Southern Cross

by Jen Blood

  “I think Wyatt helped Casey get an abortion,” I said.

  Her eyebrows went up, eyes widening. “You just let me ramble about the cat brothers for ten minutes when that’s what you’re sitting on? Thanks a lot. What makes you think that?”

  “Timeline,” I said. “Mae said Barnel cut Wyatt off about six months ago, telling him he’d crossed a line he could never uncross. Danny said Casey missed the first month of school, which would have been around the same time… And Mae mentioned the whole thing about Wyatt going to talk to Casey’s father right about then.”

  “You really think he’d do that?”

  I’d been going over that in my head. I had a hard time imagining it—Wyatt and I were long-time friends, but our views on sex and marriage and everything in between couldn’t have been different. I glanced up front while I was thinking it over.

  Casey and Sophie were still talking, though it looked like their friendly chat wasn’t quite so friendly now. Sophie said something and Casey looked back toward me, her cheeks coloring when she realized I was watching them. She leaned in and said something more to Sophie, clearly pissed, and Sophie grabbed her arm as Casey started to leave. Solomon followed my gaze.

  “Looks like a cat fight’s about to break out,” she noted.

  I stood just as Casey pulled her arm free, turned on her heel, and started for the door. She stopped halfway there, as though she’d spotted someone outside. When she turned toward me, all the color had drained from her face. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end when I realized what she’d seen.

  “Diggs?” Solomon said.

  “Get down,” I said, my voice tight. Solomon just stared at me, forehead furrowed.

  “What?”

  “Now!”

  The glass in the restaurant’s front door exploded an instant later as a tan minivan tore through the front of the restaurant and came to a stop in the middle of the dining room. Screams filled the air. I dove for Solomon, pulling her from the booth to the floor, and covered her body with my own. There was a split second lapse in which everything went quiet, and I heard something small and metallic hit the floor. It rolled toward us.

  “Stay down,” I whispered in her ear, bracing myself.

  The world hung suspended for a tenth of a second before the first explosion rocked the building. The force pulled me up off the ground for an instant, but I kept my body curled around Solomon and held on. Two more blasts went off around us before the van itself exploded.

  I waited ten seconds, then fifteen, for something more to happen. The smoke alarm wailed; kids screamed. I still had my head down, my face pressed into Erin’s neck while she lay pinned beneath me, but I could feel the heat and hear flames surrounding us.

  “Diggs?” Solomon whispered to me.

  I lay there, frozen for an instant, before I recovered enough to speak. “I’m okay,” I said. I lifted my head and took stock of the situation before I let her up. The kitchen was ablaze, the rest of the restaurant filling with smoke. I stayed low, noting gashes on Solomon’s forehead and arm when she sat up.

  “Are you okay?” I shouted over the noise.

  She nodded. Her eyes were already huge, but they widened even further when she looked at me, her gaze lingering on my shoulder.

  “I’m okay,” I repeated.

  She shook her head. “You have a shard of glass above your shoulder blade.” She pulled out her cell phone and handed it to me. “Call for help, okay? Don’t take the glass out. Get whoever you can and get the hell out of here.”

  She scrambled away, toward the worst of the injured. I dialed 911 even though I was sure by this time the whole town had been alerted, and hung up when the dispatcher assured me that, yes, there was definitely someone on the way.

  Casey was kneeling beside Sophie, her eyes wide with shock, her face bloodied. The other girl lay twisted, unmoving on the floor. I crouched low and began to move as Solomon checked Sophie for a pulse.

  The minivan was engulfed in flames by now, the driver unrecognizable. Solomon ran to me and shouted over the noise.

  “We need to get people out—if the gas tank blows…”

  She didn’t need to complete that thought. I began with the little kids that had come in with their parents, their mother’s screams on a par with their own. The father lay on the floor, unconscious, his forehead bloodied. I picked up the bigger of the two kids, a boy maybe five years old.

