It took five minutes of tromping through mud and old sodden leaves before Lou found a suitable pair of branches, each about a foot longer than Cap’s leg. One of them had a fork at the end, which was going to be helpful. Lou did not have enough ACE bandage to secure the splint in place, so he cut the backpacks and Cap’s shirt into strips that, along with some excess rope, would do the job.
But first, they had to straighten out his leg.
Lou glanced over at his AA sponsor, who mercifully appeared to have drifted off.
“Buddy, you got to get ready,” Lou said, gingerly securing the rope around Cap’s right ankle. Even the slightest movement of the leg induced a groan. This was going to be bad.
“I’m ready,” Cap said.
Lou released the rope and felt around the ground for a sturdy stick, which he gently slipped between Cap’s teeth.
“Here you go, pal. Just pretend you’re on a Civil War battlefield and bite down on this anesthesia machine when it hurts.”
“It already hurts.”
“I mean really hurts,” Lou said.
“Swell.”
“I got no whiskey like they had at Gettysburg, but I promise that if I did, I’d let you have as many swigs of it as you wanted.”
“Just do what you need to do.”
“Okay, this is it. Five … four…”
The rope tightened around Lou’s wrist as Cap preempted the countdown by jamming his foot against the tree. Lou gave the rope another wrap around his own wrist and wedged his foot against a boulder to help with leverage.
“Three…”
“This wasn’t your fault,” Cap said through the stick. “I wanted to come on this run.”
“Two…”
“Let’s do this!”
“One! Push, Cap, push!”
His gaze fixed on the fracture site, using all the strength he could summon, Lou pushed against the boulder and pulled on the rope. Cap cried out as he forced his good leg against the tree. After a few seconds, he spit the stick out and bellowed, the sound echoing off the canopy of damp spring leaves. Then, like a fast passing train, his screams stopped. His eyes were narrowed and utterly determined, as if he had crossed a threshold of pain tolerance. He was hyperventilating rapidly through his nose.
Lou felt his friend’s intensity, and called upon his own legs for more power. Finally, millimeter-by-millimeter, the jagged, bloodied bones began to slide apart. The spasm in Cap’s quad was lessening. Lou’s teeth were clenched as he ignored the nylon rope cutting into his wrists and demanded still more from his legs, which were themselves beginning to spasm.
The femur ends moved past one another and disappeared into the gash.
“More pressure, Cap. We’re doing it! We’re doing it! Force that left leg out straight.”
The man responded, and Lou sensed another few millimeters of movement. With the tourniquet still tight, there was essentially no bleeding. Maintaining maximum tension, he wrapped the cord several times around the tree. The femur fragments held.
“That’s it, baby! Keep the tension on. I’m going to set the splint now. You’re going to make it. You’re going to make it off the battlefield and we’re going to win the war. Then you’re going to go home and get elected the first black governor of Virginia.”
There was no response. Wide-eyed, Cap was staring straight up, awake and unconscious at the same time, but still maintaining the force necessary to keep his leg extended.
It took Lou several minutes to wrap the ACE bandages and nylon straps from what remained of his backpack around the sturdy branches he had placed alongside Cap’s leg. He then created another wrap around Cap’s foot with the remaining strips of backpack fabric.
“Looking good … looking good,” he said.
But there was more to be done. Undoing his shoelaces and knotting them together, he secured one end to the fork in the branch at the bottom of the splint, and pushed the other end up and underneath the nylon strips around Cap’s foot. This would hold the traction on the leg.
Cap’s eyes had closed, and for the briefest moment, Lou thought he might not be breathing. In fact, that was an issue. He had at last surrendered to the pain. His breathing was shallow, and his pulse, still without much force, had slowed to ninety. But he was no longer conscious.
“Nice going,” Lou whispered. “Damn, but you are tough.”
The rain had stopped completely now, and the sky had begun to brighten. Lou lay what few bandages he had across the wound, rocked back on his haunches, and examined the splint. Given the circumstances, it was about as good as it could get.
