All The Dark Places

4. The Broken Man

    At just after one in the morning Martin's yell sounded through the forest. The sound echoed through copses of trees and off the bank of a ravine. Rosalind heard it, but was not sure what direction it originated. Through the forest came a low keening moan that accompanied frantic cries for help. He must have been unconscious for a while, Rosalind thought. Ivy found him and by the time Rosalind and Toby reached them, she pulled him a few feet away from the bottom of the ravine. With half of his body buried in mud, he struggled to keep his head above the water that had collected in the stream. He was weak, struggling to stay above the mud. If Ivy had not found him when she did, he might have slipped down further and drowned. 

    "Ya shouldna moved him, daughter," he said. Rosalind wondered what kind of father called his child 'daughter' instead of her name. In any case she did not seem to mind.

    "If I didn't move him, he'd have drowned. And so now he's not drowned, and we need a cot to get him out of here." Ivy crouched down in the mud, her long legs perched with one foot on a sturdy stone and the other down into the mud. Her hands held Martin's head up from the mud and water. She looks like a spider, Rosalind thought. A whip thin Daddy Long Legs spider. 

Rosalind decided immediately that she liked the girl. She was strange and beautiful and something out of a storybook. She wanted to write about her and make her a character in one of her novels. She wondered what the girl would think of that.

     "The ambulance canna get out here for all the trees and the mud. Me and Ivy will keep the man as well as we can. You, Mrs. Pyrne, go and fetch the medics and bring 'em back this way. Be quick now!" Toby's thick Scottish brogue was a slow drawl.

Rosalind mounted her horse in a flash. She navigated through the twisting and turning paths that wound through the trees and embankments. When she reached the open field behind the castle, she sped up as fast as Desmond would allow. She did not stop until she reached the steps of the castle where she saw Tess sitting on the stone steps, hugging Felicia to her like a mother tiger with her cub. 

Tess was crying, dark streaks of mascara running down her cheeks. Several castle guests sat with her, trying to console her. Everyone was worried and too excited by the day's traumas to consider sleeping or staying inside. Rosalind was relieved to see that the ambulance was still there, and two medics stood by the vehicle, one of them smoking a cigarette as his hand shook nervously.

    "We need an ambulance and a stretcher! We found Martin. His leg is broken. Tess, he's alive. He's hurt, but he is alive. We'll get him to the hospital."

Rosalind saw Tess give her a silently mouthed 'thank you' before she hugged her daughter tighter and broke into tears. 

     "There's a problem." The medic put out his cigarette and immediately lit a fresh one. "We're broke down. The ambulance isn't moving."

    "Oh Jesus. All right, we'll have to put him on a stretcher and get him out of the woods. Meanwhile, one of you ring for another ambulance to come."

    "That's the problem." The man's hand shook more as he took a long puff of smoke into his lungs. He spoke so fast that she had difficulty understanding him. "I called it in and no one can get out here. None of the ambulances are working. It's as if they all ran out of petrol except they didn't. They're all well serviced, and they've just... stopped. All the god damned cars have stopped running."

The other medic was a solid, stout woman with large, round brown eyes named Jody. She climbed into the back of the ambulance and came back out with a blue canvas case.

   "We can give him some morphine, sedate him and see if we can get him into a splint and on a stretcher. At least get him back here in one piece and then go from there."