All around her, people gasped and cried out, their exclamations hammering home the reality of the situation. On the street, Charlotte’s former seatmate hadn’t moved. The other woman was sitting beside her now, cradling an arm against her chest. Charlotte heard a tinny voice nearby saying “911, what is your emergency?”
“Several people just got hit by a car!” a panicked man said.
Charlotte sucked in a much-needed lungful of air, and then she was moving. She lurched out of her seat and bolted down the aisle. On the street, there were more screams, more people on the phone—presumably with 911—but no one wasdoinganything. The SUV came to a stop about twenty feet down the road, and the driver got out and started shouting.
Charlotte couldn’t make out the words over the roaring in her ears. She approached the women who’d been hit. One woman was clutching her arm, crying, while Charlotte’s seatmate lay flat on her back at the edge of the street. Her eyes were closed, and her body was too still.
Fuck.
Was she dead? Charlotte’s mind replayed how the vehicle had flung her, the brutal way she’d slammed into the pavement. Seeing something like that in person was so shocking, soviolent. Blood stained the snow around the woman’s head.
Stop the bleeding.
The thought popped into Charlotte’s head, maybe from all the hours she’d spent watching one of her favorite TV shows,9-1-1. She dropped to her knees. Where was the blood coming from? Charlotteswept a quick gaze over the woman’s body, andoh god, her right leg looked weird. Like, obviously broken. Charlotte’s stomach lurched.
“Hey.” She reached for one of the woman’s hands. Her skin was cold and clammy against Charlotte’s. “Can you hear me?”
The brunette’s eyes fluttered and then opened, and Charlotte wanted to cry from relief because she wasalive. Her fingers twitched, and her features twisted into an expression Charlotte knew she would never forget. To call it a grimace was too tame. The woman’s face radiated a visceral kind of agony that was absolutely horrifying.
Her eyes met Charlotte’s, glassy and desperate. “Help.”
“I will.” Charlotte darted another panicked glance down the woman’s battered body. She seemed to have taken the impact of the SUV on her right side, which made sense from the direction she’d been walking. Her breath came in fast, shallow gasps, and her expression indicated a level of pain Charlotte couldn’t even fathom.
By now, other passersby had gathered, surrounding them in a circle of concerned faces and anxious murmuring. Charlotte had no idea what to do. “Does anyone have medical training?” she called, her voice high pitched and shrill.
Heads shook all around her. Peripherally, she was aware that the other woman who’d been hit was sitting on the curb now while a passerby attended to her.
“Do you know where you’re hurt?” Charlotte asked her seatmate as she debated her next move. She knew not to move the woman in case of a spinal injury. Trying to stop the bleeding still seemed like a good idea, though.
It felt like an eternity had passed since the accident, but it had probably been less than a minute. These moments felt so much more exaggerated in real life than they appeared on TV. In a TV show, you would see the accident, and then it would cut to the arrival of the ambulance. In reality, every second dragged.
There wasso much blood. It had seeped into Charlotte’s pants as she knelt in the street, but hopefully the snow was dilutingit, making it look worse than it was. Maybe her seatmate wasn’t as badly injured as it seemed. Charlotte would get her name and visit her in the hospital, bring her flowers and candy and read her another horoscope.
What at first looks like a new beginning might actually be an ending.
That ominous line from Charlotte’s horoscope flitted through her mind, and she shuddered, rejecting what it might mean. But, as she watched, the woman’s eyes closed. Her mouth hung slightly open. Her skin was ashen. Even her lips looked gray.
“I’m going to see if I can find where you’re bleeding from, okay?” Charlotte spoke loudly and firmly, trying to sound more confident than she felt. The woman’s eyes flickered open, a silent scream held in their depths, before closing again.
Charlotte felt another punch of adrenaline. With fingers almost numb from the cold, she ran a hand through the woman’s hair, locating a gash in her scalp, which was hopefully the source of all the blood. Head wounds bled a lot. She remembered reading that somewhere.
In the distance, she heard sirens.Thank god.Her gut said this woman was in real trouble. The ashy tint to her skin was terrifying.
“The ambulance is almost here,” Charlotte told her.
The woman’s eyes opened sluggishly. “Help,” she repeated.
“Can you tell me what hurts?” Charlotte asked somewhat desperately.
Her eyes rolled back for a moment, and then she blinked, looking up at Charlotte. “I can’t feel ... can’t feel anything.”
Charlotte’s chest tightened. Did she have spinal cord damage? Charlotte had already noticed how shallow and rapid the woman’s breathing was, but now she saw that the left side of her chest seemed to rise more than the right, as if the right side had ... collapsed. A thin trickle of blood ran from the corner of her mouth. Her eyes were unfocused, the pupils blown wide.
Not sure what else to do, Charlotte took the woman’s hand in hers the way she had before, trying not to notice how cold it was, howlimp. “Stay with me,” she said. “The sirens are getting louder. The ambulance must be almost here.”
The woman’s eyes focused on her for a moment, and Charlotte forced a smile. She gave her fingers another squeeze, then reached out with her free hand to brush a damp strand of dark hair from the woman’s face, offering what comfort she could.
“I—” the woman gasped.
