The Battle: Alone: Book 4

by Darrell Maloney

  But he had no second chance. The wounded man staggered inside the door of the farm house, the unarmed man close behind him.

  Chapter 31

  Satisfied he’d get no more targets of opportunity on this particular day, Dave rose slightly, turned around, and disappeared into the deep woods.

  Inside the farmhouse, meanwhile, a sense of chaos reigned.

  Sarah and Lindsey, when hearing the gunshots, watched from an upstairs window as Swain and McDonough went racing out to inspect the commandeered vehicle.

  They were disappointed to see that McDonough was the one shot instead of Swain. McDonough was the young man who was sweet on Lindsey and brought the two of them extra rations occasionally against Swain’s orders. He was also the one most likely to raise a rebellion against Swain, since he not-so-secretly despised the man.

  Sarah went downstairs, since she knew she’d be called upon to care for McDonough. She’d once toyed with the idea of becoming a paramedic in her younger years and had taken several courses to obtain her certification.

  But alas, she got pregnant with Lindsey and put her career plans on hold, then never got back to them. Still, she knew more about emergency triage and first aid than anyone she knew.

  Swain knew it too. He’d seen the way Sarah had treated Karen’s leg wound and the other wounded. He knew Sarah was the only one with any chance to save McDonough’s life.

  “Secure the damn doors!” Swain shouted as he reentered the farm house. Get away from the windows. Westfield!”

  A short and portly man entered the room, his pistol drawn. Obviously he was ready to shoot somebody, anybody, and just needed a target.

  “Put that thing away, you fool. They’re not storming the farm, they’re shooting from a distance. Everybody heard the shots. They’ll all be under cover now until darkness falls. As soon as you can, you get me a casualty report. I need to know if we lost anybody else.

  “When darkness falls, gather everybody and bring them into the house. We can’t just stand around and let them pick us off one of two at a time. Not anymore.”

  Two other men appeared from nowhere to help McDonough to the living room couch, where he collapsed and immediately lost consciousness.

  Swain told Sarah from across the room, “See what you can do for him.”

  Even though McDonough was on Swain’s side, and therefore the enemy, Sarah would try just as hard to save him as she would any other man. It was the same reason she could never bring herself to drive by an injured dog or shut her door on a hungry stray cat. Her heart was the biggest part of her, Dave used to tell her. “Even bigger than your boobs.”

  Sarah hadn’t known how to take it the first time Dave told her that. At first blush, it sounded almost like an insult. But she looked at his face and didn’t see his usual evil grin. What she saw was a look of sincerity. And something akin to admiration. He was dead serious.

  “Let me put it another way,” he said when he saw the confusion on her face. “As nice as your boobs are, and trust me, your boobs are pretty amazing… your heart is even more amazing.”

  But her heart wouldn’t save McDonough. It would take all of her medical skills, and even then the odds were stacked against them.

  She went to her knees in front of the couch and placed a towel against the gaping hole on the side of his chest.

  At the same time she barked orders.

  “You! Get the first aid kit”

  “You! Get the rolls of gauze from the kitchen counter!”

  “Lindsey, honey. Go to the kitchen and get me a trash bag. The heavy duty kind. In fact, bring the whole roll.”

  She elevated his feet and said, “Get some blankets. Cover every inch of him except his face and the area I’m working on. Hurry. He’s gone into shock.”

  She checked the entry wound. It was bleeding steadily but not gushing. She took a thick gauze pad and pressed it against the smaller hole. She told Gomez, the man who brought the gauze, “Put your hand there and press hard. Do not let up until I’m ready to seal the lung.”

  McDonough was barely breathing, and she knew why.

  “His lung is collapsed. We have to get as much air out of it as possible. Baker, get over here. When I tell you to, I want you to press down hard on his stomach. Lindsey, let me have a bag. Give Gomez another one.”

