“Can you stop it?”
“Impossible.” Slow it some, yes, but I can’t stop it. An arm, a leg, we can work with. A neck wound? Good lord.”
In a tunnel of icy tension, Abel nearly collided with the rear steel bumper plate of the truck when it bucked to a stop at the edge of the abandoned village Graceville. Max sprinted back to talk as Abel rolled the window down.
“Abel, 28 east of here is doable, I think,” the driver of the truck said in an excited rush.
“There’s not so much ash under the snow out here. I can cut through it a bit with this plow blade.”
The doctor roared from the back seat of the car: “Max, put the pedal down. Do everything you can. We need speed, man. Go. Go!”
Route 28 presented a desolate snow-swept flat eastbound, but Max kept the fleet rolling. Pelee slipped down the black well of shock. Doctor Ruckelshaus touched a finger to her eye and received no response in return; the eye was fixed, rigid and unblinking. Her skin, the color of rotten hardpack snow, was cold to the touch. Tiny sweat beads broke out from her facial pores. Her pulse was shallow and picking up tempo.
“We’ve got to go, man, we’ve got to do better,” Art yelled.
“What’s the matter?”
“I’ve got tachycardia.”
“Heart rate?”
“Yeah, yeah, fast. Getting faster.”
“What can you do?”
“We need plasma, soon.”
Ruckelshaus applied as much pressure as he dared to the neck wounds, but she was slipping away. Death sought to infiltrate the automobile, slip in under the old molding or squeeze through the air intake, but the doctor fought it off.
“Where are we, Abel?”
“Chokio. Max has picked up the pace.”
“When we get to the hospital, pull up to the ER door, okay? Drive right through it if you have to.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Get an IV into your daughter. We’ll have seconds when we get there, I hope. You grab somebody, anyone. Drag them kicking and screaming if you have to. Tell them to get a bag of plasma to the car. We’ll start a needle right here. Never mind a transfer first thing. She needs fluids. Then we can think about getting her into the place.”
Inside the Morris town limits, there were few tire ruts in the snow and the streets had not been plowed. University Hospital sat on Sutter Hill above town. Max rammed snow and ash out of the way as he willed his plow truck into the hospital lots. Abel swung the car around the plow, bounced over a curb and brought the vehicle to a halt before sliding doors. From the rear seat, Ruckelshaus glowered at the doors. The interior foyer was not illuminated. No one was standing at the ready with a gurney, an IV pole, anything.
“Get in there,” the doctor yelled from the back seat, even as Abel was out of the car.
Expecting the doors to part automatically, Abel slammed into the glass and bounced back. He tried wedging the doors apart with his hands but failed.
“Never mind,” screamed the blood-drenched physician in the car. “Ram the damn doors. Use the car.”
Talons of panic slicing into his hide, Abel wrenched the car’s transmission into gear and punched the throttle. Safety glass in the sliding doors exploded into fractured beads as the metal frames buckled under the impact of the car’s grill. A shriek from a female human voice spun up through the ruined entrance. “What are you doing? What are you doing?”
A heavy-set figure in the gloomy interior curled into a ball of self-protection as Abel vaulted through the doors toward the only person on the floor.
“IV, we need IV plasma, now. Now!” Abel shouted. “My daughter is dying.”
The woman, dressed in a winter coat, trembled and croaked, “There’s no doctor here.”
Abel was incredulous. “What? Look, there’s a doctor in the car with my daughter.”
“They’ve all gone to St. Cloud.
“Never mind,” Abel scoffed. “Where’s the plasma? Didn’t anyone call?”
“Everything has been shipped out to Regional.”
Bellowing now: “Plasma, woman. Get it!”
“I can’t. The hospital is shut down.”
From the car, the doctor yelled for Abel to come to the back of the vehicle. He instructed Abel to take his place with his daughter and to apply pressure to the makeshift bandages. Art bolted from the back seat, emerging slick with blood from his neck to his feet.
“Oh, sweet Jesus,” the woman on duty squealed with fear at the sight of gore smeared down the doctor’s raiment.
The physician grabbed the employee with both hands, buried his face into hers and commanded, “Show me where you store plasma.”
“You don’t understand.” Tears erupted from the woman’s face.
“I’ve got a dying child back there,” the doctor screamed in a bald rage, spittle flying.
“You don’t understand, for heaven’s sake,” the lady wailed.
“What don’t I understand?”
“Everything has been moved out. Emergency orders. The drugs, the machines, all gone weeks ago.”
“Where is it, woman?”
“At St. Cloud Regional.”
“No, not St. Cloud.” The doctor seemed to shrink before the stark revelation.
“UH is closed. So are most of the outlying facilities in the state.
“You have no plasma, no nothing?”
“No.”
“That’s another hour out. We don’t have one minute.”
It was no small miracle that Pelee reached Morris alive, the community doctor knew. A ten-year-old bleeding profusely could tolerate the loss of a few pints, maybe. Anything more and there would be precious little for the heart to pump. Blood pressure would drop drastically. Blood supply to the cells would virtually cease, bringing on a cascade of organ failure.
Pelee lay limp in her father’s arms. Abel could not detect the rise and fall of her chest nor feel air moving in and out of her mouth. There was no fanfare to it, no Hollywood theatrics. Stealthy death quietly shut the child away from the living, leaving a small gangly body to quicken no more.
Abel needn’t hail a coroner to pronounce the end. Through the skin of his sticky, soaking hands, he could feel the last of it, fragile life, tumble from his grip and fall down to nothing.
At once, a swollen lake of tension and terror breached its confinement, tearing away Abel’s defenses. A deluge of emotional darkness struck him a brutal blow, engulfing him. He gasped, drowning, desperate to suck down air. His lungs full, he coughed out his daughter’s name, a howl rising, agony swimming in the sound waves, a tone so mournful as to skitter and spark like electric current along the vertebrae of every wounded passenger in the little car fleet.
The shout of despair ebbed, pulling with it every ounce of energy remaining. Abel sat languid in congealing blood, moist and still. The muscles below the wet surface of his face drooped, his jowls fell, hound-like, and years of age advanced and metastasized to the skin. The doctor, leaning into the car to make certain for himself what Abel already knew, recoiled from the ghastly look of the vibrant man he had known well for nearly a decade.
“She’s gone, Abel. You did well by her,” whispered the doctor.
“I did nothing.” He could manage a listless puff.
“I have to get the others some treatment.”
“Yes, of course.”
“We’re going to make the trip to St. Cloud. Will you come? They can help you with your daughter.”
Abel finally looked up at the doctor. “No, Jim.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I want to take my daughter home.”
“I see. I’ll have one of our folks drive you back.”
“Yes, that would be good. I want to wash my daughter. I want to wash her clean. She has to be clean. Has to be.”