The Remaining: Fractured (48 page)

Wilson didn’t hesitate. He yanked the steering wheel to the left.

The barricade rippled with muzzle flashes. Bullets meant for them.

The windshield spiderwebed, then shattered. Someone cried out and the M2 suddenly stopped firing.

LaRouche spun into the backseat, about to ask who was hit, but a squirt of blood struck him in the face, followed by another almost immediately after. LaRouche reared back, saw Joel’s leg with the hole directly in the center of it, the pant legs soaking through with amazing speed and the arterial force of the blood shooting out in high-pressure spurts.

Joel screamed, thrashed. “Oh my God oh my God oh my God…”

LaRouche put a hand in front of his face to block the spray and then jammed it out so that his palm was pressed to Joel’s leg and he could feel the hot liquid pulsing against his own skin. “Somebody plug that shit up!” he yelled, as Jim began pulling Joel out of the turret.

Dorian’s face was like cut steel. He glanced at Joel’s leg, like it was a minor annoyance, and then climbed over the man’s body to take the turret. LaRouche watched Dorian grab the gun and rip it with surprising speed into a rear-facing position, opening up on the barricaded position as they fled. And he didn’t know whether Dorian’s reaction to Joel’s wound impressed him or concerned him.

 Like all that mattered in the world was the chance to put a bullet in one more of those fuckers.

“What’s going on back there?” Wilson said, his voice up an octave with stress.

“Joel got hit!” LaRouche said, pressing both hands down into the leg and still not cutting off the flow. Red spurted up between his fingers as the movement of the vehicle slipped him around. And Joel wouldn’t fucking hold still. LaRouche looked at Jim who was trying to contort his body in the narrow backseat area to provide room for Joel to raise his leg.

“It’s the femoral,” LaRouche said, like it was a death sentence. “Caught his fuckin’ femoral.”

“My what?” Joel said, his words flattened out by the grimace on his face, strained and strangled by pain. “Is my dick still there? They didn’t shoot my dick off?”

LaRouche hitched his knees up onto his seat so he could apply more downward pressure. “Your dick’s fine, bro.”

Joel craned his neck and Jim failed to stop him from looking. His pale blue eyes stretched impossibly wide. “Lemme see…lemme see…
HOLY SHIT!
Oh my God, Sarge, that’s too much blood! That’s too much! I lost too much!”

“Shut the fuck up!” LaRouche yelled. “You ain’t a motherfuckin’ doctor!”

Joel grit his teeth, screamed through them.

LaRouche looked at Jim. “Lemme have your belt.” Back to Joel. “Is Jim praying right now?”

Joel looked confused. “No,” he whimpered.

“Is he giving you last rights?”

“No!”

“Then you’re not dying! You got that? Don’t you fucking puss out on me right now!” LaRouche looked back over his shoulder, which was looking forward through the windshield. They were just coming out of that curve. The initial blast of adrenaline wasn’t strong enough anymore to keep his wounded arm from spiking, sapping his strength and preventing him from pressing down hard enough on the hole in Joel’s leg. “Wilson, stop here.”

The M2 fell silent as the barricade passed out of sight behind the curve.

Wilson looked around, seemed on the verge of questioning it, but then slammed on the brakes. “Why are we stopping?” he said before they’d even halted. “Why are we fucking stopping?”

“I can’t push with my arm,” LaRouche motioned with his head. “Put pressure right where my hands are until Jim gets that tourniquet nice and tight. We’re gonna switch places.”

“Aw, fuck…” Wilson squirmed out of his seat, reached through and took over for LaRouche.

Jim wrestled his own belt from around his waist, already knew what to do with it. He leaned over all the arms and legs in his way and wrapped it around Joel’s thigh, above the wound, almost at his crotch, and tightened the belt as tight as it would go.

“Ah! Jesus Christ, that hurts!”

“You’re good,” Wilson nodded, pressing his body down onto the wound. “You’re good, man.”

LaRouche stumbled out of his seat and around the front of the vehicle, wiping blood-soaked hands on his jacket. He felt oddly dazed. Like none of it was real. He jumped into the driver’s seat, slammed the door and threw the vehicle in gear. The sounds behind him were a slurry of encouragement, fear, agony. LaRouche blinked rapidly, felt his stomach twist up inside of him. He swallowed against the burning sensation clawing up his throat, tasted acid on the back of his tongue. Acid and blood.

