The Chickadee Girl

Three in the Forest

The child's face was pale under dirt, and his shirt was soaked with blood on the left side of his chest. His clothes were summer-weight and he had no jacket, and My God he was a person, the first she'd seen in nearly a week. He lay on his back, arms extended over his head, left palm bloody where he had clearly clutched at the wound.

How the hell did he get here?

Her second thought: What kind of sick, freakish person would do this to a child?

He interrupted her third thought by moaning softly, and shifting a little. She started. He was alive!  He was dangerously pale, and as she crouched down and examined him, she saw that an alarming amount of dark red had soaked into the forest floor around him, blackening the earth. 

She laid a careful palm on his stomach, and he winced ever so slightly at her touch, his face registering a shadow of pain that then quickly slipped away again into the expressionless mask of one near death. Her mind raced - he was alive, but clearly not for much longer. She had to get him help. He was certainly small enough to carry, but how far, and in what direction? No time to think. She scooped him up, and began to run back the way she had come, Midas keeping pace beside her. The boy was barely warm, and this was more disconcerting than the blood. She ran with no idea of what direction she was going in, and no idea of what she would do when she arrived. As she ran, the child limp in her arms, his blood began to soak through her own shirt. 

She raced onwards, Midas at her back. Even when the scarf came untied from her leg, and she nearly tripped on it; even when her muscles cramped and begged her to halt, to rest. She lost all sense of time, spurred on by something within, and something in the boys face and his butterfly-soft lashes and his halting breaths and oh Christ she couldn't let him die. Gasping, she cradled him against her and stumbled forward as afternoon became evening. By the last light of the day, and running on fumes, she sighted the back of Peyman Hall, and felt nothing. She was still here. This was still happening. And she had to save this child. She didn't slow. 

Her arms had long since stopped complaining, and were now simply numb, as though they had somehow, painlessly, come adrift from her body. As she rounded the chapel, the tiny green-roofed infirmary building loomed up in front of her. She burst through the front door, never even giving the thought that it might be locked any space in her mind. She deposited him on the bed in the care room closest to the nurse's station, and then blew through the little office, opening store cupboards and drawers and cabinets at random, until she found what she was looking for.  Half of the things she touched clattered noisily to the floor, her panic making her clumsy. 

The circulation in her arms was returning and her offended muscles began to scream again, stiffening and spasming as though she'd just been beaten. Midas was keeping watch over the child's bed as she returned to the care room, and Isa willed herself to be calm. Basic first aid training wasn't much, but it was what she had. Clean, disinfect, bandage - if this didn't work, she had nothing else to turn to. The grey-striped curtains in the examination room were already tightly drawn, and so she flicked on a bedside lamp, and moved it so it was under the bed, praying that not too much light was spilling out into the encroaching darkness of the evening. 

She stripped off the boy's t-shirt, and began to clean the gash in his chest, which was deep and angry looking, almost like he'd been carved...or...she stopped, and stared in mounting horror. It looked almost as though Something had clawed at his heart, as though trying to tear it out of his chest. She reeled a bit, and had to sit on the bed, fighting back the urge to be sick.How long had he been out there, all alone and bleeding? Where had he come from, and what had done this? It was entirely too much to take in. She forced herself to focus, and unable to do anything else, she cleaned and inexpertly bandaged the wound as best she could.