For several minutes, he caught his breath and debated between trying to claw his way back up the steep hillside to the trail, or building some sort of A-frame litter and heading down toward the river. It would be hard going—a few feet at a time over nasty terrain, but in the end, the thought of leaving Cap was unacceptable, and he opted for the litter, provided he had enough rope.
Naked from the waist up, and now starting to shiver, Lou stood, stretched, picked up the knife, and began casting around for some branches he could lash together—hopefully ones still on the ground.
It was at that moment he heard loud rustling coming from the dense woods downhill from them.
There was no chance it was the wind.
CHAPTER 10
As for man, the biological laws make no exceptions for intelligence and his fate is the same as all lesser creatures. Death.
—LANCASTER R. HILL, 100 Neighbors, SAWYER RIVER BOOKS, 1939, P. 212
Bear?… Wild boar?… Coyote?… Mountain lion?…
Lou listened, frozen, as the rustling grew louder. He was no expert at such things, but this was nothing small. In deciding not to leave Cap alone while he scaled the steep dirt and rock cliff and ran back to the lodge, abandoning him to the jaws of a carnivorous animal had never even been a consideration. Perhaps it was just a deer. Whatever was moving through the dense net of brush was closing on them fast.
A pit opened in Lou’s gut. Beside him on the ground was a thick, barkless branch he had rejected for the splint, but was keeping near in case he needed it for the litter. It was longer than his arm and capped at one end with a series of short spiked branches, giving it the heft and feel of a medieval mace.
Shirtless and shivering, scraped and bruised, Lou crouched in an attack stance, holding his weapon like a baseball bat. Cap lay on the ground nearby, eyes closed, breathing shallow and grunting, unaware of this newest danger. From the beginning, he had been going in and out of shock due to diminished blood volume and dilated vessels caused by pain. Cap was a fanatic about working out. Now, every minute spent toning his muscles and strengthening his cardiac status was going to be brought into play. But, as with everything biological, the ability to resist shock had its limits. Renal shutdown … cardiac arrhythmia … brain cell death. The window to getting Cap medical attention, especially fluid replacement, was closing fast.
Lou was uncertain whether to remain absolutely quiet or get noisy. No half measures.
“Who’s out there?” he suddenly heard himself shouting. “Anybody out there?”
No answer.
The sound of rustling bushes grew louder. Now Lou could see movement of the topmost branches. He gritted his teeth, tightened his grip on the rain-slicked club, and eased closer to Cap as the muscles in his arms, back, and neck tensed. His gaze was riveted on the spot where whatever was approaching would soon emerge. With a steadying breath, he raised his weapon.
Bear?… Wild boar?… Coyote?… Mountain lion?… Deer?…
To Lou’s astonishment, it was none of the above. The creature who entered the small clearing was human—a ragged, weathered man, tall and lanky, with a craggy face that was, for the most part, buried beneath a billowing, gnarled gray beard. His hair was tucked inside a hat made from the pelt of some black and tan animal.
There was nothing about the man’s stance or bright hazel eyes that said he was a threat. He could have claimed to be
fifty or eighty, and Lou would have believed him. He wore a fringed, oil-stained buckskin jacket, spotted with what might have been dried blood. Dangling around his neck was a leather thong, heavy with bear claws. Strapped to his narrow waist, sheathed within a beaded leather scabbard, was one of the largest knives Lou had ever seen. It made his efficient Spyderco blade look like a toy.
Perhaps, Lou mused, as he and the intruder sized each other up, the woodsman had used the knife to kill the rabbit lashed to his belt. Or maybe he had used the double-barreled shotgun he held loosely at his side. The man’s gun came up just a fraction as he checked out the weapon in Lou’s hand.
“You don’t throw that log at me and I won’t shoot you,” the man said in a thick Southern drawl as languid as his movements.
Lou needed no additional coaxing. He set the stick on the ground and raised his hands.
“No need to go puttin’ yer hands up, neither,” the man said, setting the butt of his shotgun on the ground. “I ain’t gonna shoot you. I just didn’t want you gettin’ clever with that there bat.”
