People would come and look down on her. They would shake their heads and say: What a shame or: What a waste of a fine piece of ass. They would discuss hauling her carcass back down to the valley, but it wouldn’t be more than just talk. None of them would want to be burdened with the extra weight, so they would all agree that it made better sense to put her “out of her misery” even though she wouldn’t really be in any pain.
She would try to scream and plead for her life, but one of them would squat next to her and say: Sorry about this, before sticking a handgun to her head. She didn’t know if she would even hear the report of the gun or see the flash, yet the result would be the same.
In a flash of goose bumps, the shiver went down her in a wave. She ignored it as best as she could as she cinched the belt back in place and when Grey grunted again in pain, she ignored that too, knowing he would be embarrassed if he knew he was making what he would consider a sound of weakness.
“There,” she said when the bandage was in place. She ducked down out of the path of the bullets. “Feel better?”
“It…it’s great,” he said, trying to smile. It was a crooked on one side; another bad sign.
She smiled back, hoping that it conveyed reassurance instead of fear for him. She wanted to say something that would be full of meaning but couldn’t seem to put two coherent words together before someone came rushing up. It was a soldier splashed with more sweat than camo paint.
He slammed square into Sadie, crushing her down, so that his entire weight was practically on top of her. “It’s ok, I got this,” he said.
“Got what?”
The soldier didn’t answer. In the meager cover afforded by the rock, he unzipped a medkit and pulled out an IV bag of normal saline. “Open that,” he said, shoving the bag at Sadie. Around the bag was a tough outer shell of plastic which she tore open with her teeth.
“Here you go.” She tried to hand the bag back, but he wouldn’t take it. He was busy trying to thread a needle into one of Grey’s veins that usually looked like subcutaneous pipes but which now were only blue lines barely showing through his skin. After much digging with the needle, the soldier said: “There it is.” He then withdrew the needle, leaving only the catheter behind. To it he attached the IV tubing and then ran the fluid into the captain’s arm, full bore.
“Keep that up in the air,” he told Sadie, indicating the IV bag. “It runs on gravity. Also, tell me when it gets low.”
Sadie lifted the bag until her hand was just at the height of the rock they were crouched behind. She worried that her arm would get tired, however the bag drained so quickly that she didn’t have time to tire. After only a minute, she tapped the soldier on the back. “It’s almost out.”
He was huddled over the captain, his hands wet and shiny with blood. “I’m a little busy here. Just grab another and plug it in. It’s not hard to do.”
She had to almost climb over the soldier to get to the med bag. As she did, she saw him trying to tie off the bleeder in Grey’s arm. The artery was a slick little thing and was constantly obscured by the fresh blood pooling in the wound. “Damn it! I can’t get this. It keeps slipping. I’m going to need your help, ma’am. But first get the IV hooked up.”
That took all of two seconds and then she and the soldier shifted positions so that they were kneeling side by side over Grey. Sadie felt entirely too exposed. The full length of her right side wasn’t protected by the rock. “What do you want me to do?”
“Hold these clamps steady. Don’t let them move.” On both sides of the lacerated artery the soldier had attached bright steel clamps. To get at them, and allow the soldier to work, she had to entwine her arms through his. With her elbows resting on bare rock, it was a painful position. She didn’t complain.
While the battle raged around them, the soldier struggled to sew up the artery, but after a few minutes he yelled in frustration. “I can’t fucking get it!” The problem was his hands. They were too large and thick. One got in the way of the other and they both made visualizing the wound practically impossible.
“Let me,” Sadie said. She had no idea how to properly place sutures and the last time she had sewn anything had been in the seventh grade when she had made sock puppets in a lame home economics class, still she understood the concept and her hands though filthy, were small and nimble.
In seconds she had hooked the suture needle through both ends of the artery. “Ok, good,” the soldier said. “Form a loop...yes. Now push the needle through and pull, gently...gently! Now do another right next to the first.”
