by D. J. Molles
Halfway onto the table now, and then being laid down, Getty looked horrible. His entire leg, from the point of the wound and nearly down to his ankle, was soaked. His face had the tired expression of someone that wants to grimace, but doesn’t have the energy for it. For all of that, he still looked like he was mentally with it.
Virgil was almost to them when he turned and pointed harshly at Walter where he stood. “You! Watch them!” he pointed to the family. “Nobody moves.”
Virgil stalked to the table and did all but throw Hank out of the way. The smaller man staggered back and caught himself before he hit the couch where the family was sitting. He stared back at Getty as they laid the wounded man down on the table and started working.
Hank looked washed out. He gasped for air, and sweat profusely, and he looked shaky and feverish.
Hank backed himself into the living room. He seemed to realize that he was in front of a new audience, and tore his eyes away from Getty to look at the people sitting on the couch. He looked flummoxed, as though he couldn’t remember how they got there, or how he had come to be in their house.
He raised both of his hands up, a sign of harmlessness. He didn’t have a weapon.
Hadn’t Tria given him one? What the hell had he done with it?
“Everyone just stay calm,” he said, in a voice that was distinctly un-calm. “We’re just…we’re not here to hurt anyone, okay?”
Walter looked the family over. He shifted his weight.
He wanted to agree with Hank. He’d said the same words when he’d spoke to the woman in the bedroom. After he had kicked her to get her away from that dresser, and before he had threatened to kill her husband.
On the table Getty thrashed and cried out.
Walter glanced up, saw Virgil holding Getty’s shoulders while Tria violently tightened down a tourniquet high on his leg, nearly to his crotch. They mumbled reassuring things to him, and in the living room, Hank mumbled reassuring things to the family, and Walter stood there with a gun in his hands, wondering when they were going to die.
When was the spotlight going to illuminate the windows? When was the sound of rotors going on bear down of the house, and the doors go flying in, and the diversionary grenade come rolling across the floor to leave its crescent-shaped scorch mark?
On the kitchen table, Virgil was hanging over Getty, speaking to the man face to face. “Hey, Buddy, our medkit’s super basic, alright? I need to see if it clipped an artery.”
“What’re you gonna do?” Getty’s voice wasn’t exactly slurred, but the clarity had gone out of it. He was getting lost in the pain, and for the first time that night Walter looked at the man and realized with some distance, as though he was watching a documentary of the moment and not being a part of it himself, that Getty could die.
Virgil hesitated, then shook his head. “I don’t think I should tell you.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s just gonna freak you out.”
“It’ll freak me out worse if you don’t tell me.”
“I have to put my fingers in there.”
“In the hole?”
“Yes.”
“No!”
“I have to.”
“Come on, man!”
“I need to see if it hit an artery.”
“Fuck!” Getty took a shaky breath. “It’s gonna hurt.”
“I know.”
“It’s gonna hurt like a motherfucker.”
“I know, Buddy.”
“Gimme somethin’.”
“I don’t have nothin’.”
“Gimme somethin’ to bite before you do it.”
Virgil had already laid his rifle out on the table next to Getty. He grabbed the strap of the rifle, folded it over on itself, and then placed it next to Getty’s lips. The man leaned forward and took it into his teeth.
“Okay,” Getty said around the mouthful. “Okay. Okay.”
Virgil nodded rapidly. “Alright.” He looked to Tria. “Gimme those shears.”
Tria stood off to the side of the table, watching this unfold with something like morbid fascination. She twitched when Virgil spoke to her and then hesitated, but then caught up with the request. She had a pair of shears attached to her softarmor, along with a small black pouch with a gray cross on the front of it. She ripped both the shears and the pouch from their mounts. She handed the shears to Virgil and opened the pouch and started rifling through the contents.
Virgil set to work cutting a long slit up Getty’s pants, all the way from the ankle to where he could shear no further without taking off the tourniquet. The bisected pant leg flopped away, soggy and limp with blood, and underneath, Getty’s pale skin was rosy with blood, and it collected the hairs of his legs together in reddish clumps and small rivulets.
