Abandoned Treasure

Enforcer Vic Knightly’s POV

Near North Moccasin Mountains, Montana

Saturday, September 8th, 2007

I shot Nathan twice, and he dropped like a sack of potatoes. I ignored him, focusing on the pregnant rogue in the driver’s seat.

Carol was alive but seriously hurt. She had multiple cuts on her face and arms, but what worried me was the bleeding from her vagina. The crash so scrambled Carol’s brain that she didn’t fight me when I handcuffed her. She could barely walk as I brought her back up the bank to my car.

I hit the key fob for the rear door. The third row was down, so I eased my prisoner onto the blanket I kept there. Carol was in the fetal position, crying over her child, now struggling to survive. I grabbed a towel off the seat and put it between her legs. “You’re hemorrhaging. Hold that in place. I’ll get you to a hospital.”

“Leave me to die,” Carol begged.

I looked up; multiple cars were coming from the north. I didn’t have time to retrieve Nathan’s body, nor could I do anything to hide the crash. I had minutes to get away before they reached the scene. If I got lucky, the car would catch fire and destroy the body and the evidence. “I can’t do that.” I hit the close button and ran around to the driver’s side. Putting the car in gear, I turned around and raced to the south.

I looked in the rear-view mirror, watching the headlights until the road turned and hid me again. I didn’t have a good feeling about it. Why would three cars suddenly come our way when there was zero traffic for miles? Out here, there was a good chance the cars held werebears.

That’s when I remembered I’d turned down the volume on my phone before trying my pit maneuver. I spun the volume control back up. “You guys still there?”

“We’re here, Enforcer,” Alpha Todd said. “What happened?”

“I forced them off the road, and they crashed and rolled a few times. Nathan came after me in wolf form, and I shot him twice. He’s dead. Carol survived, but she’s badly hurt and bleeding. I put her in the back and took off before other cars arrived. I think she’s losing the baby.”

“Dammit!” Mark yelled for someone to get the Doctor in there. “You left a dead wolf behind?”

“I didn’t have a choice, sir. The female needs a hospital, or she and the baby won’t survive. I’m going to hang up and dial 911. Maybe an ambulance can meet me on the way to Great Falls.”

“NO!” I recognized Chairman Gruber’s voice. “You CANNOT involve the humans. It’s bad enough that you risk us all with your incompetence in leaving a dead wolf behind.”

“Mr. Chairman, the baby won’t make it without a hospital.” I was doing almost a hundred miles an hour towards Great Falls now, but it was a twenty-minute ride. The way she was bleeding? No way.

“We can’t worry about that. We have to contain the potential exposure back at the crash site. I’ll contact the Den Leader personally. Maybe they can get there quickly enough to keep the Sheriff or Highway Patrol from finding out too much.”

Trestman added in. “Vic, can you turn around and contain it?”

“No way, sir. I show up covered in blood with an injured woman in the back? I’d have to kill them all.”

“We might have to get the bears to do that anyway,” the Chairman replied.

There were no good options. “Carol? How are you holding up? ”There was no answer, and the smell of blood filled the car. “I’ve got to check on her.”

“Find a spot hidden from the road and pull over,” Mark ordered.

I pocketed my phone and put it on speaker. I turned right onto a dirt road a mile later and drove a hundred yards until I was hidden from the road by a rise. I put the car in park and jumped out, hitting the rear hatch button as I exited. “Shit,” I said when I got a look at her.

“It’s Doc Jones. What is going on?”

“Doc, she’s unconscious, pale as a ghost, and there’s a lot of blood coming from her crotch. Her pulse is weak, along with her breathing.”

“Do you have a knife, Vic?”

“Of course,” I said. I pulled out my Gerber folding combat knife from my front pocket.

“Carol’s already dead, Vic. Her body hasn’t caught up. You can’t worry about her anymore. The only thing that matters is saving that baby.”

He was right; this was a better death for her than Alpha Todd would have if she survived. “What do I need to do?”

“Get her on her back and cut away her clothing. You need to have clear access to her abdomen. Make sure you have good light.”

I sliced away her clothing. “What else do I need but light?” I returned to the driver’s door, where I had a good flashlight with a magnetic base. My go-bag in the backseat had a headlamp in it. I put it on and turned it on bright.

“We’re not going to worry about bleeding, but you’ll need something to tie off the umbilical cord. A leather shoestring, string, anything.”

I had a pair of mocassins in my suitcase. I pulled one out and pulled out the leather shoestring. “Got it.”

