Simon’s PDA had cut out in the middle of his conversations with Mal and Kaylee (apparently the apocalypse was bad for service) and he’d been wandering nearly aimlessly through the wreckage ever since growing increasingly frustrated. If he knew the Captain the man was already looking for him, intent on either securing the rogue element of his crew or doing something violent and dramatic to whatever had decided to imitate said crew member. While the other man’s refusal to realize that without a ship he wasn’t actually captain of anything but S.S. Delusions of Grandeur was at times infuriating the thought of Mal on the warparth was reassuring today. Simon would find/be found by Mal, he’d get answers, he’d find River. It always seemed to come down to Simon, stumbling around, out of his depth, trying to save River (“You left her behind and she lost her mind” echoing cruelly).
Of course there aren’t usually zombies he thought, scrambling for cover behind the gutted wreck of a car as he heard a noise in the distance. It took him a moment to realize that these weren’t the noises of a group of the infected moving through the wasteland, these noises were screams, human screams. Simon wasn’t a fighter but it wasn’t in his nature to run away physically any more than it was to turn his mind away from a difficult problem and he closed his fingers around a rusted hunk of metal (Kaylee would have known what it was but he’d still never gotten the hang of these “cars”) and, staying low, crept closer to the noises.
He’d known, on some level, what he was going to find when he got close enough to see what was happening. He’d been prepared and he was a steady hand even in the face of violence, had to be, the things he’d done to save River the first time, the after-effects he’d seen on the operating table, but what he saw in the settlement still made him blanch. Demons, he thought, curling his fingers more tightly around his makeshift weapon and forcing himself to keep his eyes on the slight blonde girl standing in the midst of the carnage even as memories of being a helpless observer behind his own eyes tried to force him into senseless fear and the screams of those being ripped apart by the hell hounds sounded around him. There’s nothing I can do here, he realized, not with just some piece of a car, on my own. Then he heard the rasp of breath nearby and edged around the cover he’d found until he saw the man (young, in his twenties, multiple puncture wounds, significant blood loss, he thought clinically) lying a few feet away.
Simon didn’t have his bag, didn’t have so much as a bandaid, but he’d taken an oath and he moved cautiously out from his cover to crouch over the young man. “It’s okay, I’m a doctor,” he said, taking better stock of the man’s injuries and trying to push back his frustrated helplessness in favor of doing what he could. “I’m going to try to move you behind cover, try to help me if you can,” he added, getting his hands under the young man’s arms. Normally he wouldn’t have moved a patient he hadn’t examined but the man’s spine actually seemed intact and, if he was honest, without any equipment or medical facilities he doubted he could do much anyway.
He had to rise a little higher to begin moving his patient but there was nothing for it, all he could do was hope that the demon would be too busy at the center of the carnage to notice Simon on its edges.