  “We need to get outside,” I said to the woman. The left side of her face was burned, but not badly. The kids seemed relatively unscathed. She stared at me blankly, then shifted her focus back to her husband.

  “I’ll come back for him,” I said quickly. “You need to think about your kids right now—please.”

  I shepherded her and the kids outside to the parking lot, where emergency vehicles were already pulling in, then started back in for Solomon. A fireman stopped me, decked out in full gear. The back of the building was consumed with flames, every window in the place now broken.

  “We’ve got this—you hang back, let somebody check you out.”

  He motioned to a paramedic to come get me. I was about to dodge them and force my way back in when Solomon came out with Casey’s arm draped over her shoulder, half-dragging the girl to safety. I’d expected to find World War Three in the parking lot, but apart from a couple of broken windshields, the damage was confined to the DQ. Solomon left Casey with the medics, then returned to my side.

  “Come with me, okay?” she said. She took my hand and led me toward one of three ambulances. The medic looked at me, then back at the bodies still being pulled from the building. He was young—maybe twenty-one. Clearly out of his element.

  “I’m a certified EMT,” Solomon lied. At least I thought she was lying. She was just lying very, very well. “I can help you guys. You’ve got at least twenty injured in there; are you set up to handle that?” He shook his head, still looking dazed. “That’s what I figured. I can help triage. Are these your only rigs?”

  “Paducah’s sending more,” he said. “But they’re an hour away.”

  “Okay. Is there any kind of air evac unit coming?”

  The man who appeared to be in charge—a paunchy guy with a handlebar moustache—came over. “You’ll need to set down, ma’am,” he said to Solomon. “Somebody’ll get to you two as soon as they can.”

  “I’m fine,” she said impatiently. “You’ve got a guy in his forties in there with a head injury, and I wasn’t getting any breath sounds on his right side. Probable neumothorax. And there are at least five people still trapped in the kitchen. I can help with victims once you get them out here.”

  He looked torn for a split second before he nodded. “Yeah, okay.” He pointed to the second ambulance, which appeared abandoned. “Go on over there, just assess as people come out. Don’t do anything, you hear me? Just red tag the worst cases so we can get ‘em out of here.”

  “Got it,” she agreed. She led me to the second ambulance and made me sit on the back end while she snapped on latex gloves and checked me out. “I see you didn’t listen to me about pulling out the glass. You’re lucky you didn’t bleed out before you got out of there.”

  “It didn’t hit anything; it was just in my shoulder.”

  “Actually, it could’ve hit a few things,” she said grimly. “And knowing I was right wouldn’t have been that much comfort if you died.” She took a pair of scissors and cut my t-shirt down the back, carefully peeling it away from the wound.

  “You’ll need stitches,” she continued. “Are you up to date on your tetanus?”

  “Yeah,” I said “Got a booster last summer, remember?”

  “Right.” She put a compress to the wound, then took my left hand and guided it back to my shoulder. “Just hold it there, okay? Firm pressure, and stay still. When Juarez gets here, he can give you a ride to the hospital.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  A firefighter carried a teenage girl away from the building, heading toward us.
I watched from the sidelines as Solomon worked with another paramedic, setting the girl up with oxygen and checking her vitals. The fire had spread to the front of the building by now, and the parking lot looked like a scene from some war-torn country: people of all ages milling around, clearly in shock, their clothing torn and faces bloodied.

  One of the teenagers who’d been sitting behind us stood off to one side. The right side of his body had gotten the worst of the blast, his clothes and body burned, a deep gash down his right cheek. No one seemed to notice him, and Solomon was busy with three of the workers who’d just been pulled from the kitchen.

  I jogged over to the boy. He spun toward me in confusion.

  “Have you seen Reggie?” he asked. “I…” he trailed off, eyes welling. He was probably Danny’s age, maybe a little younger.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I’m just gonna take you over to get some help, okay?”

  He backed away when I tried to touch him, his voice tinged with hysteria. “Nah—my friend Reggie’s still in there. He’s got a piece of glass… They just left him in there. Somebody needs to help him. Please.”

