The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,219

head, still trying to catch his breath. “Not her. The girl.”

“What girl?”

His eyes were amazed. “She’s a Walker, Sara.”

By the time they reached the Infirmary the sky beyond the lights had begun to pale. No one was there, which struck her as strange. From what Caleb had told her, she’d expected a crowd. She mounted the steps and rushed into the ward.

Lying on the nearest cot was a girl.

She was lying face-up, the bolt still embedded in her shoulder; a dark shape was pinned beneath her back. Alicia was standing over her, her jersey spattered with blood.

“Sara, do something,” Alicia said.

Sara moved quickly forward and eased her hand behind the girl’s neck to check her airway. The girl’s eyes were closed. Her breathing was rapid and shallow, her skin cool and clammy to the touch. Sara felt her neck for a pulse; her heart was banging like a bird’s.

“She’s in shock. Help me roll her over.”

The bolt had entered the girl’s left shoulder just below the spoon-shaped curve of her clavicle. Alicia wedged her hands under the girl’s shoulders while Caleb took her feet, and together they eased the girl onto her side. Sara retrieved a pair of scissors and sat behind her to cut the blood-soaked knapsack away, then the girl’s flimsy T-shirt, snipping it at the neck and tearing the rest of it free, revealing the slender frame of an early adolescent—the small, curving buds of her breasts and her pale skin. The bolt’s barbed tip was poking through a star-shaped wound just above the line of her scapula.

“I have to clip this off. I’ll need something bigger than these shears.”

Caleb nodded and ran from the room. As he passed through the curtain, Soo Ramirez rushed in. Her long hair had come undone; her face was streaked with dirt. She stopped abruptly at the foot of the cot.

“I’ll be goddamned. She’s just a kid.”

“Where the hell is Other Sandy?” Sara demanded.

The woman appeared dazed. “Where on earth did she come from?”

“Soo, I’m all alone in here. Where’s Sandy?”

Soo lifted her face, focusing on Sara. “She’s … in the Sanctuary, I think.”

Footsteps and voices, a buzz of commotion from without: the outer room was filling with onlookers now.

“Soo, get these people out of here.” Sara lifted her voice to the curtain. “Everybody, out! I want this building cleared now!”

Soo nodded and darted outside. Sara checked the girl’s pulse again. Her skin appeared to have taken on a faintly mottled appearance, like a winter sky on the edge of snow. How old was she? Fourteen? What was a fourteen-year-old girl doing out in the dark?

She turned to Alicia. “You brought her in?”

Alicia nodded.

“Did she say anything to you? Was she alone?”

“God, Sara.” Her eyes seemed to float. “I don’t know. Yes, I think she was alone.”

“Is that blood yours or hers?”

Alicia dropped her eyes to the front of her jersey, seeming to notice the blood for the first time. “Hers, I think.”

More commotion from without the room, and Caleb’s voice yelling, “Coming through!” He burst through the curtain, waving a heavy cutter, and thrust it into Sara’s hands.

A greasy old thing, but it would do. Sara poured spirits over the blades of the cutter and then her hands, wiping them dry on a rag. With the girl still lying on her side, she used the cutters to clip the arrowhead free, and poured more alcohol over everything. Then she directed Caleb to wash his hands as she had done while she took a skein of wool from the shelf and snipped off a long piece, rolling it into a compress.

“Hightop, when I back the bolt out, I want you to hold this against the entry wound. Don’t be gentle, press hard. I’m going to suture the other side, see if I can slow this bleeding.”

He nodded uncertainly. He was in over his head, Sara knew, but the truth was they all were. Whether or not the girl survived the next few hours depended on the extent of the bleeding, how much damage there was inside. They rolled the girl onto her back again. While Caleb and Alicia braced her shoulders, Sara took hold of the bolt and began to pull. Sara could sense, through the bolt’s metal shaft, the fibrous gristle of destroyed tissue, the clack of fractured bone. There was no way to be gentle; it was best to do it fast. With a hard tug, the bolt pulled away in a sighing gush of blood.

“Flyers, it’s her.”

Sara turned