Creatures of the Storm by Brad Munson Page B

time that there were streaks of gray in his long blond
hair, and a noticeably thin spot was starting to show right at the
crown. Even ageless hippies get
old , she thought with an unexpected
tenderness. Doesn’t seem
fair …
    “Come on, Fender,” she said again. She put
her other hand under his chin and slowly, steadily, forced him to
look up.
    He was crying freely. His glasses were
crooked, almost falling off. She removed them and put them on the
counter, then pried his hands away, still muttering meaningless,
comforting things: “It’ll be fine, let’s just get a look. Come on,
Fender, help me out here, man, let me look, you’ll be fine.”
    “Shit,” he keened. “Shit shit shit…”
    It was worse than she thought. A gash over
two inches long and a half an inch deep ran from the middle of his
right cheek to within a quarter-inch of the corner of his eye. It
was gushing blood, red and plentiful and, if anything, thinner and
messier than she had expected. She had heard that head wounds were
bad, that much she remembered that from her first aid classes. But
this?
    She looked around his tiny
kitchenette and caught sight of a roll of paper towels. “Hang on a
second, Fender, give me a second.” She grabbed at it, tore off
three sheets, and folded them rapidly into a thick pad. “Here. Hold
this against your cheek, man. Tight, now, tight as you can. And no
taking it off to look.” She put the pad in his palm and pressed it
hard again his face. Apply pressure to the
wound , she told herself, if only to keep the idiot from freaking out at
all the blood.
    “Do you have a first aid kit?”
    “Shiiiit,” Fender said, groaning thinly as he
held the pad to his cheek. He was starting to rock back and forth
like an autistic child.
    “Fender!” she said, and jerked him by the
shoulder. “Join me, here, man! Do you have a first aid kit?”
    He stopped groaning and shaking. After a
moment he gulped in a mouth full of fresh air and said, “Kinda.
Band-Aids and Bactine. Above the sink.” He pressed down harder on
his cheek and started to double over again. “Shit!”
    She found it in the half-broken cupboard and
brought it out. Just as directed: Bactine, Neosporin, a used
athletic bandage, and three half-empty boxes of Band-Aids in
different sizes, surrounding an unopened bottle of Tylenol.
    “The best that modern medicine has to offer,”
she said. She pulled out the boxes, quickly locating the type of
Band-Aid that was the large square pad usually used for scraped
knees.
    She turned back and pulled
Fender’s face up to her again. He didn’t fight as hard this time.
“What was that?”
he asked, his eyes squeezed shut in pain.
    At least that’s better than
‘shit shit shit’ , she thought. “I haven’t
got a clue,” she said, “but the wind must have caught it and blown
it into you.”
    “No way,” he said. “It bit
me, Lucy. That thing jumped on me, man! It bit me!”
    “Okay,” she said. The truth was, it had
looked like that to her, too, but that wasn’t possible. Seed pods
generally didn’t attack at will. At the moment, it didn’t really
matter. This guy had a serious facial wound, and they had to deal
with that first.
    “Never mind,” she said, “We’ll get this
cleaned up and get you over to the Clinic.”
    “No way,” he mumbled. “I hate those guys.
Always thinking I’m OD’ing or something, even when I just got the
flu.”
    She nodded in understanding. The Borrego
Clinic wasn’t exactly Cedars-Sinai, but it was all they had. This
looked like it was going to need stitches and antibiotics at the
very least. “We’ll see,” she said, then she reached out to gently
pull the hand with the blood-soaked paper towel away from wound.
She was braced to see the worst.
    She saw a thick, scabby, almost dry line of
blood no more than two inches long. That was it. No bubbling gash,
no bright red gush, just a dark and crusty blot on his cheek. As if
he’d barely bled at all.
    “I’ll be