One Moment

I will survive

I remember waking up to the sounds of sirens and thinking the cops had knocked me unconscious for whatever I'd done this time. But I didn't feel handcuffs, nor did it feel like I was in a cop car.

I struggled to sit up and the pain that shot through my shoulder cause me to groan and drop back down.

"Please miss, try not to move, it's only just stopped bleeding." I opened my eyes, and everything around me was dark and blurry.

"Wh-" My voice broke down to nothing when I tried to speak, and I clear my throat before trying again. "Where am I?" I got the words out, but just barely, and the effort it took to get them out left me breathless. "What happened?"

"You're in an ambulance on the way to the hospital in town. Your shoulder has been badly burned. Please don't move." I looked at the person speaking and saw the woman from the church sitting on a bench beside me. I took a quick glance around, trying to get a hold on where I was and what was going on around me. I was in an ambulance, and I could see another one through the back window.

"Where's Dally? Johnny? Ponyboy?" I didn't think at the time that this woman would have no idea who I was talking about, but all I wanted to know was that they were somewhere close - that none of them were dead.

"The boys you were with? They're all in the ambulances behind us. It's going to be OK once we get all of you to the hospital." She paused. "That was a very brave thing you did for those kids. I can't thank you enough for it. One of them was my son." I could barely nod my head, and I took in a deep breath of the air, heavy with the smell of a hospital, and cringed. I hated hospitals, always had since I was a kid.

"How are they? Are they all... alive?" I almost didn't think I wanted to hear the answer. What would I do if any of them were dead? Especially Dally? As often as we fought, he meant everything to me.

"They're all alive. Two of them are going to be fine - all of you inhaled a lot of smoke, you got the least though. But one of them is in rough condition, he was pulled out of the church unconscious." I couldn't help the sob that passed through my lips. Johnny. It had to be Johnny since Dally had gone in to pull him out when I blacked out on the ground.

I bit back the rest of my sobs for the rest of the trip to the hospital. I hated the feeling of being wheeled down those halls by the doctors and nurses that surrounded me. But it didn't take long for them to get me into a room and patch me up, though they said that they wanted me to stay for a few hours, just in case there were any complications with the medicine they gave me. They than tried to confine me to the bed, I struggled for a moment, but it wasn't worth much. The stuff they'd given me was to dull the pain in my shoulder, and it was making my reaction time slower than I liked it to be.

"Dally. Where's Dally?" I slurred.

"He's getting stitched up too, you can see him in a little while. The worst of the medicine last about an hour, you need to sit down." I took a seat on the bed that they pushed me towards and nearly fell over on my way there.

"When does this feeling go away?" I asked, referring to the sick feeling in my stomach when there was only one nurse left in the room.

"The sickness should only be a few more minutes." She said as she cleaned up all the bandages and wrappers. "That's some burn you got there, miss." I nodded and placed a hand on my forehead. The nurse left and I sat there, waiting for the worst of the effects to fade away.

When I finally felt like my legs could hold me up, and I made my way out of the room and down the hall to the nurses station I'd noticed when I'd been wheeled in.

"Where's Dallas Winston?" I asked, still feeling slightly off balance. The nurse behind the counter looked up at me and then down at a chart in front of her.