Ground Down

Chapter 6

It was mayhem. Her fingers were blistering from stitching wound after wound, civilians, soldiers, they all blurred into an endless stream of people who had gotten hit by shrapnel, by each other, by themselves, because people were still stupid enough to make their own ammo but call themselves opponents of the military. Her legs were burning from having sprinted into the bunker, she'd tweaked her shoulders trying to help the patients who'd rushed down with her and collapsed on the way back up, she hadn't drank enough and her head was spinning all kinds of wrong with the persistent wailing of siren after siren that got progressively harder to ignore underlined by the whistling of wind through the holes torn into the building. 

Clarke had stood in it. She had stood at the edge of a crater a hitting rocket had torn into the hospital, she had stopped right there where there had been floor and patient rooms, the heat of the explosion slicing through her scrubs, pieces of stone and plastic embedded in her skin, the man in the bathrobe in front of her gone. He stuck to her face still, she could feel the blood dry on her neck, it had cooled down too fast, staring down the hole filling with debris, ears ringing, and then the screams and moans when noise had come back. She had wet herself, standing there, but she hadn't realised until she had been suturing her own skin and broken down screaming and crying. Never before in her life had she wanted to run to her mother that badly, her knees had nearly given out under her when she had found Abby in a hallway, no time to acknowledge her, her mother had unclenched with pure relief and then rushed after the nurse shouting her name. 

And Clarke had pulled herself together with desperately trembling limbs, fought the urge to throw up and gone back to bandaging wounds, stitching up gashes and testing haematoma for damage to the bone because she couldn't risk bothering the doctors for an x-ray if the bone didn't definitely feel broken. She could probably authorise an x-ray now. Who should care, they shoved people into her arms as if she knew what she was doing, but she did not, she did not know how to talk to them, how to calm them down, how to calm herself down, she was heavily swaying between frantic and apathetic and if she breathed too quickly, she could name at least five symptoms of shellshock she was actively experiencing. 

The boy in front of her was scared of her wide eyes, screaming, clutching his mother's arm, the woman was bleeding from the head, shouting at Clarke, but she couldn't make her out. She needed her to hold the boy still so she could get the splinters out of his side, she needed to sew him up and move on, her name had been called twice, but the woman kept shouting and the child squirming and squirming and the sirens were blaring. The floor shook under her feet, her hands twitched, she bit her lower lip and the next tremor caused her teeth to draw blood. 

"Grab a bandage," she heard herself advise. "Take the pliers, get to the bunker, two splinters left, hurry!" 

The woman complied as soon as the thread snapped under the scissors and Clarke stepped back, the metal clattering against itself in her shaking hands, she heard the sharp whistling of a projectile, then bang of it hitting too close yet not close enough to feel the tremors, people shouting. She ducked down a hallway, the siren blocked out the noise of her steps, the words on the walls flashing in alternating red and blue, the air tasted burnt. The floor shook again, she staggered into the lobby on swaying tiles. 

"Clarke, get the fuck down!" 

A hand grabbed her shirt, she was yanked to the floor, felt the impact numb her hip and then the crash of projectile into wall made her duck from the ensuing cloud of dust. She covered her ears with her face by her knees, teeth gritted against the next bang and crash, her head collided with somebody else's.

"Who the fuck still has grenade launchers?! And why the shit are you using them on us?!"

Clarke peered past her arms, faced with a furiously red Emori who wielded one bruised wrist with the attached fist like a flaming sword in no particular direction, yelling towards the crash and rumble of stone giving way.