  “What’s he look like?” I asked.

  “Red hair. He’s got a pierced lip. And a tattoo.”

  “Just hang here a second, okay?”

  I stopped one of the firefighters as he was walking past, lowering my voice. “Did you see a red headed kid in there—pierced lip. Tattoo?”

  “Reggie Bloom,” the firefighter said grimly. “He’s gone. Piece of glass severed his carotid. Bled out before we even got here.”

  The world blurred. Smoke made the air hazy, clouds roiling overhead. My stomach burned. I jogged back to the boy.

  “I told them to look for him,” I lied, figuring it was better than sending him into a tailspin while he was clearly in shock. “Everyone’s doing what they can. What’s your name?”

  He wiped his eyes. His hand came away bloody and he stared at it in confusion.

  “I’m Diggs,” I said when he didn’t answer. I still wasn’t touching him, but I’d managed to herd him toward safety.

  “Mike,” he said absently. “I’m Mike.”

  “Good to meet you, Mike. Listen, I’m gonna bring you over to get checked out, okay? Let’s let these guys do their jobs.”

  He let me lead him to Solomon. Just before we got there, he stopped and stared at me, eyes uncomprehending.

  “Why’d he do it?” he asked. He shook his head. “I don’t understand why anybody’d do a thing like this. I know he didn’t like us, but why’d anybody go and do this?”

  “He?” I asked carefully. Solomon approached. I held up my hand to get her to hang on a minute more. “You saw who did this? You could tell who was driving the van?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “He was right outside the door. Casey saw him. We all knew who it was. He coached Little League—we’d been in that van a hundred times.”

  Solomon tried to lead the kid to a waiting gurney. I held her off one more second. “Who are you talking about, Mike? Who was driving the van?”

  “Sheriff Jennings,” he said. “He came straight for us.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  SOLOMON

  There’s a reason I didn’t become a doctor. Actually, there are several reasons—the main one being that, by not becoming a doctor, it was guaranteed that I would piss off my mother… possibly for life. The other reason, however, is one I would never, ever admit to aloud:

  I always hated seeing people in pain.

  Not because I’m secretly some saint in love with the human race or something. Please.

  I just hated the chaos of it all. The lack of control. The loss of dignity. The screaming and the snot and the tears.

  If it were just blood and guts, I’d be fine.

  But it’s not.

  Strangely enough, my mother—the least empathetic person on the planet—seemed to thrive amidst the screaming and the snot and the tears. Of course, she was never Miss Sunshine about it, but in New England that doesn’t actually matter so much. Mainers are a pragmatic lot; we’ll take competence over kindness any day. If my mother practiced in Kentucky, she’d probably be burned in effigy within the week.

  Despite the screaming and snot and tears, however, about two months after the nightmare in Black Falls last summer, I enrolled in a basic course on first aid. And while I was recuperating and dealing with shitty surgeries and generally trying to pick up the pieces of my life after a year that had included a miscarriage, a divorce, multiple attempts on my life, and saying goodbye to the best friend I’d ever had, I kind of… found medicine again. After that basic first aid course, I took another, less basic course. Which led me to a harrowing eight-day Wilderness First Responder course, followed by my first ride-alongs with Portland Emergency Services.

  I told almost no one—not Juarez, and certainly not my mother. I did tell my mother’s partner, Dr. Maya Pearce, since I needed a reference and Maya seemed as good as anyone for that. I swore her to secrecy, though. I’d wondered more than once what Diggs would say about this unexpected development, but, of course, I wasn’t talking to him anymore. And so, this odd new piece of my life became sort of my dirty little secret.

  Until now.

  Late that night in Kentucky, while doctors were still trying to sort through the casualties and nurses waded through the bleeding masses at Paducah General Hospital, I found a plastic chair and sat alone with my head tipped back against the wall. I was bruised and gashed and stitched in two places. Covered in other people’s blood. My hand throbbed.

