Lethal Treatment

by S A Gardner

  What I didn’t bother telling Damian was that I didn’t have to set foot on the ground to reach them. He should figure that out on his own.

  I heard him now without the benefit of a radio, still bellowing for me to get back inside.

  Just that he thought I was moronic enough to run over mine-infested land— Ugh.

  Snapping on my gecko-like climbing gloves, I wound down my window, put one foot on its edge, braced the other on the seat’s back, met Ayesha’s upturned gaze.

  “Hand me the bag when I tell you to.”

  Bracing, I reached up to the top of the truck. Youch. Freezing metal. Could feel it even through the gloves. They protected me from a cold burn, but weakened my grip. And I’d never gotten used to using my hands with gloves that thick. Skin-thin latex had spoiled me. But without those I’d have no traction on those slippery sloping surfaces.

  Gritting my teeth, I adjusted my center of gravity, transferred my inside foot to the truck’s vertical chrome handle just beside the door. I had about three inches of support there, curved, highly polished support. Not a footing I’d prefer fifteen feet up and in danger of falling onto a land mine. It was the one I got.

  I pushed up on tiptoe, placed one palm onto the back of the truck, the other on the aerodynamic edge. They surely hadn’t designed the thing with climbing on its roof in mind.

  Summoning all my calisthenics training, I pumped my body up in one slow motion, my heart’s booming drowning out Damian’s. Pouring every ounce of strength and balance, I unfolded upward in a handstand. The sloping surface sabotaged my grip and I ended the impressive maneuver with an ungainly crash on my back. My clothes, sharing none of my gloves sticky qualities, almost made me slide off after all.

  Scrambling from the edge, I rose to my knees, hands stinging. No surgeon would dream of abusing their hands this way. But only one part of me was a surgeon. The other parts had abusing hands as part of the job description.

  It had all taken me seconds, and I immediately flattened on my stomach, dangled off the truck’s roof for the bag. Ayesha lifted it up, standing where I’d been seconds ago. Intent on following me? Uh-uh. There was no way she’d make it up here in one piece.

  “Stay here.” I was uncompromising, cutting off any intention of debate. “Prepare me another bag. I’ll come back for it if I need it.”

  I jumped to my feet, maneuvered the bag’s straps backpack-style, got a bird’s-eye view of the whole scene. The first thing I saw was Damian, standing on top of his truck, laden with equipment. Had the same idea, huh?

  Of course he had.

  Just ahead of him was the bombed trailer, its rear half blown to a metal mess. That meant one hell of a mine. But the truck itself hadn’t exploded, thanks to our almost empty gas tanks. We’d been scheduled for a refill just about now. Thank God it hadn’t been the supply trailer, or we would have all gone up in smoke.

  The trailer’s current position told its own tale. It was a few feet out of line of the rest of the convoy. That meant there was no telling what a few inches off our current course if we tried retracing our path would entail. We were probably smack dab in the middle of a minefield.

  We were trapped.

  My heart fired again. The driver’s window of Ed’s truck burst out in pulverized sheets of safety glass, then a blonde blood-drenched head stuck out.

  Ed

  “The radio was knocked out,” he yelled. “Me, too, I guess. Then it took a while to check on Suz and Shad.”

  “Status?” I heard Damian’s hissed question as if he was right next to me. The silence was eerie.

  “I cut my scalp. Suz fractured her arm. But it’s Shad I’m worried about. He’s knocked out, lying in an awkward position in the back. I’ll go examine him….”

  “Don’t,” I cried out. “You may exacerbate his injuries. I’m coming.”

  Damian bellowed again. “You stay where you are, and I’m not repeating this.”

  I glared at him. He didn’t really think I’d let him stand in my way to an injured teammate, did he?

  But the problem was, I was out of his way. One of those long-legged leaps of his would have him on Ed’s trailer. I was in a whole different situation.

  As I assessed it, I met Matt’s eyes who was standing at his door. I shook my head at the question in his eyes. As the only two multidisciplinary surgeons, we could never risk both of us in any given situation. I was also lighter, and way more agile.

