Rain of Shells

Daybreak had just arrived.

A murky mist rolled across the Bighorn Range like a giant funeral shroud draping over the valley of Talon Ridge.

Elena stood imposing before the mouth of the makeshift limestone alcove.

A blast of bone-chilling air rushed straight into her lungs, turning her exhaled breath into a thick plume of white steam that curled and dissolved slowly into the freezing void.

The village, on the eve of reckoning, sank into a suffocating silence.

Devastated tipis lay shredded amidst the snowy mist, with a few meager wisps of hearth smoke rising weakly from mounds of lingering embers.

The stench of match-head brimstone and sulfur smoke drifted over from the southern river bend, tearing at the throat, arriving even earlier than the thunder of the cannons.

Every remaining native soul in this place was tirelessly carrying out the final act of their lives.

A warrior knelt upon the powdery snow, relentlessly sharpening a stone-tipped lance—rasp... rasp...—until sparks flew.

A young mother wrapped her small child tight one last time, pressed her lips against the infant's forehead, and handed the baby across the saddle to an evacuating rider.

Black Arrow personally bound a strip of deerskin gauze tightly across his thigh, the blood drying dark, yet his marble-sculpted face did not show a single twitch of pain.

Elena turned back to her field instrument tray.

The compact titanium scalpel set, two surgical clamps, bison-tendon thread boiled in alcohol as a substitute for sutures, and Old Wind Woman's finely ground herbal paste were lined up in neat order upon a hide rug.

The long, graceful hands of the cardiothoracic surgeon rested lightly on the stone ledge.

They were steady.

Without a trace of a tremor.

She lowered her head to gaze at her ten fingers, raw and chapped from the cold, whispering to herself in a voice cold to the bone:

"Not time to shake yet."

WHSSSH... T... T!

An ear-splitting screech echoed first, sounding like a massive blade slicing the frozen sky in two.

And then... BOOM!

The first salvo struck.

The ground beneath Elena's feet buckled slightly, vibrating in violent surges like a wild beast thrashing in its final agony.

White stone dust and frozen snow fell from the ceiling of the limestone alcove in continuous showers, coating her ash-blonde hair in a hazy gray layer.

The force of the shockwave was so immense that Elena's eardrums rang with a prolonged, deafening Riiing...!

All the bustling sounds of the surrounding world were abruptly submerged to the floor of a deep ocean.

She could no longer hear the howling wind, nor the frantic shouts calls to one another. The world transformed into a cruel silent film, leaving only wildly shaking images.

Right before her eyes, a buffalo-hide tipi was torn open by an exploding shell fragment. Orange flames erupted, consuming the cedar frame.

The pungent, acrid stench of burning buffalo hide blasted straight into her nostrils, sharp and agonizing.

A Lakota warrior was thrown backward by the shockwave, collapsing limply right before the field ledge, blood welling from the corners of his mouth.

Elena lunged forward.

Dropping to her knees upon the powdery snow, her hands seized the shoulders of the warrior's deerskin tunic, drawing upon every ounce of her strength to drag him into the interior of the alcove.

Her throat burned. She could feel her chest heaving, saw her mouth opening to shout something to her assistants...

Yet her ears were completely deafened.

She heard not a single word uttered from her own mouth.

Dense plumes of black smoke swirled in midair, shredded by streaks of flying shrapnel.

Elena wiped a smear of stone dust from her eyes, turning her head to look through a gap in the cedar timber barricade.

Through the murky haze of gunsmoke... she saw him.

Grey Elk.

The chief stood imposing right at the front line of the battlefield.

He rode atop his jet-black warhorse, which was rearing its front legs into the air amidst a hail of rifle fire.

His hand gripped a stone-tipped war lance, his broad chest crushing every trace of panic from the massacre.

The ash-gray eagle feather pinned behind his neck whipped violently against the artillery wind, brilliant and supremely proud.

Grey Elk raised his war lance high toward the snowy sky, his marble-sculpted jaw parting as he shouted a brief command.

The entire line of warriors surrounding him raised their heads as one.

The deep crimson war paint across their cheeks flared under the flash of exploding shells.

Not a single man yielded a step. Not a single man turned his back. They stood as a human wall of stone against Thomas Whitfield's modern artillery battery.

Elena could not hear his command through the furious ringing in her ears.

She saw only his broad chest heaving, saw his mouth open with fierce power.

Elena's chest constricted ruthlessly.

He was their chief... and he would never fall until his last drop of blood dissolved into the snow.

A brief line of thought flashed through her mind, firm and bitter, before she spun back around to face her blood-stained surgical tray.

Casualties flooded toward the limestone alcove in an ever-accelerating stream, dragging fresh trails of crimson blood across the white snow.

Elena took her position immediately at the cave entrance.

