Just Shy of a Dream

by M. L. Buchman

  “Finally,” Sara cursed and slapped a morphine shot into the major’s exposed flesh.

  In moments the major stopped responding at all. Only the beeping readouts indicated she was still with them.

  “She shows no sign of blood pooling beneath the skin,” Sara sounded as if she was speaking to herself—a habit he’d forgotten about.

  “Maybe she doesn’t have enough blood for any to be pooling.”

  “It doesn’t quite work like that.”

  But while Sara sounded distracted, her hands were moving like lightning flashes, grabbing supplies from the heavy gear bag she’d dragged aboard.

  “Give her another unit of blood,” she pulled open an insulating bag and dropped the warm plastic sac into the palm of his free hand.

  “Like I have a clue what to do with this.” The sac seemed alive in his hand, overheavy, a turgid red so dark it was nearly black.

  “Hang it up. No! Don’t release your pressure on the wound—I always seem to need a third hand.” Even as she spoke, she was doing something with the tubes dangling from the bag and Major Beale’s arm. With the blood flowing, Sara rolled out a surgical kit.

  5

  “You aren’t a sicker, are you, Chief?” Sara nearly snarled at him. Just what she’d need, another crew chief who barfed on a patient when there was a little cutting to be done.

  “Remember Jeff Lyons?”

  “No. Who?”

  “Jeff Lyons. Mr. Lyons. Teacher. Senior year auto shop?”

  Sara extracted a scalpel from her kit and held it frozen in mid-air over the major’s buttock. She needed to find the bleeder inside the major or she was going to lose her patient.

  But Mr. Lyons…

  “I don’t have time for this!” She leaned down and tried to see what was going on inside the woman’s butt cheek and upper thigh.

  She hated this moment. She wasn’t a surgeon but, being a combat medic, she might as well be. But every time she had to cut into a patient, adding to their injuries in an effort to save them, it gave her the shivers. It reminded her of the first time she’d ever cut into a man to save him. A vision of spraying blood that—

  Focus. Focus.

  Not the femoral or profunda femoris or the leg would be cold. Also, if those were severed, the patient would already be dead. She poked at the woman’s skin, trying to feel the flexibility of the underlying flesh. Was there a spot where it was engorged with misplaced body fluids that would lead her back to the source?

  It was impossible to tell in the helicopter. Vibrations rippled through them all as it raced north—low and fast. They’d been told to stay off radar—which was always a rougher ride—but the pilots knew to smooth it out as much as possible to let her work.

  She didn’t want to just slash all the way across, creating a bigger wound than the one she was trying to fix.

  “Is she out?”

  The crew chief knocked on the top of the major’s head like it was a front door. “Not an eyeblink.” It was almost funny. She supposed it was funny, but she’d never learned to laugh—having far too much trouble with just speaking.

  “Okay, stick your finger into the hole you’re putting pressure on. See if you can feel the bullet.”

  The crew chief swore hoarsely, but did as he was told. Which earned him a lot of credit. She could see him probing around, then he shook his head.

  That told her where to cut, hopefully. Bullets had a nasty habit of ricocheting around inside a body, but she didn’t have the time or an x-ray machine to find it. She’d cut in the same spot as—

  Jeff Lyons!

  The memory crashed in and she slammed it aside—and began to cut.

  6

  Damn but Sara Camron was chill.

  Not even a flinch as she sliced into the flesh—then or now. Maybe the old jokes about her being ninety percent cyborg hadn’t been so far from the truth.

  With his free hand, Stephen dabbed, held, handed off tools, and tried desperately not to watch. All of the old high school memories were coming back far too vividly.

  The chain on the engine hoist had broken with an ear-shattering snap, ricocheting off like a bullet. Over six hundred pounds worth of big block Chevy V8 had come crashing down onto the auto shop floor. Pinning the shop teacher by the leg.

