by J. D. Tyler
Sometimes you had to stand up and serve.
“Okay. You,” Rouse pointed to a guy who was across the room, tying up the other two waiters who’d been with Decker. “Samson. Switch places with...” He turned back to Edward. “I’m sorry, I forgot your name.”
“Edward. Edward Millner.”
“Edward, head for the stage.”
Edward took a deep breath, and then nodded.
He levered himself easily up onto the stage. He kept in shape –-not SEAL shape, but close-- so that was easy. The stairs onto the stage were all in the back of the wide, tall, platform. Both sets of stairs were covered with fallen lighting bars, the remains of the DJ’s chairs, his second mixing board, and some other debris. Added to that were the fractured and lethally sharp remains of Retta’s massive sculptures and the stairs were a no-go. There was also stage gear, some of it still sparking.
They wouldn’t be taking people down that way.
It was his turn to take charge of the mic. He took a breath. When placed in charge, command the room.
He’d heard a famous general say that. Time to live it.
“Okay, here’s how this goes. If you can bandage yourself, great. If you’re mobile, help people over here to the stage who aren’t. If you can’t walk and need help, I’ll come to you as soon as I can.”
He saw two women and a man helping another. “You three,” he said. When they looked up, he said. “If you find anyone that needs me urgently, holler. Until then, I’m starting up here and working my way down to the floor. If you can get people over here to the floor in front of the stage, that’s a plus.”
When they nodded, he said the last bit he had to say.
“We work, and keep working ‘til we know who’s living, who’s dead, and who’s gonna make it if we can get help.” He turned away, but then, seeing the lights, turned back.
“Rouse, we need fire control –-a fire extinguisher if anyone can find one-- as soon as someone can get to it. Back of the stage.”
Black-Dress-Lady had moved up on stage now as well, helping the wounded women Decker had dragged up there for his little show. She looked him in the eye when he crouched down beside her. “What’s your training?”
“Military. Navy Corpsman.” That was close enough.
“Okay,” she said, making room for him. “What can I do?” she said.
She was watching him closely, but didn’t say a word. He could only imagine what ran through her mind. Why weren’t you over here first? Why did you not head straight for the wounded? What the hell?
Any of the questions would have been on his tongue were the positions reversed.
“I need any kind of cloth –-napkins, ripped up tablecloths, bar towels-- ice, alcohol from the bar if you can get to it,” he said. “Belts, ties, anything I can use as tourniquets.”
“Got it,” she said, heading off.
“Hey, Rouse, this guy’s waking up,” one of the wounded security guys called to Rouse. He was standing over one of the tied waiters. “Let’s get some answers.”
Rouse strode over from the rear doors. From the stage, Edward saw the tied man’s eyes open, but he turned away. His concern was the patient in front of him.
“You’ve got this,” Retta said, her voice soft and sure at his elbow. She too had levered up onto the stage, bringing napkins and tablecloths with her.
“Have to,” he said, through gritted teeth.
“I’m here. And I’m an able pair of hands. Tell me what to do.”
He closed his eyes. This. This right here was why he’d asked her again, and again, to marry him.
She always said no. She had her personal demons as well. Maybe if they survived this...
“Give me whatever you can to get this man’s head elevated. His breathing’s labored and I have to figure out why.” The man was unconscious, his lips tinged blue. When they propped him up on the side of the fallen podium, the blue receded slightly, but not all the way. Checking his pupils and other vitals, Edward moved on to checking everything else. He pulled the man’s suit jacket back and immediately let it fall. He almost panicked right there. It was like John Turner. On the boat.
There was a silver table knife embedded to the hilt in the man’s right lung.
“Honey?” Retta said, and the tone of her voice, the warmth. snapped him back.
Nothing they could do about the knife, for the moment. The guy could survive with a collapsed lung, even some blood or fluid in the lung. But if they pulled out the knife, he would die without the kind of tools and equipment only a paramedic or hospital could provide.
“Okay, keep him propped up,” he said to Retta. “And wrap some napkins or towels or something around that knife. Brace it and him and we’ll keep moving.”
