wheel, swerved the ambulance toward the runty trees. It lumbered off the road between saplings; then it rattled to a stop, and she backed it up.
Pines pressed the crumbling little town, and through them, the wind carried a faint scent of rain. The sky brooded, barely suppressing thunder.
Mumbling and sweating, Siggy peered through the hatch window. Doris tried to look over his few long wisps of sweaty hair, got a whiff of breath like dead mice and drew back hastily.
“It’s all right, Sig.” She inhaled thinly. “We can handle these folks.”
Trembling, he tried to grin. His teeth were yellow and ground to nubs, as though his diet consisted entirely of birdseed. “They, uh, a couple of them have got guns.” His voice seemed to come from somewhere around his knees.
“You can wait in the rig.” She pushed him aside and shoved the hatch open. Vaulting down, she moved toward the crowd, Larry and Athena close behind her. Athena lugged the first-aid kit.
The cluster of pineys fell silent, still refusing to make way, and several glared openly at Athena’s limp. Doris shouldered her way in.
Larry stared. These people had to be the worst he’d ever seen—some of the men held shotguns, muzzles low to the ground, and two sharp-ribbed dogs skirted the group. He followed Athena’s slender form as it wended fearlessly through the small crowd.
A woman in a filthy black dress got in front of him, and mumbling an apology, he tried to ease past her, unable to keep from staring at her plastic brooch: a Christmas tree, sparkles mostly gone. Her hollowed face pressed toward him, glaring with rheumy eyes, and he found himself holding his breath.
An adolescent boy lay stretched out in the bloody sand, the crowd poking and prodding.
“Don’t touch him!” shouted Doris. “Siggy! Where’s that stretcher?”
Larry glanced back to where Siggy cowered in the rig. “I’ll get it, Doris,” he said and plunged back into the crowd.
Thunder rumbled, and the wind blew harder. The crowd made a murmuring noise, and as Doris and Athena knelt on either side of the injured boy, one of the dogs began to howl.
The boy’s right hand had been shattered into burned fragments.
“Very shocky.” Athena checked his pulse. “Lost a lot of blood.”
“More than he should have.”
The crowd grew louder with angry mutterings.
A shotgun leveled. “Whatchyou doin’ to that boy?”
“Throw the kid in the rig,” Doris whispered. “Be ready to run.” She stood up, smiling. “Are you the father?”
“Whatchyou doin’?” he slurred. “Whatsat frizzy-haired bitch doin’ to him?”
Her smile never wavered. “Are you the boy’s father?” she repeated, making eye contact.
“I might be. Maybe. I could be.” Alcohol fumes belched from the toothless face. “No.”
Doris spotted a car about thirty yards away, another shotgun sticking out of it. She squared her shoulders.
Larry ran back with the collapsed stretcher under his arm, then stood gaping at the guns.
Athena beckoned him over. While they lifted the boy, she kept one eye on the crowd.
“Isn’t anyone here related to him?”
Siggy clucked in fussy circles around the stretcher. “They could kill us all and bury us out here and nobody’d ever know.”
“Get to work, Sig,” Athena told him. The glowering sky made her nervous. “Anyway, what makes you think they’d bury us? They look more like they’d eat us.”
Larry barked a laugh.
She glanced back—their squad captain still spoke to the man with the shotgun, pacifying, politicking.
Larry wrapped bandages around the boy’s hand, and Siggy had begun fiddling with an IV unit.
“Sig, I heard Doris tell you about that twice already. You set up that I V, and the hospital won’t even want to admit him.” She turned away in disgust. “We’re going to have trouble enough if she can’t find a relative.”
With a movement both clumsy and graceful, she jumped down from the back of the rig and stood in the road. Sand blowing in her face, she craned her neck to watch gray violence gather in the sky. “Doris, we’ve got to move,” she called. Shielding her eyes from flying grit, she climbed back into the driver’s seat. From one of the sagging structures, an infant wailed, but none of the people in the road responded, and the ocean sound of wind in the pines pooled and eddied around the clearing.
The motor idled.
Doris clambered into the back of the rig, slamming the doors. “Take us out, honey.” Siggy sighed loudly as they lurched away, bouncing over a rut with a jarring thud.
“Nobody admits to being the boy’s family,” Doris told them. “Or to making the call. Christ. Guess they’re all afraid of getting stuck with a hospital bill. How you making out, Sig? I looked all over the place but couldn’t find the fingers.” She laughed. “Maybe one of the dogs ate them.” Siggy held sterile compresses over the mangled stumps where the boy’s index and middle fingers had been, and she passed him more bandages. “It’s still coming out. Here, Larry,” she said, “push down hard on the wrist, try to slow the flow.”
Siggy wrapped another triangular bandage around the hand, and they all swayed as the rig swerved onto the highway. Struggling to keep his balance, Larry pressed his palm on the boy’s wrist.
“Harder.”
He could feel the pulse as liquid tried to squirt through.
“Hell.” Doris went after the brachial artery in the upper arm with her fingers.
Siggy wrapped the pressure bandage tighter. “Uh…Doris…it’s still not clotting.” The fresh gauze was already saturated, and their fingers were wet with the warm fluid.
“Christ, this kid’s a regular fire hose, got to be a bleeder. You know how to do a tourniquet?”
Larry hesitated. “I thought I wasn’t supposed to…Could lose the arm that way, couldn’t he?”
“Look at it this way—it’ll sure cure him of sucking his thumb.”
To show he wasn’t shocked, he laughed and with trembling fingers felt around in the kit for a length of rubber tubing. Wrapping the cord around the boy’s forearm, he jerked it tight, tighter, crushing blood vessels and tissue. The blood gave a strong spurt and then slowed to a darker ooze, finally stopping. The skin of the arm turned waxy, and the boy grunted in agony. His breathing evened out slightly.
“What do you think, Sig?” Doris winked. “I for one think he’s going to work out fine.” She beamed at Larry, now almost as white as the boy. “We get lots of fingers blown off around this time of year,” she went on. “Goddamn homemade fireworks. Usually they can be reattached—we put them in saline solution. See these? We had a couple of kids in here on the Fourth—half a dozen little jars.”
Larry shook a bit, the aftermath of the adrenaline rush. “H-How can you tell whose finger is whose?”
She gave him a big smile. “It helps if they wear signet rings.”
“Shut up, Doris,” groaned Athena. “You’ll be making him sick in a minute.”
She snickered. “How we doing, ’Thena-honey?”
“May beat the storm.”
“Which way we heading?”
“Out the pike to the Med Center,” Athena called over her shoulder. “Probably the fastest.”
“Right.”
Siggy made a clucking sound. “Uh, I thought you told me they, uh, didn’t want us there…anymore.”
No one paid any attention to him, and the knocking in the engine grew louder.
Lumbering on the highway ahead, an overloaded vegetable truck emitted smoke as black as the sky. Two
