Salvage Claim

Oh Jesus, I thought, regaining consciousness, bit by bit.

What have they done?

Slowly, the room came into focus around me, but other than the flash memory of the oncoming Honda, I really wasn't sure where I was or what exactly had happened. I just knew that the two street racers coming at me over the hill was a mistake that I was now going to be forced to pay for.

Consciousness faded once more, taking with it the pain...

I came awake, hurting everywhere, but otherwise rested.

Apparently, I was still in the hospital, my left arm slung from a scaffold and wrapped from hand to shoulder. With my right hand, gently, I reached up to explore the bandages that encased my entire head and face, a shiver of horror racing up my spine when I wondered at the implications of that.

I heard the door to my room open, and watched quietly as a doctor came in, complete with lab coat, stethoscope, silver temples and clipboard.

He looked to be the poster child for shit news.

“Tammy,” he announced, shutting the door softly behind him.

“It’s time we talked about your options…”

Well fuck... I thought.

Thirty three months later…

There it was again.

“What is that?” I asked no one in particular, because as far as I knew, I was the only person within five hundred yards of where I sat reading and it had been that way pretty much since I’d recovered from the ‘EVENT’.

I had begun to think of it as the ‘EVENT’ in an attempt to lend a bad situation a modicum of humor, lest I go mad of loneliness and hate for the kids responsible.

For almost three years now, since being discharged from the hospital, I had experienced not a single touch that wasn’t meant to measure or repair something broken and at thirty-two years of age, I feared I may soon forget what sex had even been like other than a kaleidoscope of physical, mental and emotional stimuli, not to mention the hormonal exchange between sex partners.

The plaintive whine was barely audible from where I sat, so, putting aside the book I was reading, I rose, panning my good ear back and forth in an effort to zero in on the source of the sounds, and slowly moving in the general direction they seemed to be coming from.

There...it’s coming from below, down by the river. I thought, turning and craning my head that way for a better look.

Still seeing nothing but feeling a sense of urgency, I hurried back to my chair and grabbed a cell phone and bottle of water, then took the trail that circled back down fifteen feet to the narrow strand of beach running along the slow moving river below.

I found the source of the sounds I’d been hearing almost immediately.

I knelt beside the animal slowly, carefully, hoping to not spook him.

He was a huge beast, easily one hundred fifty to two hundred pounds. Maybe more. It was alive, but seriously injured with two compound fractures of his left legs, an ear torn nearly off and one eye swollen shut.

There may have been more, but I lacked the skills to be certain. If he was going to survive though, I would need to act quickly.

I was dialing in Steve Randal’s number without needing to look it up. He was the local fixer. If it was broken, he could fix, or cause to be fixed anything within reason and I used his services regularly.

We talked briefly and arranged for him to meet me in twenty minutes, then turning back to the injured dog, I kicked off my shoes and waded out, dragging the floating canine along with me into the current, where we- began to drift downstream, heading towards Steve and his truck, and from there, to the ...