He practically put his foot through the floor as he pushed down on the brake as hard as he could.
The tires screeched in high-pitched protest as they came to a halt inches away from the front of the clinic.
As usual, the waiting room of Forever’s lone medical clinic was very close to filled. It was the only available medical facility for fifty miles and the people of Forever were grateful for that. It wasn’t all that long ago that the clinic had stood empty, its last physician having moved away thirty years ago. There was something comforting about having someone to turn to because they felt ill, or just because a husband or wife had nagged them into availing themselves of an annual—or bi-annual—exam.
Startled by the combined, unnerving sound of screeching tires and squealing brakes, everyone in the clinic’s waiting room turned in unison toward the noise. As a rule, Forever was thought of by its residents as a sleepy little town that no one outside of the area ever really noticed and where nothing of consequence ever happened.
That meant that no one, either out of boredom or a sense of competitiveness, engaged in car races or harrowing displays of one-upmanship.
So when the teeth-jarring noise pierced the morning air, every patient within the waiting room, as well as the one nurse manning the desk, Debi White Eagle, instantly glanced in the direction of the bay window. The window looked out toward the front of the clinic.
“What the hell was that?”
Rancher Steven Hollis jumped to his feet, verbalizing what everyone else in the room was thinking.
The question didn’t go unanswered for more than a couple of quick beats. Almost immediately thereafter, the roomful of patients witnessed what all would have readily agreed was a very unlikely sight: a bare-chested Deputy Cody McCullough bursting into the clinic with what appeared to be a newborn baby in his arms. The baby was wrapped in his uniform shirt.
Debi, a surgical nurse by vocation as well as one of the most recent additions to Forever’s population, vacated her desk and rushed over to Cody.
“What happened?” she asked.
Cody quickly transferred Layla into her arms. “The baby’s mother is in the truck. She’s lost a lot of blood and I need help.”
“Holly!” Debi yelled over her shoulder toward the rear of the clinic. “We need a doctor out here, STAT!”
It was an order she was accustomed to issuing when she worked at the hospital in Chicago. Here, however, the word left more than one of the patients looking at the others in bewilderment.
Grabbing the fresh lab coat she’d brought in for one of the doctors, Debi quickly removed Cody’s shirt from around the tiny body and rewrapped the newborn in the lab coat. Acting in the interest of practicality, not to mention cleanliness, she figured the doctor would forgive her.
“Here,” she said, giving Cody back his shirt. “You don’t want to be out of uniform, Deputy.”
With that, Debi immediately turned toward the most maternal patient available to her, Anita Moretti, who had five children and a brood of grandchildren of her own. “Anita, hold the baby,” she requested, then looked at Cody. “Where’s the mother?”
“Out here.” He threw the words over his shoulder as, shrugging back into his shirt, he ran outside, secretly almost afraid of what he would see once he opened the truck’s passenger door.
“Where is she?”
The question came from Dan Davenport, the doctor who had initially reopened the clinic and who was currently in charge of it as well as the care of the citizens of Forever.
Cody was already at the truck. He threw open the passenger door and unbuckled the seat belt that was the only thing holding Devon in place and semiupright.
As carefully as he could, he lifted Devon out of the vehicle. The lower half of her dress was soaked with her blood.
Dan attempted to take the unconscious woman from him, but Cody shook his head. He wasn’t about to let her go. “No, I’ve got her.”
“This way,” Dan said needlessly as he and Debi went back into the clinic ahead of Cody. “What happened?” Dan asked. “Did you find her this way?”
More than a dozen set of eyes looked in their direction as Cody carried the woman in.
“No, she was conscious and screaming when I found her,” Cody answered, giving no indication that he even saw the other people in the room.
“Was she still in labor or had she given birth already?” Dan asked, leading the way to the room where he and his partner, Dr. Alisha Cordell-Murphy, performed both the simple surgeries and the ones that were classified as emergencies.
“As far as I could see, she had just started,” Cody told him, aware that every word was being greedily absorbed by all the people in the waiting room. “I tried to help her. When she gave birth, I thought she’d be okay,” Cody went on. “I didn’t realize...” His voice drifted off helplessly.
It was clear to Dan by Cody’s tone that he felt guilty that the situation had somehow devolved to this point.
“Not your fault,” Dan told him, indicating the freshly prepared gurney in the room. “People don’t realize that there are a lot of unforeseeable elements that can go wrong as a baby’s being born.”
“What have we got here?” Alisha Cordell-Murphy asked, peering into the room in response to Holly’s summons. Her eyes widened when she saw the unconscious woman. “Omigod, who is she?” she asked, looking from Dan to the man who was covered in the woman’s blood. She had only been in Forever a little over a year now, but she was acquainted—at least by sight—with everyone who lived within the area. This one was definitely not anyone she knew.
“Cody found her and brought her in,” Dan answered.
Cody gave her the highlights. “Her truck was pulled over on the side of the road. I wouldn’t have even seen it if she hadn’t screamed,” he confessed.
“I need plasma,” Dan declared. “It looks like she’s lost more blood than she can afford to.”
Debi, who had come into the room with them, was cutting away the woman’s clothing, preparing to put a sterile gown on her. Holly, who had already brought in the plasma, was now wordlessly preparing what she assumed the doctors were going to need to stop the hemorrhaging as well as to get a transfusion going.
Cody took a step back, and then another, giving everyone else there room to work. He felt as if he was just in the way.
“I’ll just wait outside,” he said to no one in particular as he took another step back.
Dan looked up, sparing him a fraction of a moment. “Don’t go too far away. I’ve got a few more questions you might be able to answer.”
“I don’t know more than I just told you, but sure, I’ll just be in the waiting room,” Cody told the doctor, but he knew he was talking to himself. Everyone else in the room was busy, doing their best to try to save the woman’s life.
Concerned and more than a little agitated, Cody slipped out.
The minute he was back in the waiting room, a barrage of questions rose all around him, coming from all different directions.
“You know her?”
“Where’d you find her?”
“Is this her baby?”
“Where’s the father?”
There were more, all mingling with one another until it was just a huge wall of sound.