Free Wake the Dawn by Lauraine Snelling

roads. If they can get us clear one way, we could send the ambulances with our bad ones to the hospital. Perhaps the choppers can fly come daylight. We’re all praying for that.”
    Ben felt his jaw tighten. Why waste your time praying to a God who kills women and babies? At the look on her face, he realized she’d guessed what he was thinking.
    She laid a hand on his arm. “No easy answers, I know.”
    Ben turned away and thought about Mrs. Unfeld curled up on a quilt in the corner of the break room. Bessie Unfeld, a church leader for years, and look how God rewarded her. He almost said something but kept on going; he’d not seen Esther for how long? He opened the doors to the examining rooms, peeked in. Rob was cleaning two, apparently having just handled a case. Denise, the internal bleed, was sleeping on her table, Roy stretched out on the floor beside her. Culpepper was cleaning one, working around their asthma guy.
    Here was Esther, in the mini surgery with a patient on the table. “I could use another pair of hands here.”
    “Scrub?”
    “Get the gloves on.” She wiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. Strange, it wasn’t that hot in here.
    Though she had snapped at him before, he decided to try again.
    “What’s wrong?”
    “I can’t keep the blood out of the field.”
    Ben didn’t mean what was wrong with the patient, but he said nothing.
    Ben looked from her to the child whose compound fracture of the tibia lay exposed under the lights. Sure there was blood, but not a bleeder, or else she had already stopped it. The man hovering at the head of the table looked up at Ben. He poured a bit of water on the wound, irrigating it, keeping the bone moist lest it die.
    “Hi, Jensen.” Ben turned to Esther. “You going to try to set that?”
    Jensen nodded. “Hi, Ben. It was bleeding pretty bad, but she got that stopped.”
    “How’s the rest of your family?”
    “Safe. Down in the basement. With all this rain, that’s starting to leak, but I got a pump and a generator.”
    “Okay, here we go. Jensen, you hang on to your son.” She gave Ben orders and together they pulled the bone back into place. She picked out small bone fragments and blew out a breath. “Thank God for anesthetics. Clear the field for me again, and I’ll go searching.”
    Ben recognized the gauze sponges as having come from the OB kit. They were using every bit of supplies, and now these were used up as well.
    They placed a drain, Esther did some fancy sewing to close it up, they bandaged the wound. Slipping an inflatable splint onto the leg was the easy part. Ben blew it up by mouth, since he had no idea where the pump was. At least their supply of inflatables was still adequately stocked.
    Jensen was smiling a sad, weary, grateful smile. “Just as good as the big city.”
    Ben chuckled mirthlessly. “That’s what we told some other guy. He didn’t want quacks working on him.” That was long ago, so very, very long ago! Ben looked up at the clock. Seven A.M . He’d been on the go for twenty-four hours and he knew others were functioning on even less sleep. Dennis and Yvette, and…
    Let’s insert a ray of sunshine here, Ben, boy. “Barbara thinks the choppers might be flying now that the wind has died some.”
    Esther stepped back and pulled off her gloves, the ones that had been in the OB kit. Or had she raided other OB kits to get more? “Please, God, I hope so. The woman…”
    Ben knew she meant Denise. “I looked in on them a few moments ago. Want me to check again for you?”
    “No, you stay here until the anesthetic wears off and I’ll go see.”
    Ben watched her tilt and thump against the doorjamb as she went through the door, lurch erect, continue on out. How much longer could she keep functioning? Were the rest of them in as bad a shape as she was?

Chapter Six
    E sther sagged against the wall behind her office door. Come on, woman, you know the tools to deal with this. Stay with it.