“Or at least, glass as fine as the shrapnel that hit you,” I corrected myself.

Now that might be a different story.

A shrug and a nod from the paramedic.  I got my mental bearings and continued, “If you’re pulling the glass out of your cuts and wounds and you lose track of which ones you’ve tended to, they’re going to have to explore the wounds to investigate, queue you up for x-rays and maybe even cut you open again later, after the skin has closed up, to get at any pieces they missed.”

Ahh, yeah, that makes sense.

I could see uneasy reactions from the crowd.  I raised my hand, just in time for the first of my swarm to arrive.  I closed my hand around a pen as the cloud of airborne insects delivered it to me.  They dispersed, and the pen remained behind.

I wonder if the pen was visible through the swarm before it dispersed, or if it just looked to the crowd like Skitter just made a pen out of bugs.

“I’m going to give some of you pens and markers.  We’re going to have a system to make all of this easier on the doctors.  Dotted lines around any injuries with glass sticking out.  Circles around wounds where the glass may be deeper.”

I like this plan.

The paramedic waved me over.

Ah, yeah, I suppose it would make sense for him to have some input on this.

I moved briskly through the crowd to the stretcher.

“Tetanus,” he said, when I was close enough.  “We need to know if they’ve had their shots.”

I don’t know what tetanus is – a disease or infection, I presume – but adding more information to the system is a good idea. The more they can tell just by looking, the better.

When I was done, I called the swarm to me.

Minus the non-roach crawlies, I would assume? Since they can’t go through the water.

I turned my attention to the injured who were clustering around the ambulances.

“Listen!” I called out, using my bugs to augment my voice.  “Some of you have been picking the glass out of your skin!  I understand it hurts, but you’re slowing things down!”

How so? By not doing other things?

I got some confused and angry looks.  I held up my hand to forestall any comments or argument.

“Any paramedic, nurse or doctor that helps you has to make absolutely sure that you don’t have any glass embedded deep in your body.  I don’t believe x-rays can detect glass-”

That would make sense. X-rays are a form of light, and glass is translucent, at least to the visible range.

I paused as a paramedic snapped his head up to look at me.  Okay, so I was wrong.  I wished he hadn’t reacted, though.

Ah, okay. Fair enough!

I suppose even if the glass is translucent to x-rays (which I don’t know), that would still be detectable because flesh isn’t as translucent to them?

People were paying attention to the paramedics, they’d noticed, and it wasn’t critical that these people know the exact details of the treatment they’d get.  If he’d just let me lie or be wrong, this would have gone smoother.

Yeah, but I can’t fault a trained medical professional for reacting to medical misinformation.

More people returned with the injured.  I administrated my bugs while I gave new directions to the rescue parties.

Just carrying the things on a tide of bugs wasn’t going to work.  The crawling bugs couldn’t pass through the water, and there was no way to have flying bugs carry things – too many of the objects were too heavy, even with the flying insects gathered on every inch of their surface and working in unison.

Dang it.

And even water-walking insects can’t do that while weighed down.

Minutes passed as I tried different configurations and formations of bugs, trying to wrangle things like the small bottle of hydrogen peroxide with my swarm.

This plan… might not work out.

Then I saw the woman with the maxi-pad eyepatch and a man of roughly the same age carting someone to the ambulance using a blanket attached to two broomsticks as a stretcher.

Ohh… Inspiration! I guess flying insects might be able to lift things if a mini-stretcher were to make it possible for more of them to help out?

I could do the same thing.  I called on my black widow spiders, drawing some out from the terrariums where I had them contained.  Wasps carted them to the necessary spots, and I had them spin their silk around the objects in question and tie that silk to the necessary bugs.

Niiice.

Silk looped around the neck of a marker, then around a series of roaches, who could then be assisted by other bugs.  I did the same for the other things, the iodine, markers, pens, candles and more.

So do the roaches act as the stretchers here, with the items tied to them so they don’t fall off?

I had to use my bugs.  That wasn’t so simple when the things I was retrieving weren’t small.

Yeah, figured they wouldn’t be. If they had been, the bugs would’ve probably been her first choice.

I had a box of pens and markers in my room, for sketching out the costume designs.  I also had first aid kits in my bedside table upstairs and in the bathroom on the ground floor.

Hm, yeah, that sounds useful. Especially the first aid kits.

Bringing all of that stuff here meant opening the boxes and retrieving everything I needed, carting them here on a wave of crawling bugs, past puddles and flooded streets.

Finally the pens, markers and first aid kids can experience the joys of crowdsurfing!

I collected markers, pens, bandages, ointments, iodine, candles and needles.  Especially needles.  Smaller bottles of hydrogen peroxide.  At least, I hoped it was the iodine and hydrogen peroxide.

