by D. J. Molles
“What the hell are you doing?” Harper growled, his eyes filling with tears from the pain. “Go get that motherfucker.”
In Lee’s ears, he could hear Carl once again: “Lee, he’s at the fence. He’s climbing over.”
Lee had questions, but they withered and died, half-sprouted. What good would those questions do him? Tyler was not the man that Lee had once known. And Lee was not the man that Tyler had known. Perhaps they had both miscalculated each other. Lee had tortured Tyler’s man for information, and Tyler had shot Lee’s man to get away. The both of them were morally unfettered.
Now, kneeling there in the middle of the grain mill, with a friend bleeding out in front of him, Lee had no more questions of Tyler. The man he’d once considered a friend was a friend no more and had not been for a very long time, though Lee had just not realized it. He had no questions. No desire to confront Tyler anymore.
With bloody fingers, Lee depressed his radio button. “Take him out, Carl.”
There was no response from Carl, other than the distant whump of the suppressed rifle, and the snap-crack of a single round travelling at 3,000 feet per second. Lee heard the smack of the round finding soft flesh and destroying it, and along with it the sound of breath coming out of someone’s lungs as their entire body was put into shock.
“He’s down.”
Lee had abruptly forgotten about Tyler. It was strange how all the way in he’d forgotten that Harper and Julia were the reason he was here. He’d been so consumed with Tyler that he couldn’t picture anything but taking the man down. Vengeance. Answers. He had been forced to endure pain, and it had felt like the time was ripe to shift that onto someone else. To pay back a little of what he’d received.
Now he had a friend in his arms.
Did I fuck this up?
No, don’t think about that. Think about how to fix him. How can you fix him?
“Roll onto your side, buddy.” Lee pushed Harper’s shoulder. He searched Harper’s back for an exit wound. Often the exit would bleed more than the entrance. He needed to find that and stop it. In the darkness, though, he couldn’t seem to see anything. The blood from the front had soaked through into the back, so everything was just a mess of sopping clothing.
Do something!
Stop the bleeding. That’s what you can do.
What if it’s worse? What if it punctured an organ?
No. Just find the exit. Stop the bleeding.
“Ah, fuck!” Harper cried out as Lee started ripping the man’s clothing off.
“I need a fucking light!” Lee shouted out. “I need some help over here! Help!” He was trying his best to keep pressure on the entry wound and simultaneously pull Harper’s clothing off and search for the exit wound. It was just too dark to see.
White light came swaying in, jangling their shadows left and right and splaying them out like dead bodies.
Lee looked back, his thoughts filled with panic now. Josh Miller Tango Tango Tango and the Petersons and Bus, Bus, Bus, I’m losing everyone, everyone—
“Everyone around you dies.” Angela’s phantom voice rolled crystal clear through his head.
“Not you. Not you.” Lee was speaking to Harper, though Harper didn’t know it. Not Harper. Not this. Not again. Don’t forget Lucas, you fucking killed him, you motherfucker, he was trying to help and you killed him but you didn’t know, you couldn’t have known. And Abe, your best friend, the last friend, you fucking killed him, too, didn’t you? And LaRouche is gone, and so the fuck is Wilson and Father Jim and Jacob and everyone else. Jesus Christ, they’re all dead! They’re all fucking dead and here’s Harper…
What could I do to change this? his mind screamed over the cacophony of recrimination. What could I have done differently? Is this my fault?
“I can’t…” Lee’s voice was shaking with frustration. He looked behind him, to the source of the light.
Julia was limping up, arm around one of the Delta operators—Mitch, it looked like, by the small frame. He held a rifle, and she held the gas lamp from inside the barn. “Oh my God,” she choked out. “Harper… Harper, are you okay? Is he okay? What happened?”
Lee didn’t answer her. Couldn’t answer her. He turned back to Harper, used the light to search his bare back. “I can’t fucking find it! God damn it!”
Harper was starting to shake badly. “It’s fucking inside of me.”
“What?”
“It didn’t go through,” Harper said, as though he could feel it lodged somewhere in him. “The bullet. It’s inside of me. Just get it out. Get it out of me.”