Tria removed a gray, metallic package from her small pouch and held it out to Virgil. “HSA,” she announced, grimly.
Virgil glanced at it, then nodded. Then he looked at Getty, who was watching him back, waiting for the moment with a shade of terror in his eyes.
“You ready?” Virgil asked him.
Getty let out a small, low whine, but nodded.
Virgil stared at the red hole on his friend’s leg.
Then he slipped his fingers in.
Getty’s body stiffened on the table, like someone had connected electrodes to him and given him a jolt. But he made no noise. Not yet.
Virgil grimaced and kept probing around in there.
Getty still didn’t scream. His right hand balled into a fist and he started pounding the table to a rapid rhythm. His face was turning red, then was past red, nearly purple, the creases of his face turning white with the pressure he was exerting.
“Hang on,” Virgil mumbled. “Almost done.”
It started in Getty’s throat like a groan, like someone lifting a heavy weight and struggling with it, but then it quickly spiraled out of Getty’s control and came out, only half-muffled by the rifle strap in his mouth, a painful, ragged howl.
Virgil closed his eyes. Kept his focus.
Tria’s hand, still holding the pack of hemostatic agent, was visibly shaking. The metallic packaging caught the light from the fixture over the kitchen table and it flashed in Walter’s eyes like a signal. Like someone with a mirror trying to message their desperation.
Getty spit the rifle strap out of his mouth, and his voice came out high-pitched and staccato: “Stop stop stop! Please, Virgil! Fucking stop!”
Virgil withdrew his finger only a second or so after Getty made this request.
His bloody fingers hovered there in the air.
He looked at Getty and nodded with the shade of reassurance on his face. “I don’t think it hit the artery. I think it just went straight through.”
Tria rattled the HSA at him again. “Here. Take it.”
Virgil took the package in his bloody fingers, leaving little red slime trails behind on the metallic packaging. He held it with some consideration. “Getty, I don’t know how long until you can see a doctor.”
“Okay.”
“I can put the HSA in the wound. But it might be in there a while.”
“Okay.”
“It can get infected.”
Getty seemed woozy for a moment. His voice came out strained. “Well, what else were you gonna do? You can’t leave the tourniquet on me forever.”
Virgil stared at him for a breath or two. “We could…uh…we could cauterize it.”
“Aw. Fuck man...” Getty laid his head back. His chest jumped up and down. “Lemme have a cigarette.”
Walter blinked. Realized that his eyes had become over-focused, and that the rest of the world around him had started to bleed into unreality, into a hazy, black-and-white nothingness. He looked away from the kitchen table and looked at the family. They all stood there, not looking at Walter, not looking at Hank, not looking at anyone.
They huddled together, the small children in the center, all their arms around each other, like a famil
y in a storm shelter, ducking their heads while a tornado rips their house apart just feet above their heads.
Walter glanced up at Hank.
The man was backed even further away from the kitchen. He was nearly at the living room wall. He looked into the kitchen with a pale face, and open, quivering lips. His left arm was crossed to his body like he had a stomach ache. His right was tucked in there. And Walter could see the movement. He could see the fingers moving deftly.
“What are you doing?” Walter said.
In the kitchen, no one heard him, and they kept hovering over Getty.
Hank jerked. Looked at Walter. “What? I’m not doing shit. Why don’t you pay attention to these people.”
Walter glanced at the people. Then back to Hank.
Hank was staring at him. His eyes were feverish.
What was that look?
The concept rolled around in Walter’s head. It rolled around the outside, and then began to spiral inward, into the center of him, like those old candy machines that his mom would bribe him and Roy with to get them to behave during a trip to the store. The one where she would swipe her PD, and the gumball would come out and roll, roll, roll around, while he and Roy watched in eager anticipation, rolling, rolling, rolling, into the center of a funnel, and then—plunk!
