Page 38

No, it’s the man. He’s just ahead, lying on the ground, ragged pajama leg blood soaked. He sees us, and his head lifts and he squints nearsightedly and starts inching backward.

“It’s us!” I call.

I honestly don’t expect this will be very reassuring. At best, we’re the strangers who abandoned him to his fate. But he lets out a bleat of what sounds like relief.

“Oh thank God, oh thank God. Please. Please help. The dog—the beast—it’ll come back. Please. My leg.” A strangled cry. “My leg.”

Henry marches forward, still gripping my hand, and he starts to say something to the man and then—

They both disappear.

FIFTEENHENRY

Still clutching Ellie’s hand, Henry strides toward the man. Then he falters, and he hates—hates—that he falters, but his medic brain has clicked on and screamed “Trap!”

The man is missing half his leg and has been for at least twenty minutes, and the road had been slick with blood, which means, at the very least, he should be unconscious from blood loss.

Henry glances at Ellie, expecting her to ask why he’s stopped, but her gaze is on the man, and he can’t see her face, her hood pulled tight against the drizzling rain.

He looks back toward the man. “Sir?”

“Help me. Damn it, why are you just standing there?”

Run.

Henry glances again at Ellie. He wants her to say something, to question, to let him give voice to his horrible suspicion and tell him he’s wrong and it’s fine and they can save this man.

“Where’s the…?” Henry begins. “Whatever did this to you. Where did it go?”

“Who cares?” the old man snaps. “It’s gone.”

Henry’s gaze slides around the forest. “Can you tell me what it was?”

“I’m bleeding out here, boy. Help me.”

Henry tenses at the “boy.”

Ellie hasn’t moved. She’s staring at the man as if in shock. In shock at his condition? In shock at why Henry isn’t running to help him?

“Sir? Can you please tell me your name?”

“What the fuck?” the man snaps. “Do you need my name before you can save me? You useless piece of shit.”

Henry rocks back. “I—”

“You’re going to let me die, aren’t you? Like you let him die. You aren’t good enough for this job, never have been, never will be, and the only reason you have it is the color of your skin. A fucking diversity hire who needs real paramedics to prop him up, because when they don’t, someone dies.”

Henry stares, but it’s no longer an old man on the ground. It’s his first partner, John, with his grizzled face, nose already taking on the look of rhinophyma, that classic sign of long-term alcoholism. Those words are exactly what the bastard had said after … after …

The familiar strobe of an ambulance light. A roadside at night. Dark. Raining. A boy of maybe twelve, shaking convulsively in the undergrowth, one leg bent, blood running down his forehead. Henry himself kneeling beside the boy.

“It’s okay,” the memory-Henry whispers. “I’ve got you. It’s going to be okay.”

To his left is the road, with an ambulance and two crashed cars, one swung his way, the windshield broken, as if someone flew out the passenger side.

Memory-Henry works to stabilize the boy, whispering reassurances, telling him everything he’s doing. He’s checking his head, his spine, saying he’s going to get a gurney, that his partner is working on the boy’s mother and it will be okay.

It will be okay.