The Saffron Malformation (54 page)

             
Quey shook his head and sighed.  “You want the truth?” Quey asked, exhausted as he sank down in his seat.

             
Arnie glanced over at him and nodded, “Yeah.”

             
“In love… no.  We had a time together and in it I developed a fondness, no denying that, and maybe some other where or some other when that would have grown into being ‘in love,’ but it never got the chance in this when and where.”  Arnie swallowed hard before Quey went on.  “It took with you,” he conceded.  “It took with you and though I’ll always have a shine for her it’ll never be that, what it is for you and her.”  He sighed.  “All I can assure you on is that I have no intention toward bedding or wedding her.  But I do mean to look to her and after her as best I can until I can’t no more, whether it’s due to the passing of my life or her wanting for it.”

             
Arnie looked over at him, took a deep breath and nodded.  “I’m glad we’re with you,” Arnie said.  “And not just cause we’d be dead by now if we weren’t.”

             
Quey chuckled.  His head was soupy and he wanted to sleep.  Sleep sounded good but he knew it was bad.  “I don’t know,” he said then muttered some nonsense and passed out.

             
The car was a tomb.  Rachel stared out the window at the landscape whipping past.  Feeling had begun to creep back into her and the pain from her burns was nearly unbearable but she wouldn’t let it be known.  Besides, right about now she rather liked the physical pain.  It was easier to deal with than the other kind that was threatening to crumble her into a pile of uselessness.

             
Leone curled up against Rain in the back seat and talked to her.  She was pale, more so than usual, Reggie could see as he glanced into the rear view mirror.  The wound was bad and there was a lot of blood.  She was going to die.

             
“And there was…” Leone trailed off and glanced at the two people in the front seat.

             
“What?” Rain asked dully.

             
“Nothing,” he replied.

             
“Hey,” Reggie said and Leone looked at him.  “We’re not here, kay buddy.  You tell her everything you want her to know.”

             
Rachel shot him a look.  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ it asked and he added, “Just talk to her.  It helps.”

             
The boy looked at his sister who might as well have been his mother and started talking again.  He told her about a girl he liked.  A girl who reminded him of her.  A girl who had kissed him.  A girl he’d never see again.

             
Rain smiled and said, “That’s good.”  She ruffled his hair weakly.  “Not the never seeing again but, you know… the rest of it.”

             
Reggie had seen this in the war.  He’d ridden in two vehicles carrying friends with wounds like this.  Both had died and both had been going to a place with doctors, not medical school drop outs.

             
“Viona!” the boy shouted from the back seat and Rachel turned around in her seat.  She watched the boy scream in her face, blind with panic.  “Viney, wake up.  Wake up Viney,” he begged repeatedly until he grew angry.  He wasn’t sure why he was mad, just that he was and so he slapped her and that brought her around just enough.  She looked at him.

             
“Okay,” he said through tears.  “Please don’t leave me,” he pleaded through a wall of sobs.  “I couldn’t have done it without you,” he told her and she touched his face.  He gripped her hand and looked in her eyes and spoke frantically.  “Okay, I couldn’t have done it without you, I’d have died without you and… and I’m sorry, okay, I’m sorry I blamed you for leaving and I’m sorry for the time I didn’t talk to you and I’m sorry you had to take care of me because without that-”

             
Rain sat up just a bit and gripped his mouth with her hand.  Rachel could see it was solid, her fingers pressing hard against his cheeks.

             
“Don’t you dare,” she said in a whisper.  “Anything else is fine but don’t you ever apologize for that.”

             
He nodded frantically and she let him go and slumped back in her seat.  He fell against her weeping.  “Don’t go,” he said.

             
“Listen to me,” she managed.  Leone settled into subtle sobs as he struggled to keep silent.  Rain was looking at Rachel, the color gone from her face, her eyes glassy and something behind them was fading but still she held the woman’s gaze.  When she spoke she was speaking to Rachel.  “No matter what, you stay with them,” she told Leone.  “Quey and Rachel, you stay with them you hear me? Don’t run off.”

             
Leone sat up and looked at her.  “What about Arnie?” he asked.  Rain kept Rachel’s gaze until she nodded and the truth she saw in her face allowed the girl in the back seat a sigh of relief.  “Arnie was for me,” Rain said, looking at Leone and touching his face again.  “He was good for me but Quey will be good for you.  What you need to get through this and stay alive,” she finished.  Her eyes drifted lazily and she looked at Rachel one last time, just to be sure.  Rachel reached out and touched Leone’s shoulder and she was.

             
Natalie was waiting for them out front of another cheap motel along the side of the road.  They didn’t have time to worry about being spotted at the moment.  The blue four door and the moving truck rolled into the parking lot and parked haphazardly in front of the room where Natalie was standing.  The doors flew open.  Quey hopped from his side of the truck and Natalie was checking him when he heard the commotion in the car.  Leone was sobbing wildly and Rachel was trying to calm him.  Reggie stepped from the car.  He glanced at Arnie but couldn’t keep his eyes there so he moved his gaze to Quey.  “She’s dead,” he said quietly but Arnie heard.

             
Quey felt his heart sink into freefall.  He watched Reggie and Rachel try to hold Arnie and Leone out of the way while Natalie leaned into the back seat to have a look at the girl.  Quey could see her, eyes closed, too pale, too much blood soaked into her shirt and the makeshift bandage they’d wrapped around her.  Far too much pooled in the back seat around her.  He smacked his wounded shoulder and sent a surge of pain shooting though him just to feel something that wasn’t this.

