Page 120 of Just (Fake) Married
“Oh, fuck!” Ethan yelled, and swerved to miss him.
I braced myself, eyes shut as we drove into the ditch. The brakes squealed and there was the horrible thud of the car hitting the animal and then hitting the ditch on the other side of the road. The air bags exploded and a chemical powder filled the air. I coughed and tried to wipe my face.
“Harmony,” Ethan said, as he ran his fingers across my skull and down my neck, over my shoulders to my arms and then my fingers. “Do you have any pain anywhere? Or numbness?”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“What day is it?” he said, coming back to look at my eyes.
“You know I’m not good with the days,” I huffed. “Wednesday?”
“Tuesday,” he muttered.
“Help!” A kid shouted, the voice coming from across the road. “Help! Please! Someone help us!”
Ethan and I threw off our seatbelts and got out of the car that was on a steep incline in the ditch. “I have a first aid kit in the trunk,” he directed me. “And a shotgun if the elk needs it.”
He ran across the highway towards an old blue Toyota truck which was sitting ass up on the other side of the road.
I popped the trunk and grabbed the biggest first aid kit I’d ever seen and the shotgun everyone carried in their truck for exactly this reason.
The downed elk in the middle of the road was huge. Seven hundred pounds easy, but he was already dead. His neck clearly broken.
“Harmony! Over here,” Ethan shouted to me. I ran across the road and skidded down into the ditch where the old truck was crumpled.
Ethan was standing in the driver’s side door opening. There was a woman sitting in the driver’s seat, unconscious. The truck was so old there were no airbags, and the woman had a gash on her forehead and blood was gushing down into her face.
In the passenger seat was a very nervous boy.
“She’s unconscious from the head wound,” Ethan said. “And she has a broken collarbone on her right side.” I put the first aid kit on the ledge of the truck bed and unzipped it so Ethan couldget what he needed. He snapped on gloves and took a thick piece of gauze and pressed it to the woman’s head.
Not as unconscious as Ethan thought, she flinched and tried to push Ethan away. “Ouch,” she said, her voice raspy. “Leave it.”
I ran around the truck to get to the kid in the passenger seat.
“Hi,” I said, trying to pull his attention away from his mother’s horror show of a head wound. “Hey, can you tell me your name?”
“No…Noah,” he said, with gasping, shuddery breaths. He wiped his tears away with the flat of his hand. He wore glasses that were crooked on his face.
“And what’s your mom’s name?”
“Mom.” He pulled in a big breath that shuddered. “Oh, you mean her name. Cinnamon. Cinnamon Swift.”
“Wait, I know her,” I said, looking across the seat at the woman fading in and out of consciousness. With the blood, I hadn’t recognized her.
Cinnamon Swift was Chuck’s granddaughter. She’d dropped out of high school and no one in the Gulch had heard from her since.
Judging by the direction they’d been going, they must have been heading up to visit Chuck.
“We need to get her to a hospital. With the bruising on her chest from the steering wheel I’m worried about internal bleeding,” Ethan said. He stood and pulled his phone out of his back pocket. “Sandra,” he barked into the phone. “There’s been an accident. No, we’re fine, but there’s another car involved. What are my chances of getting an air ambulance out here?”
He walked away so I didn’t hear the rest of the conversation. A helicopter would have to be flown in from Big Horn, but that would also be the closest hospital.
“Got it,” he said, coming back to the truck. “I’m sending you my location now.”
“It’s bad, isn’t it?” Noah asked. His freckles stood out on his pale face and something about him was familiar to me.
“She’s going to be alright,” I said, pulling his attention back to me. “Ethan is one of the best doctors in the whole country. She could not be in better hands. I’m going to call your grandpa, okay?”
