She wasn’t going to thank us for touching that with hot water.
“Ready for your pain medication?” Marlon asked at that moment, as if he’d had the exact same thought as I did.
“I’ve been ready for hours,” she joked.
Marlon turned away to a cupboard and came back a moment later with several syringes. He held up one, then the others.
“Morphine,” he said with the first. “Lidocaine,” he said with the second two. “I’m going to give you quite a dose of morphine to control the overall pain, though I don’t have the equipment or the ability to put you out completely. I wouldn’t, regardless, because I wouldn’t be able to monitor your heart rate while you were asleep. Too dangerous. But I’m going to give you enough that I hope it will at least dull the pain. The lidocaine will numb the area around the wound. Extra insurance, you might say.”
I saw Angie pale for a moment, but then she gave him a brave nod. “Fair enough. Do whatever you can, Doc, and I’ll manage through the rest.”
He gave her an admiring look, and I moved to take her hand.
“I’ll be right here,” I whispered.
When she looked up, I saw nothing but trust and love in her eyes. “I know,” she whispered back. “Just make sure it’s quick, eh? I don’t think we’re going to have time to hang out and party here for long.”
I cracked a grin at that, then looked up at Marlon and nodded, giving him all the permission he needed to get started with this haphazard, done-by-daylight operation. I didn’t think it was going to be easy. But I agreed with Angie on one thing: It needed to be quick.
I hadn’t forgotten the men who would be coming after us.
The operation was done, Angie resting in semi-consciousness on the table. She’d done her best not to scream when we set her leg, but that hadn’t fooled anyone, and I thought Marlon and I both understood how much it had hurt her.
We’d worked as quickly as we could. And now her leg was set and her wounds cleaned and stitched.
“It’ll still take her awhile to heal,” he said quietly. “Months for the bone to knit, and that’s only if we can get her to a hospital where they can put her on the right medication to help her. But we got to her before any of the tissue died, and being out in the cold actually helped you. Stopped the bleeding, kept everything… well, alive,” he finished somewhat lamely.
He turned to start strapping the splint back onto her leg. We’d left that until last, wanting to give her a chance to recover. But we couldn’t afford to leave it off for too long. Her leg needed that support.
“You had this in your supplies?” he asked as he worked. “That was surprisingly thorough planning. What exactly were you planning to do out there in the woods?”
“Certainly not get attacked by a bear,” I replied. “It wasn’t ours. Belonged to a guy who strapped her up with it and then tried to kill me. Him and his cousins. Found out who Angie was and thought they could keep her for some sort of leverage with Ellis Woods. I didn’t exactly figure into that plan.”
Marlon frowned and looked up at me, pausing in his work. “How long ago did this happen?”
I tried to figure out how many days had passed. We’d slept one night at Randall’s cabin, and that was it. Then we’d left… and Marlon had found us, which brought us to this point. Had that only been last night that we slept at Randall’s? And this morning that I’d fought with him and his cousins? It seemed impossible, but it was also the only accounting I could come up with.
But that brought up an entirely different problem: How much information could I trust Marlon with? Yes, he was a stranger, and I wasn’t necessarily fond of those—especially after what had happened with Randall.
At the same time, my instincts were telling me that we could trust him. That he was friend rather than foe. That he was some sort of military—and that it made him a known entity. Even if he wasn’t actually. Those instincts hadn’t lied to me about what Randall and his cousins were up to. In fact, those instincts had saved our lives. Or at least mine. And I decided to trust them again right now.
“We were attacked yesterday,” I said. “The EMP, it made the animals in the woods go crazy and we tried to get back to our truck, to get the hell out of the forest and figure out what was going on. When we got to the truck, we found a bear in our supplies. Instead of getting scared off, it attacked us. I got Angie into the truck, but then it wouldn’t start. And the phones wouldn’t work. Finally decided that I had to strike out on foot. That was when we found a deserted cabin. Eventually this guy showed up, acting very weird but offering to help, and I knew we didn’t have any choice. When I overheard that he and his cousins were going to try to use Angie as leverage, though… Well, I wasn’t going to just sit around and let it happen.”
“Why would they try to use her as leverage?” he asked.
“She’s the niece of the mayor of Ellis Woods. Evidently they have a problem with the mayor. With the town. Thought they could use her to alleviate their problem.”
At this, Marlon’s face cleared. “This guy… did he look like an angry bear in human skin? Glowering? Dark?”
Angie shivered. “Sounds about right.”
It was right. That described Randall exactly. Which seemed odd—unless Marlon had also had some run-in with the man.
Marlon continued wrapping up Angie’s leg. “Did you find out his name? The man I’m thinking of is named Randall.”
I nodded and caught Angie doing the same. “That’s the man,” I said. “Evil son of a bitch.”
“Okay, well, then this would be the splint I put on his wife.”
Everything around me stopped. I’d seen that entire cabin, and I hadn’t seen anything that indicated there was a woman there. Or that there’d ever been a woman there. “He has a wife?”
“Had. She died on the table two days later from… something that should not have been in her system. A toxin. That was five years ago.”
He looked away, as though trying to escape the memory, and I exchanged a wide-eyed look with Angie. More and more curious.
Marlon finished strapping the splint back onto Angie’s leg and then looked up at me, his face deadly serious.
“John, mind if I have a word with you? Angie here is going to need to rest for a little while before we can move her. That was quite an ordeal.”
I cast a glance at my wife, saw that he was right about her needing the rest—her eyes were already drifting closed—and nodded. “Lead the way.”
A moment later, we were standing outside of the operating theater, on the other side of a not-quite-closed door. Marlon looked up at me with serious eyes.
“We’ve done the best we can for her, I’m afraid,” he started. “She won’t be able to walk. Or rather… She will, but it will be slow. Incredibly painful. Wherever you’re going, it won’t be quick unless you build her another sled. And even then, you’ll have to pull it, which will slow you down. There’s no way around that. If you’re planning to move on, that’s your option. I would offer you my truck, but as you can imagine, it’s out of commission. I don’t have any vehicle that actually works. Not right now.”
“I hadn’t expected any vehicle,” I assured him. “I knew that would be a long shot with the EMP. We’ll have to go on foot. We can’t stay here. We have a daughter in Ellis Woods—one that needs us. We have to move on as soon as Angie is able to go.”