Her voice flat, Winnie mumbled a last few words over the new, cold liquid grave. “Understand? Now do you understand?”
Chapter Ninety-Two
Leaning over the aged maple podium, Abel beheld a sea of hands. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to air an idea about how to bridge the looming calorie gap he had spoken about. It was heartening. Always, whenever the community faced a hurdle, dozens of people came forward with suggestions and with offers of help. He pointed to a woman waving with urgency among the sea of faces.
“Yes, Betsy, you have the floor.”
As the mother of a new Independency citizen stood to address the crowd, Pelee, standing at an east window at the back of the room, erupted with a shrill screech: “Winnie.”
The instant Pelee squealed, staccato explosions sounded. At the podium, Abel stood suspended; time ceased to move forward altogether. The crowd appeared riveted to the chairs they occupied, frozen in place as the atmosphere around them spun in a vortex of violence. Then came a shout from somewhere beyond the doors at the rear of the room. “Get down, get down!”
Standing at the east window, young Pelee watched figures run before her, turn and strike poses facing the building. A heavy-framed man held something lengthy in his hands. As his arms lifted the object, Pelee was horrified to see that it was a firearm of sorts, something she had seen only a handful of times during her young life.
Pelee’s call was greeted with a volley of shots toward her position, standing at the glass. One of several rounds caught the child in the neck, the bullet entering in muscle and flesh but missing the carotid artery and the third cervical vertebrae. Missing the vital structures, the bullet still savaged tissues as it passed through the body at supersonic speed. The impact instantly dropped the child’s body in a disfigured heap near the dining hall entrance doors.
Two gunmen cut a swath with shots across the entire span of the building before Winnie could get into a position to use her weapon. Bullets grazed four townsfolk as they struggled to find safety. A fifth person fell with a shallow shot across the abdomen, the bullet acting like a scalpel, zipping open the supporting skin and muscle tissue and permitting the intestines to protrude like wet rope.
One of the community’s registered nurses reacted to the explosive reports by bolting straight up from her seat into the path of a round. It entered beneath the cheekbone, destroyed the palate and sinuses and sent rippling fractures through the skull. She collapsed with just seconds to live.
Another shot found the father of two, struck as he tried to force his wife and children to the floor, the bullet severing the man’s spine. Dead the instant he was hit, he crashed down onto his family, pinning them below the mayhem.
Infinite silence followed the gunfire, swallowing the congregation for several heartbeats, only to disintegrate as moans, screams and shouts rocketed off the floor. Last to dive to the maple flooring, Abel was one of the first to push into the crowd to assist. He reached the nurse, sprawled in a circular and expanding pool of blood, took her wrist and tried, unsuccessfully, to find a pulse. He spat on his hand, wiped the saliva on his ear and placed it next to the remains of the woman’s mouth and nose to try to see if she was exhaling air. Gurgling was the only sign of life.
Bobcat yelled out, frantic to locate the community doctor. Abel went to Bobcat’s aid and found his friend pressing the spilled guts of a victim back into the abdomen. “Where’s doc?” blurted Bobcat. “We’ve got to sew up him up right away.”
A single shot outside the building brought another wave of screaming, but the shot was not followed by a second. The room emptied of most of the town’s citizens, many running to the basement, others to the second floor. Few dared venture outside. At the back of the room, Abel recognized community physician Arthur Ruckelshaus. The doctor was leaning over a small figure on the floor, tearing at his shirt, ripping strips of cloth away and wadding the material. Abel left Bobcat and jumped over fallen chairs to get to the back of the room. He came down on his knees next to the doctor, and pleaded for him to help with the injured man at the middle of the hall.
“It’s your daughter, Abel,” spat the doctor, working frantically.
Abel glared at the waif sprawled in a lake of blood on the floor.
“No, no!” he yodeled to the ceiling. “This can’t be happening.”
The doctor pushed cloth into a great open wound at the back of the neck, and plugged a tiny hole around the opposite side.
“She’s bleeding out, Abel. I’ve got to stop this or I’m going to lose her.”
Abel hands trembled. He stammered, stuttered. “What, what, can I do, ah, what? I’ve got to do something.”
“Get Max to plow us out to Morris.”
Through the community center Abel sprinted, screaming the name of Max, the man who managed the production facilities and maintained the fleet of restored cars at the Beaver Den. Max bounded down the steps from the second floor and caught Abel as he raced for the basement stairs.
“What is it?
“Get the plow out!”
“What?”
“We’ve got injured. Let’s go.”
Max held the Abel at an arm’s length. “Abel, we can’t plow that crap out there.”
“Damn it, man, make it happen. I don’t care how,” Abel bellowed.
Fronted by a dump truck, outfitted with chains and a steel V-blade plow and heavily weighted down with a load of wet earth, a convoy of three automobiles edged into the lot before the CC. The most seriously injured were ferried from the building to the vehicles and stretched out in the back seat of each. Abel insisted on driving one of the cars while the doctor worked to stabilize his daughter. The community figurehead was scattered. He needed something concrete to focus on.
The doctor fashioned a backboard from a cupboard door ripped from the kitchen and tucked folds of linen tablecloth on each side of Pelee’s head. Slowly six volunteers moved the child to the first car in line behind the truck. As they loaded the little figure into the back seat, the doctor gave the six instructions.
“Have Bobcat get in touch with University Hospital any way he can. Tell them to have IV plasma at the ready and to scrub up for surgery. Now, there are two dead inside. Remove them to the kitchen, please, clean them with care and wrap them in cloth. Strap them down to something, anything. Put the bodies in the cold foyer, please.”
Ants in a line, the vehicles threaded the narrow two-mile access lane out to Rural 7. Against the burden of ash and new snow, the plow labored at a snail’s pace. They could get to Graceville on Route 28, Max guessed, since he and a crew had slashed a single lane out through the ash to that hamlet a week earlier to gain access to Chamberlain Lumber for a load of sawdust for the town’s powerplant. But east of Graceville, the driver of the truck feared, the convoy would bog down.
In the forward car, the community physician had little to bring to bear against the grievous wound in Pelee’s neck. Abel, glancing incessantly into the rear view mirror, watched Art Ruckelshaus raise the child’s legs and prop them up higher than the body. He covered her with his jacket and told Abel to turn up the car’s heat fully. The general practitioner applied sustained pressure to the neck wound for a minute then relaxed. This he repeated over and over in the hopes that the pressure would encourage clotting in minor blood vessels and slow the loss of blood.
“You’ve got to go faster, Abel,” the doctor ordered. “She’s losing too much blood.”