  Mr. Lyons’ scream had shattered the roar of a dozen different machines—lathes, torches, grinders—all drowned out in a moment. Everything in the entire shop silenced by that one sound.

  Stephen had been only feet away and had shouted for someone to call 911.

  He’d held Mr. Lyons’ hands even as he’d instantly organized a couple of the guys to find another chain and prepare to lift the block.

  Then Sara had slid in through the window open against the June heat.

  Helena High School’s auto shop faced the athletic field. When Sara entered, he looked up to see the entire women’s cross country team lined up against the outside, staring in horror as Mr. Lyons kept screaming. Two disappeared below the sill—one to faint and the other to barf.

  Not valedictorian Sara Camron. She’d walked up close like some kind of ghoul. The weirdo, silent brain-girl of the school. Always strange, always distant. Staring intently at Mr. Lyons like he was some kind of broken engine.

  “Look at the blood,” her voice had barely been a whisper.

  His terror for Mr. Lyons was building with each inch of the spreading pool and Stephen wanted to smack her aside. Mr. Lyons had been the one who had pulled Stephen out of the morass of teenage bad boys and shown him there were other possibilities. But his shop rules were strict: none of his big brother’s drugs, none of his parents’ alcohol.

  “Clean and sober,” he’d insisted. Stephen had watched him throw out too many guys to doubt it.

  Hadn’t saved Mr. Lyons from a failed chain link.

  Before Stephen could tell her anything, she had begun whispering again.

  “It’s flowing too fast. Hand tools. Where are your hand tools?”

  Stephen had nodded at the big roll chest behind him.

  “Don’t lift the engine yet. Okay?” Her voice was so cool and calm that all he’d been able to do was nod again. Except she wasn’t there to see it.

  In moments she was back with a wide variety of tools spread out beside her in a neat row and a half dozen clean rags from the shelf. She also had the First Aid kit from the wall—meant for cut fingers, not crushed legs. She gloved her hands, then squatted without even looking at him. Her whole attention was focused on Mr. Lyons.

  She gave each tool a quick wipe down with a gasoline-soaked rag.

  “Best I’ve got,” she’d spoken to herself. Then to him without looking up. “Okay, you can lift it now. Don’t let go of his hands.”

  As if on cue, the guys had just finished chaining the block again—doubled up this time.

  The moment it was clear, the pooling blood had pumped out in a wild spray.

  Sara had reached into the fray, set a tie-down strap around Mr. Lyons’ upper thigh, and then cranked it tight using the haft of a long-shank half-inch screwdriver. But it didn’t completely stop the bleeding.

  She cocked her head for a moment.

  Puzzled?

  “You call 911?”

  He nodded.

  Not puzzled, she’d been listening for sirens.

  He listened too. Not yet.

  Sara reached for the next tool and when he saw it, he redoubled his grip on Mr. Lyons’ flailing hands.

  A slash with a razor knife and the pant leg was split open. Another slash, and the skin beneath had been flayed apart as well.

  In agony, Mr. Lyons tried to grab her, but Stephen kept him pinned, hanging on grimly and hoping against hope that she knew what she was doing.

  The sound of barfing didn’t only come from the window now. A couple of the guys in the shop were losing it too.

  She actually reached up inside his leg with a pair of lineman’s pliers, then picked up a paddle-jawed sheet metal clamp. Pulling out a lon
g, slippery tube squirting blood—that he’d later learned was a femoral artery—she clamped the end of it with the wide jaws of the Vise-Grips.

  Sara had been gone before the ambulance drivers were done. It had been left to him and a very ill-looking vice principal to calm down the other kids. He’d done the cleanup on his own.

  It was the last time he’d seen her other than giving the valedictorian speech on graduation day.

  He couldn’t get over how little had changed in the last decade…and how much.

  The tools were finer, and properly sterilized. Instead of being “safe” in Helena, Montana, they were racing through the Polish night in a thirty-million-dollar combat helicopter.