He kept his eyes on the road, but turned slightly to shout into the backseat. “Did you get that tourniquet on yet?”

“Yeah,” Jim replied, his voice raised. “What next?”

“Here,” LaRouche leaned over into the floor of the passenger seat and swiped up his pack, stuffing it into the backseat where the others were crowded. “Hemostats in the side pouch. You gotta find the artery and clamp it. Glove up before you go in.”

LaRouche kept looking back, the vehicle swerving every time he did.

“We got this, Sarge,” Wilson said.

“Do what the Sarge says,” Joel mumbled, beginning to sound out of it. “Don’t let me die, guys. You gotta…you gotta keep me alive.”

“We’re working on it, buddy.”

“We got you, Joel.”

LaRouche just stared straight ahead.

Abandoned houses.

Auto salvage and tiny airstrip.

Going back the way they came.

He balled one hand into a fist and punched the steering wheel.

Wilson glanced back at him.

LaRouche just kept his eyes on the road, kept that double-yellow line passing right between his tires. And before he could fully process everything that happened, before he could work his mind around what he had done and the implications of it, he found themselves back with the others. The LMTVs and the Humvees crowded up on the road. The occupants pouring out of them as they saw the bullet hole in the windshield, and Jim exiting the backseat, covered in blood. LaRouche could hear the talking, the yelling, but it was like background noise. The dull hum of a crowd through thick walls. He could hear the emotion in their voices, the fear and the loathing at the sight of Joel being carried out of the back of the Humvee, his eyes half-lidded, sweat dotting his upper lip. Everyone panicking to save him, everyone pushing and shoving, trying to help him in some way. And LaRouche standing off to the side, one hand on the hot metal of the Humvee’s hood, watching them with the expression of someone gone catatonic. Standing off to the side, because he already knew the truth.

They laid Joel out on the pavement and he disappeared behind a wall of bodies.

He wouldn’t be saved.

All the care, and all the prayer in the world couldn’t put all that blood back into his veins.

Wilson shoved through the crowd, parting it with his arms. “LaRouche!” he yelled. “Need a fucking IV here, man!”

LaRouche wanted to say, “It doesn’t matter how many bags of IV you shove into him, it ain’t gonna make a shit’s worth of difference!” But he couldn’t bring himself to say that ugly truth, not after everything he’d done. And it wasn’t so much that he’d given a command that had resulted in someone getting hurt—that shit happened and you couldn’t get around it. But he could see their trust in him flagging. He couldn’t simply act like he didn’t care.

He went into motion, shoving through the crowd. “Middle pouch,” he yelled at Jim, who still held his pack with all the medical supplies. “Gimme the IV bag that says ‘Lactated Ringers’.” He knelt down, started fishing for some latex gloves. “And get his jacket off.”

Dorian had wrangled himself out of the turret and knelt at Joel’s head. He began to work the jacket off.

LaRouche found a rolled up pair of gloves and struggled to work his fingers into them, his skin catching, tacky with half-dried blood. As he did this, Jim placed the IV bag of clear liquid in front of him. It wasn’t going to save Joel, not by a long shot—it would only swell his blood pressure back into a semi-normal range, and maybe not even that, depending on how much blood he’d lost. He glanced down at Joel’s leg, saw the hemostat dangling, and the wound no longer squirting.

Maybe…

He shook his head. He wouldn’t allow himself that hope. He pressed his fingers to Joel’s radial, felt what could have been a pulse. Then checked the carotid and felt it there, but weakly. No. There was no hope to this. This was an exercise in futility. An empty performance. A dog and pony show for the rest of the people that wanted to believe that the man in charge of them actually gave a shit.

He pulled a sealed plastic bag out of the same pouch Jim had retrieved the IV from. Inside were a few needles, a few blood catheters, a coil of tubing, a green rubber strap. Your run-of-the-mill IV kit. He opened the bag, rummaged through for the iodine wipes—actually thought of not bothering with cleaning the needle site, but then stubbornly figured that he might as well give Joel the best chance that he could. He might as well do it right.

