I pushed through the branches, heading toward my friends, not caring that I was being loud anymore, or that some of the branches were scraping against my face and scratching my cheeks. Hell, I didn’t even care that there were branches sliding along my bare legs and poking me in my underwear.
I was Tripp Light. Fantastic. I felt fearless.
Then I found my friends and every bit of fearlessness drained from my cheeks and I morphed back into the skinny sixteen-year-old wiseass that I had always been, except I didn’t feel sixteen anymore.
I felt six.
“What the hell was that?” Trina cried as she dashed up to me and grabbed my arm so hard that I was fairly certain that she was drawing blood.
“I . . . um . . .”
“You just freaked out and ran, you dumbass. We had a plan. Then you had to go and scream your name out like that. What an idiot,” she spat. “What a freaking idiot.”
Trina didn’t even give me a chance to explain. Before I could open my mouth, Jimmy rolled up to me with his chest sticking out like he was getting ready to rumble.
“Damn you, Tripp,” he snarled at me.
Yeah, that’s right. Jimmy James actually snarled at me.
“What . . . I . . .”
“Just shut the hell up,” he bellowed, almost jumping out of his chair. I involuntarily took a step back.
Why was everyone so mad? I didn’t understand. I had just figured out about the most important thing ever.
Then I saw Bullseye. He was crying. His eyes were all puffy. He kept balling up his fists and squeezing them tight. Newfie was standing next to him with his tail between his legs.
“What’s going on?” I whined. “I don’t . . .”
“No you don’t,” Bullseye spat out. “You never do.”
God, where was Prianka? I needed her to ground me, or smack me, or something so I could just get this part over with. My eyes looked pleadingly from Trina to Jimmy to Bullseye before I realized that Prianka wasn’t standing with them. Sanjay wasn’t standing with them.
“Badirchand,” squawked Andrew. He flapped out of the darkness and landed on Bullseye’s head.
Bullseye turned sideways and I saw Whitby lying on the ground. She had just saved Jimmy James by sprinting out of the darkness like a bullet and grabbing onto a soldier’s wrist. Poopy Puppy was nestled in the leaves next to her, and Sanjay was stooped over something, frantically bobbing back and forth.
“Guns do kill people. People kill people, too,” he kept saying over and over again. “Guns do kill people. People kill people, too. Guns do kill people. People kill people, too . . .”
Whitby crawled forward on her stomach, stretched out her neck and began licking something. There was a still form on the ground, sprawled out underneath a tree.
In that moment, something inside my head actually broke. I think I started shaking.
I know I started shaking.
“Prianka?” I whispered as tears started gushing down my face. “Prianka? . . . Prianka? . . . Pri . . .?
31
FOR THE SECOND time that day, I was behind Jimmy James’s wheelchair, pushing with all my might. He had Prianka with him. She had one arm resting in her lap. The sleeve of her shirt and her jeans were turning black and shiny in the darkness. She held onto Jimmy’s neck with her good arm as we all flew across the lily pond bridge and headed to the trail that led back to the parking lot and the bus.
Prianka needed a doctor. She needed a doctor right now. Thankfully, my dad was a doctor and he was holed up in a Walmart in Apple. All we had to do was get to him and Prianka would be okay.
She had to be okay. There wasn’t any other thing she could be. How else would I be able to make sense of everything that had happened since all this craziness began?
I let angry tears and sweat mingle and drip down my face as I ran, pushing Jimmy’s chair as hard as I could without tipping both of them over and spilling them onto the ground.
Meanwhile, fireworks went off in my head.
Now I knew that the explosions I had heard had been gunshots. Right when I ran out of the woods and Prianka fell away from me, I didn’t even think to stop or tell my friends what I had figured out. There had been no time. I had to draw the soldiers’ attention away from Jimmy before he told them anything vital.
The first gunshot destroyed the head of one of the statues. I guess bits of hard plastic had sprayed everywhere. The headless statue remained lashed to a tree, dressed in orange robes, and the gun that was attached to it didn’t budge.
That’s when the soldiers figured out that they weren’t surrounded at all. So much for adding virtual numbers to our ranks.
The second gunshot exploded into the night when the guy who had been threatening Jimmy found a whippet attached to his gun hand. He tried to shoot Whitby but missed. That was the bullet that hit Prianka in the arm.
While I was hiding in the IN/OUT box, trying to draw the soldiers away from all my friends, Prianka fell to the ground. In short order, Bullseye and Trina freaked out, and Sanjay watched the only person in his family who still tethered him to reality, potentially slip away.
It was all too much.
It was all my fault.
As we passed the tool shed, Trina stumbled over a rock or a root. I didn’t know what it was.
“Are you . . .?”
“Shut up,” she spat at me as she pulled herself to her feet and kept running. She might as well have stuck a knife into the middle of my chest.
We heard more gunshots as we ran. Somehow I knew they weren’t aimed at us. They were probably coming from inside the monastery where Cheryl the It was most likely holed up in one of those nice, clean rooms with beds and bathrooms, and totally not understanding that bullets did nothing to stop poxers. Only fire helped.
