Case and Jen did their best to encourage John during the wait. For his part, John gulped a gatorade and tried to calm down. He could feel the patients’ lifeforce slipping away on the beds behind him, but he trusted his mom. Mana trickled back into John’s system. It was coming back slower than it had in the wee hours of the morning, he noticed. Maybe the magic was running out or something?
John’s friends eventually fell silent, leaving him to rest. The medical workers were scrambling to prepare whatever supplies they needed, watching them only distressed John more. He tried searching around with his magical sense, looking for anything that could distract him from the waning sparks behind him. John passed over Case and Jen’s auras and looked through the surroundings. He could feel everything out to around a hundred and fifty yards clearly, past that the overlapping auras turned into unintelligible noise.
Now that he had a defined limit, John looked for anything cool inside his range. He found several of the mages from earlier. Lt. Long paced around the medical area accompanied by the bear mage. John felt several new mages with varied impressions. One woman felt like nothing other than the concept of a swarm of cicadas and their music. Neat!
John started. Around the edge of the medical area, at the closest point to the secured perimeter, he felt something new. No, not new. There was plenty of it around him after all, this was just… older. There was an awful lot of old, spilled blood over there. It was kind of strange. It wasn’t one big puddle, rather several dozen distinct masses that had vaguely rectangular dimensions. And… verticality, somehow? What the hell is that?
John realized the truth as the timer beeped for him to start healing again. Those were body bags. He was able to feel the cadavers, victims that his mom and her team hadn’t saved. She’d said there were only ‘walking wounded or unrecoverable corpses’ earlier. John swore under his breath.
It must have been a lie, probably to keep John calm. He wanted to confront his mom, but there was no time. A paramedic tugged him to his feet before hauling him to stand between the four final gurneys.
His mom had a clipboard, “Alright John. Our plan is to have you alternate healing each patient. If you can seal up the worst of their wounds, we can get these people ready for transport. Got it?”
John nodded and raised his hands, “Tell me where to go.”
Medical personnel directed John and reordered their efforts to stem bleeding as he passed. Like the woman with the mangled arm, he pressed his hands to the worst areas. John had to treat a bullet hole through a clavicle, a terrible laceration on a man’s thigh that had just missed his artery, and a miscellany of other bloody injuries.
John switched patients rapidly, every thirty seconds or so. As the major traumas improved, he would occasionally have a hand on two patients at a time. Flesh healing directly beneath his fingertips still grossed him out, but he wasn’t completely nauseated this time.
Everything was going well. John’s mana stores decreased at the expected rate, grisly wounds healed up, and color returned to patients with critically low blood volume. John felt certain his mana was doing something to people’s metabolism to accelerate regeneration. because all of these patients were visibly losing fat. One woman’s cheeks went from cherubic to sunken over the course of minutes. John almost felt bad, but she would live to see another day.
John was starting to relax. An EMT wheeled one gurney away from him, then a police officer steered another off. Just as the third was beginning to leave his mom let him know he could taper off his mana flow on the last patient.
The last few drops fell down onto the man’s leg. His thigh didn’t look right to John, but the professionals assured him that the stitches would hold thanks to his efforts. A good thing too, he was running on fumes. As the final droplets of mana sank into his chest, the big man twitched, coughed, sucked down a breath, then began to yell and thrash.
Dr. Brisal paled, “John, get out of the way.”
John hesitated. He thought if he used the last of his mana he could help whatever the problem was. When he tried to rally the shallow puddle to do something useful, it barely made it to his shoulder. A piddling four droplets leaked from his outstretched palm as a nurse shoved him out of the way. John accepted that he couldn’t help with whatever was happening and scrambled out of the way.
As John twisted to clear a path for the medics, Case snagged his arm and dragged him from the flow of traffic. Jen chewed on a fingernail as she watched. The three teenage mages had been forgotten while the fresh medical drama played out.
Case steadied John and asked, “Do you have any idea what’s happening?”
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John limply shook his head, “No idea. He feels much better to my senses, but something’s wrong.”
Nurses and EMTs were trying to hold the man down. John realized the thrashing might reopen the leg wound and endanger the artery. Even if John’s magic had restored some blood volume, there was just no way the patient could survive his femoral splitting open.
John pointed at the gurney, “Jen, can you hold him down? He’s going to kill himself if he keeps thrashing like that.”
Jen nodded, “I got this.”
Jen squinted before a half dozen vines manifested from the floor. The vines snaked around the struggling patient’s limbs and lashed him down to the gurney. A nurse capitalized on Jen’s restrictions and wrestled an oxygen mask onto their patient. John sidled up to his mom. The stream of orders had stopped.
“Mom, what’s wrong with him?” John asked.
“Hypoxic shock. Basically, even though you restored some of his blood volume, he’s not breathing right. His body freaked out and started thrashing to try and get air. You see it sometimes in choking or drowning victims.”