Lee couldn’t do that. There was no point in getting it out. That would be ripping and tearing blood vessels and Harper didn’t have the time or the blood pressure to withstand that kind of extra trauma. “No, I gotta stop the bleeding. I need to get you stabilized first. Then we can get you to the field hospital in Fort Bragg.”
“What? Fort…” Harper shook his head. “Okay. Okay. Do what you gotta do.”
I do what I have to do. I always do what I have to do. That’s the fucking problem.
“Roll back. Roll back and try to let me work here.” Lee put Harper onto his back. The hole in his gut just kept bubbling out. It wasn’t stopping. Lee raised his voice. “I need a medic or something! I need some fucking… some gauze or something.” He turned to look behind him. Julia was leaning up against Mitch still, her face blank with shock, tears in her eyes. Mitch had doffed his helmet and was ripping through his pockets, looking for something. For once, his face seemed completely serious.
“Here,” he said, producing a green foil package. “Combat gauze.”
Lee snatched the package and ripped it open with his teeth and his left hand, keeping his right depressed onto Harper’s belly. Lee started unfurling the gauze, which was treated with a blood-clotting agent. “Get on the radio. Get that bird on the ground right-the-fuck-now. He needs to get to your field hospital.”
“Roger.” Mitch relayed the request.
Harper was groaning and mumbling incoherently now.
Lee scooped one hand under Harper’s head and tilted his face up to meet his eyes. Harper’s face was getting pale, made even more washed out by the white light of the gas lamp. His eyes looked strange. Glazed, but still there. There enough to feel the pain.
“Harper? You with me?”
“Uh-huh…” Harper struggled to nod.
“This is gonna suck, okay?” Lee wadded the combat gauze in one hand. “But it’s gonna help you, so you gotta let me do it.”
“A’ight… a’ight…” Harper sucked in a few shallow breaths. “Okay. Do it.”
Lee felt Harper’s body tense beneath his hands. He shoved the gauze into the hole of the wound. Harper’s body contorted beneath him. Lee bore his weight down, trying to stabilize Harper. “Hold still! This is gonna help you! This is gonna help!”
“Harper, hold still you stupid sonofabitch!” Julia yelled from behind Lee.
Despite Harper’s writhing, Lee managed to get the gauze plugged into the wound. Overhead, Lee registered the sound of rotors beating. “Okay, he’s plugged up. You okay? Harper?”
Harper looked at Lee like he didn’t recognize him. His eyelids fluttered and his hands kept lazily trying to get past Lee’s to touch his own wound. Lee didn’t know how “there” he was anymore.
“Harper, stay with me. Say something, buddy. We got the helicopter and everything, we’re gonna get you to a hospital…”
Harper’s body went limp.
“Hey!” Lee shook Harper by the shoulders. “Hey! Wake up!”
In response to this, Harper’s chest hitched up only once.
“Aw shit.” Lee’s hands flew about, trying to find something to do. “Aw shit, shit, shit!”
“Harper!” Julia was screaming at him. “Wake the fuck up!”
Lee pressed two blood-sticky fingers against Harper’s carotid artery and felt a feathery pulse that might have been his own, throbbing through his fingers. Harper’s che
st wasn’t rising and falling anymore. The air above Harper’s nose and mouth wasn’t steaming.
“He alive?” Mitch asked, coming down to his knees on the other side of Harper and leaving Julia to balance herself on her own. “He got a pulse?”
“Pulse, I think,” Lee said. “No breath.”
“Breathe him,” Mitch said firmly.
CPR, Lee realized.
He bent over and sealed his lips over Harper’s. He pinched the nose shut and breathed out a steady breath, watching the chest. A gulp of air and another breath. The chest rose an inch or two. There was the sound of something sloshing around inside of Harper. Lee tried to pull back, but he wasn’t quick enough. Bile and blood filled his mouth.