It took eight minutes to stop the bleeding and another two in order to clean out the wound with alcohol and bandage it with a new field dressing. By the time she was able to look up, she noticed that the battle had shifted down the hill—the Azael were running away. “Stay with him,” the soldier said, handing over the last IV bag in his medkit. “Elevate his feet; keep the IV running and make sure he’s warm. I’ll be back.”
Sadie watched him leave and then, seconds later, found that she had been staring at nothing instead of following the instructions. She put the IV bag on the rock and turned it down halfway so that it wouldn’t run out so quickly. She then dragged a tree branch over and propped Grey’s legs on it. Finally, she scooped up leaves and dumped them over Grey’s prone body to keep him warm—he hadn’t stirred or even groaned in all the time she had been working on him.
He still had a feeble, thready pulse which meant he was alive. It was almost the only sign. His respirations were so shallow that she could barely tell he was breathing at all and his skin was ashen, cool and slightly damp. To keep him warm, she laid down next to him and flung an arm across his broad chest.
She found herself staring again, her eyes fuzzy in a state of semi-focus. They were locked, in a vacant sort of way, on the black face of Grey’s watch. It was a few seconds before she realized it was almost nine in the morning. That caused her to say, “Huh?”
It felt much later. Hours later. She had never been so thoroughly exhausted in all her life. She didn’t even know if she could stand, not that she wanted to. She wanted to sleep, badly, but there was no way she could. The soldiers were going to be back soon and she didn’t want to embarrass herself by being caught sleeping. It seemed weak and she didn’t want to be looked on as weak.
It was a fight to keep her eyes open, a fight that she lost, and just as her lids began to droop beyond her control she remembered the old commercials the Army used to run when she was very little. Their catch phrase back then was: We do more before nine a.m. than most people do in a day. She never realized how true that was until that moment.
And then she was fast asleep, cuddled up to Captain Grey in the middle of a battle field.
Chapter 22
Neil Martin
If anyone was as tired as Sadie, it was Neil Martin. He had been up for a day and a half straight with zero sleep and almost no rest. There had been too much to do to even consider sitting and putting his tired feet up for even a minute. In fact, he’d had to go to the bathroom for the last five hours and was only just breaking away.
He stood in the bathroom that sat adjacent to his new office, with his head canted back as a steady stream, one that lasted almost four minutes, flowed out of him. He almost didn’t want it to end. “There’s more work to do,” he told the empty room. After the briefest of hand washes in which he spent most of the time staring at the ruin of his face and noting how old his bloodshot eyes appeared, he left the bathroom only to run into Deanna Russell, who accosted him immediately.
“Any word yet?” she asked, her pretty face worn down by anxiety. “They’ve been gone for hours and the guns stopped ages ago.”
Neil felt awkward standing less than a foot from the bathroom door with his hands still damp and Deanna almost nose to nose with him. He edged to his right, hurried into his office and put his desk between them, saying: “Oh, hey, Deanna. Yes, I did hear something, about an hour ago. It was a real brief radio message
because of the static. They said the mission was a success and that they’re bringing back six casualties and one deceased. I’m sure it’s not Captain Grey.”
“Just six hurt?” She relaxed, visibly. “And only one dead? Ok...ok, it wouldn’t be him. He’s too good. And...and it wouldn’t be Sadie either. You know how slick she can be.”
“Yes, she is pretty slick,” Neil agreed. He wasn’t worried for her. He had been earlier as the mountain gun battle had stretched over two hours, gradually getting closer and closer, but once he heard the garbled message crackle over the radio he had calmed just as Deanna had. Sadie was indeed slick and she knew her limitations. She wouldn’t risk her life for nothing.
Deanna grinned suddenly, something she hadn’t done in hours, not since the explosion that had destroyed the howitzers. It brought back her beauty full force and it seemed ten years dropped from her face. “Ok, that’s all I wanted to know,” she said, turning away. Neil grabbed her arm.
