READER ADVISORY: THIS CHAPTER CONTAINS GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS OF EMERGENCY FIRST AID AND MAY BE DISTURBING TO SOME READERS. ALL INFORMATION IS CAREFULLY RESEARCHED, BUT SHOULD ONLY BE USED UNDER LIFE-THREATENING CIRCUMSTANCES, AND AT YOUR OWN RISK.
Miraculously, the band made it to the sound room without further trouble, save for a run-in with the savage deer Judy had fought earlier. The deer must have gotten into a bad fight since then, for he was so battered that Vicky was able to lay him out with a single blow.
"Later, Florence Nightingale," the hyena quipped to cut off a protest from Nicole. "He'll live if he can get help. We've got bigger problems."
Swallowing her instincts as a caregiver, Nicole yielded to survival for the moment and held her tongue until they were safely at their destination, with the door shut and locked behind them.
"We could have shoved him in a room and closed it," she pointed out.
Xavier shook his head as he settled to the floor off to the side. The fur of his chest was still damp with blood; not a good sign. He wasn't looking good, but his eyes still held a determined gaze. "There wasn't time to think. Vicky acted. That's why I had her in front. Now take over. There's mammals who need us."
Nicole bit her lip. She'd seen more than her share of bloody damage and unthinkable calls in her career. Still hated it, but Xavier had a point. "Vicky, you do equipment. Isabelle, keep an eye on Taelia and let me know when she starts coming around. I'll check on Xavier and Ellen."
Xavier sat up a little. "Hey, Vic, anything we don't need can be piled at the door. If someone tries-"
"If you try to do anything other than lie still until I say so, I'll tell Isabelle to slap you," Nicole warned sharply, checking Ellen for any signs of internal damage.
"I'll do it," Isabelle promised.
Ellen's vitals were stable, but her ribs hurt badly and a few of them yielded a lot more under pressure than they should. Making her comfortable and moving on to Xavier, Nicole found more signs for worry. Although his wounds seemed shallow, his bleeding hadn't slowed noticeably since the time of injury. She used some bottled water to do a quick rinse, but stopping the blood was vital.
"Give me Ellen's purse," Nicole ordered. "Maybe there's something in it we can use."
"Like what?" asked Xavier.
"Anything clean and absorbent," Nicole replied, digging through the contents like a pig going after truffles. "A pack of tissues, or-"
The silence was just long enough to be noticeable as she pulled out some sealed paper packages.
"He's not gonna want those," Ellen noted.
Xavier surprised her. "If they're clean and they soak up blood, I'm not complaining." Feeling the combined stares of his bandmates, he shrugged and then winced. "Hey, emergency training, remember?"
Nicole obliged by tearing open the packs and tucking the gauze into the lacerations, covering it over with more and pressing it down with a paw. She had to be careful about pressure in case any of Xavier's ribs were damaged, but stopping blood loss was still the most immediate priority. All the while, she was doing her best not to think about Jerry or Willy. Had they made it to safety? Were they fighting for their lives even now? Could they already be in much the same state as Xavier, or… she gulped. 'Or Taelia?' She didn't know what was worse, and she didn't dare stop to think about it. Right now they were in all-too-literal survival mode, and the only thing that mattered until further notice was that nobody in that room died.
"I'll need something to hold them on," she said, focusing on the task at paw. "Anyone got some cloth or... uh, Isabelle?"
Nicole's surprise and confusion were only too understandable. Isabelle was already in the process of removing her shirt, and in a moment she had it extended in her paw. The top underneath was passable considering everyone in the room was either female or her husband, but her face wore an expression that plainly said, 'Hurry and patch him up before I lose my temper.'
"Thanks." Nicole grabbed the shirt, folded it over itself a couple of times, and improvised a bandage over the pads. Isabelle went back to keeping an eye on Taelia, who was beginning to thrash less vigorously.
"How's she doing?" asked Ellen weakly.
Taelia grew still, then let out a sound that was half-growl, half-groan. For an agonizing moment, she seemed to hang suspended between recovery and something that looked way too much like permanent brain damage for anyone's liking.
"I never want to do that again," she said at last.
Isabelle at once set about letting Taelia out of her bundle. The vixen's eyes popped open when she saw what had become of her friends. "What happened while-?!"
"We'll fill you in later," Isabelle promised tersely. "Right now, we've got to-"
"Hey," Xavier broke in, sounding a little stronger than before, "give her some slack. If she pushes herself too far it could ruin everything."
Isabelle, who was nearly at the end of her wits, whipped her head toward her husband to fire off an angry remark. Then she stopped herself. Right after nearly getting killed was just about the worst time for an argument, and besides that he was right. "Sorry."
"Here," Nicole offered, getting up and jerking a thumb toward Xavier and Ellen. She pulled off her watch and passed it to Isabelle. "Keep tabs on their pulses. Switch back and forth tracking how many beats each has every fifteen seconds and watch out for a drop. I'll take Taelia."
Taelia, being uninjured except for a nasty headache and some pains in her neck, needed breathing space more than anything else. Isabelle moved on to Xavier, who had made himself as comfortable as possible and reported that he was pretty sure the bleeding had slowed. If nothing else, it didn't seem to be seeping through the gauze when he told her to check for that. As for Ellen, the best she could say with any confidence was that she didn't look to be dying – or at least not yet.
"Let me know if I can help," the dingo offered with a weak smile.
"You can help by lying down," Nicole retorted.
"I hate to interrupt," Vicky put in, "but the keyboard's all set."