Still, gunshots were the last thing I wanted to hear ever again, because as Sanjay so adeptly pointed out, guns do kill people after all.
“Pri, are you okay?” I breathed out as Jimmy’s wheelchair careened down the trail. She didn’t answer me. More tears filled my eyes.
She had to be okay.
She had to be okay.
Please be okay.
I had just found her. Even though I had known her my entire life, I had just really found her and now that I had her, I never wanted to let her go.
As the wheels on Jimmy’s chair threatened to bounce off the trail, I found myself wishing that I was the one with a bullet in my arm instead of Prianka. I wished I was the one who made that sacrifice instead of her.
We came to the bottom of the trail, sprinted across the parking lot and pushed the school bus door open. Only then did I let go of the back of Jimmy’s chair, and reach my arms around my girlfriend.
“Give her to me,” I said in a voice that sounded way more like an order than a request. That’s because it was an order, and I wasn’t going to take no for an answer. Jimmy let her go as I slipped one arm around her back and another underneath her legs and lifted. She felt as light as a feather, and I wondered if I had unknowingly turned on some weird adrenaline switch in my body where I would be able to lift a car or break boulders with my bare hands.
Prianka leaned her head on my shoulder with her eyes shut, while I gently carried her onto the bus and deposited her on a seat only a few rows back from the front.
“I’m fine,” she whispered to me as she struggled to adjust herself. She winced and my heart broke.
“You’re not fine,” I said. “You’re shot.”
“It doesn’t feel like I thought it would feel,” she said. Unfortunately, I think every one of us has probably thought about what it would feel like to get shot. We were in a new world with soldiers chasing after us. Of course we thought about what a bullet would feel like.
Sanjay came up to me with
Poopy Puppy attached to his ear. He nodded, over and over again before letting the stuffed dog fall to the floor.
“Gunshot wounds are one of the most traumatic injuries one can suffer,” he said. “It’s difficult to assess the extent of damage done by a gunshot wound, and it typically far exceeds what you can reasonably treat with first aid.”
It took every bit of self-restraint not to revert to the old Tripp Light and say something really mean like ‘Tell me something I don’t know.’ Instead, I swallowed and asked our little shaman a simple question. “Do you know what we should do?” In any other world but the one I was living in right now, asking a tiny autistic boy whose best friends were a dirty doll, two dogs, and a crow, something so adult would have been absolutely ridiculous.
Not in my world.
In my world, until we got back to my father, Sanjay Patel was about our best chance of helping Prianka.
If not him, then who?
32
TRINA DROVE THE bus. The door remained open and Bullseye hung his head out and guided her any time there was something in the way. We were practically blind because there was no way she could drive at night with the headlights on.
Unlike when Dorcas and I went to Guilford without knowing if there were really helicopters in the sky looking for us, this time we knew. There was a helicopter, maybe even calling for backup, and it was close. If there weren’t so many trees between us and the sky, they would be able to see headlights for sure.
“Stalled car, veer left,” I heard Bullseye shout out, and Trina swerved the bus. “Two poxers dead center,” he cried again and Trina pressed on the gas. The bus shook a little as she rolled over them without a second thought. In some way, each thud I heard underneath my feet gave me some small amount of satisfaction, which was totally and completely wrong. It was the same sort of satisfaction I used to get when popping a pimple in the mirror with the bathroom door locked because I was doing something I shouldn’t be doing.
Gross, right? Yeah, I was feeling pretty gross, but probably nothing compared to Prianka.
“We have to take her shirt off,” Sanjay said. Andrew was now standing on his shoulder, dragging strands of Sanjay’s dark hair through his beak.
“Shirt off. Shirt off,” he repeated, and my face began to burn.
“Just do it,” Prianka said through gritted teeth.
“I . . . um . . .”
“I’m wearing a t-shirt,” she said in such a calm way that I felt like I was the one with a bullet in my arm, and she was the one who was being gentle and kind.
“Okay, right,” I said as I reached over and started unbuttoning her top. I was so focused on what I was doing, I hardly noticed when strong fingers gripped my shoulder and lightly squeezed. It was Jimmy. I knew he was only trying to help, but his support only made me feel worse.
“I got it,” I snapped and he pulled his hand away. I knew he was still mad at me. Everyone was still mad at me. I didn’t have time to pull focus from Prianka and explain to my friends that what happened up at the Peace Pagoda was exactly what needed to happen. Right now, the most important thing was to get Prianka’s shirt off.
This is so not how I ever expected this part of our relationship to jump to the next level.
Prianka yelped a little bit after I unbuttoned the last button and slowly peeled her shirt back, especially when I had to pull her blood-soaked sleeve away from where she had been shot.
“I need a flashlight,” I said and held out my hand without moving my eyes away from her arm. I felt like a surgeon waiting for a nurse to pass over a scalpel. In mere seconds, a small flashlight was put in my hand. I flicked the switch and pointed it at Prianka’s upper arm.
Jimmy made a muffled sound behind me but I stayed completely quiet.
“How bad is it?” asked Prianka without any emotion in her voice except for a little bit of ice that seemed not directed at anyone.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s bloody. I can’t tell.”
