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matter what they did.
    Cal panted and sat back. If he was annoyed or angry she hadn’t jumped in to help, he didn’t show it. He swiped his hand over his forehead. “Shit. He’s not breathing. Shit. I don’t know. Maybe he had a heart attack. Or a stroke. We need to get him to a hospital.”
    She winced and pointed all around her. “Cal. They’re all dead. There must be a dozen bodies here. Just…maybe you should leave him.”
    He looked at her, and she looked back. Steady. But his gaze broke her down, and she sighed.  
    “He’s dead,” she said softly.
    “Maybe…maybe someone can save him,” Cal said. “Since I can’t.”
    This was important to him, she saw that much. Somehow, some some way, Cal wanted to be able to save this guy. So she nodded and bent to help lift the weight of him. Together they put him in the backseat.  
    She didn’t want to turn around and see a corpse in the backseat of her car. Cal wove through the wreckage, easing the Volvo through to the other side of the road, where he picked up speed. He hit a bump going too fast, and Renton rolled. He hit the back of her seat. He hit the floor.
    “Keep going,” Abbie said through a thick throat when it looked as though Cal meant to slow down. “He’s not going to mind. The sooner you get him to the hospital, the sooner you can get him help.”
    The sooner you could admit he’s dead, she thought but kept to herself.
    The closest hospital was still standing, as was most of the town when they got there. Emergency personnel, all of whom seemed to know Cal by sight, rushed out to meet them. They took Renton away and left Abbie and Cal to wait.
    There was paperwork. There always is. The ER was overflowing with refugees from the destruction. Many of them knew Cal too. More than one, mostly the women, gave Abbie the sort of half-curious, half-hostile looks she’d come to expect from other females, especially when there was an attractive man involved.
    Still, paperwork aside, they were only there for fifteen minutes before the doctor came out to talk to them. “I’m sorry. He’s gone.”
    Abbie tried hard to look appropriately sad. “Oh. That’s too bad.”
    “Was he a friend?”
    Cal shook his head. “No. We just met up with him over by Pickett…well. Shit. What used to be Pickett…”
    The doctor nodded. “It’s bad out there, I hear.”
    Cal nodded, solemn. “Yeah. It’s bad.”
    “Well. I’m sorry he didn’t make it, but there wasn’t anything we could do. He was gone when you brought him in. Probably stroke, though they’ll do an autopsy to be sure. It’s going to be a long night.” The doctor sighed, rubbed his eyes. “We could use some extra hands around here, if you’re willing, Cal. Your friend too.”
    Abbie shook her head. “Oh. I don’t have any medical training…”
    The doctor gave her a bleak smile. “You can make coffee, right?”
    She hesitated, then nodded with a quick glance at Cal. “Yes. I guess I can.”
    Those five words were the reason why she was in the ER when they brought in the screaming woman. There’d been a lot of noise there. Injured people who were still conscious tended to shout out their agony or frustration if they weren’t deemed high priority and had to take a turn in the hard plastic bucket seats while they waited for the attentions of the overrun and overwhelmed staff. A few screams had filtered out from the exam rooms as doctors and PAs reset bones or stitched wounds. But nobody had been wheeled into the emergency room shrieking like a fire bell.
    What made it worse was that the EMTs were as overwhelmed as the onsite staff, if not more. Instead of taking her into an exam room, they simply brought her in the wheelchair, pushed it to the side of the admittance desk, locked the wheels and left her to go back out on call. The nurse at the desk tried to get some information from her, but all she did was scream. She had no visible injuries. No blood. Her clothes weren’t even torn.