Gabriel lay against the bulkhead where he’s spent most of the trip across, his breathing weak, and his face flushed. He had opened the backpack and pulled out a small, wire bound notebook.
I left the helm and took the gun from the seat beside him.
“We have one more question to answer,“ I said, my voice shaking.
I raised the gun and settled it with the sights centered in the middle of his chest.
“Our name is legion. Explain that, Gabriel. If you don’t, I swear by all that is holy, I will kill you, right here, right now.”
He stared up at me, his face flushed with fever.
The engine droned behind me, shoving us through the light chop on the sound. Wind tugged at his shirt collar.
He licked his lips.
“I told you. I’m different,” he said finally. “That little demon did something to me. Just like one did something to her, and like that one you tried to kill would have done with the boy if you hadn’t caught it.”
“What are you talking about?”
The older man shook his head.
“I heard the doc. That woman hadn’t been feeling good for a week,” he said. His face tightened. “How much you willing to bet one crawled in that open window and right down her throat?”
He sat up straighter. “The one that flew up in my face? The damned thing was all over my face trying to get to my mouth.”
The man looked wild. The whites of his eyes seemed swollen, reducing his pupils to tiny black dots.
“It either got in her or put something in her,” he said in a determined voice. “These things have two purposes. Spread the evil and find whatever it is they’re trying to find.”
“How do you know that? Come on, Gabriel, tell me. How do you know?”
He nodded toward the leg stretched out in front of him on the cockpit seat. “It’s coming from there, like something is alive in the wound and growing. She’s right. The drugs may cure the infection, but they won’t cure that.”
Gabriel looked me. “You guys don’t have a surgeon back at the station do you?”
I shook my head. “No, why?”
He made a wry face and pointed at the notebook. “Your doctor friend said the leg needs to come off. He left notes on how to do it. Sounds simple enough from what I read. Put a tourniquet above it, cut around the bone, saw the bone in half, tie off the arteries, and cauterize the stump.”
He looked out over the blackness of the sound. His eyes had turned bleak when he turned back to me. “He was right. It needs to come off, but not for the reasons he thought,” he said. “I’ll be alright for a while. Keep the gun if you want. Tell the old woman when we get back. She’ll know what to do.”
Neither one of us spoke the rest of the trip. I sat in the very back with the helm under one hand, and the gun in the other. We ran in the dark with the only light coming from the night display on the GPS. As dim as it was, I could still make out his form leaning back against the bulkhead.
Angel skimmed through the light chop. The tide had grown slack, leaving the sound as full as it would get before the moon slipped over and pulled the water back the other way.
Gabriel grew still after a few minutes. I couldn’t tell if he’d fallen asleep or died. I had no intention of sidling up next to him to check either.
I brought Angel into the dock nearly five hours after we had left it, easing in opposite Ark Angel. I remembered then, telling him that I hoped the coincidence of names didn’t mean we’d need angels. We had. I just wasn’t sure which type had come to call, those from heaven or the twisted and disfigured souls who had been cast into hell.
Either way, the night wasn’t over, not by a long shot. Whatever had to be done would be done by morning, even if I had to do it myself. I figured I could handle the job after trying to pull a woman’s face apart. If push came to shove, Elsie had mentioned they’d found an axe in the old General store. It would lack the delicacy of a scalpel, but I was sure it would do the job.
My head ached. I had too many questions and not enough answers. The only certainty my mind had to offer pointed toward life getting worse before it got better. The Fever was spreading, leaving millions dead in its wake. Thousands more were killing each other. Perhaps even worse, winter loomed close on the horizon. The survivors might make it past the disease only to die of starvation and exposure afterward.
Looking back, the only good thing about that night was that I had no idea just how bad the next few weeks would be. If I had, I might have handed Elsie the axe and put my own head on the chopping block.
The shit wasn’t about to hit the fan. It was damned near close to obliterating the fan with me and few billion other people standing in the front row waiting for the show to start.
Life as we knew it had ended. Months would pass before anyone realized how stark the lines had been laid between past and present, between a life of worrying about bills and one of wondering what hid behind the next bush.
Fear, disease, famine, and evil had come. Those who couldn’t evolve would die. Those who could adjust still had lessons ahead, simple ones, like learning to breathe a sigh of relief at sunrise, and learning that happiness meant still being counted among the living.
Life had a new goal, one we hadn’t recognized yet, and one that could be framed in a single word.
Survival.
Chapter XV - Sacrifice
I loaded as much on the dune buggy as I could. The backpack filled with antibiotics went up front. Gabriel went in the passenger’s seat. The biggest chore turned out to be getting him off the boat and to the vehicle. The fight on Ocracoke had taken a lot out of him. No matter how much I pulled, tugged, and called out his name, the man never came fully awake.
I ended up lifting him to his feet and working him over to the side of the boat. From there, I rolled, pushed and shoved him onto the wooden planks. Angel behaved during the transfer and hung close to the dock even when his weight pushed her in the opposite direction.
