Chapter 7 - The Red Snow
The sound of Claire’s fragile cries filled the abandoned chapel, but Emma’s silence was deafening.
Her skin had taken on the gray translucency of paraffin wax.
Deputy Vance pulled a roll of heavy medical tape and packed the final layer of sterile gauze between Emma’s thighs.
“We can’t wait for the ambulance, Miller,” Vance said, his voice flat with clinical urgency.
“She has no radial pulse.”
“Her carotid is barely a thread.”
“If she stays in this freezing temperature for another fifteen minutes, her core temperature will drop below eighty degrees and her heart will stop.”
Vance stripped his high-visibility outer parka and wrapped it around Emma’s torso, cocooning her in the foil emergency blanket.
“Keep the baby pressed against your skin under your shirt,” Vance commanded, pointing at my chest.
“Your body heat is the only incubator that child has right now.”
I tucked Claire deeper against my bare chest, zipping my inner fleece jacket halfway up to shield her from the wind while keeping her face clear.
Claire let out another tiny, angry whimper, her miniature fist pressing against my sternum.
“I’ve got the baby,” I said, my teeth chattering uncontrollably from the cold.
“How do we get Emma up that ravine?”
Vance grabbed a heavy canvas tarp from the chapel’s maintenance corner, shaking out old leaves and frost.
We rolled Emma’s limp body onto the canvas, wrapping the heavy fabric around her like a sled.
“Grab the top ropes,” Vance grunted, taking the front corner.
“We pull together.”
We stepped out of the broken doorway of St. Jude’s Chapel into the teeth of the gale.
The blizzard had intensified, sheets of horizontal ice pellets stinging our exposed faces like needles.
The red droplets Emma had left on her way to the chapel were already being swallowed by fresh white drifts.
Every step up the steep rocky ridge was agony.
The snow reached our knees, hiding slick sheets of black ice and jagged limestone rocks beneath its surface.
I hauled on the canvas rope with my right arm, using my left arm to protect Claire against my chest from any falling branches.
My lungs burned as if filled with acid.
Twice, my boots lost traction and I slammed down onto my knees, my shins smashing against buried stones.
Each time I fell, Claire let out a startled cry, and each time I forced myself back to my feet.
“Don’t look down, Miller!” Vance roared over the wind, his heavy frame straining against the canvas harness.
“Keep moving!”
Behind us, Emma’s pale head rested against the snow-covered canvas, her dark hair frozen into stiff ribbons.
She was entirely unresponsive to the jolting of the sled.
It took twenty-five agonizing minutes to drag her limp body four hundred yards uphill to the edge of the logging road.
When our boots finally struck the gravel shoulder, the rhythmic pulse of sirens echoed through the frozen pine trees.
Two massive four-wheel-drive emergency vehicles were plowing through the drifts toward the ridge.
A heavy municipal rescue truck and an all-terrain tactical ambulance skidded to a halt ten feet from where we collapsed into the snowbank.
Four paramedics in red snowsuits leaped from the rear doors carrying a folding basket stretcher and oxygen tanks.
“We have two patients!” Vance shouted, waving his arms violently.
“Thirty-two-week premature infant with hypothermia, and a twenty-eight-year-old female with eclampsia, severe abruption, and massive postpartum hemorrhage!”
The paramedics moved with terrifying, practiced speed.
Two of them took Emma, slicing open the canvas wrapping and sliding a rigid cervical collar around her neck.
“Her blood pressure is sixty over forty!” a female paramedic shouted, inserting an intraosseous needle directly into Emma’s shin bone.
“Start two liters of warm saline wide open!”
“Push four milligrams of magnesium sulfate and get the bag-valve mask on her!”
The third paramedic, an older man with gray hair, approached me with a heated infant transport pod.
“Let me take the baby, sir,” he said gently, reaching toward my jacket.
“No!” I snarled instinctively, backing away into the snowbank, shielding Claire with both arms.
“Sir, look at me,” the paramedic said, his voice calm and firm amidst the chaos of the blizzard.
“Your daughter’s core temperature is dropping.”
“She needs humidified oxygen and a heated incubator right now, or she will enter respiratory distress.”
“You saved her life out here.”
“Now let me keep her alive on the road.”
Looking down at Claire’s tiny, shuddering frame, my defenses broke.
I carefully unzipped my jacket and lifted my daughter into the paramedic’s sterile, warmed blankets.
He checked her heart with a miniature stethoscope, his eyes widening in slight relief.
“Heart rate is one-twenty, lungs are clear,” he reported to his partner.
“She’s a fighter.”
They loaded Claire into the back of the first ambulance, securing the heated transport pod to the floorboards.
Suddenly, a piercing flatline tone screamed from the heart monitor inside the second vehicle where Emma lay.
“She’s in ventricular fibrillation!” the female medic screamed, jumping onto the side rail of the gurney.
“Initiating chest compressions!”
“Charge to two hundred joules!”
The sight of Emma’s chest being compressed with violent, rhythmic force shattered whatever remained of my sanity.
“Emma!” I screamed, lunging toward the ambulance doors.
Deputy Vance caught me around the collar, hauling me back into the snow with all his weight.
“Let them work, David!” Vance yelled into my ear.
“You get in the way now, and she dies!”
“Clear!” the medic shouted inside.
Emma’s body jolted off the gurney as the defibrillator discharged through her chest.
“No rhythm!” the medic yelled again.
“Continue compressions!”
“Push one of epi!”
They slammed the rear doors shut, the siren wailing as the heavy four-wheel-drive tires churned through the snow, speeding toward the regional medical center forty miles south.
I stood in the red tire tracks left by the ambulance, the silence of the forest closing in around me once more.
Vance grabbed my arm and pulled me toward his cruiser.
May you like
“Get in, Miller,” Vance said quietly.
“We’re following them in.”
