Especially not if you’re going to shove them in a car and bounce them around—”
“Hey!”
Dennis put up a calming hand and tried again. “You can leave them here, no problem. And yes, any food you want to give us will be appreciated.”
“And protection,” he said, his curled lip almost making it a sneer.
“We’re the only medical help for a hundred miles around. Maybe more. Your people would be dead now. You tell me whether or not we deserve protecting.”
Adam didn’t have anything to say to that.
Cynthia and Maggie emerged a little while later. Cynthia looked tired, shadows under her eyes, a slump in her shoulders. But she also seemed determined. An edge of that ever-present anxiety was gone. Kath was close enough to hear Maggie say to her, almost under her breath, “We’ve got a cupboard full of IUDs. I think we even have a few diaphragms stashed away somewhere. Tell your friends. We’ll help anyone with birth control, no barter needed. Spread the word.”
Cynthia nodded. “Yeah. Okay.”
In what Kath thought was a gesture of supreme goodwill, Maggie invited Adam and his gang to stay for the day, to get some sleep, and to share breakfast. Kath realized later the underlying motive: make the clinic compound feel like home. Make it feel safe, and give them a stake in keeping it that way. They declined, however. Adam muttered something about not wanting to feel even more indebted. Cynthia took hold of his arm, whispered something, and the man settled.
They agreed to leave their injured and return for them in two days. That gave the clinic a couple more days to get them as strong as possible, and make sure infection didn’t set in. They had a pretty good track record with this sort of thing so far, but it would only take one death from sepsis to undo everything.
The stakes seemed so high, for everything they did.
“We’re running out,” Dennis said, as they stood on the barricade, watching the caravan drive away, tires kicking up chips of broken asphalt.
“Of what?” Maggie said tiredly.
“Everything, really. But specifically—I think we should try to start growing some penicillin.”
She stared. “Can we do that?”
“I think we can. I think we have to.”
Maggie bowed her head. “What you’re saying is you don’t think this is ever going to end. It’s never going to go back to the way it was.”
“No,” he said, folding her into his arms when she started to cry.
Technically, Kath’s watch shift ended hours ago. A second night on her feet, she ought to be exhausted. But her nerves were wired, her skin itched. She set off for a circuit around the barricade. Still had the shotgun slung over her shoulder, shells hanging in her pocket.
She hadn’t gotten a quarter of the way around when she spotted Melanie standing at the barricade, looking out at the sun-baked plain.
“You okay?” Kath asked cautiously.
“Would it sound weird if I said that was kind of fun? Good trauma practice, you know? Nice, thinking I actually helped save someone.”
Kath stepped forward, well into her space, and kissed her. Jangling nerves stilled. Melanie pulled back, surprised, glancing around to see if anyone was watching.
“We’re not being discreet anymore?”
Kath shook her head. “I told Maggie. She was freaked out that I was going to get knocked up.”
She laughed, hugging Kath close. “That woman needs to chill the hell out.”
“Yeah. But I don’t know. She’s the one holding all this together.”
They walked on for a while, arms around each other. The sun felt warm this morning instead of scorching. Kath finally felt ready to lie down for a nap.
Looking ahead, along the junkyard edge of the barricade, Melanie asked, “Where would you be now? If none of this had happened?”
She wouldn’t be in Melanie’s arms, for one. That was a weird thought, that if none of this had happened she wouldn’t have Melanie. And that would be a shame. She rested her head on her shoulder and sighed.
“It doesn’t matter. This is where I am.”
About the Author
Carrie Vaughn is best known for her New York Times bestselling series of novels about a werewolf named Kitty who hosts a talk
radio show for the supernaturally disadvantaged. Her latest novels include a near-Earth space opera, Martians Abroad, from Tor Books, and a post-apocalyptic murder mystery, Bannerless, from John Joseph Adams Books. The sequel, The Wild Dead, will be out in 2018. She’s written several other contemporary fantasy and young adult novels, as well as upwards of 80 short stories, two of which have been finalists for the Hugo Award. She’s a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared world superhero books edited by George R. R. Martin and a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop. An Air Force brat, she survived her nomadic childhood and managed to put down roots in Boulder, Colorado. Visit her at www.carrievaughn.com, or sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 by Carrie Vaughn
Art copyright © 2018 by Jon Foster