  I felt movement beside me. Juarez sat next to me and draped his arm around my shoulders. I tensed, strung tight. I opened my eyes when he pressed a kiss to my temple.

  “Hey,” he said. He looked tired. I still hadn’t seen Special Agent Blaze since the explosion, but I figured when I did we were all goners. She’d melt us with her poison-dart, über-military death ray eyes. I snickered at the thought.

  Juarez looked at me like I was nuts.

  “I’m a little punchy,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “You were incredible, you know,” he said. He rubbed my knee. Usually, Juarez has a soothing effect on me, but his touch wasn’t doing much just then. There was no part of me that didn’t ache. Someone should make a PSA about getting caught in a car bombing. Those fuckers hurt.

  “Can I get you anything?” he asked. “Tea? Soup?”

  I arched an eyebrow. Even that was painful. “Have you met me? When have I ever wanted tea? Or soup?”

  It came out snippier than I meant it to. Juarez removed his hand from my knee. I put it back.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Apparently, tragedy makes me bitchy. Er. I’ll get myself something in a minute. What about you? You okay?”

  “You mean aside from the fact that my girlfriend and a restaurant full of innocent civilians just got blown up by a guy who was supposed to be on our side, and not one of us saw it coming?”

  Right. Dumb question.

  “Sheriff Jennings never really seemed like he was on our side as far as I could see,” I said sympathetically. “And, realistically, who thinks a guy like Harvey Jennings is gonna snap and drive his minivan through the local Dairy Queen? If you’d told me he was gonna grab a semi-automatic and mow down the local chapter of the Sierra Club, I wouldn’t be surprised... But this was a shocker.”

  “Well, it’s my job to anticipate these things,” he said.

  We sat there in a mutually miserable silence until he squeezed my hand and stood. “I’m going to speak with the doctors one more time, then we should go.” He hesitated. “If you’d like to stay with me at the hotel, there’s room. Unless you wanted to go back to the Durhams’ with Diggs.”

  I thought of sleeping in the car the night before. My whispered screaming match with Diggs. The Kiss. The feel of his body sheltering mine when the world exploded around us.

  If I didn’t have a headache before, I sure as hell had one now. “No,” I said. “I’ll stay with you. Than
ks.”

  He left. Five minutes later, I was half-asleep when someone pressed something warm into my hand. I opened one eye as Diggs sat down.

  “You brought me coffee?”

  “Only half-strength—I figure eventually you’ll want to sleep. And here.” He set a Hershey bar on my leg.

  “Coffee and chocolate,” I said. I looked at him suspiciously. “Did you hear what Juarez wanted to get me?”

  “Rookie mistake.” He shrugged. “He’s just trying to take care of you.”

  “I don’t need someone to take care of me,” I said testily.

  He harrumphed, but wisely let it go. We sat there in silence for a long time, arms touching, sipping our coffee. I closed my eyes again. Bloody faces swam through the darkness. Kids screaming. The smell of burning flesh. I thought of the look on Sophie’s face—the terror she must have felt in those instants before she died.

  “So, you’re doing this now,” Diggs said.

  The bloody faces vanished. “Doing what?” I asked.

  “Fixing people up,” he said knowingly. “Don’t tell me all that was just your mother’s lessons from fifteen years ago kicking in. You knew what you were doing.”

  “I may have taken some courses over the winter.”

  When I opened my eyes again, Diggs was grinning at me. “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” he said. He shrugged, but he was still smiling. “I just love it when you surprise me.”

  “Glad I could oblige.” I started to lean back again, but something about the way Diggs was looking at me stopped me. Like he was getting ready to dive from an airplane and he didn’t have a lot of faith in his parachute. “You have something else you wanted to say?”

  He thought about it for only a second more before he spoke. “My brother was a vegetarian,” he said.

  It took me a second to figure out what he was talking about. Then it came to me: our fight back at the house the day before. Everything’s this deep dark mystery with you. I looked at him. He looked back at me. No flinching. No deflection. Despite that, there was no doubt how hard it was for him to share this piece of himself with me.