  I could easily jump on Matt’s trailer since we were jumper to jumper. But the next truck, Ishmael’s, hovered about ten feet away from Matt’s. Ishmael asked me to guide him through a reversal to close the gap. I refused. A foot out of their exact course by any wheel could mean disaster.

  Okay. One long jump coming up. Both my and Matt’s trailers’ hundred and forty something feet would have to do for a running start.

  “Don’t you dare think it, St. James,” Damian shouted without looking at me as he pulled Ed out. Those feelers in his back.

  “It’s just ten feet,” I protested.

  “You’re discounting the length of Matt’s truck. The moment your foot leaves the edge of his trailer, you’ll have to cover at least fifteen. Fifteen feet above a minefield. I’ll take care of Shad.”

  “All due respect to your paramedical expertise, De Luna, but I’m the one Shad needs now.”

  “I’ll stabilize him and get him out for you to examine.”

  “I have to examine him before you move him. And fifteen feet is no big deal. My long-jump record is over twenty-two feet.” As I was sure he remembered in that archiving mind of his.

  “That’s when you weren’t carrying half your body weight on your back. On the ground, with a running start.”

  “I do have a running start.”

  “You call slippery, uneven roofs a running start?”

  Why was I debating with him? I could do this. I had to.

  I turned on my heels to more of his bellows, ran back. At the end of my trailer, I took position, rocked back and forth, once, twice then I shot forward.

  The slick surface became every treacherous terrain Damian had made me race and dodge on, oil and mud and rocks and ice. The helicopter-transportation rungs became the barbed hurdles he’d strewn in my path, and the gulf between the vehicles his fire pits. Everything he’d forced me to overcome, each adversity he’d put me through an incentive to allow for nothing but perfection on the first go.

  I reached the edge of Matt’s truck and launched in the air. I arced, folding my body forward, legs and arms reaching, my focus not on the chasm beneath me but on Damian. He’d risen to his feet, watched me flying, his face seized, his body clenched. A portrait of enraged horror.

  I landed. Feet first. Well over Ishmael’s trailer’s body. Phew.

  But relief didn’t have the chance to sink.

  The trailer was moving!

  Ishmael had decided to bridge the gap, after all, too afraid for me to think of the consequences, and not realizing I’d already jumped.

  My screamed “Stop” echoed back to me on Damian’s voice.

  Ishmael braked, too late. For me.

  The backpack’s weight and the counter-momentum dragged me backwards.

  Panic flashed at the plummeting sensation, and I went over the edge. Headfirst.

  Really annoying this habit, always falling headfirst. At least I wouldn’t have to worry about this. Ever again. This might be my final fall.

  Nineteen

  I didn’t fall.

  A vise snagged my ankles, aborting my plummet. Momentum expended itself by slamming my body against the rear of the trailer. The backpack took the brunt, but transmitted it into my every bone. Pain almost shut me down.

  Damian. His name flickered in my mind, the first thing to register as it came back online.

  He’d caught me. Greased lightning had nothing on him.

  Impossible strength dragged me up. I completed the movement with my life’s hardest sit-up, rebounded right into Damian, bang
ed my nose on his chin.

  He surged right back, his anger and agitation flaying my numb cheek. “Why do I bother? Why don’t I just let you kill yourself?”

  I grabbed his arms, reality and stability, toughness and protection, made sinew and bone. Stress hormones enough to power me for a decade flooded me, making my fingers claws and my nerves exposed wires.

  “Your troubles would come to end then, huh?” I choked.

  The gold of his eyes shattered under the obsidian spread of his pupils. “They’d never end, you lunatic.”

  Okay. All right. That was one hefty statement. One this doctor contraindicated probing. Ever.

  I pushed to my feet, ignoring the screaming in my back, the hitch in my heart. Damian hovered over me as we rushed to our injured teammates.