One of the food sacks also went with us, tied to the little flat spot on the back that had been intended to hold a cooler. I didn’t know what the bag held, but guessed that Elsie could work her magic at the cook stove with whatever Charlie had thrown inside. We needed magic or at least something new. Too many oatmeal mornings had everyone aching for change.
Elsie and Kate greeted me at the door when I stumbled in with Gabriel slumped against me. Joshua and Denise sat on the floor with their back against the bar, the rifle stretched out between them. Joshua rose and helped me wrestle the older man up the stairs to the sick room.
Denise led the way, carrying one of the Coleman lanterns. Once we had him in bed, I told the two to try and get his pants off while I went down to talk to Elsie and Kate.
The two women sat at the table when I came back down. I waved and headed for the door to retrieve the backpack, but stopped part way across the room. All the windows had been shuttered and barred. The setup looked strong enough to withstand a battering ram.
“Damn, Keith did a good job.”
Elsie nodded. “He did. That boy is a good one. He sat there and figured it all out, how they’d open and close, how to make them strong, and how to put it all together,” she said. “He’s got one of them analytical minds and even better, hands that can turn what’s in his head into useful things.”
She paused as her mind switched gears. “How was Charlie? What about my cow and chickens?”
“He rounded up the chickens for you. I have six in a crate strapped on the cabin top. You can forget about fresh milk though. I couldn’t have ferried a cow across the inlet even if he’d had one waiting.”
I hesitated. “Charlie’s dead, Elsie.”
Her eyes went wide. She brought a hand up to her mouth.
“I just talked to him today. What happened?”
I rubbed at my eyes. Every day seemed to be turning into a twenty-four hour battle for existence. Elsie deserved an answer that made sense. I didn’t have one to give her. Explai
ning what had happened with Marcy would generate an hour of discussion. I didn’t mind having that conversation with her, but preferred to do it in the light of day after we had dealt with Gabriel. Still, I needed to give her something.
“What happened is he was killed by some of the same things we’ve been hearing about on the news. I’ll tell you about it later, but Charlie spent his last day giving us the tools to keep the man upstairs alive,” I said. “If we don’t get busy, his work will be in vain. Gabriel’s leg has to come off. I don’t think he’ll live another day if we don’t do it now.”
I shot her a pained expression.
“I’m not trying to pass the buck, but Gabriel said to tell you, Elsie. He said you’d know what to do about the leg.”
“That’s because he knows I’m old enough to remember when people didn’t run to the emergency room every time the least little thing happened,” she said and grimaced. “Doing it won’t be the worst part. Worst part is, we don’t have no way of knocking him out.”
“Yes we do,” I said. “Charlie gave me a backpack full of drugs. Let me get it.”
I opened the pack on the table after fetching it from the dune buggy. Rather than pick through it, I unzipped it and dumped most of the contents out on the flat surface. Half a dozen bottles rolled across the table, most rattling as they turned end over end from the pills inside. Gauze and surgical tape followed, along with a thick bundle of needles, all individually wrapped in protective plastic sleeves. Charlie had bound them together with a rubber band. Also stuffed into the backpack were bandages, a big bottle of aspirin, another of ibuprofen, a bottle of red liquid with Betadine written across the front, and a thin strip of rubber that had to be a tourniquet.
He had placed two bottles inside an inner pocket. I pulled them out, read the name, and mentally shrugged. I might as well have been reading Greek.
Three items remained. I pulled out the two metallic pieces. One looked like a stainless steel razor. It had to be a scalpel. I had no idea what the official name of the other item might be, but a saw is a saw and that one looked wickedly capable of chewing straight through bone.
The notebook Gabriel had been reading lay at the bottom, though calling it a notebook would be putting an optimistic spin on something the size of a pack of post-it notes. The first few pages listed the names of the drugs, the types of maladies they should be used against, and treatment schedules.
Four pages deep, I found the instructions for performing the amputation. Clearly, the veterinarian had been rushed. The dosage rates for the other medicines had been written in neat, block letters, making them easier to read than anything I’d ever seen come from the hand of a doctor. Charlie had returned to his medical roots when writing about the amputation and scrawled several pages of notes in the small tablet.
Gabriel had summed them up succinctly. As detailed as some of the writing seemed to be, the wounded man had noted the bullet points. Place a tourniquet above the wound, but not on a joint. Use the scalpel to cut away the skin and flesh, working around the leg until the bone was exposed. Change over to the bone saw and grind away. Charlie noted tying off arteries and cauterizing the stump as the best options to prevent major blood loss. The final instructions covered the IV drip solution and anesthetic. Those two items tied back to the bottles secured in the inner pocket. The one labeled Ketanest was apparently the knock-out drug. The other, Gentamicin, he recommended for fighting the infection.
Elsie and Kate sat silently while I read the notes out loud. I leaned back when I’d finished and slid the notebook across to the old woman.
“We’re going to need heat, a lot of it to cauterize the wound. Charlie said something about a summer kitchen. Is that the thing that looks like a shed stuck on the back of the station?”
Elsie nodded without looking up from the tablet.
“He said the caretaker who lives here during the summer cooked out there using a kerosene stove.”