Lee reared backward, coughing and heaving, Harper’s blood and vomit trailing out of his mouth. He tilted off to the side and let out one giant heave, purging himself, then managed to choke the next one off. The world was a blur through tears. His stomach was still trying to rebel, but he made himself control it. When you put air into a body, sometimes other shit came out. That was the name of the game. It was Harper. It was his friend.
Lee blinked away the tears and saw the clumpy white vomit and ribbons of blood spilling out over the side of Harper’s mouth. “Tilt him,” he croaked, then coughed. He managed to get back onto his knees and pulled Harper onto his side so the vomit and blood could spill out and not block his airway. Lee shook him a few times.
“You good?” Mitch reached across Harper’s body and grabbed Lee’s shoulder. “You ready to do it again? I’ve got no pulse right now. No pulse.”
Lee turned his head and vomited one more time. Then he wiped his mouth with his hand, wiped it off on his pants, and then used the sleeve of his jacket to rub the sputum from around Harper’s mouth. Two breaths, Lee told himself, battling an almost overwhelming sense of revulsion. You can give him two fucking breaths.
He put his mouth to Harper’s again and breathed. One breath. Chest rising. He pulled back. The chest fell. Another breath. Chest rising. Then falling.
“Go,” Lee said, struggling not to gag again despite the taste in his mouth.
Mitch bent over Harper’s bloody chest and put his hands to the breastbone and began to do compressions, counting them out loud. “One, two, three, four…”
When he got to fifteen, he stopped and leaned back.
Lee gave breaths.
But every time he did, Harper’s mouth would pool with the contents of his stomach and they would have to tip him over and drain it out. And the contents began to look less like vomit and more like just blood. Blood, blood, and more blood. Filling Harper’s stomach. Filling his throat. Leaking into his lungs. Leaking into every cavity inside the man’s chest. Making everything futile.
It was the fourth time when Lee felt a little bit of that welling blood touch his lips again that he finally leaned away from the body, spitting and swearing and coughing. He pulled Harper onto his side to once again drain his mouth, but then he didn’t lay him back out again. He sat there on his haunches, head bowed, eyes on the bloody, wet gravel as his own saliva mixed with Harper’s blood and poured from his lips in long, silvery pink streams.
He spat and stood up. Then he turned quickly away from the others. He couldn’t look at Julia. He could hear her behind him, but none of the words she was saying made any sense to Lee. He had none for himself. None but curses.
What do you do?
What the hell do you do?
And all he could think was, Too much, too much, too much.
He walked. Into the darkness. The darkness that roared and screamed and sounded like men shouting and helicopters landing. The darkness that held nothing for him but pain, but it was a smaller pain than the one at his back. A more manageable pain.
He walked until he could see fencing and he stopped there. His gaze traveled along it until he saw the body of Tyler, sprawled out flat in the weeds that had grown and died at the edge of the fence. Lee watched that body for a long time, but it never moved.
Lee turned around, his back to the fence. Now he was at the point of a triangle, bisected in the middle by a dilapidated silo. At the point to his right lay Tyler’s body, alone and unmourned. At the point to his left, there was lantern light and men, and Julia crying out for a friend that lay at her feet.
But at Lee’s point in the triangle there was only darkness.
He tottered on rubbery knees and fell into a sitting position in the gravel and tall, dry weeds. He kicked his legs out and slouched. He could not see over the tops of the weeds, and he could not be seen. He doubled over on himself and felt like he was shrinking, collapsing, getting so small that he couldn’t contain what was inside of him anymore.
But he just closed his eyes tight, and shut his mouth.
He could do nothing else.
What’s done is done. You don’t need to wrap your brain around it now. You don’t have the time. Right now, you need to put it away. Stuff it down. Don’t think about it. You have other things you need to do. You’re so close. You’re so damn close, don’t fuck it all up now…
With unsteady hands, Lee snatched up the handset from the manpack still attached to his chest rig, tuned to the Camp Ryder command channel. He stared at it, clutched in his hands, and he felt ashamed at the tremble that was working through them, no matter how hard he gripped it.
He waited, still kneeling in the tall weeds, refusing to stand up and face what was out there. He felt guilty for being on the radio, for worrying about those other things that demanded his attention. But he knew, in that ever-practical side of his brain, that no amount of thought and concern, or weeping and gnashing of teeth, would bring Harper back to him.