  On reaching the battered vehicle, we wordlessly worked in tandem. He lay on his stomach, dangling me over the edge. I entered with a helping from Ed. A quick assessment of Suz told me she didn’t need me.

  “Get Suz to Matt, De Luna,” I called out.

  He and Ed got her out, just as I saw Shad. Through the distorted hatch the blast had blown into the trailer body.

  My breath backed up in my lungs. The way he was lying…

  Not now. Get to him.

  I threw my bag ahead, slithered through the hatch, realizing halfway through that I should have widened it first. I’d have a new scar. All the way down my back.

  The destabilized compartment creaked beneath my weight as I crawled through the debris. Anything could cave in beneath or on top of me at any moment.

  I finally reached Shad, conducted a lightning exam and my breath stalled again. How I hated polytrauma. Especially those resulting from blast injuries.

  I pushed my radio button. “De Luna, I need a backboard, total body harness and foam blocks. And you. And don’t rock the trailer as you come in.”

  I started my measures, was done with the most critical ones when Damian entered the truck through the window. In one weightless motion from the best panels of a super hero comic. Ed handed him the stuff I’d asked for.

  I outlined our problems as he joined me through the hatch. How he fitted through without snagging like I had, when he was double my size, I couldn’t understand. Maybe his chameleon powers extended to changing his physical shape, too.

  “Shad has extensive primary blast injuries,” I said. “Pneumothorax, ruptured intestines, worst of all arterial gas embolism.”

  Most people thought explosions killed with shrapnel or blowing off body parts. But that was considered only secondary injuries. The primary ones resulted from the concussive blast itself that ruptured non-solid organs, pushing air into blood vessels, causing widespread AGE, producing harder to diagnose and treat injuries. During the attack, we hadn’t been near the detonation’s epicenter and out in the open. Shad had been right above it, and in a closed compartment. It made me want to gnaw those who planted that mine, and mines in general, to death. With my teeth.

  Damian gritted his, echoing my impotent rage. “What do you want me to do?”

  I bit my lip, focusing. “We must put him in the coma position, to protect against coronary and cerebral embolism.”

  He moved immediately to implement my directions. I stopped him. “Not so fast. I think he has a neck fracture.”

  He started, froze.

  Then he rasped, “You think, or you know?”

  “I’ll need a CT, but—yeah, I know.” His shoulders slumped. I squeezed his hand. Something inside me melted when he clung back. “But his spinal cord is intact. All this gear is for keeping it that way.”

  He closed his eyes for a long moment. I knew what he must be feeling. One wrong move could make Shad a quadriplegic. But neither of us intended to make any.

  We started working together. And it was as if we’d always done so, with him giving me perfect, intuitive assistance, and my expertise undisputed deference. It was weird, but revitalizing, like holding my face up to a trickle of cool water in an inferno.

  It took us both breath-bating, sweat-pouring moments to stabilize Shad’s cervical spine, then get him on the backboard with his left side down, and his elbow and knee supporting his body.

  Then I rechecked his neurological status before nodding eager assurance to Damian.

  His pent up breath escaped in a ragged hiss. “What about the rest of his injuries?”

  “I need him in OR for those, asap.”

  “Can’t you hold him steady until we can get him out safely?”

  “Nothing I could do here would stabilize him for as long as it would take to de-mine a path from here to the STS.”

  He muttered something in Spanish. Sounded murderous. He never spoke in his mother tongue except in absolute extremes. As now was.

  Grabbing his radio, he barked, “Ed, we need to get Shad out and into surgery without touching ground, stat.”

  We kept busy with Shad as the others concocted the needed maneuver. At one point, I felt Damian’s eyes on me.

  Needing to connect, to draw on his strength and give him mine, I raised my eyes. “How many of us do you think will fall before this goddamned mission even starts, De Luna?”

  “Considering we’re in the middle of a minefield, supposedly every last one of us, St. James.”

  “You being funny? You’re going to let a few hundred mines and the bastards who planted them get the best of you?”

  A vicious lip tilt answered me before his words did. “I said supposedly. As in, not going to happen.”