  Sarah looked at Gomez and said, “When I say now, I want you to place the plastic bag tightly over the gauze pad, then press down firmly again. We have to make both bullet holes airtight so he can reinflate his lung. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Lindsey, I want you to close his mouth so he has to breathe through his nose. Then put your ear close to his nose so as soon as he exhales, you can pinch his nose and keep him from inhaling. Then we’ll force the air out of his airway. Are you ready?”

  “Yes, mom.”

  “Baker, watch Lindsey’s fingers. As soon as she pinches his nose, push down hard on his abdomen. Are you ready?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Swain stood, ten feet away, and marveled at how quickly Sarah took control of the situation.

  That pleased him a bit.

  But he wasn’t happy that his men seemed to respond to her orders with much more fervor than his own.

  That pissed him off a little. Of course, it might just have been because of the gravity of the situation, and because all of his men liked McDonough. He was the happy-go-lucky one of their bunch. The man who was always joking around and having fun with them. None of them wanted to see him die.

  But even if that was the case, Swain was a bit unnerved to see his men working so closely under Sarah’s commands.

  On the outside he was a concerned and worried spectator.

  On the inside he was seething.

  “Okay, Lindsey. Whenever you’re ready.”

  Lindsey forced McDonough’s mouth closed, then placed her ear next to his nose. After he exhaled, she pinched his nostrils closed and Baker immediately pressed down on the man’s midsection.

  “Go, Gomez. Now!”

  At the same time, Sarah and Gomez placed heavy plastic over the dressings covering the patient’s entry and exit wounds, making the lung s airtight as possible and allowing him to reinflate it.

  “Okay, let go of his nose and mouth.”

  Lindsey did as she was told and McDonough drew a long breath.

  It wasn’t as much as Sarah had hoped, but at least oxygen was getting into his bloodstream.

  She checked his pulse. It was shallow but steady. He’d lost a lot of blood, but if they could get the bleeding stopped his body would start replacing it.

  He needed a surgeon. He needed someone to open him up and sew closed the holes in his lung. Then to suture the holes in his back and side.

  Sarah wasn’t trained to do that.

  Swain stepped over to the couch and asked, “What’s the verdict?”

  “Not good, sir. We can stop the bleeding from the outside of the body by direct pressure. But there’s nothing we can do to stop the internal bleeding.”

  “Won’t it stop on its own?”

  “It might. But it probably won’t. Not without something to help the blood to coagulate. And we don’t have anything to give him. And even if it does stop on its own, his chance of infection is extremely high. None of the stuff we’ve used on him is sterile.”

  “What are his odds?”

  Sarah didn’t want to admit it, but they weren’t good.

  “I’d say, realistically, less than fifty percent.”

  Sarah turned to Lindsey.

  “Honey, get me that roll of gauze so we can start wrapping his torso and hold these bandages in place.”

  Lindsey turned, and Swain stopped her.

  “No.”

  Sarah asked, “What do you mean, no?”

  “If he’s going to die anyway, don’t waste any more of our precious resources on him. Just make him comfortable until he passes.”

  Then he turned and walked away. />
  Lindsey and Sarah just looked at each other, neither wanting to challenge Swain.

  And not knowing quite what to say even if they had.

  In the end, McDonough’s biggest enemy wasn’t Dave Speer.

  It was his own commanding officer, John Swain.

  Chapter 32

  In the tunnel, in the forest, Dave was struggling to catch his breath. He’d run at a full sprint back to his base of operations. Or, at least, as fast as a man who was out of shape could run through heavy woods carrying a backpack and a sniper rifle.

  He didn’t allow himself the luxury of thinking on his way back. He had to focus on spotting his markers, so he wouldn’t get lost.

  These weren’t like the woods in central Texas, where the trees were mostly sparse and spotted with mesquite trees. Mesquites were squat, close to the ground, with twisted and tortured trunks, each one unique in design like a snowflake. Memorizing the shapes of the mesquite trees, one became familiar with the Texas woods, and after a while could read them like road signs.

