Gunpowder
Chapter Eight

Panic shot through Axis’s nerves as she was met with the sight. It wasn’t a normal crash, not at all. The automobile looked like a crushed soda can, with the front end completely smashed in. The rear hadn’t fared much better, with the back rim completely pushed into the back window, easily shattering it.

She quickly dismounted her horse and hurried over to the car’s side. If anyone in the car was still alive, they probably wouldn’t be conscious, and even if they were there was no way they would be able to open the car door. She couldn’t see anything through the window, as a seat had been shoved in front of it. Still, as to alert anyone in the vehicle of her presence, she knocked on the door, right below the busted glass. Something in the station wagon shuffled. Something was alive in there!

Axis took the door handle in her grasp and yanked, but it refused to open. It wouldn’t budge! She took a deep breath and got a handhold on the side of the door. Her muscles strained as she forced the door open, seeing as it slid to the side. Axis cocked her head; Such an old style of door went out of use decades ago.

The seat still blocked her way however. She heard something shuffle again. She was sure that there was something alive in there now. Like a protective parent, she ripped the car seat, which had been shoved back from the front of the car, out of its spot. The leather tore easily from its destroyed metal frame, and Axis flung it behind her. She had practically developed superhuman strength from the adrenaline rushing through her veins.

The first thing she saw when tore away the seat were two, terrified, blue eyes staring at her. They belonged to a pale, bloodied face, which Axis thought was about her own age. The pale woman’s hair was a bleached blonde mess. Some of the strands were glued to her face with the blood that spurted from a cut in her lip. Blood drained from a huge glass shard deeply embedded in her neck. She was laying on top of what looked like a dead body.

Axis didn’t care who the woman was or what side she was on, she just knew that she needed help now. She took her communicator from her belt and quickly turned it on; She then dialed the emergency number specifically reserved for soldiers and those working in law enforcement.

“I need help out here now! There’s two people, possibly more, injured in a car crash out here! One appears to be deceased, but the other is conscious! Get out here! They need help!” She screeched, not caring about the formalities of it. Those blue eyes were still staring at her, as if pleading. Axis hung up, knowing that they could track the location of the call.

Just seeing the woman’s injured face tore at her heartstrings. Rivers of tears streamed from the blonde’s eyes. Axis was no medic, but she knew that having glass stabbed into your body probably wasn’t good.

The injured woman was close enough to her that she didn’t need to lean into the car to reach her. She held out one hand, as if approaching a skittish cat. She then pulled the matted hair from her face and brushed it behind her ears, all while murmuring things uncharacteristic of her, such as: “Shh,” and “It’s gonna be alright..”

The sweet little nothings seemed to calm the woman down, but she still did not speak. Axis continued to murmur as she slowly reached her hand towards the woman’s neck. Swiftly, she removed the glass shard embedded into the soft skin, seeing the woman wince in pain. She then yanked out a piece of glass from her forehead, which she had just seen.

The woman started to creep backwards, though every step seemed to cause her pain. Axis tried to get her to come back by holding out her hand again, but the woman refused.

Then she jumped.

A loud whirring noise resounded from above; Axis immediately recognized it as the blades of a helicopter. She nodded at the woman, hoping she understood, and left the car. Sure enough, a helicopter was beginning to descend mere yards away from her. The copter was pure white, with a red cross painted on the side.

The gust of wind nearly knocked Axis off her feet as the aircraft landed. It blew sand everywhere, which Axis avoided by leaping out of its range. When the helicopter finally landed, two people hurried out of the doors. They were both dressed in blue uniforms with red crosses printed over their hearts. One of them was a slightly tanned woman with red short hair, and the other was a black male with dreadlocks hanging down from his scalp. They saw her and looked at each other as if silently conversing, then split apart. The man ran over to the car, while the female ran over to her.

“Your name?” she asked, hurriedly pulling out a communicator of her own.

“Axis Adlven,” Axis responded, sensing the urgency in the medic’s voice.

“Name of patients?”

“Unknown,”

“Amount of injured?”

“At least two, possibly more,”

“Thank you for telling us. We will do all we can,”

Axis nodded, watching as the woman hurried away. Two more people had emerged from the copter by then, pushing a stretcher between them.

She jumped when she heard an earsplitting noise come from the car. She raced over to where the male was standing by the car. The woman at the back of the car seemed to be hissing, eyes glinting with anger.

“Be gentle with her!” Axis screamed, not truly knowing why. Something was compelling her to protect the woman. She held out her hand like she had done earlier.

“J-Je suis parle,” the scared woman responded hoarsely. Axis cocked her head.

“Do, you, speak, English?” she asked, not understanding the woman’s tongue. She spoke slowly, as to let the woman understand her.

The woman nodded sharply.

“Can you walk?” The black male asked.

She shook her head in response; Speaking seemed to hurt her.

“Can you get out of the car? We can carry you if you cannot. Our unit is equipped with a medical transport device,” The blonde woman offered.

The woman’s hands balled into fists, clearly opposed to the idea.

The blonde and the black man nodded at each other again. They disappeared into the car, and a few seconds later the blonde appeared, holding the injured woman in her arms, bridal-style. The black man appeared afterwords, holding the other, possibly deceased, woman in the same way.