Taelia shook her head, trying to clear it. "Good. Nicole, help me with the laptop."
It took some doing to get the computer up and running, and all the connections in place. Nicole was worried about Taelia's strained state. She had recovered well enough the first time, but this time seemed worse. If they were wrong about the effects of this whole thing on someone's brain, she'd never forgive herself.
"You know you don't have to do this," she advised. "If you don't feel up to it-"
Taelia turned and caught her with a determined gaze. Maybe it was the drug. Maybe it was seeing what everyone else had gone through to make this crazy idea possible. Maybe it was just some part of her even she hadn't known was there until she had no other choice but to use it.
"I'm doing this," the vixen replied firmly. Shifting her shoulders as if she could actually feel the weight of the world on them, she turned her head toward Ellen. "Ellen, we'd better call that guy Judy told you about in case I need an extra egghead."
"On it," Ellen replied, already on her phone. Then she paused. "I don't think I've ever heard you use the word 'egghead' before."
Taelia waved a paw dismissively, signaling that Ellen was talking too much for even her patience. "Yeah, yeah, scratch that off the bucket list. Now hurry up with that call."
"Dialing," Ellen announced as the phone – now on speaker mode – started to ring.
Nicole sighed – and, despite herself, smiled just a little. Taelia's brain might have been impaired, but her heart and her attitude were doing just fine. "You're a wonder, Taelia," she remarked. "Whatever happens tonight, you're a wonder."
Lots of mammals would have been annoyed to have to work on the night of a big event like the charity concert – and at a desk job, too. Conversely, Kevin McHowlister was quite pleased with the solitude. Even the work part was mostly the computer's doing; running seized files through different algorithms made to seek out repeated words or phrases that might be code or slang. He could pay as little as ten percent attention without losing productivity, and without anyone noticing.
He almost jumped – and lost the game – as his phone suddenly belted out a tune about a boundless virtual world. "Oh, shitake mushrooms," he groaned, answering the phone with one paw while restarting his game with the other. "Hello?"
"Hey. You don't know me, but this is Ellen Angelo. Judy Hopps gave me your number."
O-kay, not exactly an opening he'd ever expected on a phone call. "My number?" he asked, baffled. Somewhere in the back of his mind he hoped Judy had a darn good reason for that, though he was a little too busy being confused to spare much annoyance about it. "Well, I'm not dispatch, but what can I do for you?"
"Well, some terrorists just turned our concert into-" Ellen suddenly broke off. "Are you playing Galagoat?"
He narrowly dodged a kamikaze dive on the screen, then hit pause. "Say that again?" he asked.
Whoever this Ellen was, she sounded smug. "I'll bet you thought no one would-"
"Not the game, stupid!" snapped another female voice. It sounded as if someone had yanked the phone away, and a moment later the second voice took over the call. "Kevin, you're with the ZPD, right? Taelia here is trying to stop that Obearon creep from turning a PA system into a WMD, and she's half-loopy on some Night Howler stuff. Can you help us out or not?"
Kevin sat stunned for a long moment. Somewhere in the back of his mind he was thinking to himself, 'Well, that escalated quickly.' Out loud, he defaulted to his nearly-forgotten training from the police academy about handling public issues. "Is Taelia free to talk?"
"I'm here," came another female voice much more tired than the others. "And lucid – mostly. Long story. Can someone hand me some noise-canceling headphones so I don't have to listen to Ellen?"
"I got 'em," came the second voice to have spoken. "You sure you can do this, Tal? You sound like… well, me."
"Just give me the headphones and let me concentrate," Taelia snapped, and by the sound of it she must have yanked them out of whoever's paw had brought them. "Hold on a second, Kevin."
'And here I was all set to take a walk,' he thought, wisely keeping the sarcastic remark inside his head. "So, you need computer help?"
"Yes," Taelia affirmed, and judging by the sound she was trying to pair the headphones to her phone. Then came the sound of her tossing something aside. "Forget that. Everyone just stay quiet. Kevin, I don't know exactly what they did, but we think someone hacked into the system from outside the mansion and patched into the sound system. They're playing a noise that… oh, never mind the details right now. I'm trying to see if I can shut them out so the noise stops making everyone crazy."
"Hold up on that," Kevin broke in, his background in cybercrime coming to the fore. If he had been a regular officer, his training would have been to prioritize damage control; cut the line the bad guys were using and try to keep casualties down. In his line of work, though, police had to play a long game and often did so against criminals who could always be expected to have more and worse in store if their initial plan were beaten.
"If they know you're interfering they might track you down, or do something to make things even worse," he pointed out. "Have you had any contact with the terrorists? Did they make any threats or demands?"
A male voice came through, sounding further away from the phone. "Judy said Obearon made some threat about a grasshopper jumping. Does that mean anything?"
There came a brief pause. Then came the sound of a paw smacking against a forehead. "Phantom of the Obeara!" exclaimed another voice. "Willy and I watched it. It means explosives!"
Kevin licked his lips nervously. "Okay, that's heavy. Let's try to avoid that."
I was actually planning to continue with Judy's pursuit of Cudd in this chapter, but as it played out jamming with the band took up enough time that it just made sense to stop here. Speaking of stopping, how are they going to disrupt the noise without Cudd noticing – and what will happen if he already knows they're trying to stop him?
There's still more action to come, so stay tuned!
Easter Eggs
Kevin's Ringtone
A euphemistic epithet about fungus
Weight has nothing to do with it
A game on the sly