The idea rolled, rolled, rolled.
Guilt. That was the expression on his face when he looked at Getty on the table, Walter thought. And now his expression, his body language, the little twitches in his face, they are screaming “caught red-handed.”
Roll, roll, roll.
Plunk.
Walter’s gaze narrowed at Hank. He adjusted his grip on his rifle. “Hank, what happened to your gun?”
Chapter 16
“Walter,” Virgil griped from the kitchen. “What the hell are you doing?”
Walter didn’t bother to respond to Virgil. Didn’t even bother to look.
His eyes tracked down to Hank’s left hand, his arm still pulled across his body, his hand hovering about the PD affixed to his inner left forearm. But it had stopped twitching about. The tendons and muscles of his right hand had stopped their movement. And Hank was staring back at Walter with eyes that both pleaded and threatened all at once.
Walter raised his rifle. “Take your hand away from your PD.”
Hank’s face seemed to writhe. His skin looked greasy and moist. He slipped a glance at the woman who was his nominal boss. “Tria. Help me out here. This fucker’s crazy.”
Walter could see out of the corner of his eye that Tria was facing him fully. Her head ducked to Virgil for a bare moment. “What’s this asshole doing now?”
Again, Walter ignored them, and focused on Hank. There was no mistaking it now—he was definitely pointing his rifle at the man. Threatening him with it. “Take your hand away from your PD.”
Hank jerked his hand away. Stammered, but got no words out.
He stood there with shaking hands half-raised.
Walter advanced a half-step. “Where’s your rifle, Hank? What happened to it?”
“I don’t know,” Hank said. “I lost it.”
“How did you lose a rifle?”
“I dropped it.”
“Where?”
“In the woods.”
“You didn’t grab it again?”
“I was running,” Hank blustered a bit, seizing upon some modicum of indignance to try and make himself seem right, but his wrongness was a billboard sign so brightly lit on his face that it astounded Walter that the others couldn’t see it.
“What were you doing on your PD?” Walter asked, not giving an inch now. He knew the truth. He’d latched on like a fighting dog onto a jugular. He wasn’t letting go now. Not with so much at stake. Not with his own life on the line. Not with Carolyn hanging in the wind.
“I wasn’t on my PD,” Hank said flatly, almost quietly.
Virgil spoke again, but this time his voice was hovering on that balance beam of incredulity and suspicion. “Walter, what are you doing?”
On the kitchen table, Getty let out a low wheezy noise and coughed.
“Let me see your PD,” Walter said.
Hank shook his head. “Why would I show you my PD?”
“You lost your rifle because you didn’t wanna get shot,” Walter suddenly asserted. “They knew where we were because you’d called them in on us. That was why you were ducking for cover when the rest of us were still trying to figure out what was happening. And you didn’t have your rifle then, either. You’d ditched it because you wanted them to know you were unnarmed. You knew they were coming and you didn’t want to get shot.”
Hank made blustering noises, but said nothing.
Walter went towards him another step. “You just signal them? Huh?” he could feel the anger in him, very rapid, very sudden, as his mind decided that he was right, yes, he could not be mistaken, Hank was guilty, guilty, guilty and every second he sat there was a second of their lives ticking away.
He jabbed the rifle at Hank. “How much time do we have, Hank?”
Hank tore his eyes from Walter. He seemed to know that what he was peddling was not being purchased. He threw it at Tria, in desperation. “You don’t believe this motherfucker, do you? Come on, Tria. It’s me. I wouldn’t do that. We don’t even know this guy. It could be him! It’s him! He’s the one that’s betrayed us…”
Virgil took a step out of the kitchen space and into the living space and Hank jerked at the movement, as though he expected to be hit. But Virgil stood there looking down at the smaller man, and his jaw was working and his fingers were twitching around the sidearm in its holster.
“Hank, quit fucking around,” Virgil grated. “Show me your PD. That shit shouldn’t even be on. We all shut our shit off. Show me that your shit is off, Hank. Just show me that.”
