The Island seemed darker.
It wasn't; it was just as bright and beautiful as it had always been, but the day's events seemed to have drawn a pawl over the landscape. Every tendrilous finger of a shadow seemed to flee the glorious sun and reach from each cloud and tree in ever more threatening shapes toward me.
Each of them seemed to point accusingly at me.
The ambulance procession back to the bunker had been long and slow. Ray had remained mercifully unconscious for the entire journey. Still, the soft, pained groans coming from Zoe told every other member of our group that she was not only awake but was feeling every single one of the careful footsteps that her stretcher bearers were taking.
Amy, ever vigilant, stopped the trek a few times to check and refix her blood-saturated dressings before allowing us to continue. Each time, Amy's face grew a little darker. Zoe had lost a lot of blood, and Amy, having no means to check blood types, had no way of giving her more. The doctor looked exhausted. It had been less than an hour since the moment that possessed-Ray had attacked Zoe, but Amy looked like she had lived at least a week's worth of hard work in that time. What was worse was that we all knew that she wasn't just the only person who could help but that her task was far from finished.
Two people required her aid, and one of them was looking to be in a very bad way.
Zoe was pale; her breathing, even the one around her throaty groans, was shallow and labored, and a slight sheen of perspiration gave her skin a sickly, almost grey hue. She was conscious, but her eyes were closed, and the arm on her uninjured side hung limply off the edge of the stretcher and dangled toward the ground.
The look that washed over Amy's face with each of the many, many glances that the doctor gave her patient could only be described as distraught.
I flashed a look to Tom and gestured for him to take over carrying the head of Ray's stretcher. Considering he lived with a condition that the cliches said made him oblivious to the subtleties of interpersonal communication, a pointed look and a nod were all it took to get him to step away from the group at the back of the procession and take the poles from my hands to bear the weight of Ray. Like so many people living with Autism, his ability to defy the stereotypes was genuinely amazing. Far from being fearful or frozen when he had returned to the carnage of the lake with Louisa, he had simply acted. He saw what needed to be done, and where everyone else was panicking, he just did it.
I had spent much of our time on this Island thinking that Tom needed to be sheltered, looked after, protected, or otherwise treated differently from the rest of the group. Now I could see that Tom may very well have been the best of us, and I felt a momentary pang of shame for ever thinking otherwise. I rested a hand on his shoulder and nodded my silent thanks to him before stepping closer to Amy.
She barely even looked up.
She was smeared in blood. It was caked into her hair, over her bikini top, and spread onto the skin of her chest. Her hands were covered in it as I slipped mine into hers and laced our fingers together.
"You are doing everything you can, Amy," I whispered softly.
"It's not enough," she murmured back with a trembling breath, her hand squeezing mine as a tear carved its way through the crimson stains on her face.
I chanced a look behind us. Everyone was listening. I couldn't be sure if the women at the back of the line - including Katie, who was equally covered in blood from her efforts to drag Zoe from the lake - could hear us, but the solemn, worried looks on their faces were certainly hinting that they could.
Only Caroline held my eye. In the time that it had taken us to get here from the lake, her expression had shifted. Not to replace the reverent, heated fever with which she looked at me but simply to include a significant amount of concern for her friend. That real-world fear was the only thing stopping her from acting on the desires smashed into her by our apparently shared vision.
"What do you need?" I asked Amy, returning my full attention to her while being careful not to pile the pressure onto what must have already been a monumental load on her shoulders.
"Dan, she needs a hospital. She needs blood; she has lost too much, and we don't have it. Even if we did, I have no idea what blood type she is, let alone anyone else's. The wrong blood type will kill her. But if she loses much more, she will start suffering from organ failure. Her heart is already beating more than twice as fast as it should be." The tears were starting to come faster now. "I don't... I don't know what to do."
I didn't know what to say. Our beautiful, amazing, heroic blonde doctor was doing all she could, but from the way she seemed to be breaking before my eyes, it sounded like it wouldn't be enough. All I could do was try to reassure her and repeat myself, even if it would change nothing. "You are doing everything you..."
"Hmmmmmm, I am O-Negative." Tom interrupted, sounding almost cheery from behind us.
Amy whipped around with a speed that should have snapped her neck. "What?"
Tom had something of a smile on his face as if he knew he was being helpful, even if the relevance of his outburst was completely lost on me. "My blood type is O-Negative," he repeated proudly.
"Are you sure?" Amy had let go of my hand, and the tears had been replaced with a look that could almost be called hope.
"Yes. I am O-Negative." He nodded, maintaining his smile. "I give blood at O'Connor hospital in San Jose every twelve weeks.... It is on Forest Avenue, and I go on a Tuesday." He finished with an affirmative nod.
"Oh my God, Tom, I could kiss you!" Amy almost screeched.
Tom cast a nervous look back to Louisa. "Ummm. No, thank you." He frowned
The whole group was following the conversation, too, but a few of the women, Louisa, Robyn, and Liz specifically, seemed to understand the relevance a whole lot better than I did. "I'm... what? I'm confused."
"O-negative is the universal blood type," Amy explained excitedly as a wave of relief seemed to wash over her. "It doesn't matter what Zoe is. Her body won't reject Tom's blood, even if they don't match."
I could almost see her burden lightning. "Does that mean...?"
Amy wasn't listening; her mind was already busy elsewhere. She was thinking out loud rather than directly answering me. "I need to seal her wounds; her dressings will need to be changed and kept clean... We can't drain Tom, we will need to pace any transfusion... and she will need to be kept on broad-spec antibiotics to stop any infections, but..." She finally looked back up at me, the most beautiful of relieved smiles painted on her lips. "...I think she might be okay."
********
The next few hours were a bit of a blur. With a glimmer of hope about Zoe's condition, the ambulance procession redoubled its pace and proceeded without pause or hesitation. The two stretchers were practically power-marched up the side of the mountain and toward the bunker where Caroline, possessed by Mother, had found me the previous day. It was the most direct route to the hospital from this part of the Island, if not the easiest of climbs.
This slope was steep, and the footing was uneasy. The pace of the march had to be measured against the sureness of each footing, but it was still much quicker than crossing the river and climbing the gentler east side of the mountain to the main entrance to the bunker.
