Chapter 1 - The Woman From the Swamp
Where did all those larvae come from? The resident's hands were shaking as they cut the bandage off my leg — and I was seven months pregnant
"Why are there live larvae inside this woman's wound?!"
The resident's voice cracked as he folded back the sheet covering the leg of the pregnant woman they'd just carried in from a flooded marsh south of Lafayette, Louisiana.
The nurse clapped a hand over her mouth and rushed out of the treatment bay. The woman was caked in dried mud and barely conscious. Her lips were split, she was seven months along, and a filthy homemade bandage was knotted tight around her right thigh.
Nobody in the room could understand how she was still breathing.
Stranger still was the fact that the tiny larvae seemed to be gathered only over the worst, blackest part of the wound.
Five days earlier, Rachel Dawson had been behind the wheel of her old pickup with one person on her mind: her mother.
They hadn't seen each other in sixteen years.
"Your mama had a stroke, Rachel," Della Prewitt, their neighbor of forty years, had told her on the phone. "She can barely lift her right arm. And she asks about you every single day."
Rachel had gone completely quiet.
At twenty, she'd walked out of Marrow Bend after a vicious fight with her mother, Eleanor.
"You don't want a family, Rachel. You want to chase sirens and other people's disasters for the rest of your life," Eleanor had screamed that afternoon, standing in the middle of the kitchen with her hands shaking. "One day something's going to happen to you out there, and I won't even know what county to bury you in."
Rachel had answered with a sentence she hated herself for over the next decade.
"Then don't lose sleep over it. As far as you're concerned, I'm already dead. Starting today."
Then she walked out the door and didn't look back.
She became a paramedic. She worked disaster rotations after hurricanes, wildfires, and floods, and deep inside cut-off rural towns. She learned to improvise when the nearest hospital was a hundred miles away, to stay calm when everyone around her lost it, and to survive on almost nothing.
Now she was thirty-six, seven months pregnant, and had finally decided to go home.
She loaded clothes, water jugs, and her battered field-medical pack into the truck bed.
"We're going to meet your grandma," she whispered, resting a hand on her belly.
The last stretch of the drive followed a rural road chewed up by days of rain. Near sunset, an enormous fallen oak blocked the whole road. Faint tire tracks curved around one side.
Rachel sat there with the engine idling.
Turning back meant hours added to an already brutal drive.
She followed the tracks.
It was a mistake.
The ground looked solid, but one tire suddenly dropped. The truck began sliding, slow and heavy, toward a low swampy hollow full of mud, weeds, and black water. She stomped the brake.
Nothing.
The pickup lurched to a stop at a hard angle in the brush.
When she tried to climb out, a rusted edge of the door tore deep into her right thigh.
The first thing Rachel felt was cold.
Then she saw the blood.
She forced herself not to panic. She cleaned the cut with the little water and supplies she had, wrapped it tight, and checked her phone.
No signal.
She tried to crawl up the muddy bank toward the road, but her injured leg folded under her weight.
That night she slept in the tilted cab while mosquitoes ticked against the glass and rain began hammering the roof.
By day two, she had a fever.
By day three, the wound smelled different.
Rachel knew that smell far too well.
Dead tissue.
Infection.
She looked at her last clean bandage, the nearly empty water bottle, then down at her belly. The baby barely moved.
"No… not you," she whispered. "You're not paying for my mistakes."
Then she remembered something she'd seen years earlier, working with an emergency team in a town cut off after a hurricane. An old treatment.
Ugly.
Desperate.
But medically real.
She closed her eyes. She knew the risks of trying anything like that outside a hospital. She also knew exactly what doing nothing would cost.
And when she finally decided, the decision frightened her.
May you like
Because what she was about to do to save herself and her baby was something anyone who found her later might mistake for a nightmare.
She had no idea that five days later a doctor would scream when he lifted that bandage… or what the team would realize once they looked closer.
