Bullard’s Best by Dale Mayer

Author:Dale Mayer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Military, Romance
Publisher: Valley Publishing
Published: 2021-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Katie could see the consternation among the faces in the group, when the locals realized they knew who had attacked the old woman, and that it was a black sheep of her own family. Katie looked down, as Dave gently made the older woman more comfortable, straightening up her body and placing a pillow ever-so-slightly under her neck to support it before covering her up. She checked for a temperature, as his gaze studied her skin.

“You have a lot of medical experience, don’t you?” Katie asked Dave.

“Bullard and I both do,” he said.

“Will she be okay?” one of the women asked anxiously. The woman was heavy with child, and it was obvious that she was close to her time and stressed out.

He turned toward her. “I can’t be sure. She’ll need to wake up for us to evaluate that.”

The woman nodded and gently rubbed her belly. “I need her to help with the baby,” she murmured.

“Does she look after everybody’s medical needs here?”

The group nodded.

He frowned at that. “Do you not go to the mainland at all?”

“Not if we can help it,” the woman said. “We have to pay them.”

“And here, she just looks after you?”

“We’ve come to her for decades, generations even,” the woman explained.

He nodded and assessed the look of his unconscious patient again.

“You’re not happy about how she looks, are you?” Katie asked.

“I’d feel a lot better if she were awake. Concussions are tricky things, and so are head wounds.”

Katie didn’t know the first thing about that kind of medicine. “Well, Leia’s coming. Maybe she’ll help.”

“She might, and she’ll certainly settle down these other people, I’ll bet, but there’s nothing much to be done for head injuries like this. It just takes time.”

“If the old woman were in a hospital, would she be okay?”

“Only if the brain isn’t swelling inside,” he noted. “They would just monitor her otherwise. And it’s like they say, medical care is out of reach for anybody here. There’s no free medical anywhere, and they don’t have a way to earn cash.”

“Right.” Katie sighed at that. “Life is just fine and dandy, until something traumatizing happens, and then you realize the safety net you thought you had isn’t quite a safety net anymore.”

He nodded and stepped up to some of the locals. “Where can we find this Pietro?”

One of the men shrugged. “He went back to the mainland.”

“To get his wrist fixed?”

One of the other men said, “To bring back friends.”

“Ah, so, he wants to continue the fight, huh?”

The other man nodded.

“We’ll see how he likes that,” Dave muttered. “And what about Ramon?”

“We haven’t seen him,” one of the women said nervously. “Not since yesterday.”

“Does he hang around with Pietro a lot?”

“Too much,” the man replied.

“And what about anybody else here? Do they hang out with that group?”

“No,” the pregnant woman replied. “Most of us just want to live our peaceful island life.”

“And Pietro and Ramon want something different?”

“They always want something different,” she said, stifling a heavy groan, as she tried to shift the large weight she was carrying.

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