Chapter 4: The Van

A hand locked around my arm and pulled me backward off the curb.

The van went past so close that the wind of it slapped my coat against my legs.

Something hit the man who had pulled me, and I heard it hit.

We went down together on the pavement.

I landed on top of him, with my hands braced on his chest and a taste of blood in my mouth again.

The van's side mirror had caught his shoulder.

It tore off and skidded across the lane.

The van itself clipped a bus-stop sign, swerved, and kept going.

Its plate was smeared with mud.

It didn't brake, and it didn't stop.

"Don't move," Brogan Buckley said under me, through his teeth. "Is anything hurting? Your stomach?"

"My stomach's fine. You're bleeding."

"I'm fine."

"You are not fine, your arm is wrong."

He looked down at his left shoulder.

It sat lower than the right.

"That's a dislocation," he said. "Hold still, they're coming."

Hattie got to us first.

She had run across four lanes in her coat.

She dropped on her knees on the asphalt with her hands already on my neck, my wrists and my belly.

"Look at me. Don't talk. Did it touch you?"

"No. He pulled me."

"Okay. We're going to Mercy North. Both of you."

"I can walk," Brogan said.

"You can lie there until the stretcher gets here," Hattie said, "or I will sit on that shoulder."

He looked at her.

Then, for the first time, he almost smiled, and he lay back on the cold street.

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