“Whoa, slow down. How are the walls holding up?”
“Oh, right. Sorry, my head has been spinning and I’ve been on the go for hours. Red Gate 3 is holding steady. From what Oliver says the tracks on the crane are ‘done in,’ whatever that means. I suppose it means it won’t be going anywhere, but at least the crane part works so the wall is very strong and so is the Red Gate 4. It looks strange so close to the other one but it was as far as the crane could reach.”
She smiled again and Neil inclined his head slightly waiting for her to continue. “And the other walls?” he finally asked.
“Right, sorry. The Blue Gate is going to fall sometime this afternoon, at least that’s according to Captain Tully. He says the mound of undead will broach the wall by 3p.m. He tried to show me the math, but I didn’t really pay attention. All I cared about was that the wall is going to be breached. The second wall we built with the crane is only ‘okay.’ We placed the cars sideways on and there’s no way of knowing if it will hold when the zombies reach the highest level. We used a bucket loader and propped it up with more cars but we could only stack them three high, so it just might tip.”
Neil nodded, remembering how the second wall behind the Red Gate had toppled with surprising ease under the weight of the zombies and the pounding of the howitzers.
“With that in mind, we have built three smaller walls behind that Blue Gate 2,” Deanna went on. “Each should hold up the zombies for five to six hours depending on if we get to use guns or not.”
“Not,” Neil was quick to say.
This caused a quick look of pain to cross her features. “We’re going to need them in the river tonight. General Johnston says there’s no way to hold it without using guns.”
“I agree with the river, but nowhere else. We’ll just have to figure out something. Any other hot spots that need to be handled?”
“If you recall, other than the river, we had one other overflow spot at the Red Gate but since the main wall went down that stream of zombies have merged with the main group. It’s at the Blue Gate where we still have zombies coming down out of a couple little ravines. Thankfully neither has crested badly and from what I saw, we are getting only thirty or forty an hour. It’s not bad at all.”
Neil raised a partially chewed off eyebrow. “Not bad at all? How come I find that hard to believe?” He had visited each of the battle zones already three times, twice during the night when everything was dark and quite scary, and once after the big explosion when he and Dianna had been alone, standing against a wave of zombies on the partially built third wall behind the Red Gate. On each visit the number of zombies was definitely in the ‘very bad’ category.
“It’s true, the numbers have really slacked off. You know how much the zombies hate hills, especially steep ones. General Johnston thinks that since the zombies can’t go forward or back, they’re only milling about on the two highways and that unless something on the Azael side changes, the overflow will keep slacking.”
“Ok that’s the good news. What’s the bad?” There was always bad news. Neil had come to grips with this reality in the last year.
Deanna didn’t hesitate with an answer. “Everyone is exhausted. The civilians aren’t used to such hard labor on four hours of sleep. They’re starting to get sloppy and starting to make mistakes. There’s been a bunch of near misses and one not-so near miss. This guy named Mason had his leg broken when someone bumped into the jack holding up the car he was working under.”
A broken leg? Neil wanted to roll his eyes. Soldiers were dying on the front lines and a broken leg just didn’t compare. “I’d like to tell them to just suck it up and keep...” Just then a young woman with mussed hair and a wrinkled white blouse busted into the room. She looked like she had just been pulled from a deep sleep.
“Sorry, Mr Martin. I just got a message from the second team. They’re inbound with an ETA of twenty minutes. They say they need two operating rooms ready to go and as much O negative blood as we have on hand.”
Next to Neil, Deanna went white and she put a delicate hand on the pine-knotted desk he had inherited from General Johnston. “It’s Grey,” she said in a whisper. “He has O negative. I saw it on his dog tags.”
Neil knew it as well, just as he knew all eighteen people in the valley who possessed what was an inexplicably rare blood type. According to the Margaret Yuan, there should have been at least two hundred people with O negative blood in the valley, but for some unknown reason they had only found eighteen and two of those were also carriers of hepatitis.