Black-Dress woman returned, her arms full of bottles and towels from the second bar. “I’ll go back for ice,” she said.
“What’s your name?”
“Sara. Sara Hardinger.”
From the corner of his eye, he saw Rouse whip around. “Sara?”
“Yeah, Pete?” It was said in a resigned kind of way.
“You okay?” Edward could hear the deep, real concern on Rouse’s part.
“Yeah, you?” He could tell she wanted to know, but didn’t want to care. Black-Dress-Lady and Rouse had some history.
“I’m good.”
The words were cordial, but the tone...
“Bad blood?” Edward asked softly as she knelt next to him.
“You could say that. I’m a Montgomery County, Maryland, detective. He’s a Fed.”
Having grown up in DC, Edward knew the way DC cops, and the Bureau, treated the local jurisdictions. Of course, that kind of thing happened in every branch of service, military and civilian. Territorial cat-fights.
Then again, Montgomery County had caught that sniper that had terrorized DC when he was a teenager, so they got a bit more respect than most.
“Edward Millner,” he said, by way of introduction.
“Yeah. I recognized you,” she said, smiling. “What next?”
Edward moved to the next guy. “Shit.”
The man had stopped breathing. Even as he began to castigate himself for it, he saw the injury. Even if he’d come sooner, nothing would have saved this one.
“We need some sheets to cover bodies,” he said. “Retta, are there more table cloths? Are there enough for ripping up for bandages and covering the dead?”
“We need to preserve...” Sara began, then shook her head. “No, you’re right. For everyone’s sake.”
She didn’t finish the sentence, but Edward was glad she got it. It was a hell of a crime scene, yeah, but hysteria was brewing. He could hear it in the mutters and murmurs, in the groans and questions people were throwing at Rouse and the other agents, at anyone up and moving.
People weren’t used to death being so up close, personal and bloody. This group of elites and socialites, even if they weren’t the elite-elite of Washington, were less used to it than anyone.
The longer they saw it, lay next to it, breathed it in, the more panicked they would get. There was near-continuous gunfire echoing in the outer corridors and someone kept coming back to the service doors, shouting for Decker and trying to force their way in.
“Hey!” a tremulous, but very loud, voice suddenly blasted through the groans. “Where the hell is my Scotch? Why aren’t there any sirens? Where are the police, for Christ’s sake? Why won’t my cellphone work? Where the hell is my toupee?”
“Oh, sweet Jesus,” Sara muttered. “I cannot believe that idiot survived.”
It was Senator Trammelstone. Still drunk. Still an idiot.
Edward laughed. “One fool can ask more questions in a minute than a wise man can answer in an hour.”
Sara snorted a laugh. “That’s Trammelstone, dead on. That a quote?”
“Nikolai Lenin,” Edward said, bandaging another bullet wound. “And I didn’t know Trammelstone wore a toupee.”
“I wish I sti
ll didn’t know,” Retta said, as she shoved a pile of cloth onto the edge of the tall stage and heaved herself up again. “Jesus, I need more upper-body work,” she muttered. She moved right to Knife-Chest-Guy and doubled up two heavier tablecloths to cover him to the bandages they’d wrapped around his chest.
“Good,” Edward approved. “It’s not much, but we need to keep him warm and keep him from going into shock any more than he already is.”
She covered the dead man’s upper body with a table topper, and moved to do the same around the stage. She was doing red-tag work for the on-stage victims –-the kind of triage everyone hated-- checking the fallen for a pulse, confirming who was living and who wasn’t. Down on the floor, another younger man was doing the same. That let him move to the next uncovered body, knowing the person was possibly someone he could save.
God, he loved her so much. Never more than now as she went about the grueling business of tending to the dead.
“Sir? Sir?” Edward said insistently, tapping the cheeks of a thirty-something who lay on the stage. His chest rose and fell, but he was unconscious. Edward thought he might have been one of the agents who rushed Decker, but no blood marred his pristine shirt, or his pants. “Let’s lift his head, clear this out,” Edward said moving to kneel by the man’s head, as Sara moved with him. The man had fallen onto the top of one of the tall, but now collapsed, speaker towers.
