He searched around the cockpit for his med kit and found it wedged below his seat. Carefully he reached for it and began to remove the equipment he would need. He began with an injection of morphine and waited a few minutes for the pain relief to take effect. Next he tied a tourniquet above the wound, tightening the strap around his thigh as hard as he dared. Too hard and he risked permanent damage to nerves and circulation. Too soft and he would lose blood rapidly. Severe blood loss was the number-one killer on the battlefield, and a rupture of the femoral artery would be a death sentence if not treated quickly and expertly. Fortunately, he was the best expert he knew.
There was little room in the cockpit. The metal rod that pierced his thigh anchored him in position and allowed very limited space to move. To escape from this trap he would have to twist sideways somehow. Yet even the slightest movement caused searing pain, despite the morphine. He steeled himself for what he must do.
He played out the necessary manoeuvre in his mind, planning exactly how he would do it. Then, carefully but with determination he eased himself back in his seat, moving slowly so as not to further damage the tissue, and grimacing as the pain increased in intensity.
Bad news. Blood gushed from the wound as soon as he began to move. A major vein or artery was bleeding. He applied extra pressure with his fingers as he sought to free himself. The pain was excruciating. He roared in agony, taking breaths in deep gulps. A fresh fountain of blood erupted from his leg as he shifted and turned, gradually drawing clear of the penetrating metal spear. Eventually he was out, but his problems were only just beginning.
A bleed of this magnitude must mean that the femoral artery was damaged. If it was severed he would certainly die. If it was merely damaged, there was still a ghost of a chance. Griffin was no stranger to emergency battlefield medicine, but this would be the first time he had practised it on himself.
He felt a rush of anxiety at the prospect of treating his own wound, but anxiety was one of the normal side-effects of shock and he shrugged it away. He was breathing rapidly too, and his skin felt cold and clammy. More symptoms of severe shock, but that was to be expected given the amount of blood he had already lost.
It was agony to move his leg, but he managed to lift it up and rest it on the helicopter seat, elevating the wound above his heart to reduce the rate of bleeding.
Much would now depend on the severity of the wound. He examined it carefully. The metal shard that had pierced his thigh had done him a favour by opening up the flesh so he could get a clear look at the damage. Sweat formed on his fingertips as he probed the wound and mopped away blood with a surgical sponge. The femoral artery was cut, as he’d suspected, but the cut appeared clean and was not as large as he’d feared.
And yet to operate on himself was insanity. A feeling of hopelessness grew inside him.
Just shock, he told himself. Keep going. The most insane action now would be to give up.
He clamped the artery above and below the bleed, gave himself a second morphine boost, and then began the almost impossible process of stitching the wound.
His leg was cold to the touch, and time was very much against him. The severe blood loss had dropped his blood pressure to a critically low level. In due course this would lead to tissue necrosis and eventual organ failure. Already his breath was rapid and strained, and his heart pumped fast and loudly in his chest, fighting a losing battle to keep him alive.
Focus, Griffin.
He began to sew up the artery with practised hands, hands that had carried out the same operation on a thousand men. Hands that did not tremble even now he had to save his own life.
‘Especially now,’ he muttered aloud, grimacing against the rising pain.
A moment later he opened his eyes and found himself slumped back in his seat. He must have lost consciousness briefly. The twin dose of morphine had reduced the pain substantially, but the suffering was still almost unendurable. That, combined with the low blood pressure, and it was hardly surprising he had fainted. He was sweating profusely and had to fight for every breath. Time was running out. Every second mattered. Every drop of blood was precious. He counted his rapid breaths, using it as a distraction technique to fight the pain and to continue with his task.
He pretended he was sewing a tear in a piece of clothing, not struggling to repair his own flesh. The needle went in, then came back out. In, out. It was a simple task, one that his mother might have done to darn his father’s old socks. All it needed was concentration.