“Get the lights situated. Let me know when you are ready.”

I attached one light to the roof of the SUV and pointed it at Carol’s stomach. “Ready.”

“Make a vertical incision from her belly button to the top of her vagina,” he said.

This was going to suck. I took a deep breath and began. Thank Luna that my knife was razor-sharp. It didn’t bleed as much as I thought, perhaps because her heart was so weak. “Done.”

“You’ll need to cut through the stomach muscle and lining to expose the uterus. Use one hand to cut and the other to hold the tissue apart.”

“Just like carving a pig,” I said to myself. With how rounded Carol’s baby bump was, it was more like releasing the springs. It was easy to identify the uterus, as the baby stretched inside it. “I’m there.”

“Reach in with both hands and lift the uterus out of the incision,” he told me.

This part was like wrestling a greased pig, but I got most of the uterus out. “Done.”

“Make an incision through the uterus, but carefully. If the amniotic sac ruptures, it’s not a problem.”

It did, and it made a mess. “I can see hair.”

“Remove the baby, supporting the head, and set it on the mother’s stomach.”

I had to wiggle the baby out, but in thirty seconds, a blue baby girl was on her belly. “She’s blue, and she’s not moving.”

“Tie off the umbilical cord about an inch from the baby. Make it as tight as possible, then cut the cord an inch to two above the knot.”

I wrapped the leather lace around the grey cord and tightened it before tying it off. Cutting the cord was tough, even for a sharp knife. “It’s done. She’s still not moving.”

“Suck what you can out of her mouth and nose with your mouth, then hang her by her legs. Give her a whack to kick-start her breathing.”

I don’t want to know what I swallowed doing it, but it tasted nasty. I held the baby up and smacked her with my fingers. There was a cough, a breath, and then the screaming began. “I did it!”

“Congratulations, Enforcer Knightly. Clean the baby off the best you can, wrap her to keep her warm, and get back on the road. How is the mother?”

I checked her pulse. “She’s gone.”

“You did the best you could, Vic,” Mark told me. “Cover her up and drive towards Great Falls. Pick up Interstate 15, and Alpha Todd’s people will take care of the rest.”

“All in a truck filled with blood, a newborn baby, and a dead body.”

“Drive casual, Vic. Don’t get pulled over.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll call back when I’m on the interstate.” I hung up and went to work. I cleaned off the baby, then wrapped her in a T-shirt like a little burrito. I set her in the passenger seat while I cleaned up the back. I managed to roll Carol into the blanket and clean up the visible blood. I had to strip to my underwear to clean the blood off me before closing the back. I put on fresh clothes as I pondered my next move. I decided my go-bag would make a decent baby seat. I lined it with rolled-up clothes, placed a soft sweatshirt over the padding, then put the crying baby in the center.

It would have to work for a few hours. I buckled the case in place on the passenger seat, then buckled myself up and got back on the road.

Thankfully, the baby fell asleep after ten minutes.She didn’t wake when I met Alpha Todd’s men outside Helena. They wrapped Carol and the bloody evidence in a tarp and taped it up before putting her in the back of a van. A young Omega female took custody of the baby, and they were gone again.

I found a 24-hour car wash in town. I pulled into a bay, closed the doors, and fed a stack of coins into the pressure washer controls. I spent the next two hours cleaning my SUV until I couldn’t scent blood. I had to power-wash the back with soap and water, then drive back to Great Falls with the windows down so it could dry out.

I called my boss again on the way north. “I think I got rid of everything,” I told him. “What a fucking day.”

“You did all right, Vic. You found the two most wanted wolves in the world and saved a baby. It’s not going to get better than that.”

It didn’t feel that good. I killed one wolf that I had to. I was beating myself up about putting a pregnant woman in danger when we had other options. “What about the mess I left behind?”

“The Chairman got the Bear Den to clean that up for us. It cost him a few favors, but the Den will make the car and the body disappear. You were right; the Bears were the ones coming your way. If they’d caught you at the scene? You’d all be dead.”

He wasn’t kidding. The Den Leader wouldn’t appreciate a Council wolf leaving bodies on his doorstep. They are at risk from human exposure like we are. “What do I do next?”

“Get a hotel room and get some sleep. There’s no point going to Bitterroot now. Come Monday, see if you can figure out where they stayed. Clean up any evidence they existed.”

I could use about twelve hours of sleep. “Thanks, Mark.”

“Good job, Vic. This job was a tough one.” He clicked off, and I went back to driving.

Beer and pizza would have to wait for the late afternoon football game.