Edward could tell the guy’d hit his head, but he was also pretty sure there were broken ribs, maybe internal injuries. Edward had palpated a lump on the back of the man’s head, and there was swelling on the side of his chest.
There were dozens of things it could be, but a listen to the chest wall gave no indication that the lung was compromised.
For now, all he could do was make the guy comfortable. This wasn’t the Navy. He could improvise some things, but he didn’t have access to anything here, and with active shooting going on to boot, he had no time to search out improvised tools.
“Brace his neck and lift it and his shoulders, as carefully as you can,” he told Sara. “I’ll move the speaker.”
Since the speakers easily weighed several hundred pounds, he figured that was the best allocation of brains and brawn.
“Got it,” she said, gripping the man’s jacket with one hand, cradling his neck with the other. One heave and he moved the speaker and then shoved back a tilted amp too, so it wouldn’t fall. That done, he hurried back to help Sara.
They’d just laid the man flat when one of the men with Rouse shouted and jumped back. The tied-up, fake waiter on the floor convulsed, his body bucking.
“Hey! What the hell?” Everyone turned to stare, and a woman screamed and began moaning and rocking in place. Edward recognized her severe shock as a sign of a mind overloaded by horror, but he couldn’t help her right now.
Edward jumped off the stage, and his hip fired in pain. He pushed that aside and rushed to Rouse.
“What the hell? I didn’t touch him,” the bloody, panicked agent said.
“Edward?” Rouse looked at him. “Any idea?”
“Poison,” Edward declared flatly. He’d seen it before. “Probably cyanide.”
“What the fuck?”
“You...will...never...stop...Red...” The man sputtered the words as saliva drooled from his mouth, frothing again as he convulsed. “Never...Stop...”
“Doc?” Rouse said, insistently.
“Rouse, I’m not a doctor.”
“Yeah, and I’m not a general, but we’re all we’ve got right now. And call me Pete.”
“There’s nothing I can do for poison. Especially not under these conditions. And if it’s cyanide, help wouldn’t arrive fast enough even if we weren’t in this hellish debacle.”
Another shout from the stage. “Edward!”
Back to the stage and a sea of slippery red on the deck of the ship where the men lay screaming...
“Edward, she’s coming around. What do I do?”
No boat. No men screaming, no storm. No water.
Focus, you stupid fuck! Edward could hear the SEAL instructor yelling in his ear as he tried for the last time to hit the man-shaped target at a thousand yards. Miss and he was out, not out as SARC, but out of the SEAL program.
He’d hit.
Edward knelt beside Madeline Arrsworthy. She had a through-and-through in her upper arm, which he quickly bound up with a napkin and five folded tissues Sara handed him from the woman’s own purse. Madeline was regaining consciousness, yes, but not easily. He checked her head again, carefully. There was a lump the size of robin’s egg an inch back from her temple. Concussion, at the very least, possible blood clot, dammit.
“Here,” Sara Hardinger thrust a wet, but clean, bar towel at him.
“Thanks.”
“So, you’re not a doctor?” she said, casually, not looking at him. “You just play one on TV?”
He heard Retta laugh, and managed a smile of his own. “I was in the service for six years. Navy.”
“A corpsman, you said?”
“Yeah, sort of,” Edward prevaricated. “Hey, Secretary Arrsworthy? Hey, there you go,” he said as Madeline opened her eyes and gave him a puzzled, bleary look. “That’s it. Open your eyes. There’s been a lot of trouble here, and we need you to stay with us, okay?”
She nodded carefully. Her gaze was sharpening with every second, and horror shone in her eyes as they cleared.
“Yeah,” he confirmed, “it’s bad. But you’re alive. So are we. Just hang on, okay?”
She managed a nod.
“We’ve done what we can for now. Don’t make any sudden movements, don’t try to get up, all right?”