Sanjay, as matter-of-fact as ever, put Poopy Puppy to his ear again and nodded a bunch of times. Then he took a deep breath and said, “Blood loss is what kills most people when shot. Look for swelling, skin discoloration and other signs of hemorrhaging, then try to control blood loss by applying manual pressure on the wound or fastening a tourniquet high and tight on the limb where the wound is located.” He took a deep breath. “Poopy Puppy says so.”
As I looked at the mass of blood on Prianka’s arm, she turned her head and stared out the window. Meanwhile, Jimmy nudged me from behind and held out his belt.
“Tie it up at the top of her arm, right above the wound,” he said. “Right, Sanjay?”
“Yes,” said Prianka’s brother.
Oh God. What was I doing?
I looped the belt underneath Prianka’s arm, gently brought it all the way up until it was right beneath her arm pit, then pulled it tight.
She gasped.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry.” I wanted to cry. I wanted to curl up into a little ball on one of the vacant bus seats and go to sleep. I wanted to forget about everyone and everything, just for a few minutes.
I wanted to breathe.
Instead, Sanjay said, “Assuming one is not shot in the heart or the brain, statistics indicate that gunshot victims have an eighty percent survival rate, as long as one can get to a hospital immediately.”
There were no hospitals. There was only us. My temples began to throb.
Jimmy nudged me from behind again. He had pulled off his tee-shirt and handed it to me. “Use this,” he said. “Wipe the blood away and let’s see what’s underneath.”
I took a deep breath and nodded. Then I wadded up Jimmy’s tee-shirt, put the flashlight in my mouth and gently reached forward intending to wipe the blood away, but I stopped just short of Prianka’s arm. What if I did something wrong? What if by touching her I pushed the bullet one millimeter too close to an artery or something and she bled out all over the bus in the middle of ‘Nowhere’ Massachusetts? What if . . . ?
“I trust you,” Prianka whispered. I looked up and she was staring at me instead of away. The light from the flashlight bounced off her dark eyes, and suddenly, everything inside of me melted and froze and melted again. This was Prianka Patel. She was my girlfriend and nothing . . . NOTHING . . . was going to happen to her.
Not on my watch.
“Okay,” I said. “Sorry if this hurts.” Then I reached down and started dabbing at the blood on her arm, trying to be as gentle as possible as I wiped it away, bit by bit, to reveal the damage that was underneath. I told myself that whatever it looked like, no matter how bad the bullet really made a mess of everything, I wasn’t going to react. I was going to remain as a much of an icicle as Prianka usually did. It was the least I could do.
It was the best I could do.
It was the only thing I could do.
33
TEN MINUTES LATER Sanjay was up at the front of the bus. He had a map in one hand but it was closed and at his side. His enormous brain had probably absorbed everything he needed to know so he no longer had to look at it.
Poopy Puppy was in his other hand, but not pressed to his ear like usual. Instead, Andrew sat on his shoulder, bobbing his black head up and down while Sanjay gave directions to Trina.
Meanwhile, my sister white-knuckled it through the darkness without the benefit of headlights, weaving the bus through stalled cars and the occasional poxer. We were headed back to Apple and Walmart where my dad could make everything right again.
At least that’s what I was hoping for.
As for Prianka, she sat pressing Jimmy’s bloody tee-shirt against her arm and trying her best to look like there was absolutely nothing the matter.
She was so wrong. She was shot, but thankfully the bullet only grazed her and was n
ow sitting someplace lodged in a tree back at the Peace Pagoda, because it wasn’t in her arm.
I was so relieved to find that out that I almost cried.
When Diana shot my dad while we were in the process of breaking my parents and the others out of the McDuffy Estate, he had said the graze was nothing, and it turned out to be just that. In Prianka’s case, her bullet wound was far from nothing, but at least it wasn’t a hole. The bullet had certainly dug a little trough of flesh out of her upper bicep, but it didn’t burrow itself inside my girlfriend. It just made for a particularly ugly wound.
“I can’t believe you don’t have a bullet in you,” I whispered to her.
“Well, this way I can still beat you at arm wrestling,” she said. “In a week or two.”
“Deal,” I told her. I had no doubt that my black-belt girlfriend could beat me at arm wrestling any day of the week, even after being shot, but I still had a little bit of pride left. I wasn’t going to let her know that she was tougher than I was.
She probably knew anyway.
Besides, everyone was far more interested in the implications of what I told them about why I freaked at the Peace Pagoda and botched our whole plan before it even started.
“So let me get this straight,” Trina said as she gripped the steering wheel of the bus with her bandaged hands, squinting into the darkness while just barely making out the road ahead. “Now we’re not looking for Diana?”
I nodded my head.
“He’s right,” said Prianka as I reached over and gently placed my hand on top of hers and helped apply pressure to her arm. “No one has the right to pick and choose who gets super immunity and who doesn’t. Either everybody should get it or nobody does.”
“Wow, man,” said Jimmy. He was sitting behind Trina like he had before. “This is some pretty heavy duty stuff you’re talking about.”
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