Hard to tell without reading the labels.

So “materials” meant mainly medical supplies. No wonder there weren’t many around, besides the ones in use by the paramedics.

I couldn’t exactly read the labels.  The bottle shapes felt right, anyways.

So here’s a thing – if she’s gotten better at processing audio input from the bugs, enough to recognize the kind of music someone was listening to while in a stupor, could something similar have happened with visual input? Maybe she would even be able to read if she tried?

Though if you go by the theory that she got better at listening through the bugs because she subconsciously tried to understand Grue using them, there wouldn’t be a clear reason for the same to have happened to sight. Yet.

“Those are probably okay to remove,” I told her, “But avoid disturbing any close to the arteries, here, here and here.”

Yeah, glass in the arm is better than bleeding until he can get help from someone who can patch him up.

“He doesn’t have cuts there.”

“Good,” I told her.  “But you should know for later, for when you’re helping others.”

Good thinking. And Taylor’s implicitly saying “you’ll be doing this for other people too, riiight?”, putting more of that social pressure on the woman by implying that her helping others is something that should be taken for granted.

She pointed at her leg.  Sand had flayed the skin of her foot and calf and turned the muscle a dirty brown color.  “I can’t really walk.”

Then others should come to her. Simple as that.

“You won’t need to.”

A plan was coalescing in my mind.  A way to give people something to do and give them some indication they’d eventually get help.

See: distracting them. 🙂

But yes, by putting them to use, she keeps them away from bothering the paramedics, while at the same time getting the benefits of more people doing useful things.

The problem was, I needed materials to carry this out, and there wasn’t much nearby.  It meant I had to get the materials from my lair.

Hm. Alright. What sort of materials do you need?

I wasn’t willing to leave for any length of time, though, and I didn’t want to spare Charlotte, either.

And Sierra’s off at the hospital, probably making sure her family is alright.

Would’ve been nice to have some Coildiers around right now.

So I guess bugs are the best remaining option other than informing someone from the crowd on how to get into the Hive, which I doubt Taylor wants to do.

People in this area formed closely knit packs.  They would step up to defend the people they cared about far more quickly and easily than they had with my appeal to help strangers just minutes ago.  I didn’t trust them to remain peaceful if this kept up.

Yikes. That sounds like a recipe for street brawls, and on a larger scale, gang wars or riots.

What the hell was I supposed to do with them?

As lost as I felt in that moment, I managed to look calm.  My bugs gave me an awareness of the situation, and my eyes swept over the scene to get a sense of the mood and what people were doing.

Looking calm is important. It contributes to her air of authority and order and makes people more likely to listen to her.

I spotted a mother picking at one of her son’s wounds, and I realized what she was doing.  I hurried to stop her.  “What are you doing?”

Yeeah, that doesn’t sound good.

Riding the highs and the lows of emotion from the past hour or two, I might have come across sounding angrier than I was.  She quailed just a bit.

Oops.

“He has glass in his arm.”

And if you take it out, it’ll leave room for the blood to come spilling out.

He did.  There were slivers of glass no longer than the nub of lead in an old-fashioned pencil, sticking out of his cuts.

It just occurred to me that on top of all the wounds themselves and the property destruction that’s going to make it hard to find warm places to sleep, there’s probably a high risk of infections from these wounds too. Eesh.

There were more people to pick out of the crowd, more orders to give.  It was all about setting them up so that refusal made them look bad, both to themselves and to others.  Social pressure.

That does sound quite effective.

By the time I’d sent two more groups, some of the others were coming back to be directed to the next few injured.  I gave them their orders.

Reduce, reuse, recycle!

Just… not the Bonesaw way. :p

Which only raised the greater problem.  How were we supposed to handle these people who were hurt and waiting their turn?  They were scared and restless.

Handling things after a disaster like this isn’t easy, and for this area, a lot of that burden has fallen on Skitter.

I would probably not know what to do in the slightest.

That unease bled over into their friends, families and maybe their neighbors, who were scared for themselves and the people they cared about.  Already, they were gathering around the ambulances, pleading for help from too small a group of people, who had their hands full saving others’ lives.

Maybe calling in extra help from Coil might work? Even with how much Taylor has already relied on him and how we’ve been talking about there possibly being a limit to how much he’ll accept, this ought to be a special case. In this case she actually needs the help far more than in for example the rat incident.

Some were simply asking the paramedics for advice while keeping a respectful distance, others were demanding assistance because they felt their loved ones were more important than whoever was getting care or attention at that moment.

Of course.

The paramedics couldn’t answer everyone.

They need to be able to focus. Maybe distracting the crowd somehow could help?

Anyway, let’s get back to the chapter!