She nodded again. Together, they carefully propped Madeline up with a detached seat cushion and another fallen speaker. Retta covered her with a doubled tablecloth blanket and they moved on.
“Were you emergency med, hospital or field?” Sara asked as they used a belt for a tourniquet on the surviving agent’s leg. The break was compound, and he called O’Keefe and JR up to hold the man while he pulled it straight and splinted it.
In better conditions, he would leave it for the hospital, but he had no idea when help would arrive. He couldn’t leave it, because that would do more damage. Setting it would hurt like Hell’s own fire, and it might make things worse, but the man couldn’t stay that way.
The man screamed like he was dying as Edward set the leg, but the bone moved back into place and Edward tied it to four pieces from a mic stand to keep it braced. Hopefully the man wouldn’t bleed out before they could get help.
“Jesus, dude,” JR said, rubbing at his eyes. “I hope I never have to do that again.”
O’Keefe and JR both looked white. He passed them a bottle of Jack Daniels Black Label that Sara had brought from the bar. He’d been using the liquor for crude sterilization. It was what he had. They both took a hit, before moving off the stage. He left the bottle next to the injured agent.
He’d need it when and if he regained consciousness.
He saw JR leading a bandaged young man to the stage. The beefy marine gave the guy a leg up onto the stage. “Here’s someone to sit with the agent, make sure he stays still.”
“Thanks,” Edward said, moving on to the next.
They bound a deep gash on the woman Decker had identified as Roberts, and did their best to stem the flow of blood on another bullet wound. The bullet was lodged in her hip, maybe deeper in the pelvis. This was either a ricochet or smaller arms fire from a Glock, Beretta or the Chameleon’s Kahr, because the hip was still intact.
“Seriously,” Sara reiterated. “You’re good. Where’d you serve?”
“I was SARC,” he said, thinking she wouldn’t know what it was.
She stopped, looking at him with shock. “Sweet jumping Jesus, you’re a Special Forces medic?”
CHAPTER THREE
From the corner of his eye, he saw O’Keefe wheel around to stare. Others did the same, but after a few seconds, they had to go on w
ith their tasks.
“No, I was assigned to a SEAL team,” he muttered, rolling Cheryl Parkerston to her side to see the wounds on her back. She had three long gashes running vertically down on either side of her spine. There were contact burns, and she, too, had a head injury.
She groaned under his hands. “What the fuck?” she managed, her words slurring out with another groan. Her face was a mass of bruising, her lips swollen and bleeding from where the gunman had struck her.
“You’ve been shot, and a few other things. Hang tight, we’re going to do as much as we can until outside help arrives.”
“Shitdammitfuckinghell,” the woman swore as Edward used a wet towel to wipe away the blood and debris. He delicately picked out glass shards as well, as gently as he could.
“What the fuck happened here? This wasn’t some big...” She groaned again as Edward removed a particularly long shard of glass.
One of the stupid freakin’ snowflakes from the ceiling.
“Fuck, that hurt,” she said, then added, “Thank you. Who are you?”
“Edward Millner,” he said. “We’ve met at some of the functions ‘round town,” he said drily.
“Yeah,” she managed a laugh, but he heard the tears. “Don’t tell anyone I cried like a baby when you did this, okay? It’ll ruin my rep.”
He laughed. “Surviving this, if we do, will make your rep ironclad, Cheryl.”
“Tell that to your dad,” she said. “We go head-to-head on most contracts. He wins fifteen out of twenty.”
“I know.” Edward pulled more glass out, doing it quickly to spare her pain, but also so he could move on. Talking about his father had never been his go-to preference. “He’s a bastard.”
She snorted, then groaned. “Jesus, that hurts. Am I really shot?”
“You’re John Wayne,” Edward said. “You’re shot, stabbed, burned and damn near dead,” he said with a fake Texas drawl. He’d heard somewhere that Cheryl Parkerston loved John Wayne. “And now, when I pour whiskey over this, you’re probably gonna scream like hell and pass out.”
“The fuck I will. Not in front of Thomas Millner’s kid I’m not,” she declared. “Give me something to chew on, paleface.”