Eventually the wound was closed and the bleeding stopped. He removed the clamps and felt pins and needles as the blood flow returned to his leg. That was a good sign. Yet still the operation was not complete. He cleaned and closed the surface wound with more stitches, binding it tightly with surgical gauze.
He blacked out for a second time, and awoke gasping for breath, his heart hammering as it fought to pump depleted blood around his oxygen-hungry body. The bleeding may have stopped, but he had lost a massive amount of blood. He really needed an emergency transfusion of plasma or red blood cells, but that was impossible here. Instead, he rigged up a simple intravenous saline supply into his arm, and lay back in his seat, wrapped in a blanket to try and stay warm.
He felt his eyes grow heavy and this time he had no fight left to resist the passage into darkness. If he survived the night, he would wake again to sunlight and birdsong. If not, he hoped that there would be no pain in his final moments. He tried to picture Chanita, smiling. If he could only see her once again, it would be enough. It would make the agony worth enduring. As he fell unconscious he thought he heard her voice. He wondered if it was real, or if it was just the sound of the red kites calling.
Chapter Fourteen
Gatwick Airport, West Sussex
The knocking on the door was as loud as gunfire. Liz sat bolt upright, jolted from a light sleep, and reached for her wristwatch. Six in the morning. She had only been asleep for a couple of hours. Her body rhythms had shifted, and she was becoming gradually more nocturnal.
The door to the hotel suite banged again and this time a voice cried out. ‘Help! Police! Emergency!’
Liz crawled from her makeshift bed – a mattress on the floor – and staggered over to the door, weaving her way past her sleeping companions. The room was filled to capacity, with Samantha and Lily sharing the double bed with old Mrs Singh, Vijay in one of the single beds, and Mihai in the other. The rest of them had found space on the floor, making do with whatever bedding they’d been able to scavenge. It was far from ideal, but Liz wasn’t going to complain. They were together, they were warm and dry, and for the moment they seemed safe. At least, they had until now.
She opened the door and found a group of agitated people in the darkened corridor outside. Their flashlights were bright enough to dazzle her and she automatically pulled on her sunglasses, almost without thinking. She was beyond caring whether people found her behaviour odd. ‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘What’s happened?’
‘A killing,’ said a man she recognized as one of her new neighbours, Joe Foster. He was a middle-aged man, an engineer of some kind, with a shock of dark hair, and wire glasses perched on his long nose.
‘A woman’s been murdered,’ said his wife, Pamela, a friendly woman who already seemed to know everyone in the hotel. ‘Come quickly.’
Liz followed them along the corridor and down one flight of stairs to the floor below. ‘How fortunate for us that you’re a police officer,’ said Pamela, seeming more excited than appalled by the idea of a woman’s murder.
‘Not so fortunate for Liz,’ said Joe. ‘With her being the only police officer around here, it looks like she’s going to be given all the police work from now on. Not very fortunate for the dead woman either.’
‘Can you tell me exactly what’s happened?’ asked Liz.
‘It’s better if we show you.’
They led her to a room almost immediately below Liz’s, where a crowd had gathered around the open door, blockin
g the corridor.
‘It’s the police,’ announced Joe to the group. ‘Step aside. Make room for her to see.’ His voice commanded authority and they did as he asked. He held the door wide open for Liz to enter.
The room had the same style of furnishing as Liz’s own room, but was normal-sized, not a suite. It contained just one double bed and some mattresses spread around the floor. She entered and found half a dozen people inside, clustered around a woman’s body lying on one of the mattresses. They cleared a way for her as she approached.
The corpse was covered from head to toe with a white sheet, and Liz drew it back to reveal a slender woman, aged around twenty, with long blonde hair and blue eyes, lying on her back and staring up at the ceiling. Her face looked serene, as if she were just resting, but her skin was unusually pale and her lips were blue. Pallor mortis. One of the first indicators of death. Liz kneeled beside the body, checking for a pulse and any signs of breathing, but as she’d anticipated, there were none.
‘Is she really dead?’ asked Pamela.