“Can we help him?”
“The oxygen should help his respiration. We don’t have the equipment to evaluate what’s wrong with his lungs. Could be anything from fluid to seizures in his diaphragm. Not much we can do but be ready if he starts to code.”
“Can we leave? I don’t want to watch this.”
Katherine Brisal started, “Oh, hell. I’m sorry John. Yeah, you can leave. We’ll replace Jen’s vines with straps,” She glared at some of the orderlies, who sprang to action.
“Thank you, Mom. I’m sorry I couldn’t do more.”
Katherine made eye contact with her son, “We’ll talk later, but sometimes all you can do is your best. Don’t sell yourself short, what you did for these patients was a miracle.”
John nodded. He turned away from the final gurney and left, doing his best to ignore the big man’s waning vitality. Case and Jen trailed out after him and exchanged a look.
The trio found a bench outside.
John sat down and sighed, “Man, this blows.”
“Can’t argue there,” Case shook his head, “You gonna be alright?”
“I don’t know. If the best I can do can’t even save ten people, how are we going to keep everyone safe?”
Jen scoffed, “John, that’s horsepuckey, and you know it. You’re exhausted, you’ve never done this before, but at the end of the day, those people are going to live when otherwise they might not.”
John’s eyes came to rest on a refrigerated box truck parked suspiciously close to the medical tents. The logo on the side belonged to an ice-cream brand, but his magical sense told him there was an awful lot of blood pooling in discrete puddles. John shuddered. Guess I was too late for them.
Jen grabbed John and shook him. “Hey, look at me. Those folks inside, they’re going to live, ok?”
John dragged his eyes off the truck full of bodies and grumbled, “If we get them to the hospital.”
Jen threw her hands up, “Of course we’ll get them to the hospital! There’s north of a hundred mages in here, and they’re all as strong as us.”
“Alright Jen, how about I take this one?” Case touched Jen’s shoulder and shook his head.
Jen started, looked between John and Case, then nodded.
“I’m going to go wait for the message with orders for us. See you guys later,” Jen darted off.
Case sat heavily next to John, “Hey bud.”
“Case, what are you doing?” John sighed.
“My friend’s going through a rough path in the middle of the biggest shakeup to life on Earth since the Chicxulub impactor. Talking it through with you is the right thing to do,” Case smiled gently.
“Chicxulub? That was the dinosaurs, right?”
Case nodded, “Damn straight it was. Blew everything inside of five hundred miles right to hell and dusted the rest of the planet with enough iridium and debris that it made a visible layer in the geologic record. Say, I bet there’s some mage out there with iridium magic who’s gonna be hurtin for that stuff.”
John grunted, “What’s your point?”
“Oh! Right, sorry. Why don’t you just tell me what’s going through your head? You’ve been running from crisis to crisis since this morning. Jen and I had some time to sit down and talk about everything, but you’ve been passed out, getting yelled at, or fighting for someone’s life.”
John chuckled, “Huh, I guess I have. This morning, while we watched the news, I had this noble idea of how we had this power, so we should help people with it! Some real Uncle Ben sentiment! Look where that got me! In the last twelve hours, I’ve been shot, electrocuted, almost blown up, had a heart attack, and whatever the fuck you call it when someone throws a ball of shadow mana at you!”
John’s raving continued, “All that mess, and what is there to show for it? My brother’s still unaccounted for, I can only imagine how many people are dead, and I couldn’t even guarantee that patient would live.”
Case’s smile never wavered, “John, you stopped Everett. As far as I’m concerned, you saved my sister. You stood up for us in that meeting and worked miracles in the medical tent. We can’t save everyone, sure. But you’ve gone a long, long, way towards keeping us safe. I can’t thank you enough for that.”
Tears clouded John’s vision, he pawed at his eyes, “Oh, man. What else would I have done?”
Case laughed, “I don’t know! But I know what you did do, and that’s what matters. Now I know you’ll walk through fire to keep my mom and sister safe. I know my friend, John Brisal, chose to brave lightning, fire, and worse for me and mine. You don’t have to keep choosing to, but I’ll be right next to you if you do.”
John sniffed, “Thank you Case. Dunno what I’d do without you, buddy.”
“Any time. C’mere,” Case grabbed John’s hand and hauled him into a hug.
Case pulled back and put his hand on John’s shoulder, “You going to be alright?”
John nodded, “Eventually. I feel Jen coming back. No rest for the wicked, right?”
Case craned his head and paused. In the brief gap in conversation, the cacophony of magical chaos filtered in. Gunfire, sirens, bizarre magical sizzles and zaps rang out from all directions.
Case shook his head, “Yeah, doesn’t seem like they’re taking any breaks!”
“Hah! Well, let’s go find out what plan the bigwigs have planned for us.”
John and Case released each other and turned to greet Jen.