  The daredevil inside me leaped in answer, elated to have his, the one who was kindred in ferocity and tenacity. The only one I could count on implicitly when everyone’s lives hung in the balance.

  “Good.” I smiled back, fierce, defiant. “Now let’s figure out how we’ll take on this minefield and win.”

  Twenty

  We won.

  All right. We didn’t, not yet. But we’d half won, had covered half of the remaining distance to the camp. One more mile could still mean hours. Or more vehicles. Or lives.

  One thing I knew for sure. We were crazy.

  It had taken us some extreme improvisations to get Shad out and into OR. Then we’d operated on him for six hours. Once he was stable and on the gyroscope-mounted harnessed bed in IC, my team had joined Damian’s in de-mining our immediate maneuvering vicinity. It had taken us the rest of the day and night. We’d been smack-dab in a beehive of death.

  At one point, Damian had clamped my arm and pointed at where I would have fallen. And the cluster of antipersonnel mines we’d dug from there. If he hadn’t caught me, I would have been blown apart.

  I’d insisted I’d calculated right, that it had been Ishmael’s miscalculation that had put me in danger. But Damian had been deaf to my protestations. After he’d made sure I got a good look at the heap of deactivated death traps that could have killed me or worse, he’d thrown my arm back at me.

  But his exasperation hadn’t felt like anger. It had felt like unappeased agitation, unspent fright. That had gotten me hotter than anything ever had. Throw in the all-present danger, and you had one explosively—uh, make that one overwhelmingly tense situation.

  I’d taken myself out of his range, accessed my less basic self and dreamed up ways out. Until one way had taken root.

  I’d rushed to let Damian in on it, expecting him to blow me off with ridicule. What had blown me away was how he’d latched on to it, debugging and expanding on it.

  Contrary to humanitarian de-mining efforts, what we’d used that far, where every inch of land had to be made safe, we needed only to clear our immediate path, military method-like. But that was still impossible since we didn’t have the means for such an undertaking. Even if we had, with sixty miles to go, we were still talking months to get the job done.

  There had been two ways out. Retracing our steps, hoping not to trigger the mines we’d been lucky to sidestep going in, and ending our mission. Or detonating our way out of there.

  Being abs
olutely nuts, all of us, we opted for the second option, unanimously, no hesitation.

  My plan was simple. To use our already bombed trailer as a detonator, and shield.

  I’d explained my plan to our gathered teams. “We attach one of our snowplows to it, let it dig out and detonate mines in our path. Steering will be our main problem with no one at the wheel. So we need to devise a remote steering mechanism.”

  Damian had taken the idea into application. “We have hooks and steel cables for setting up the field hospital and virtually unbreakable chains for towing vehicles in breakdowns and in extreme weather. We’ll make a harness for the wheel and maneuver from my truck as I shove it ahead.”

  Taking his plan, I’d run with it. “We’ll need navigators on top of your truck being your eyes since your view of the road ahead might be nil.”

  Then the others had jumped in with technical solutions.

  Once problems had been ironed out, we’d put everything into action and been on our way.

  It was my turn as navigator. Right now, I felt I might shudder apart.

  Good sign, really. You only needed to worry about hypothermia being irreversible if you stopped shivering. The night had brought an “unseasonal” drop to way below zero, with a wind chill factor worthy of Pluto.

  “Ten degrees left,” I bit off into the radio before Damian drove our sacrificial vehicle into a ditch.

  Damian adjusted until I gave him the clear. Progress was snail-slow and torturous, especially since we’d gotten off the road to avoid the high concentration of mines there.

  Next thing I knew I was facedown on the freezing roof.

  Another antitank mine. A biggie, if its shockwave could knock me off my knees at this distance.

  Problem was the truck was now a heap of junk. There’d be no way to steer it anymore. It was a miracle it had lasted through that many explosions.

  I didn’t feel my fingers as I pressed the outgoing button. “D-D-De Luna, your t-truck’s t-turn.”