The awake woman was laid into the stretcher, and the blonde and black pair scurried back to the helicopter to fetch another for the other female.

They pushed her into the back of the copter, chattering amongst themselves with obvious worry. Axis went over to her still standing horse, collapsed it with the press of a button, and shoved the transport cube in her pocket. She lied to herself that she would go along with the plane simply because her equine transportation unit was out of fuel, but even she knew that wasn’t true. First of all, they ran on battery power, and second of all, they could last for days on end without recharging. Still, something compelled her to join the medics and those injured on the copter. Some sort of emotional instinct which she couldn’t control was driving her to do so. Logic seemed to go right out the window at that moment.

Without even addressing the medical personnel, Axis hurried into the back of the white helicopter. She had never been inside an ambulance herself, she was lucky for that, but she had seen enough of them in movies and on television to know what they looked like. But the actual feeling of being in one made her quite uncomfortable.

The first thing she noticed was the smell; The whole aircraft smelled with the pungent scent of antiseptic, which almost made her want to hurl. The next thing that became apparent to her was the sheer amount of machinery lining every wall and filling every inch. There were IV drips, what looked like a defibrillator, a split-screen heart monitor, a couple oxygen masks, oxygen tanks like you would have while scuba diving, and a lot more medical stuff Axis didn’t recognize. The whole thing felt foreign and strange.

The elephant in the room, however, were the two medical beds filling the center of the area. They were identical to one another, both white with gray metal rails and supports. The mattresses on them were thin and covered in a blue plastic. Some medical gadgetry hung off either end of them, but Axis had no idea what to think about that.

The two medics in the room, both females with dark black hair hanging down to their shoulders, were scurrying about like anxious rats, grabbing random stuff off the walls and trying not to fall. At least that’s what she thought they were doing. They both seemed to be focusing on one of the patients.

The first thing they both did was take a little plastic clip off the side of the stretcher and attach it their respective patients’ fingers. The heart monitor sprung to life as soon as this was done; One of the screens had quick, fast lines bobbing up and down with every second, while the other had only a few shallow lines that popped up every few moments. A collective sigh of relief spread through both of them as they saw this. They high-fived and then did some sort of motion Axis didn’t understand. Neither of them seemed to notice her in their hurry.

Axis kept out of their way as they went through the rest of their assignments, only some of which she understood. Neither of them spoke, but they constantly looked at each other and made weird hand gestures, leaving her to wonder if they spoke sign language or something.

One of them seemed to notice her, cocking their head in her direction with a perplexed look.

“You are?” they asked, not angry, but with a genuinely questioning tone.

“Axis Adlven.” Axis responded, looking her straight in the eye. She didn’t mean to be intimidating, but it was in her nature. She had to admit it, she wasn’t much of a social person.

“The soldier who called, of course,” the lady responded, nodding her head in a respectful way, “I’m Sala Quover, and this is my twin sister, Lala Quover.”

Axis nodded, then moved on to a different topic.

“Are they going to be alright?” she asked, trying to keep her voice calm.

“The conscious one should be fine, thanks to you. If you hadn’t found her so quickly she may have been a goner. Her legs both have compound breaks, and she tore a bit of ligament in her spine. She also seems to be quite malnourished, and has lost a lot of blood, but with proper medical care she should live. This type of injury in a car accident is quite common, but with her severe lack of nutrients it could be a struggle. We’ll do everything we can to allow her to walk again, but her injuries could keep her wheelchair-bound if they can’t heal fully,”

“As for the other one?”

“Far worse condition. One of her arms was completely crushed, snapping the bone in multiple places. We were forced to amputate it, sadly. Her eye was also removed. Otherwise, she suffered no organ damage, and should live fine,”

The helicopter rumbled as it took off, flying vertically into the sky. Axis gripped a handle on the wall for support.

“Do you have any idea where they could have come from? Who they are?” Axis questioned, hoping the medic wasn’t finding her endless queries tedious.

“Unknown currently. They don’t seem to be wearing any kind of uniform, and the car was too destroyed to find any evidence,” Sala responded, still looking chipper as ever. Her sister was grumbling under her breath in the background.

“Thank you,” Axis said, deciding that the medic needed space. She kept off to the side, leaning against the wall and watching the action.

The conscious patient seemed to stir a bit more, protesting with muffled groans as she looked around the helicopter. Her hands balled into weak fists and she made a few feeble attempts to sit up, all of which failed. She had seemingly passed out upon being placed on the stretcher. Lala loomed over her bed, watching with a slight glare on her countenance.

“Can you speak?” she asked, her accent heavily British. This was very strange to Axis, as Sala had had a more American accent.

“Yes,” she responded, her voice hoarse. Her eyebrows furrowed in perceived fear.

“What is your name?” Lala questioned her again, not seeming to have any intent to be friendly.

“What’s yours?” the woman countered.

“Lala Quover, if you must know. But that is not what I asked,”

“My name is get out of my face,” she growled, baring her teeth.

Lala narrowed her eyes and started to walk away.

“My name is Poppy, alright. Poppy Zakner,”

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