The man took several steps forward and extended a grimy hand to Lou.
“Name’s Floyd. I live and hunt in these here woods. Heard lots of screamin’ and figured someone might be in need of some help.”
Lou’s hand vanished inside Floyd’s calloused grip.
“My friend Cap fell down that ridge. He’s badly injured. Broken bone was sticking out through his leg, but we were able to get it back in place and splinted. He needs water, though. Needs it bad.”
Floyd removed a thin leather flask from his belt and handed it over.
“Not what it looks like,” he said. “Well water. I jes filled it this mornin’.”
Lou cradled Cap’s head and allowed him to take several grateful sips. He aspirated the fourth or fifth one and went into a spasm of coughing, cringing in pain with every one. His carotid and radial pulses were one-ten and thin. The fluid volume he was down was barely going to be touched by what he could get in by mouth.
His skin was cool and clammy. His lips and fingernail beds were disturbingly blue. Continued oozing into the thigh was quite possible despite the tourniquet. There was room in and around the heavy muscles for a couple of quarts, and Lou had once seen a woman bleed out into her thigh from what looked like a simple fractured hip.
“This man looks to be in pretty bad shape,” Floyd said. “I’d say he needs a doctor.”
“I’d say you’re right.”
“The way you done that splint tells me yer either one yerself, or you was an eagle scout.”
“Both,” Lou said, a kaleidoscope of images of the highs and lows of his life flashing through his mind.
Cap’s next few swallows were deeper than before, but ended the same way. It was like they were shooting a rampaging elephant with a BB gun.
“We need to get him to a hospital, and fast,” Lou said. “How far away do you live? Do you have a phone or … or a car? Better still, a truck. Is there a road out to your place? How far to the nearest town?”
Floyd brushed his palms across the front of his pants.
“Easy now, Doc. Easy. You kin pepper me with as many questions as you like, but I’m only equipped to answer one of ’em at a time. I stopped gettin’ educated a little short of medical school, but I’d like to say somethin’ before I wade into that bog of questions a yers.”
“Okay, but quickly.”
“If we don’t get this fella outta here, none of those other questions are going to matter.”
First things first.
Countless AA meetings over the years, many of them with a blue-and-gold-fringed banner on the wall saying precisely that, and here Lou was getting a one-sentence seminar on the subject from a woodsman, who had probably figured out the simple philosophy on his own.
“Sorry,” Lou said, calming himself with a deep breath, checking Cap’s pulses once more, and continuing to hold his cool hand when he was done. “How far from here do you live?”
“Half mile, thereabouts.”
“Half a mile?” Lou looked surprised. “There’s no town anywhere near here,” he said, recalling what he had seen on his trail map.
“Me ’n the missus live right here in these woods. Her family land, not state owned, so we ain’t poachin’. We grow our own food and I catch whatever else we eat. We got no phone ’n no reason to have one.”
“I can’t get a signal up here.”
“Maybe out in our field you will.”
“You have a truck?”
“We got a road … if you kin call it that. No car, though, ’n no truck. We got a canoe with a five-horse outboard that we use to bring stuff we grow ’n make to Hadley, ’bout five miles downriver. Not sure we can get yer friend here in it, though. It’s only sixteen feet.”
First things first.
“Okay, okay. We’ll worry about that when we get there. Let’s build some sort of drag litter that we can also lift, and see if we can get him down to your place.”
“I wanted to tell you we needed to do that before you started firin’ questions at me,” Floyd said. “A drag litter’ll be a job, but I’m sure ol’ bucky here kin get us the branches we need.” He patted his enormous knife. “He’s got enough sawteeth to do the job, ’n you got rope. Negotiatin’ yer friend down this hill may be another matter, but I would say we got a chance. We should get goin’, though. He’s lookin’ weaker by the second.”