Hank made a sound. A huffing, chuffing sound.
Eyes darting.
Tria.
Virgil.
Walter.
Tria.
The backdoor.
“He’s gonna run,” Walter blurted suddenly, and no sooner had the words stumbled out of his mouth than Hank jumped like a rabbit scared from the brush and he seized on the backdoor and yanked it open.
Virgil was charging across the living space at him.
He wasn’t going to make it there in time.
Hank was halfway out the door.
Walter pulled the trigger.
A flurry of gunshots shook the house.
The children started screaming again.
Both men and the woman shouted in surprise.
Virgil skidded to a halt.
The frame of the backdoor splintered in several places. One foot inside, and one foot outside, Hank’s pant legs twitched like a sudden gust of wind had caught them, and his legs went tumbling out from under him like all the bones had gone out of them in an instant.
Everything exploded into chaos.
Virgil was shouting. Tria was shouting. The entire family was screaming. And yet somehow Walter still managed to pick out the individual sound of each brass casing hitting the old and battered hardwood floors of the living room.
In the doorway, his legs folded under him like a broken marionette, Hank hitched in some air, filled his lungs, then started shrieking loudly. One of his legs was jerking and flopping about. The other was locking out like it was in the throes of a vicious cramp.
“He fucking shot me!” Hank’s voice split through everything. It had gone up an octave or two.
Walter moved quickly through the living room. There was a feeling in him at that moment, something that he couldn’t deny, something that was very dirty, very panicked, very jittery. He’d never caused someone this type of harm before.
Had he really done that?
He grabbed Hank with both hands, the rifle swinging loosely between his knees. He hauled the man backward into the house, grunting, “Shut up, just shut up, you’re fine,” though the words had almost no conviction to them
.
No sooner had he cleared Hank from the doorway than Virgil slammed the door shut again.
“What the fuck?” he yelled into Walter’s face.
Walter looked up and met Virgil’s eyes, just for a moment. Just for a drawn out moment that wasn’t much time at all, but in which many volumes were said.
Tria was at Virgil’s back, looking mad to get herself at Walter, but Virgil was stiff-arming her easily into the living room wall, even as he held Walter’s gaze. Tria spit and scrabbled like a cat caught in a trap and cursed Walter up and down.
But Virgil knew.
Walter could see it in his face.
He fucking knew.
Walter took Hank and slammed his shoulders back on the floor and put the rifle to his chest.
“How long do we have?” Walter demanded.
Hank mewled noisily, but there was no guile in his eyes anymore. The mask had fallen away. “You fucking shot me!”
Walter shook him. “How long!”
“I don’t know!” Hank blurted.
There was a moment of silence.
Just a thin little stretch of time where the admission—so much as it was—was processed by those that had heard it. Tria had stopped scrapping to get past Virgil, and Virgil’s shock and attention went away from Walter, and fixed on Hank’s sweating, paling face.
Tria was the first to break the silence, only a second or so after it had been born: “You son of a bitch!”
Walter stood up quickly, looked at Virgil, looked at Tria. “We need to get out.”
“I need help!” Hank bawled.
“You sonofa-BITCH!” Tria lurched forward and kicked him wildly before Virgil extended a restraining hand and pressed her back. It didn’t stop her from screaming at the man on the floor: “Fucking Merko! Fucking Pete! You fucking killed them! You sonofabitch!”
Walter reached and grabbed Virgil, who seemed momentarily lost, and Walter realized that he was disappointed that he—the worthless grower who had never fought in the resistance—seemed to be the only one using his head in that instant.
“Grab Getty! We need to take one of their vehicles and get out.”
Walter realized that somewhere in the movement, somewhere in the scuffle, Virgil’s eyes had gone to cold marbles, and he’d drawn his pistol. Walter stepped over Hank’s body, tried to drag Virgil back towards Getty, but Virgil just shrugged him off and stood over the man on the ground.