She waved back toward the kitchen.
“There’s a kerosene stove in the kitchen too. I tried it on the first day, but it wouldn’t light. That’s why we’re using the wood stove.”
“I can’t remember the caretaker’s name, but Charlie said the man told him the tank out back still had thirty or forty gallons in it,” I told her. “I haven’t seen a tank or a cutoff, but both apparently exist. I’ll see if I can find them and get that stove going. I don’t want to be sterilizing equipment over a wood fire unless I have to.”
I paused and ran a hand across my head. “I have no idea what we’re going to use to cauterize the wound. We need a flat piece of metal. Where are we going to find something like that?“
Kate glanced up. The expression on her face reminded me of the one that had been on Marcy’s just before the woman had stepped down into the boat. Kate looked like she would rather be anywhere else.
“There’s a meat cleaver in the kitchen. It’s big and flat.”
I glanced at Elsie. She lifted her shoulders in an I-don’t-know gesture.
“Sounds good to me,” she said after a moment of silence.
The younger woman crossed her arms tightly across her middle and shivered.
“I don’t think I can do this. I know he needs help, but I can’t do it.”
“It’s okay,” I told her, even though nothing about her attitude came across as okay. Existence had no noticeable improvements coming any time soon. As little as it might be, she possessed the only medical experience in the entire group. I didn’t need her to cut his leg off. I needed her knowledge at dealing with needles and infection.
“Can you help us set up? Maybe watch us prep and make sure we don’t do something utterly stupid?”
She shook her head. “You don’t understand. The thought makes me sick to my stomach. I can’t. I really can’t.”
I couldn’t force her to take part. I also couldn’t understand what mental process would let someone die over a squeamish stomach.
“Alright,” I told her. “We need help though. See if Keith and Tyler will come down.”
She frowned. “Josh is on watch. So is Denise. Why can’t they help? They’re already up.”
I met her gaze and held it.
“Because they’re on watch,” I said, trying and failing to keep the irritation out of my voice. “That means they stay on watch. You can go to bed when you wake the other two up.”
She blinked. Color rose in her cheeks. After a long silence, she climbed stiffly to her feet and headed for the stairs.
Elsie watched her go, waiting until the girl’s footsteps had faded up the staircase.
“There you go again. You throw Moses out in the yard, tell the skinny one to shut his trap, and now insult the girl. You don’t strive real hard for the popular list do you?”
I rubbed my head wearily. She was right. I didn’t put much effort into being anyone’s friend. Then again, I never had. Patience had always been reserved for working through problems and for figuring out how to accomplish a task with whatever I had on hand, not for people who couldn’t or wouldn’t be part of the solution.
“We don’t have enough bandages,” I said, changing the subject. “I think there’s a couple more in one of the first aid kits that used to be on Angel, but even with those, we won’t be able to change the dressing more than a few times before we’re out.“
I sighed and sat back in my chair. “We’ll have to reuse them and wash them somehow in between.”
A sudden thought struck me. I looked at the old woman suspiciously. “How come your clothes look clean?”
“Because I have figured out your somehow a while back. That old iron bathtub works well as a washtub. Me and the girls done a load yesterday.” she said with a grin. “One of the boys found a washboard on display at the General Store. We heated water on the stove, used some of your soap, and hung them out to dry.”
“Where was I?”
“Wandering down the beach.”
“You wash any of my clothes?”
&
nbsp; She rolled her eyes. “Hill William, you had enough on that boat to last a month. The rest of us were in dire straits.”
“Yeah, I noticed you’ve been wearing a lot of my shirts,” I said with a grin. “Maybe that’s why my ex used to pack a steamer trunk just to go on an overnight.”
Elsie looked confused.
I spread my hands out innocently. “She obviously expected to end up on a deserted island and didn’t want to be stuck wearing a Tar Heel sweatshirt with Tennessee pants. I think you’re the first woman I’ve ever seen in sky-blue and rescue-me-orange.”
The old woman wrinkled her nose at me.
Footsteps sounded down the hall before she had a chance to reply. Keith and Tyler emerged out of the darkness. Both looked tired and wooly. Elsie got up to make coffee. I filled them in on what needed to be done.
Tyler rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and fought back a yawn.
“Okay, so who’s going to be doing the cutting?”
I shot him a humorless smile.
“I guess that would be me.”
He looked at Keith.
“What will we be doing?”
“Elsie’s friend gave us some drugs. Best I can tell, the anesthetic doesn’t last long. One of you will be armed with a needle. If he starts coming around, it’ll be your job to shoot him up again,” I told him. “According to the notes I read, we’ll have about thirty minutes, give or a little, before he starts coming around.”
I glanced back and forth between them. “The other person, well, aside from keeping the water boiling and sterilizing things, will need to help in case he does wake up.”
Tyler winced and glanced at the heavier man beside him. Neither looked happy at the prospect.
“Elsie can be my assistant,” I continued, “and just so you know, we’re flying blind. Neither one of us knows the first thing about the procedure. But, we’re out of options. He’ll die if we don’t.”
The Island - Part 3 Page 10