‘Shush,’ said her husband, Joe. ‘Let Liz do her job.’
‘Who is she?’ asked Liz.
‘Hannah Matthews. She’s my daughter.’ Liz looked up and saw a man of around fifty, tall, with the same hair and eye colour as the dead woman. His face was drawn tight and his eyes were ringed red with tears. ‘She’s been murdered.’
Liz turned to face the crowd of onlookers still crowding around the entrance to the room. ‘All right. There’s nothing more for you to see here. Please give us some privacy.’
Joe closed the door on them, but stayed behind in the room with his wife. ‘We’re good friends of Scott,’ said Pamela. ‘We knew Hannah well. Everyone did. She was a lovely girl.’
‘Right,’ said Liz. She pulled the white covering away completely and knelt over the body to examine it closely. The dead woman’s skin felt cool to the touch, but there was no stiffening of the limbs yet, so she guessed the time of death was within the last few hours. The cause of death didn’t take long for her to discover. The woman’s neck showed two deep wounds, roughly two inches apart. Her whole neck was badly bruised, as if she’d been strangled or held down while the stab wounds were inflicted. Apart from that, Liz could find no other markings on the body, which was fully clothed.
She studied the two red holes in puzzlement. They didn’t look like knife wounds. They were too small and round, more like puncture marks from some kind of sharp spike. She had no way of telling how deep they were, but there was surprisingly little bleeding for a fatal stabbing.
The sharp aroma of blood aroused her own appetite, but she took a deep breath and pushed such thoughts firmly to one side.
‘Tell me what happened,’ she said. ‘Who discovered the body?’
The woman’s father, Scott Matthews answered. ‘I did. I’m usually the first to wake. I got up to use the bathroom, and when I came back, I noticed that Hannah’s neck was bleeding.’ He faltered, fresh tears falling as he relived the memory. ‘I tried to rouse her, but she was already dead.’
‘And who else shares the room?’ asked Liz gently, turning her attention to the five other people, sitting on the bed, or clustered around the edge of the room. All of them looked absolutely shocked and petrified.
‘These are my two sisters, and their children,’ replied Scott. ‘We’ve been living here together for the past week.’
‘Did any of you see or hear anything?’ Liz asked.
They all silently shook their heads.
Scott was making an obvious effort to recover his poise. ‘Like I said, I was the first to wake. The others were all asleep when I discovered that Hannah was dead.’
‘Joe and I have the room next door,’ explained Pamela. ‘I heard Scott cry out, and came in straight away. Scott was kneeling on the floor next to Hannah, trying to rouse her.’
Liz looked from Scott to the others, wondering which one of them might possibly have carried out this murder. In a case like this you didn’t usually have to look far. Yet none of these people looked like suspects. Scott, the dead girl’s father, was obviously distraught. His three nieces and nephews were just children. And Scott’s two sisters looked utterly shocked. But something that Pamela had said was bothering her. ‘You said that you came in and found Scott next to the body,’ she queried. ‘How did you open the door?’
‘It was unlocked,’ said Pamela. ‘I walked straight in.’
‘That’s right,’ said Scott. ‘The door locking mechanism doesn’t work with the power down, so it isn’t possible to lock the door.’
It was the same with Liz’s room. The card key system was useless without electricity. ‘But didn’t you put the chain on the door at night?’ she asked.
‘It’s broken. I complained about it, but the people running this place are far too busy to fix little things like that.’
Liz examined the door and saw that the chain was broken, just as Scott had said. ‘So anyone could have entered the room during the night and killed Hannah?’
‘I guess so, although I can’t understand why I didn’t hear anything.’
Liz nodded miserably. Her list of possible suspects had just widened to include everyone in the entire hotel, perhaps even the whole of the evacuation camp. She was only a lowly police constable, working alone. She had no experience of running a murder enquiry. She had no forensic support, no fingerprint database, no backup team, not even a pathologist to establish the precise time and cause of death.