Twenty minutes later, the two of them eased Cap onto a low-tech stretcher—A-shaped, with a hefty stick lashed across the head to use for lifting when dragging was too impractical or painful. For a time, pain prodded Cap into intermittent consciousness, but soon, he drifted off someplace Lou hoped was pleasant and peaceful, and stayed there. Almost six feet of solid muscle, Cap was heavy enough. But the added weight of the splint and the litter, combined with the difficult terrain, made transporting him a Herculean task. If they were going over level ground and not downhill, the task might have been close to impossible. But foot by foot, at times inch by inch, they kept moving, Lou slipping and stumbling until he thought to borrow Cap’s shoelaces, Floyd moving with surprising agility. Even though there was really nothing further he could do, Lou paused every few minutes or so for assurance that the most important man in his life had a pulse and was still breathing.
Floyd, whose last name, Lou learned, was Weems, was a beast—wiry, and at least equal to him in strength. For most of the trek, he remained silent. When hoisting the head of the litter he’d whistle softly—a tune that might have been a birdcall. A simple life, led simply. Even after just a short time, Lou sensed this gift of a man was the embodiment of the sort of serenity he had been working toward for ten years.
Lessons … everywhere lessons.
“Not far now,” Floyd said, hoisting the litter to his chest in order to negotiate a fallen tree.
Lou occupied his mind during the tough parts of the descent by wondering how he might thank him.
What do you give a man who wants for nothing?
Time was running out. Despite the rugged work, Lou was shivering uncontrollably. His strength was going. His best friend’s miserable situation had already driven him across an invisible line of stamina. Now it felt as if there were no place further to go. He was about to beg Floyd for an update, when the forest began to thin.
“Yer doin’ fine, Doc,” Floyd said, the first time he had felt the need to voice such encouragement. “Almost there.”
The man’s words were an elixir. Lou lifted his end of the litter just a little higher, and began losing himself in what they might do next, with or without a cell phone signal.
“Floyd?”
“Yassir?”
“You mentioned you had a field by your place where you grow things.”
“I did mention that, yes.”
“Well, tell me, does that field of yours have enough space in it to land a helicopter?”
CHAPTER 11
On the heels of the Social Security
Act, the work of Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur and his Committee on the Costs of Medical Care lies in wait, readying to unleash a flurry of new legislation with a bite far bigger than its bark.
—LANCASTER R. HILL, Climbing the Mountain, SAWYER RIVER BOOKS, 1941, P. 72
The pounding inside Special Agent Tim Vaill’s head showed no signs of letting up. If anything, it might have been getting worse. The rhythmic beating against his temples made him think of The Who’s Keith Moon, fanatically pounding away on his bass drum. Bam! Bam! Bam! Vaill squinted, trying to block out the light, but that only seemed to make his headache worse.
Where in the hell am I?
What happened to me?
Feeling dizzy now, Vaill struggled to get oriented. In fits and starts, like free-floating pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, his thoughts began drifting into place. He remembered falling—falling backward.
Where?
Stairs … he had fallen backward down a flight of stairs.
But why?
Had he been pushed? Bit by bit, his memory returned, bringing with it a different sort of pain, this one spiked with anger.
Burke. I was shot by fucking Alexander Burke.
That thought quickly led into another—an image vivid and powerful enough to tighten around his throat like a python.
Maria!
His heart stopped. Maria had been there right beside him. Vaill concentrated, trying to wrangle more pieces of those shrouded events from his aching and battered brain. He winced from the effort. Out of desperation, he bit down on his tongue, trying to redirect some discomfort from the amplified thumping in his skull. The spike in pain did little to jar loose his memory of her. No matter how hard he concentrated, he had no clue as to her fate. But somewhere at the edge of his awareness he sensed it was bad.
Vaill pawed the grit from his eyes and forced them open.
How long have I been asleep?
He took some time to assess his surroundings. He was lying on a comfortable bed.
What bed? Where?
Glancing down, he saw that his left hand was wrapped in some sort of gauze bandage. An IV line had been attached to a vein alongside the wrist of his right arm. A nearby purple bruise suggested it had not been an easy vessel to nail. There were a pair of windows in the wall to his left. The blinds were open, allowing bright sunlight to spill into the room. It had been late in the day when he’d been shot. Prayer time for Dr. Kazimi.
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