His existence had no value, he was a devalued soul.
All of his lifelong days he had been battered by other men. His father, Merle on a rage, a middle school teacher, scumbags at bars, the tire shop manager, and now this man of the law. But this time it wasn't a belt or fists, clever insults or pool cues and boots. This time it was a bullet. Leastways, it wasn't the riot shotgun he had watched take down his brother and the janky little drug dealer who had driven them into this mess. He'd seen that nightmare of exploding gore just before he crawled out of the broken camaro window and put his hands up. For all the good that did, must be something that only works on the tv. He listened to the endlessly echoing report of the high-powered rifle after he felt the bullet cut through him. Thinking to himself, that's the sound of my Valkyrie, that's the sound of my leaving.
He was hit, a more serious version of what he always seemed to be on the receiving end of. But the same. The same bone shattering intent, the same mindless desire to injure, to put the hurt on, to inflict, to bring down a notch or two. And it was pain, no question about that at all, but after a lifetime of taking hammer blows he was tempered where it mattered most. His mind.
He didn't even own a gun. Certainly didn't have a small blued piece shoved into the waistband of his sagging jeans the way the drug dealer did, didn't have the mind to pick it up off the ground the way Merle had done.
He could feel the ragged field grass beneath him, somehow his pant leg had ridden up as his body spun itself around the impact of being shot, and the half-chewed blades of pasture were rubbing his calf and both bare arms. All he could see was the clear heavens arching over his head. Not a cloud in the god-damned sky, he thought, and felt his brain twist a bit with the idea of God damning heaven.
Merle was dead. And he couldn't un-see what he saw. Couldn't close his eyes for the shock, but didn't want to anyway. The sky was as blue as a bruise. And the world was spinning widdershins beneath him. It was quite a ride.
He could hear shouting. Policecar sirens muffled but urgent. And far in the distance the mournful cry of an ambulance. Say a prayer, his momma used to tell him whenever they heard the sound. Say a prayer.
Finally. He closed his eyes and drifted.
The paramedic and his EMT moved quickly through the fallen, wading in the viscera of their injuries. Squatting, hunkering, bending. Hands reaching. Clocking Seiko Chronographs with fingerpads pressed into wrist veins.
"We need another car," Jim told T-Dog.
But he looked at him across the top of the flipped and ruined sweet vintage ride and shook his head, barely a perceptible movement. "What we need is the meat wagon," he grunted. Simple.
Jim pulled a face.
Recon done, they had returned to the side of the downed Sheriff, urging all his boys to back off him, let him breathe, let them work. Bring the gurney, hold this IV bag. The man's partner was steady as sharpened steel and T-Dog left Jim to it. He slung the strap of a medic bag over his shoulder and jogged over to the guy laid out flat on his back on the far side of the wreck. There was a deputy standing some distance away, anger radiating into the space between him and the wounded man. T-Dog moved around him, and knelt down in the grass. He didn't have to pick sides; he was always on the side of the suffering.
"You still here, buddy?" T-Dog asked him, using the blunt shears to cut a line up the man's sweat-soaked t-shirt and flipping the edges back so he could press a trauma-sorb to the bullet wound. It was ragged and gaping, on the left side of his chest. Both men had taken true intention heart shots and should be dead by rights but angels or demons had deflected the bullets. Still, experience told him that the cop was going to live, he wasn't sure about the robber.
He looked around in the grass for the gun, nothing. The man did have a wicked hunting knife sheathed on his belt but that was the only weapon he could see. Not his business, he told himself. Police probably already confiscated it, but he could see the handgun gripped tight as a lifeline in the dead big fellow's hand just a few feet away. Shotgun blast to the chest had taken care of that threat real quick.
The radio on his hip crackled and he told dispatch they needed the coroner and another ambulance if no one wanted to declare the two corpses DoA on-site, but they were going to transport the two medical victims together. Time was running out the same way his patient's artery was running his blood out and onto the ground.
In the back of the ambulance, he had the deputy on the gurney and the other man on the backboard. He was kneeling between them, working methodically and efficiently while Jim expertly tore back into town towards the hospital. He had loaded the outlaw feet first in order to be as close as possible to the wounds of both men, their left sides facing him. He was tag-teaming each injury, watching as they bled through the absorbent pax and groaning their way into a shared unconsciousness. Grievous bodily injury in stereo.
The Sheriff was thrashing and T-Dog reached down for his hand, holding it fast in his own. "Steady," he told him. But it was impossible to work and offer the human comfort of holding the man's hand. "Here," he mumbled to himself and pulled the other patient's hand over. The Sheriff grasped it hard and quieted.
The paramedic didn't notice when both of their hands slipped the half a foot to the floor, holding onto one another for dear life. Tied fast, descending into the same dark waters together.