He knew all of this because Marybeth Gates was O negative and in the last eight days she had received eight and a half gallons of blood. It was the only thing keeping her alive. The wound in her liver refused to clot or heal and it would not stop bleeding; a drainage tube stuck out from the side of her body and hung down the edge of her bed where it filled a mop bucket that had to be dumped twice a day.
She went through three liters on a daily basis and the donors were starting to run dry especially with the battle raging. No one had the time or the energy to give up a liter of blood.
“Thanks, Shelly,” Neil said with a nod, dismissing the radio operator. He started for the door at a quick walk. Deanna with her long legs matched him easily; there were tears brimming in her eyes. “He’ll be fine. You don’t know him very well if you think a little raid like this will do much more than slow him down. There was this one time I saw him get shot right in the chest. All it did was bring up a burp.”
He tried a smile for her, but she was too deep in fear for Grey for it to register. They exited the hotel, and though they walked south, they both had their heads turned to the east, towards the mountains and the direction of that morning’s battle. They saw nothing but the craggy peaks and the pine strewn slopes.
Deanna kept watching even as they got in Neil’s Humvee and sped for the hospital. The hospital was actually a glorified clinic in which colds, sniffles and the occasional turned ankle had been the order of the day back before the apocalypse. Two of the rooms had since been scrubbed with ethyl alcohol until they smelled so sharp that it watered the eyes; these were the operating rooms and so far they had been little used.
In the reception area, Neil and Deanna found Margaret Yuan playing cards with a slight woman who had been a certified nursing assistant at one time. Other than the handful of Army trained rangers like Captain Grey, this was the extent of the medical personnel in the valley. The apocalypse had been particularly hard on the first responders and hospital workers.
Margaret’s narrow eyes went to slits at the sight of Deanna’s tear-stained face and Neil’s pinched look. “Casualties?”
“Yep,” Neil said. “We’re going to need both O.R.s up and going. And we’re going to need all the O negative you have.”
“O Negative?” Margaret asked, slipping her dark eyes in Deanna’s direction. “It’s Captain Grey, isn’t it? Oh, damn, I knew it. He’s donated quite a bit to Mrs. Gates, but there’s not much left and no one has come in today at
all to donate.”
Neil had guessed as much. “How much do you have left?”
“One liter,” was her quick reply. She gave him a look which he interpreted to mean: there’s going to be trouble.
Deanna saw the look pass between them and alarm registered in her face. “What is it? Is there not enough blood? That’s ok. Grey can have some of mine. I haven’t donated anything so far.”
Margaret sighed. “It’s not that easy. Captain Grey has a particular type of blood: O negative. Unfortunately, it means he can only receive O Negative blood and nothing else. Do you have O negative?”
She shook her head as her lip started to quiver. “B positive.”
“Yeah, that’s the problem,” Margaret said. “B positive will kill him. Another problem is that we have an odd deficiency in the number of people with O negative. It’s always relatively rare, making up about eight percent of the population, but for some reason we have even less than that in the valley. Eighteen altogether and that includes Mrs. Gates and Captain Grey.”
Deanna’s lip stopped quivering and she stepped toward Margaret; standing half a head taller than her, Deanna stared down and said in a chilling tone: “Who are the other sixteen? We’ll get the blood from them.”
Margaret glanced at Neil as if asking for help. Neil touched Deanna on the shoulder, fully expecting her to snap at him, but she only turned toward him, slowly. “Let’s see how Grey’s doing before we freak out,” he said. “In the mean time, we’ll turn down Marybeth’s IV and I’m going to need a list of the O negative donors.”
“You want me to turn down Marybeth’s IV? She’ll bottom out if we do.”
“Give her normal saline,” Neil replied with the cold necessity of leadership. “It’ll hold her over until we can get some more blood. If you have an issue with it, I’ll do it.” Margaret had an issue and Neil knew exactly what it was: Michael Gates was protective of his wife, almost to a dangerous degree.
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