The dead were dead. It was best to focus on the living. And there were still living people that needed his help. He needed to focus on the big picture. The details would only break him down.
He took deep breaths and hoped the shake in his voice wasn’t apparent on the radio.
Then he keyed up. “Lee to all elements on the command channel. Sitrep.”
Nate’s voice was the first to respond. “Nate to Captain Harden.” His voice was tense but controlled. “We’re moving, everything looks successful right now, but… but it’s kind of hard to tell how much of the horde is following us. When we get to high ground points I can see at least… several thousand. But I’m just hoping the rest are following. We’ve slowed down to a creep right now. Walking pace. They’re still following but it’s not an avalanche like it was when we first made contact. Break.”
The radio clicked off, then on again.
“We’re holding up fine, though. We’re going slow, but we’re closing in pretty close to Smithfield. Fuel is looking good. Haven’t taken any shots yet, just keep stringing them along, and they just keep following. We got the team ready up in the hospital yet?”
Lee closed his eyes again. Focus. Big picture. “Yeah, hold off on that for just a second. What’s your time estimate for arriving at the hospital?”
“I’d say we’re there within forty minutes. Approximately.”
“Okay. Paul and Junior,” Lee addressed the eastern bait truck. “Sound off for me.”
The older Paul came on the radio. “Yeah, uh… We’re pretty much in the same boat, but we might be hitting Smithfield a few minutes after them.”
“I copy that.” Lee opened his eyes again. “Tomlin, what about you?”
“Just got word back from Brinly,” Tomlin said. “He says they’re in position and he was contacted by Staley about an hour ago and told that the sorties were complete. All the bridges have been blown. We’re completely cut off from the north.”
Lee wanted to feel relief, or exultation. But everything in him just felt like cold stone. Besides, feeling good about anything seemed like foolishness at this point. They still had a long way to go before they could take the time to wipe the sweat off their brows and slap themselves on the back. And a lot of things could go wrong between now and then.
A l
ot of lives still hung, uncertain.
“Good,” Lee managed. “Excellent. How about you guys?”
“We got the hospital on lockdown,” Tomlin replied. “Haven’t seen much activity ’cept maybe a few packs skirting the edge of the city. No horde activity. It’s dark, we can’t see anything out east just yet, but I’m sure as hell hearing something. Something big. Might be Nate and Devon’s tagalongs.” Tomlin cleared his throat. “Nate, once you get a little closer, you hit me on the radio. I got a big-ass fire to light that’ll hopefully hold their attention while we take potshots and piss them off.” Tomlin took a deep, audible breath over the airwaves that communicated well the knot that was in his gut. “Lee, you got a ride out of here ready for us?”
Lee stood up out of the grass. “Yeah. This Black Hawk just needs a refuel, I think, and then we’re on our way. Forty-five minutes, I’d guesstimate. You pretty confident that you can hold out that long?”
A slight groan. “Yeah. Forty-five minutes. Check.”
Lee started walking for the Black Hawk. He refused to look right, to Tyler’s body. He refused to look to the ground in front of him at Harper’s body. Not now. Not right now. I can’t do it right now. I’ve got things that need to be done. I’m so damn close.
“Mac, Georgia, or Brett, or anybody in Newton Grove manning the radios, gimme a sitrep.”
The sound of empty airwaves.
Beating helicopter blades.
His feet crunching through gravel.
“Anybody in Newton Grove,” Lee said, a little firmer. Irritation and concern twining themselves together. “Mac, Georgia, or Brett. Newton Grove. Sound off.”
No response.
Sonofabitch.
Lee put one leg up into the cabin of the Black Hawk and looked behind him at Julia. Carl had appeared from out of the darkness. His face shined with sweat, despite the cold. Breath plumed out of him in rapid breaths. He held the big sniper rifle in one hand and regarded him with something akin to concern. Or the closest thing that one could expect from a man like Carl.
“We gotta roll,” Lee said hollowly. “Right now.”