Somehow he had survived the violence of medicine. But every single time he tried to pull himself up and out of the bloody waters he was drowning in and just breathe already, he would feel the strength ebb away from him; drain out the rounded heads of each of the long bones in his body. And under he went again.
"He's fighting his way back to consciousness," Doctor Greene told the ERT who was lingering in the doorway, ready to thump the patient's heart back to life with her strong hands, fingers interlocked on his sternum. "He's okay. He's going to be okay. Soon."
"That will make the policemen happy, they can have their eye for an eye," she answered, a slightly bitter tone to her words. He gave her a sober look and she nodded, contrite, her blonde braid swinging free of its pins. She reached over her head and fastened her hair back into place. "I'm gonna cut this, I swear."
"Don't Bethy, please don't. For your daddy's sake," the doctor told her, busy with notations on the patient's record.
"You don't like Maggie's haircut, do you, Daddy?" she teased him and he kept writing. Then he tucked the pen into the breast pocket of his shirt, smoothing the lapel of the lab coat back into place.
"I'm going next door now to see that Sheriff. Come and learn something, why don't you?" he walked past her but she stayed in the room for a long time looking at the man in the bed. She took a tentative step closer.
The ambulance had come screaming up to the loading dock doors just around noontime of the day before. T-Dog working without pause on the uniformed man on the gurney while she and another one of the lift crew ran outside to transfer the back-boarded patient to a medical dray of his own. The staff descended on both critical patients, but the Sheriff was the center ring in the three ring Emergency Room circus. She didn't hesitate to tend to the other gunshot victim, leaping aboard when one of the surgeons directed her to do so.
He was unaware of the intimacy they had shared, how she had to straddle his body, both of her knees pressed up hard against his sides, her elbows screaming tired from the relentless rhythm of the CPR as the ER staff stabilized him and prepped him for surgery. His blood a steady drip out of the ragged-edge bullet wound, spurting with each compression she made of his ribcage. She didn't know then that she would wake weeping for the rest of her life from dreams of his blood becoming a claret waterfall of carnage, drowning them all.
Unlike the panicked expression of the wounded Sheriff, his face had been free of strain. Not the usual grimace worn by a patient fighting for his life; she had kept her gaze fast on his features wondering if he was walking with angels. Or the dead.
"Stay with me," she had told him. "C'mon, stay here," she had urged. And nurses and doctors had grown used to the ways in which she talked to those who were leaving and they allowed her sing-song voice to call him back from wherever it was he was headed. Later, she haunted the hallway just outside the operating room, waiting for word. She had never done that before.
Now, she quickly brushed the long unkempt hair off his forehead, her fingers smooth and cool on his skin and she whispered something to him, then turned and joined her father in the room next door.
It was as if he had been sleeping off a long miserable head-pounding, ya did things ya ain't never gonna live down if I have my druthers lil' brother, drunk. He rose wobbly and parched and realized it might be more a cigarette hangover than booze. His head fucken hurt but it was his chest that was aching him as though he'd been mule kicked in the ribs. He ducked out of the tent and up on the ridge crest he saw the rest of the camp gathered for some kind of morning meeting. He could see Merle hanging just back from the group but with his head turned so that he was listening with his good ear, not his gun ear.
That suited him fine. He would rather hold himself at a distance from these people. At least for a while. It took him a long time to warm up to folks but when he did his loyalty went without question and that was a gift he wasn't ready to give. Just yet. Not until they knew more about what exactly had gone wrong with the world. He had to piss like a doused race horse and he stepped into the cool and welcoming cover of the copse of trees next to where they had pitched their own camp.
A few minutes later and Merle was banging around looking for something. He joined him.
"I'm goin' on a run with some of 'em," he told him. "Hit the train track edge of town, ya know."
"Tha' right?" he asked. It sounded very unlike something his brother would do.
"Damn straight. We need to represent to this group of uppity townies, I've been thinkin'. We need to be as much in the know as they are. 'Bout everything. All of it."
Daryl nodded. That, actually, made good sense.
"What do we need? If'n I see it."
"Arrows. Ammo. Smokes."
Merle chucked him playfully on the side of the head and nodded good bye. Daryl stood and watched the group load up.
He didn't know it would be over a year's time before he saw his brother again.
He hunkered down to tie his boot laces and noticed the toes of his Red Wing contractors were stained by splotches of what appeared to be drying blood. He had no recollection of how on earth living human blood would have splattered his boots. And certainly not recently enough to still be gobby wet. He traced the pattern with the tip of a finger but could not make sense of it. Thinking on it too long hurt his brain, not his mind, but the actual organ itself tucked inside his skull. He picked up his crossbow, patted the big Busse sheathed on his hip, and melted away into the shadow of the underbrush without a word to anyone.
