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I lie on my back and bleed for a while. From this distance, the fire is warm and pleasant. I guess we won. Cherry is staring down at me with some of the others. I wonder what she was talking to the Magistrate about earlier. But I pass out before I get the chance to ask her.
When I wake up, I’m wrapped in clean bandages. Someone wadded my shirt and coat and shoved them under my head as a pillow. As I sit up my side hurts like a burning bastard, but it looks like I’ve stopped bleeding.
I’m surrounded by maybe thirty souls and Hellions in bandages and splints, or in worse shape. Legs or arms gone. Bloody bandages over where an eye or two used to be. The Magistrate moves smoothly from body to body doing triage. Of course he’s the havoc’s doctor. He probably also wove the bandages and made a chocolate soufflé while I was out. Carefully, I roll over and get to my feet.
“What are you doing?” says Doris. She comes over from where she was kneeling next to Billy and puts an arm around me, taking some of my weight. “The Magistrate wants you to rest.”
“What’s wrong with Billy?”
“Poor dear. He took one in the belly.”
“He going to be all right?”
She shakes her head and helps me turn to see what a fucking disaster we are.
“Maybe,” she says. “The Magistrate isn’t sure.”
“Who else?”
She sighs.
“Lerajie and Babetta are gone.”
“How’s Barbora taking it?”
“Not so good.”
“Anyone else? ”
She half laughs.
“Johnny took a shot right along the side of his head. If the little shit had ears it would have blown one off.”
“That it?”
“No. We lost the Empress.”
I look at the Magistrate. All I can see is his back.
We’re basically standing in an auto-wrecking-yard-turned-hospital. Bodies and shot to shit vehicles are scattered at crazy angles in every direction. The havoc looks truly fucked.
I lean away from Doris, taking more of my own weight.
“So much for the crusade.”
“Don’t lose heart,” Doris says. “The Magistrate says we’ll be up and around in a couple of days.”
“Until we come to the next town. They’ll wipe out what’s left of us with powder puffs.”
Doris looks around, too.
“It doesn’t look good, does it? But like Mama used to say, ‘Keep a rainbow in your heart.’”
“She sounds like a nice lady.”
“Mother? Oh god. She was a monster. But she was a good cook. She taught me proper cutlery use.”
The panabas and butcher knives tinkle on her belt like slaughterhouse wind chimes. I wonder which blade she used on Mama.