What did she have? Her instincts. Her police training. And a corpse in need of answers.
The others looked at her hopefully. ‘What are you going to do now?’ asked Joe. ‘Take witness statements? Make door to door enquiries?’
‘Are you going to start interviewing suspects?’ asked Pamela. ‘You can use our room to interrogate people, if you like.’
Liz sighed. She glanced down again at the body of the murdered woman. ‘Does anyone know if there’s a doctor around here?’
Chapter Fifteen
Loudwater, A40, Buckinghamshire
Warg Daddy twisted the throttle and felt his bike leap forward like a hunting lion. Faster he pushed it, then faster still. Its engine rose to a tumultuous roar. The bike hugged the road, belting along the straights, cupping the curves as smoothly as his hand over a woman’s body. Its huge tyres rolled over tarmac, crunched on gravel, and skidded across muddy grass in the places where the highway was blocked and he had to duck around the wreckage of cars and trucks.
Faster he urged his bike, as fast as he dared. Even faster, until the burning pain in his head was gone, and the world was a blur, his problems a distant memory, and all he could feel was the roar of the wind, the throbbing of the bike between his legs, and Vixen’s fingers curled tight around his waist, as his girl clung on to him desperately for life. The rest of the Wolf Brothers trailed behind him on their own bikes, struggling to keep up.
Why slow down? There were no speed limits any more. No traffic cops. No one to tell him what to do. There would never be any of those things again. Everything he hated about the world had been blown away forever.
But there were no petrol pumps either, no one to repair or service his bike, and no one to clear the roads of abandoned cars. Up ahead the way was blocked in a tangle of steel, glass and plastic. A pile-up of dozens of vehicles, with more trapped behind.
Warg Daddy raised a hand and signalled for the Brothers to stop. They pulled up behind him alongside the line of abandoned vehicles and began to search for fuel. He watched as they scavenged what they could, siphoning off the precious fluid into their thirsty tanks. The roadside filling stations may all be empty, but every car on the road was a potential reservoir of free fuel. Liquid gold was theirs for the taking.
The petrol vapour shimmered in the warm air and Warg Daddy inhaled deeply, enjoying its heady perfume. He’d always loved the smell of gasoline. Some people told him that sniffing oil wasn’t wholesome. They said it wrecked your brains. Maybe they were rig
ht. But he didn’t care. Nothing compared with the deep intoxication of those rich airborne hydrocarbons. And now that he was a werewolf and could smell every nuance, they had become ten times more satisfying. Every sniff was a mind-blowing trip to ecstasy. And anyway, his brains were half-wrecked already. Maybe more than half. Maybe almost entirely gone.
The midday sun glinted brightly off the chrome exhaust pipes of the bikes and the shattered windscreens of the smashed cars. Warg Daddy watched the Brothers go about their work through his darkened Ray-Bans. It wasn’t gasoline fumes that made his head hurt, it was sunlight. But since leaving the city behind, the headaches that had tormented him for so long had almost gone. His vision was no longer flecked with red. The relentless growing pressure inside his skull had eased.
Perhaps it was the deafening noise of the warheads that had blown the pain away as they deposited their megaton payloads of destruction across London. Or else the blinding flash of light in his rear-view mirrors as he had sped from the burning city, almost at the last moment, deliciously close to ground zero. Perhaps it had even been the deadly fingers of radiation – gamma rays, alpha particles and neutron beams – invisible even to his super senses, but which had surely reached out and clutched at him with their lethal embrace. Whatever had done it, his mind was clear now, the pain pushed into oblivion.
The road ahead was clear too. He scanned the horizon. Nothing. No movement on the road. No one.
The full extent of his freedom was only just beginning to dawn on him. It wasn’t just traffic regulations that had ended. There were no laws of any kind, and no one to enforce them even if there had been. No cops. No judges. No courts or prisons. No rules. No limits. He could do whatever he wanted.
Lycanthropic (Book 4): Moon Rise [The Age of the Werewolf] Page 7