  But here they were, again, both squatting over a cut artery—the first by a Chevy big block and now by a bullet.

  “Not there. Put your finger in the hole again,” she spoke as if he was a simple extension of her own thoughts and being.

  He felt her finger tip coming from the other direction tap his own, then watched it move off as she traced the bullet’s path through flesh.

  “This way… Russian…”

  “How can you tell? You haven’t found it yet.”

  “What? Oh. The damage path. The 5.45 mm has a very distinct double-wave pattern in flesh. The 5.56 creates a single, wider area of destruction. The 5.56 could be Russian or NATO, but almost no one else uses the 5.45 mm rounds.”

  Maybe there were some things he didn’t want to know.

  7

  “There.”

  Sara found the artery—not severed this time, just badly cut. She didn’t have the training to cut out the damaged section and paste everything back together. That was surgeon’s work. Instead, she took a flesh stapler and closed the leak without closing the artery itself.

  In minutes, she had the bullet extracted, the little bleeders tied off, and the whole thing packed in antiseptic and gauze.

  She forced herself to stillness as she watched the monitors.

  Blood pressure, up by five points, then ten. Pulse easing down as the heart slipped back out of panic mode: 150, 125, 100… Still working hard, but it settled below 90. Oxygenation coming up, meant there was blood going to the fingers for the clip to measure.

  “I think you can call back Major Asshole and tell him his pilot is going to live.”

  The crew chief smiled at her as if she’d made a joke or something. He tugged her phone out of her vest pocket and hit redial.

  “Sir. You’ll be pleased to know that your wife has been stabilized.”

  Wife? Major Asshole and Major Holes-in-the-butt were married. And serving together? That was crazy.

  …

  “No, sir. All the credit goes to Medic Sara Camron.”

  That was another thing. How did the crew chief know her name? He’d said something about high school auto shop. He must have been there, not that she remembered him. She was never very good at remembering people.

  …

  “No, sir. I won’t put her on the line because she’d ream you a new hole in your ass for how you spoke to her earlier. And your wife already has five of them, not counting the incision that saved her life.”

  Sara would too. Except then she’d be duty bound to fix it afterward.

  …

  “No, sir. If it was up to me, I’d let her and you’d deserve it, sir. Pardon my pointing that out. Nor will I point out that I’d be glad to hold you down while she did it. Goodbye, sir.” And he hung up on the most decorated major in the entire 160th regiment.

  Sara could only gawk at him. She wasn’t used to men coming to her defense. Ever.

  The crew chief reached out and tucked the phone once more into her vest pocket.

  Then he smiled at her.

  “How…?” No, she knew the answer to that question now. “You know me?”

  “How could I not know the woman who changed my life even more than Mr. Lyons?” And he peeled off his bloody gloves—properly, she noted—and stuffed them in the hazardous waste sack.

  For the first time she looked at his ungloved hands. She’d know those hands anywhere. They used to belong to a skinny boy in auto shop. A boy who had now filled out with soldier muscle to match those hands.

  She looked up into his dark eyes, but didn’t recognize those. Of course, she wasn’t in the habit of looking in men’s eyes—then or now. They always thought it meant something when she did. But she knew those hands.

  “It was you.”

  He nodded.

  Hands had always been an obsession for her. At least ever since that day squatting in the Helena High auto shop.

  The surgeon’s fine fingers.

  The infantry grunt’s fingers gnarled with hard use.

  Asked to identify a lineup of the men she’d mediced, she wouldn’t know a one by their faces. But she might well know every single one by their hands.

  This man’s hands were big, powerful. She’d seen how they held the shop teacher’s hands as he writhed in pain. They’d been more than just powerful, they’d been kind. He’d offered little finger taps and squeezes to distract Mr. Lyons from his agony.

  And she could picture them now in the blue nitrile gloves, as they’d helped her so assuredly.

