The screaming died down and turned to anguished sobbing. The few adults were spread thin but tried their best to comfort the several dozen children and teenagers.
Kamiyo’s first destination was the spot where he’d seen Carrie-Anne bleeding from her neck. She was still lying up against the same tree, but now she was dead. Two blonde boys leant over her body and sobbed quietly. Kamiyo stayed back rather than interrupt their grief.
The unforgiving part of himself flared and tried to place blame for not helping the woman earlier, but the rational part of him knew the woman had never stood a chance—not without immediate modern medical intervention. He had known it earlier, which was why he chose to help the young man flailing in the water. After four years in a hospital, triage became an innate skill, and most doctors knew within a single second who to save and who to let die. You helped whoever possessed the most chance of surviving, which sounded counter-intuitive, but the reality was if you tried to help the person closest to death, you only wasted time better spent on someone else with more time to spare. Carrie-Anne had provided the death in exchange for the drowning man’s life.
There were still other people who needed his help. Kamiyo knew this because he could hear their plaintive cries. People crammed the clearing around the campfire, rushing around while paying little attention to what was in front of them. It made searching out the injured difficult. Five minutes passed before he spotted a child in need of help.
The young lad was sitting on the wooden planks leading up to the cabin. He wasn’t crying out in pain, but the angle of his lower arm was grotesque. Despite the hideous injury, the boy stared off into the distance as if lost in a daydream.
Or a nightmare full of demons.
“Hey,” said Kamiyo, approaching the boy carefully. “I’m Dr Kamiyo. You’re hurt, and I want to help.”
The boy gave no response, but his eyes flicked to the side, watching Kamiyo’s arrival.
Kamiyo put both hands up in peace. “A terrible thing has happened, but it’s over now. You’re safe. I think your wrist is broken though, so I’d like to take a look at it.” The boy sighed but sat back to let Kamiyo look at his arm. It was as if he had no interest at all. Unsettling, because a broken wrist should be immensely painful. “Does it hurt?” Kamiyo probed the wrist lightly. Without the luxury of an x-ray machine, it was hard to be sure, but it felt like the ulna had snapped. The bone hadn’t broken the skin, which was a blessing because the resulting infection might have been deadly in these conditions. “I have to say, you are one very brave boy. What’s your name?”
“Nathan.”
“How old are you, Nathan?”
“Fourteen.”
“You want to talk about what happened to your arm?”
“Monsters,” he said, still staring off at the lake. “One of them grabbed me. I tried to get away, but my arm twisted. Then that man came with his hammer and smashed the thing to pieces.”
Kamiyo glanced at the man with the hammer, sitting down now and staring into the fire. His heavy hammer lay on the grass beside him. Kamiyo looked back at Nathan. “One of the bones in your wrist is broken, but we’ll get you sorted out, okay? What we need to do is find something we can use as a splint to keep the broken bones in place while they heal. Good thing is, bones grow back even stronger after they’ve broken.”
Nathan blinked languidly, possibly in shock. Unsurprising, as everyone was likely suffering various levels of psychological trauma.
“Nathan, you wait right here, okay? I’ll find something I can use for the splint.” Kamiyo headed away but didn’t need to go far. His eyes fell upon the pile of weapons Jackie had been handing out during the fight. It lay depleted now, but he found a perfectly sized wooden stake right near the top. At first, his mind conjured images of vampires in the forest, but when he found two more matching stakes, he realised it was a set of cricket stumps. He left the two spares and took the other to Nathan. The remaining problem was how to secure it to the boy’s arm, but he resolved the issue quickly by using the child’s boot laces. “We need your arm to heal more than we need your boots to stay on,” he said with a smile. Nathan nodded blankly, not even reacting to the sound of a young girl shrieking nearby.
A few minutes later and the splint was held firmly in place. As long as the boy kept his wrist out of harm’s way, he had a good chance of healing well. “Do you want me to get anybody, Nathan?”
He shook his head.
“Okay, well, you stay here and rest. I’ll go see if anybody else needs my help.” He stepped away from the boy, still unsettled by the lack of emotion. Was it a psychotic break? Tonight, Nathan had learned that monsters were real.
Kamiyo sought more people in need, but again it was hard to see past the rushing bodies. He spotted Jackie and made eye-contact with her as she followed Steven and Eric into the cabin, carrying the young man from the lake. They shared a brief nod, but Kamiyo left them to their business.
“Help me! What’s happening?”
Kamiyo turned to see a woman rushing towards him; although truthfully, he was just in her way. He reached out and caught her in his arms, then held her until she stopped struggling. “It’s okay. It’s okay. I’m a doctor. Do you need help?”
“I… Who? What is happening?”
“Demons attacked the camp, but it’s okay. They’ve been dealt with, you’re safe.”
“W-We were attacked?” The woman calmed herself a little, loosening enough that Kamiyo dared release her. She didn’t run off, or try to fight him, but she seemed disorientated. He recognised her.
“Is… Is your name Carol?”
The woman