  It was hard to get lost.

  But these woods… these woods were full of tall pines and firs. Trees that were alien to Dave.

  Trees that looked more or less the same, as though they’d been stamped from huge cookie cutters.

  When he was skirting the roadway on the edge of the farm it was relatively easy to tell where the tunnel route had gone. The woods were slightly thinner there, the regrown trees slightly shorter.

  But Dave had to stay away from the roadway, because he didn’t know if it was being watched. He had to travel overland, through the woods, to get from the tunnel to the farm and back again.

  On his way to the farm, he’d set up a system of markers, every two hundred paces or so, that looked like natural events. Like, for example, a broken tree branch leaning against a tree trunk.

  There were hundreds of others like Dave’s markers, so they blended in quite well.

  But the hundreds of others didn’t have the feature Dave’s had. A fork in the branch, broken off so that the right fork was only three inches long, and actually touching the tree trunk while the longer fork skirted the trunk.

  Skirted the trunk and pointed the direction Dave was going.

  An experienced tracker would have noticed Dave’s markers fairly quickly. An experienced woodsman or hunter might have noticed them eventually. But Dave was confident that the men in the compound were mostly convicts who just happened to be former military men. Not the other way around. And hopefully not with any recent of extensive experience in tracking men through heavy woods.

  Once he was close he knocked down the last few markers. Just in case.

  And once back in the tunnel, trying to catch his breath again and unwind after killing three, and possibly four more men.

  He finally allowed himself the luxury of thinking again.

  Oddly enough, he was in turmoil.

  He felt nothing about shooting the two men on horseback. They were mounted and armed, and therefore were dangerous. He had no qualms about taking them out.

  Nor did he feel any remorse about the bastard who’d found his Explorer and was able to hot-wire it, so he could take it into the compound and show it off. He was not only armed and therefore Dave’s enemy. He had also stolen Dave’s property and made it infinitely harder for Dave to conduct his war. He only had three more days’ worth of food, and five more days’ worth of water in the tunnel. Now, if his campaign went on longer than that, he’d have to scavenge for both.

  The man in Dave’s vehicle was stupid beyond belief. Stupid to drive into a compound at siege, gun blazing, trying to attract attention to himself. A smarter man would have realized he might have been seen as a threat to his own sentries and fired upon. A smarter man might be aware that the owner of the SUV might be watching as well. Might be the same man who was raining terror down upon him and his friends.

  And who might not take kindly to someone stealing his property.

  If anyone ever deserved to die for the crime of being stupid, it was the man who’d stolen Dave’s vehicle.

  So Dave felt no remorse about his death either.

  The man he’d shot in the back, though, as he’d scampered back into the safety of the farmhouse, was the one bothering him.

  Dave was raised watching John Wayne westerns, where the good guys always wore white hats. They worshiped and protected their women and children. And they lived by a certain code of conduct, regardless of the situation.

  Oh, he knew that was make believe. He knew that the real old west was nothing like Hollywood portrayed it to be.

  But he still cringed at the realization that he’d shot a man in the back.

  It just seemed like something villains or cowards did.

  And Dave considered himself neither.

  He knew what his father, dead many years now, would have told him.

  “Dave, our system of justice is set up to differentiate the good guys from the bad. The reason we follow laws is because we’re better than them. If we used the same tactics as the criminals, chaos would be the order of the day. It would soon be difficult to tell the law breakers from the men sworn to uphold them.”

  Did shooting someone in the back, in his father’s eyes, cross that line?

  Dave also knew what Lieutenant Gus Gustafson would say.

  Gustafson was the officer-in-charge of the infantry tactic school Dave had attended. It was an Army school, taught at Fort Bliss in western Texas. Dave had volunteered to go to see how Army tactics differed from those of the Corps, and he brought back a lot of useful information that came in handy in Iraq.

