Page 45 of Trusted Instinct
Parked facing south, Rou was hard focused up the north road, her body tight. Creed knelt beside her to get her line of focus.
“It’s the keening,” Blaze said, “The wind is blowing the sound away from us. But Rou can hear it.”
Creed knew what he was about to get into when he ran down that hill through a cloud of physical and emotional pain. The keening sound of grief and pain could crawl under your skin if you weren’t careful. Then, it could come alive at night and strip you of any respite from the world’s pain. Exhausted from night terror, that’s when things could turn southward with a soldier’s mental health.
Something Creed had noticed when he was a kid was that pain was manifested, and Creed would swear that once it had form, it didn’t go far. It set up house and lived in that spot, forevermore.
When he was little, Creed could walk past a spot, and it would scare him something terrible. He thought that the centuries of Hoodoo and Voodoo that had been practiced in the Bayou might have put spotlights in dangerous areas, so peoplewould know to walk the long way. Creed was never sure that pain wouldn’t tail him home.
Creed felt it every time his team entered an area devastated by the acts of war.
Mrs. Moony, his high school A.P. science teacher, taught him the Law of Conservation of Energy, which states that energy can’t be created nor can it be destroyed. The only thing that could happen is that energy could transform. Energy in the universe remains constant over time. It can change its type or its location, but it will never disappear.
When Creed thought on that, it explained a lot about what he sensed in the woods, and later, on the battlefields.
Fear and pain, anger and grief, have ridden the wind and saturated the soil since time immemorial. But so did love. So did kindness and hope.
As a child, he’d learned that putting on mental body armor was a poor way to deal. If Creed shielded himself from the atmospheric angst, his senses were equally insulated from his ability to be aware of his survival signals, both as a child of the Bayou and later a Marine Raider.
To stay safe as a boy, Creed imagined that there was space between his cells and that his body became porous. Like water running through a sieve, it came and touched on him, then left.
Yeah, Creed’s trick meant he was freed of the miasma of haints, boo hags, and booger men so his soul could sleep safe at night.
He had taught Auralia how to protect herself that way, to open up the spaces in her physical body and mental space, and let the air and all the particles waft on through.
After that, she said she slept better at night, free from the spooks that haunted her dreams, but never free from the safety of her family’s etheric connections.
Time to open up and let the pain waft through.
The team slung their own high-vis vests into place, buckling them at the waist. It not only helped keep them safe, but it also served as an identifier for the team to keep track of one another.
Next, they dropped their hoods to pull the headlight straps over their visored caps and set to red light. The hoods on the Iniquus raincoats were tightened down over their visored caps, keeping their light system in place and the rain out of their eyes.
With everyone suited up, emergency packs on their backs, Jack stationed up the road,
Striker rallied his team. “Gentlemen, here we go. Creed, you’re learning the ropes, so I want you out front, a steady cadence as you jog the length of the crash. You need to establish a video connection with Logistics and narrate what you’re seeing. As you pass by a car, read off the license plate if you can quickly see it. That information will help emergency services identify the owner. Count heads, guess at ages, describe obvious injuries on the run. That will be the first level of information for Emergency management to assess the types of resources that are needed so they can deploy the right number of people and bring in the right equipment.” He looked down at Rou, leaning forward, ready to leap into action as soon as Creed gave the command. “Let’s leave Rou in her crate for now. But in case we need her later, go ahead and put her shoes on so she isn’t cut by broken glass.”
As Creed crouched to pull Rou’s socks and shoes from her zippered tactical vest and signaled her to lift a paw to get dressed, Striker continued.
“Next out is Gator. Your job is visual triage. Fast and dirty.” Striker lifted the strap and moved a box in front of Gator. Clasped to the strap were indelible markers. Inside were triage tags. “Use one tag per car, duct tape the tag to the right passenger’s door if possible. Keep your phone on speaker. As you fill out the tag, you’re simply saying it out loud. If you thinkit will cause undue stress to the car’s occupants, then just say the number of passengers and their corresponding colors, which will give the responders more information about resources required.”
The purpose of a triage system was to provide a quick and straightforward way of communicating an assessment. The sheet was a prioritization.
Red patients took transportation priority. Red meant that they had life-threatening injuries, but that if they got help fast, they could survive.
Yellow meant the person was seriously injured, but death wasn’t imminent. They could wait a bit.
Green was for minor injuries, what they called “walking wounded.”
The lucky ones who fell under the “White” category were fine.
Black meant they were dead or that their injuries were so extensive that treating them was performative for the family’s mental health, like performing CPR when the subject had been face down in the water for ten minutes. Any attention given to a black tag meant moving resources away from red tags, who had a chance.
This was going to be hard on Gator. Essentially, at a glance, he was tasked with determining who might live and who would die. With the closed rural hospital and the urban hospital almost an hour away, even with lights and sirens, Gator would have to weigh that distance into the tag system.
Gator looked up and said to no one in particular, “Not much chance of getting medivac support in this weather.”
Striker turned to Blaze. “Grab a roll of duct tape out of the back for Gator. And while you’re in there, grab the bag of tourniquets and the window breaker. You’ll go behind him. Your job is to tourniquet and move on.”
