Zebadiah Acker wiped down the operating table one more time, just for good measure. Coldwater wasn't the easiest town to be a doctor in, but at least he had a building, a structure that he could call his own. He didn't have to operate knee deep in mud, or in a tent with too many wounded and not enough doctors. The men weren't, usually, screaming when he got to them, and he didn't have to pull out bullets while cannon fire boomed over head.
No. It wasn't easy, but he didn't have anything to complain about. The best part was that he could keep everything neat. There weren't so many patients that he couldn't straighten things out after they left, even if blood stains were difficult to get out of the wood slats of the floor.
After he scrubbed a spot of miscellaneous effluvia left over from his last patient, he heard the shouting break out in town. He wasn't too far off from the city center, and thankfully not too far from the local watering hole and brothel, as most of his patients came straight from those places to here. But shouting didn't always mean he was needed, so he stayed put. His doctors bag was by the door, though, as always.
But when the shouting didn't die down, Zebadiah sighed. Even if they weren't calling for a doctor now, shouting like that usually meant someone would need a doctor soon. So it was when one of the local boys, Eddy Farson, pounded his fist on the door that Zebadiah already had his Kepi Union hat on his head, doctors bag at his side, and one hand on the door.
"Theys callin' for ya, doc. Some of them hill folk. Got a dead body." Eddy said without preamble, rubbing his eye, and smearing the dirt all over his young face further."
"Not much I can do for a dead body."
"Tha's what I said. But that hill folk girl is plumb crazy, crying and screaming and carrying on as she is."
"Well, regardless. Thank you, boy, for coming to tell me." Zebadiah ruffled the boys hair, "Stay out of trouble."
"Right, Mr. Acker." He said, with a smile of one who had no intention of listening.
Zebadiah strode past Eddie, and into town. The hill folk? They usually kept to their own. But if the woman was in hysterics she might be hurt, too. He wouldn't be surprised if no one thought to check. Wounded folks didn't all look the same, and many assumed if you were walking around making noise, concerned about others, you were fine, when that was very much not the case.
A small crowd had gathered. Indeed, as Eddy had said, three of the hill folk surrounded another of their kind, a trapper. Zebadiah had seen the woman before, but not the men, and he couldn't quite tell who the corpse even was.
The corpse, though! It looked like it had been torn apart. He hadn't seen such extensive damage since the war, but it was definitely not gun or cannon fire that had done the man in. But he could wait.
"Excuse me, Ma'am. Miss Skellet, I believe?" Zebadiah said slowly, calmly, in his best authoritative doctors voice. "Are you alright? I'm going to ask you to sit down, away from the corpse. I'd like to give you a little check up, if it's all the same to you. I understand he must have been a friend of yours, but there's nothing neither one of us can do for him right now and I need to make sure all that blood down your front isn't yours. Even if you don't think your hurt, you might be. Can you tell me what happened?"
Zebadiah knelt by the woman and opened his doctors bag.
Ghoulina