Free Mercy Snow by Tiffany Baker

speak as bark on the phone. “What do you mean? How do you not know?” There was a pause, and then she rasped, “Yes, of course. I’m on my way.”
    The orange wool in Mercy’s hands flashed too bright all of a sudden, the color of alerts and alarms. “Hazel?”
    Hazel’s hands were shaking. She couldn’t have wound wool if she wanted to. “Do you know how to drive?”
    Mercy nodded. “Yes. Of course.” Anything after the monstrous RV and Zeke’s death trap of a truck would no doubt handle as smoothly as a limousine.
    Hazel snapped Mercy her sedan keys. “That was Abel Goode. He said there’s been an accident and Fergus is hurt. Go start the car. You’re coming with me.”

    C haos greeted Mercy and Hazel in the waiting room of the Heritage Pines ER. Even the light in the place was calamitous, Mercy thought, flooding into every nook and cranny, chasing the shadows of death back under the floorboards for a little while longer.
    Hazel pushed her way up to the reception desk and rapped her knuckles on it. “My husband,” she demanded in her gravel-dust voice. “Where’d they take him? Fergus Bell.”
    Hazel seemed preternaturally calm to Mercy, who always itched on the rare occasions when she stepped anywhere institutional and never knew what to say. Around her, knots of panicked parents tapped their feet or just sat, silent and grim. Normally the Heritage Pines ER was a sedate place, even when full. Chainsaw accidents weren’t unknown, of course, and there were always car accidents, sports injuries, and little kids who shoved peas up their noses, but never all at once.
    A fresh pair of ambulances squealed up outside. Mercy could see through the sliding glass doors that the news was not good in one of the vehicles. The first team of paramedics was already bursting out of its rig, shouting out codes and confusing acronyms to the waiting doctors, pushing a boy on a stretcher, but for the second set of paramedics there was no such hurry. They pulled their stretcher out of the back, but the girl on it was too still and too completely covered to suggest any chance of recovery. Mercy watched as they momentarily drew back the sheet for the doctors and conferred in hushed voices. She took a step forward and then stopped.
    The girl had been beautiful. There was no doubt of that,even in spite of the bloody contusion where her hairline met her forehead. Her hair, Mercy saw, was drying to the color of clean straw. Already her skin had lost the color of life, taking on the waxy sheen of the dead. The paramedics had strapped her arms down by her sides. On her chest someone had laid a bright red mitten, knit in a chevron pattern. Mercy wondered where the other one had gone.
    Hazel reappeared at Mercy’s side as a group of nurses wheeled the girl away. Hazel stared after her for a moment with her hand over her mouth, but if she knew who the girl was, she didn’t say. “They’ll take us back now. I’d like it if you’d come, if that’s okay. I don’t…” She trailed off, then cleared her throat. “They say he’s alive, but in bad shape. I don’t know if it’s the kind of thing I want to see alone.”
    “Sure.” Mercy squeezed Hazel’s hand. If there was anything she was good for, she knew, it was beholding the kinds of things most people would rather not.
    They made their way to one of the individual rooms on the far side of the ER. That right there was a bad sign. Those rooms were reserved for serious cases. They stopped at the third door. Mercy tiptoed up and peered in. The privacy curtain hadn’t been pulled closed, and she could see Fergus laid out on the bed, unconscious from the looks of it and not breathing on his own. Two doctors seized Hazel and began trying to explain his condition to her. Mercy caught their words midstream.
    “… a chance he’s injured the brain stem.”
    “… no apparent cognitive awareness.”
    “… we’ll run tests, obviously, but does he have a living