Her ash-blonde hair was matted with stone dust and sweat, her hands already tucked into gauze strips soaked in sterile alcohol. She began emergency triage within the very first seconds of encountering each case.

"Inside!"

"Set him in the left corner!"

Her surgeon's brain operated like a quiet, ruthless machine.

Those still breathing, those with vascular damage that could be clamped or stitched, or those with salvageable chest wounds were brought straight onto the main buffalo hide rug.

As for those with full-body blast burns or severe blood loss whose pupils had completely dilated... she was forced to lower her hand, binding a simple black cloth strip around their wrists and uttering a brief word to the bearers:

"Place him in the dark corner. Give him a sip of water."

Kicking Bear—Grey Elk's seventeen-year-old cousin who had just recovered from his chest drainage operation—ran back and forth like a shuttle amidst the rain of lead, helping two Lakota women carry the wounded while constantly replacing basins of boiled water that had turned a dark, murky red.

Every field procedure laid bare a cruel detail of modern warfare.

One warrior had his thigh bone plowed open by shrapnel, stark white and exposed; another had a rock fragment embedded deep into his abdomen, spilling his intestines out; a woman suffered thermal burns that charred a strip of hide across her back.

Elena's long hands were slick with dark, clotted blood.

The heavy stench of iron mingled with distilled spirits and charred hide, forming a dense atmosphere that clung tight to her throat.

"Elena! This one can still be saved!" Kicking Bear screamed over the ringing in her ears.

A young Cheyenne warrior had his left arm shredded by an exploding shell, his severed axillary artery spurting blood in violent jets across the snow.

He had slipped into unconsciousness from hemorrhagic shock, his face pale as raw deerskin.

"Titanium clamp! Hand me pressure gauze!" Elena commanded sharply.

Dropping to her knees, her fingers clamped tight over the wound, using her sole remaining surgical clamp to grip firmly onto the end of the vessel oozing dark red fluid.

The bison-tendon needle glided swiftly through torn muscle tissue. She drove two decisive anchor stitches, pressed a stuffed hide cushion hard over the wound, and bound the gauze tight.

The young warrior slowly fluttered his dust-speckled eyelashes open.

He saw the white doctor's blood-soaked hands trembling slightly from sheer exhaustion, saw the streak of soot clinging to her cheek.

His dry, cracked lips curled slightly as he uttered a single, brief Lakota word:

"Wahte..." (Good...)

Elena had no time to offer a verbal reply.

Flipping the hem of her deerskin tunic, she spun around toward the next casualty.

A small victory. A single life snatched back from the hands of death in the middle of a massacre. She knew it, yet the ruthless stream of the battlefield permitted her not even a single breath to pause.

And then...

SNAP... BOOM!

There was no sound of tearing air.

A blinding, stark white light exploded right before the mouth of the limestone alcove, swallowing the entire space whole.

The surrounding scenery seemed to slow to a crawl.

There was no sound whatsoever. Every noise in the world was completely torn away.

A violent shockwave hurled Elena's slender frame into the air. She was thrown backward against the rock wall, her back slamming hard against the cold limestone before she collapsed onto the snow-covered ground.

Every breath in her lungs was snatched away in an instant.

Elena lay dazed amidst a heap of stone rubble and dark soot.

Dense clouds of dust and smoke enveloped the field medical post.

Her ears rang deafeningly, with only a piercing, high-pitched Veeee...eee! screaming inside her eardrums.

Slowly pressing both hands onto the ground, she struggled to sit up amidst the shattered hell.

Mere paces away from her...

The young Cheyenne warrior she had saved three minutes prior... lay motionless upon the blood-soaked snow.

The second shell fragment that struck had torn his chest open, leaving his body mangled.

The two native women assisting her in the corner of the station also lay still beneath a collapsed pile of earth and stone from the cavern ceiling.

Elena crawled forward step by step across the gray rock.

Her chapped hands, caked in white dust and dry blood, trembled violently.

She pressed two fingers against the young warrior's carotid artery, striving to find a faint, fleeting pulse.

There was no pulse.

The skin of his neck was already icy cold.

Elena did not pull her hand back. She continued pressing her fingers firmly into his neck, pressing once, twice, three times... in silent, agonizing desperation.

Elena bowed her head, slowly lowering her hand.

She looked down at her hands—the hands of a cardiothoracic surgeon now coated in pale gray stone dust and matted with dark, dried bloodstains.

The ringing in her ears gradually receded.

The cruel sounds of reality rushed back to pierce her eardrums: the slaughtering shouts of blue-coated cavalry, the roar of artillery shells tearing through the air, and Black Arrow's gut-wrenching screams calling her name from the direction of the burning ramparts.

Every effort, every drop of sweat, and every medical technique she had drained her strength to perform... had been erased by a single, indiscriminate shell fragment in a split second.

War knew no mercy.