  Gustafson would have said, “Shooting the enemy in the back? Who cares? He’s not your friend, and he’s not someone who’d give you a break if the roles were reversed. He’d shoot you in the back in a heartbeat, and that means he loses the option of expecting you to take a pass. This ain’t John Wayne and movie westerns, gentlemen. This is war, and you take your shots as you find them. Or you or your men wind up dead. You all remember that.”

  Dave was mindful of other things as well. If the man who stole his vehicle had made it into the farm house alive, he’d have told the others where he got the vehicle. And how he knew to hotwire it. Had he merely noticed it showed up in a spot where it hadn’t been before? Had he tried to hotwire it merely as a lark?

  Or, had he watched from a distance, perhaps, as Dave parked the thing? Maybe he was just lucky and happened upon Dave as he exited the vehicle and disappeared into the woods.

  And if that was the case, might he also have tracked Dave into the forest? Followed him until he disappeared into the green box in the middle of the woods? Then made his way back to the Explorer to hotwire it?

  If that were the case, all the more reason for him to die. If there was even the slightest possibility he knew where Dave’s hiding place was, then he was a major liability.

  As the pirates once said, dead men tell no tales. And the driver’s mouth was silenced forever the moment Dave’s bullet cut a path through his brain and out the back of his head.

  Dave’s thoughts went back to the unarmed man who’d come running outside, then scampered back in again after Dave’s shot.

  He didn’t look familiar, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t a good guy. He could have been a friend or neighbor. Perhaps he’d been invited by Karen and Tommy to stay at the farm with them after the blackout, for their mutual benefit.

  Dave took the fact that he wasn’t armed to mean he was likely a hostage. And therefore didn’t shoot him.

  But then he wondered about another possibility.

  Perhaps he was unarmed because he wasn’t just another grunt tasked with providing security for the escaped convicts.

  Perhaps he was unarmed because he was their leader.

  Chapter 33

  Several hours had passed. Sarah and her friend Jessika were taking turns on death watch. Lindsey was pulling her turn handcuffed to the bed in the next room, Swain’s “insurance policy.�
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  Jessika walked out of the kitchen, two cups of very stale coffee in hand, and placed one on the lamp table for Sarah.

  “I’m ready to take over now. How’s he doing?”

  “His pulse is weaker and slowing. His breaths are shallow and unsteady. He’s bleeding out internally. It won’t be long now.”

  She’d been watching his torso. It was warmer than it should have been, and his abdomen was hard to the touch. The blood they’d prevented from escaping the body was still oozing, but was pooling inside his body instead. It was just a matter of time before there wasn’t enough blood left in the veins to trigger the heart’s urge to pump it. Then he’d drift away to nothingness.

  It wasn’t a bad way to die, really. The pain he’d felt after being shot had spurred his brain into action. He’d blacked out and felt nothing after that. And in the hours since he staggered into the house, he still hadn’t regained consciousness.

  Sarah wasn’t kidding herself. She knew he never would.

  He was doomed from the start. Without qualified surgeons and scrub nurses, sterile tools and an operating table, it was just a matter of letting nature run its course.

  The human body wasn’t made to be violated with bullets. It didn’t like a tiny hole suddenly opening up on one side of the body and a gaping hole appearing on the other side.

  It didn’t appreciate it when the bullet shattered bones and organs and wreaked havoc as it passed through the body, causing blood to go to places it was never meant to go.

  The body had few ways it could respond to such insults.

  One was unconsciousness. Another was death.

  While McDonough was laying there dying, the farm house was a beehive of activity.

  The man behind the wheel of the Explorer was still out there. No one risked getting shot to go get him.

  The engine was still running, and would continue to run into the night, before it finally ran out of fuel.

  Sarah had been hoping for a chance to talk to Lindsey alone, out of earshot of Swain’s men, to see if she’d noticed the same things Sarah had as they were looking out that bedroom window.