So he went through the motions. Swabbed the inside of Joel’s elbow, staining it yellow. Tapped the vein. Slipped the needle in until the blood showed in the catheter. Looked up at Joel’s face, saw that he was barely conscious, a look of serenity on his features, that warm, wonderful shock just washing over him like a blanket. A little gift that nature gives you to make the end not so bad.

He connected the IV bag. Adjusted it to a heavy drip. He passed it off to Jim. “Hold that up high,” he said, realizing that he didn’t need to shout because everyone was deathly quiet. He didn’t stop working, because he couldn’t stand up and look any one of them in the eyes. So he turned himself to the leg and began trying to fix it. Wilson held the wound open with a pair of spreaders, the metal tongs grasping at Joel’s raw wound and not affecting him at all. His eyes just stared dreamily up at the sky like none of it mattered. He worked on pulling the artery out enough that he might be able to suture the two severed ends back together, but it was a long, and painstaking process.

Maybe another twenty minutes had passed before LaRouche smelled the bowels and when he looked over at Joel he could no longer see the chest rising and falling. He leaned over the man’s body, touched his finger to the neck again and this time felt nothing. Held his cheek over Joel’s mouth and felt no brush of breath.

LaRouche just stood up, his knees aching, his wounded arm screaming for attention. “Dorian,” he said, his words quiet and empty. Nothing left in him.

“Yeah.”

LaRouche began stripping the gloves off. “Grab some shovels. I’ll pick a spot.”

CHAPTER 31: SECRETS

The moon had lit the night so fully that they’d been able to drive without the use of their headlamps. Tomlin drove them on in silence and seemed to navigate by memory. They reached a wide swath cut through the woods to accommodate several sewer-access tunnels. They protruded from the overgrown grass like forgotten monoliths in the silver light.

Once in the woods, though, the light diminished into a confusing crisscross of dull moon glow and pitch black shadow. The two men fell into a sort of rhythm, which came naturally and unconsciously to them. They’d both done their fair share of “walking to the X” in the dead of night, and every movement felt familiar. The slight ache in the wrist from holding their rifles at a low ready. The tension that wound all the way up their legs as they moved smoothly across the dry, crackling leaves, always softly planting the heel, then rolling on the outside, steadily to the balls of their feet. Eyes wide to soak up light. Ears attuned to every sound.

They waded through the stifling darkness for what seemed like hours, Tomlin in the lead and Lee falling in behind. Tomlin pulled to a stop near a large pine and dropped quietly to one knee. He pulled a compass from his jacket pocket and maneuvered into a shaft of moonlight so he could see their course. As he worked, Lee sank down onto his haunches and stared back through the near-blackness they had just covered. He held his breath and listened to the forest, but it gave up no sound in the cold.

The quiet snap of the compass closing.

Lee turned his head.

Tomlin looked at him. He knife-handed into the forest—the correct direction for Camp Ryder.

Lee nodded and they moved out again.

The silence of the forest forced them to move slow, fearing not only being found out by one of Jerry’s men, but also knowing full well what hunted the woods at night. And in the quiet, the slightest rustle of their feet across pine needles and dried leaves seemed like it echoed through the forest.

It was sometime close to eleven, and Lee scanned the sky for a glimpse of the moon, when he heard the barest
tsst
of a hiss through teeth. He stopped in mid-pace, found Tomlin halted about a dozen yards in front of him, frozen in place.

His left arm slightly extended.

The finger splayed, patting the air rapidly:
Stop moving!

Lee wanted to sink to his knees—get low was his first reaction—but he didn’t want to move, felt like he’d stepped onto a trip wire and the slightest shifting of his feet could set something off. Though he wasn’t quite sure what that something was.

Slowly, very slowly, Tomlin turned his head partially. His hand came up, moving at the same chameleon-like pace. Two fingers to the eyes, then pointing straight ahead, and a little to the right. Lee followed the motion, stared into the woods, his neck craning out as though willing himself to get closer so he could see through the darkness.

Moonlight framed it. Like white paint drawn on a black canvas. At first Lee couldn’t tell what it was, because it was jumbled together with so many other, strange lines, very pale so that they stood out almost preternaturally in the earthen colors of the forest. But when he focused on them, when he knew where to look, then he was able to see the line, the slope of shoulders, a draped arm. A leg. A face.

Maybe ten bodies all clustered together, about thirty yards ahead of them.