             
“She’s not dead,” Natalie said loudly.  Everyone stopped.  “But we need to get her inside now.”

             
They moved with purpose and without conversation.  Reggie and Arnie eased her out of the car and started for the door.  Quey ran to the door and opened it, holding it as they brought her inside.

             
“Table,” Natalie said.

             
It was a square breakfast table near the window and Arnie and Reggie set her down gently.  She was a small girl but her legs dangled off the end.  Quey noted there was a good deal of supplies around the room.

             
“Any chance you know her blood type?” Natalie asked.

             
“We’re the same,” Leone said.

             
“What is it?”

             
Leone shook his head and tried to remember but couldn’t.  “I don’t remember, just that we’re the same.”

             
“Go in the red bag.  Should be two packs of O neg,” she told Arnie, then looked at Leone.  “After that I might need you,” she told the boy and he nodded.

             
“Where’d you get this?” Quey asked.

             
“You really want to know right now?” Natalie asked him with a hard glance.

             
He dropped it and went to the corner where he sat and watched.  Rachel, it seemed, had a knack for nursing.  She wasn’t squeamish and she did everything Natalie asked with minimal instruction.  When Natalie gave Rain a dose of painkillers she gave one to Rachel as well.

             
“You let me know if you get soupy,” Nat told her.

             
“I’ll be fine,” Rachel replied.

             
The two of them worked like a machine digging into the hole in Rain’s gut, trying to locate and remove the bullet.  Arnie sat on the bed with his head in his hands and tears in his eyes.  Reggie stayed close to the table, doing whatever the ladies couldn’t on their own, mostly it involved grabbing the dangling overhead light and adjusting it so they could see better.

             
When the blood she’d brought was gone Natalie ran a tube from the vein in Leone’s arm to Rain’s.  Finally the bullet came out and Natalie set in to fixing the wound as best she could.  Luckily the days of stitching were over, they had a tissue bonding solution that could seal damage far worse than a bullet could cause.  It would remain tender until it actually healed, until the body grew closed again, but until then everything would be held tight.

             
Leone was pale and Natalie tried to separate him from Rain.  He gripped her hand.  “She needs more,” he said.

             
“You can’t,” Natalie said.  “She’s had all we can give her.”

             
“She needs more to be okay?” he asked and saw the answer in her face.  Taking the bullet out had been time consuming and time meant blood loss.  “Then I’ll give her more.”

             
“You can’t,” Natalie said firmly.

             
Leone looked at her desperately, his eyes shimmering but all his tears had fallen, a lifetime’s worth shed, it seemed, in a single day.  “Please,” he said weakly.

             
“Mom,” Amber said.  She’d been quiet the whole time, so quiet Quey’d forgotten she was there at all.

             
“Quiet,” Natalie said with a tinge of sharpness in her voice.

             
“Mom,” she repeated and Natalie gave her a glare.  She continued anyway.  “You know I’m O negative.”  The girl stood and went to Leone.  She looked at his eyes, red and puffy with dark circles around them, orbs of despair in a face drained of color and filled with fear.  He was a porcelain doll ready to shatter and she had a pillow on which he could fall.  “Let me,” she said to him.  “Let me help her.”

             
Leone thanked her with a look and nodded.

             
Natalie sighed and looked at her daughter.  They had a conversation without saying a word and in the end Natalie connected her daughter to Rain.

             
Leone stood and nearly collapsed, the only thing that saved him was Quey, who jumped to his feet and caught him, his shoulder screaming as he did.  They laid the boy on the bed and brought him some water; it was all they had to give him for the time being.

             
Natalie looked at Quey and asked, “How about we get that bullet out of you now.”

             
“Rachel first.”

             
Natalie looked at the burns running down the left side of Rachel’s body and said, “The worst is passed for her.  You need to be next.”

             
“Much obliged,” he replied warily.  There was no question in any of their minds that Quey was in a bad way, and that he would have sat by and let himself die before he would have taken Natalie’s attention from the rest of them.

             
Comparatively his wound was nothing.  She was able to remove the bullet in just a few minutes.  After that she sealed the wound and he went to the bed and collapsed beside Leone.

             
Rachel’s wounds were more time consuming.  They took to the bathroom where Natalie carefully separated the charred clothing from her flesh.  After that she dosed her with a bit more painkiller and took to pulling off the charred bits of skin before she washed and dressed the wounds.

             
“It’s going to be a while,” Natalie warned her and Rachel nodded.  “We’re going to need to change these at least twice a day.”

             
Tears filled Rachel’s eyes as she nodded again.  It wasn’t her wounds that had brought them.  It was that they didn’t have a bandage that would help her Dusty, who was even now starting to decay in the back of a moving truck.

              Quey woke sometime later with a start.  Leone was beside him and Rain was on the other side of the boy.  A deathbed built for three, he thought with a smile before blacking out again.

              Arnie and Reggie drove the truck and car two miles up the road to a diner and parked them around back.  Natalie had followed in the van she’d apparently stolen from a medical facility and the three returned together.

             
“We needed the supplies,” she told Reggie and Rachel, “And I didn’t have time to load them all into the car.  Besides, it never hurts to switch vehicles when people are looking for you.”