Sanctus

Chapter 146

Dr Kulin followed the first trolley into an examination space and stopped short. She had covered the emergency room for upwards of ten years, but never seen anything like this. The man’s torso was covered in cuts, straight and deliberate, steadily leaking blood on to the bunched green material of the cassock that had been hastily cut away. There was so much blood he looked as though he’d been dipped in it.

She turned to the paramedic who’d wheeled him in. ‘I thought it was an explosion?’

‘It was. Knocked a hole through the base of the mountain. This guy came from inside the Citadel.’

‘You’re kidding!’

‘Dragged him out myself.’

She reached down tentatively and shone a pen-light into the monk’s eye. ‘Hello. Can you hear me?’ His head lolled from side to side, making the deep cut around his neck open and close obscenely, as if it was breathing. ‘Can you tell me your name?’

He whispered something but she didn’t catch it. She leaned closer, felt his breath on her ear as he whispered again, something that sounded like EgoSanctus. . The poor man was clearly delirious.

‘Did you do anything to stop the bleeding?’ she said, straightening up.

‘Pressure packs and a plasma drip to keep him hydrated. He just won’t stop.’

‘BP?’

‘Sixty-two over forty, and falling.’

Not dangerously low, but near enough.

The heart monitor beeped as a nurse stuck electrodes to his chest. It also sounded way too slow. Dr Kulin looked at the wounds again. There was no sign of clotting. Maybe he was a haemophiliac. The clamour of fresh arrivals forced a decision. ‘Five hundred IU of prothrombin and twenty mills of Vitamin K. And type him fast so we can transfuse. He’s going to bleed out if we don’t hurry.’

She headed back through the curtain and out into the main corridor. Three more monks rolled past at speed, heading to the far end of the ward, each losing astonishing amounts of blood from wounds identical to the ones she’d just seen.

‘Where do you want this one?’ The paramedic’s voice snapped her back to attention. She looked down and was relieved to see it did not contain a monk. ‘Right here,’ she said, pointing to one side of the corridor; the examination booths were filling up fast and this one didn’t appear to be haemorrhaging. The paramedic steered the trolley to one side and stamped on the wheel brake.

‘What’s the story here?’ Dr Kulin asked, easing open the cracked, blackened visor of the motorcycle helmet and shining a light into the woman’s right eye.

‘Found her in the tunnel,’ the paramedic said. ‘Vitals are strong but she was unconscious when we found her and stayed that way on the ride over.’

Dr Kulin switched her penlight to the left eye. It dilated slightly less than the right. She turned to a nurse. ‘Straight to X-ray,’ she said. ‘Possible skull fracture. Don’t remove the helmet until we know what we’re dealing with.’

The nurse grabbed a porter and was already moving the trolley away when the entrance doors burst open and two more blood-soaked monks were wheeled in: same wounds; same massive blood loss.

What the hell was going on?

She followed the first into a cubicle, did a quick assessment then administered the same dose of coagulating compound. She heard another doctor hollering for five litres of O-positive from down the hall. She moved to the next cubicle in a daze, battering aside the curtain as she went. Beyond it lay another surprise. Another monk, only this one wasn’t bleeding; he was standing beside a trolley, arguing with a nurse, and holding a young woman in his arms.

‘I’m not leaving her,’ he said.

He had a large amount of blood on his cassock, though not nearly as much as the others. The girl on the trolley was drenched, the soak pattern suggesting massive neck trauma. Dr Kulin stepped forward and pushed down the neck of her T-shirt. The skin beneath was stained crimson, but she could see no sign of any cuts. ‘Delivery notes?’ she asked, searching for the source of the bleeding.

‘Vitals low but steady,’ the nurse said. ‘Blood Pressure eighty over fifty.’

Dr Kulin frowned. It was low enough to indicate major blood loss, but she just couldn’t find the source. Maybe the blood belonged to someone else. ‘Keep her on a drip and monitor the BP.’ She smiled at the girl, seeing her properly for the first time. ‘Other than that, you seem fine.’ She was momentarily transfixed by the almost unearthly brightness of the green eyes that stared back at her, then got a grip on herself and switched her attention to the monk.

He pulled his arm away. ‘I’m OK, really. .’

‘Well, you won’t mind me looking then.’ She parted the bloody, shredded sleeve of his cassock to peer at the red smeared flesh beneath. The source of his bleeding was immediately apparent, a nasty deep gash right across his wrist that had obviously been quite deep. It looked a good few days old, judging by the extent of the healing, yet the blood was fresh. ‘What happened?’ Dr Kulin asked.

‘It got knocked about a bit,’ he said. ‘I’ll live. But, please. Has a woman been brought in? Looks about forty. Black hair, five six?’

Dr Kulin thought of the woman in the motorcycle helmet. ‘She’s gone to X-ray.’ The high-pitched sound of a cardiac alarm sounded somewhere behind her. ‘She’s been knocked about a bit too. But don’t worry: I think she’ll be fine.’