  Sara forced herself to relax, to lean back against the inside of the closed cargo bay door. The crew chief leaned back against the side of his seat, without rising from the cargo deck. A quick glance, to check that she could see all of her patient’s health status readouts—now stabilizing closer to normal as fluids continued to flow into her.

  Then she flicked off the bright light that had been aimed at the patient, returning the cargo bay to the soft red light for night operations. She didn’t have to look so closely at anything under those lights—something she’d always liked about the Night Stalkers operating at night.

  “What’s your name?”

  8

  Stephen practically choked.

  “Well, shit. That puts me in my place, doesn’t it?”

  Sara Camron didn’t even know who the hell he was—that seriously sucked.

  “Stephen Brown,” he nearly spit it out.

  She’d left the day after graduation, headed for college and Army ROTC. Four-oh’d in, of course. Probably a full-boat scholarship.

  He hadn’t had any interest in college. Hadn’t even thought of applying.

  “You’re the reason I went Army,” he didn’t know why he’d bothered telling her. Ms. Chill and Remote could care less.

  “Why?”

  “You kidding me?”

  She shook her head without looking up at him. That one assessing flash of her bright blue eyes had pinned him to the cargo deck—not trusting his knees to even get him back into his seat. Those eyes had nothing to do with chill or remote. Not ice blue as he’d thought, but— Dumb thought.

  “Let’s see. State champion cross country runner, valedictorian, beautiful…oh, and you’d just saved the life of the only teacher who ever gave a shit about me. He pulled me out of hell and you saved his life. When you said in your speech that you were going Army medic, how the hell else was I supposed to pay you back?”

  “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “Yes, I did.” And it had changed his life for the better far more than even Mr. Lyons.

  “I saved his life. I knew that much,” again whispering to herself in a way he wouldn’t have heard without the intercom connecting them. “Was he okay otherwise?”

  “How disconnected are you?”

  “From Helena? Completely.”

  He’d never known anything about her home life. Or her, really. Except she was the over-achiever he’d finally aspired to become himself.

  “Yes. Lyons came back to teach the next year with a fake leg. Still there. I go stay with him on almost every leave.” And if not for Mr. Lyons, he probably wouldn’t be connected to Helena ever again himself.

  “I didn’t know.” She wouldn’t look at him, staring down at the deck.

  “Sara? What the hel
l was—” But he bit it off. Her life had looked so good from the outside… Guess not so much from the inside. Come to think of it, he’d never seen her with anyone except the cross country team—and them only when she was running. She’d walked alone in the halls and he didn’t think she’d been in any of the other clubs.

  She made a show of checking on the major. Still out. The steady beeping of the machines sounded normal—after his years as a CSAR crew chief, he knew the bad sounds and there weren’t any now.

  He debated between waiting her out and telling her to go to hell. The shape of his entire life had been changed for the better by two people. Mr. Lyons had unearthed his mechanical skills and honed them. But without Sara, he’d probably have ended up in a chop shop, parting out stolen cars (and doing time whenever they caught up with him) rather than maintaining helicopters for the 160th SOAR. And she didn’t even—

  “I remember your hands. Their steadiness. Their…” she hesitated a long time before choosing the next word, “…compassion.”

  He looked down at his hands. They were just hands.

  “You remember my hands, but not me.” Weird.

  She shrugged uneasily.

  “You do that with everybody?”

  She nodded.

  Stephen opened his mouth, then closed it. His hands? He inspected them again, but ended up no wiser. Didn’t that beat all.

  The more he thought about it though, the more sense it made. She’d come aboard the CSAR helo with her medic’s pack so fast that it was as if she could teleport between eyeblinks—there and then gone. But he hadn’t needed to see her name on her flight jacket to know her. She still moved with all the precision and strength of that long ago athlete.

  Yet not once had she looked anyone in the eye. Not him. Not Donaldson. The only time she’d really spoken during either the flight or the long wait, outside of giving him instructions, had been to the injured major. Even that had felt purposeful, testing for consciousness rather than conversation.