“Tom,” she said, kneeling over him. The knife had cooled to a dull orange, but she could feel the heat radiating in waves and knew the steel was still plenty hot. “You’re absolutely sure there isn’t another way.”
“C-cut it fast as you c-can. I’ll try n-not to move. Once you’re through skin, you’ll have to … have to maybe c-cut deeper. H-heat will help with th-the bleeding. When the pus starts coming, st-stop. You’ll … you’ll kn-know when,” he panted. Turning his face away, he pulled in another gasping sob. His eyes screwed shut and his hands balled to fists, but a deep shudder was running through him now, a trembling he couldn’t control. “I’ll t-try to stay on … on t-top of it, but no matter what I s-say … don’t stop, Alex. Finish the j-job….”
Oh please, God, she thought, staring down at Tom’s thigh and the blackened, angry eye of his wound. Please save him; please help me.
She had seen movies: scenes where men dug around for bullets with bare hands. In movies, people passed out when the pain was too much.
But this wasn’t a movie or a book.
This was, in fact, much, much worse because Tom did not pass out, and he lasted only three seconds before he began to scream.
“That’s the best I can do.” She thumbed his tears away. His pain-ravaged face was dead-white, his eyes sunken into purple-black hollows. The fleshy lips of his wound gaped, and his thigh was streaked with thin rivulets of bright-red blood, but there seemed to be very little pus left. The air reeked with the stink of dead meat, boiled pus, and cooked blood. The mats under his leg had gone soupy with the muck, and she’d dragged them out, pitching them into the snow before retrieving the floor mats from the abandoned van. She’d used straight bourbon on the raw flesh of his thigh, but now she used a wad of torn shirt, stuffed with snow, to mop sweat from his forehead. “You smell like a bar.”
“Yeah.” His weary gaze fixed on her neck. “L-lot of b-bruises.”
Her throat still felt broken. “You should see the other guy.”
“Not … not a joke. That was t-too close. C-can’t l-lose you …”
“I’m not going anywhere,” she said, knowing deep down that she would be forced to. She sponged away dried blood from his chest. His torso was stippled with other, older wounds, shiny with scar tissue.
“Sh-shrapnel,” he whispered, feeling the question in her fingers. “Got myself fr-fragged six months ago. You ought to s-see me l-light up metal detectors at an air-airport.”
“And this?” She touched what looked like small burn marks just under his left armpit. Then she peered closer and made out letters:
EDEN
Thomas A.
A series of numbers. Social security number, Alex thought. The line below read O POS, and, beneath that, Catholic.
“A tattoo?” she said.
“Yeah. We call them m-meat t-tags. Sometimes there’s not a lot l-left after …” He swallowed. “You know.”
“Tom.” She reached up to stroke the damp hair from his forehead. His lips were pale, as transparent as glass. “What are we going to do?”
“St-stick to the p-plan.” He tried a smile that quickly faded. “We … we leave in the m-morning. All I n-need is a little r-rest.”
He needed a lot more, and she knew it. They spent the night on a mound of car mats in the convenience store’s back room. A few hours before dawn, Tom either passed out or fell asleep—she couldn’t tell which. Stretching out along his left side, she hugged his body to hers, so close she heard his heart. She was exhausted but afraid to sleep, worried that he would be dead when she woke up. But eventually, her thoughts thinned and she spiraled down and—
The dream, again: the one where she saw the chopper, the one carrying her mother and father, take off in that snowstorm. The helicopter rose like a helium-filled balloon, higher and higher, until at the very limit of the sky and the edge of night, it exploded in a fireball.
Alex hadn’t been there. She’d waited at home, alone, as the storm raged, while her mom did her doctor thing, accompanying a patient on an emergency evac. The only reason her dad was even aboard was that the med tech, freaked by the storm, chickened out and her dad, trained in ACLS because all cops are first responders, took his place.
The chopper had not bloomed into a fireball either. After delivering the patient safe and sound, the helicopter took off for home—and simply crashed into a hillside. No drama, no Fourth of July, although the fire had been so intense that they’d identified the pilot and her parents by their teeth.
She was fourteen. She’d felt nothing when her parents died: no premonition, no seismic shudder, no chasm opening beneath her feet. She had been awake, watching the snow swirl in a golden nimbus around the streetlight at the end of the block, waiting for her father’s patrol car to turn the corner. She’d even pictured how that would look: first his lights and then the cruiser itself pulling together out of the snow like something from a dream.
And then a cruiser had appeared, although she’d known, immediately, that it wasn’t her father’s. His was a newer model white-and-black. The one that pulled into the driveway was older, all black. Still, she didn’t think anything of it; even when she saw the officers unfold and flounder toward the front porch—even when she recognized her father’s old partner—she still didn’t understand what was happening. Leaving her seat by the window, padding to the front door in her slippers, she didn’t get it. Throwing open the deadbolt, opening the door, feeling the gust of cold air push in … she didn’t get it. She never got it; it just never dawned on her that anything horrible had happened—until she recognized the minister from their church.
Then she got it.
A month later, the nightmare started. A year later, when the smoke smell started and Aunt Hannah sent her to that shrink, she’d spun some crap about Alex being Dorothy and her parents flying away to Oz, blah, blah, blah. For the shrink, the dream was all about Alex’s fantasy that her parents were still alive somewhere.
Alex thought the shrink was full of shit. Her parents were dead. She knew that. The dream was all about her life jumping the rails, blowing up in her face, leaving her with nothing but ashes.
Which was happening now, with Tom, all over again.
When she awoke, Tom’s skin was clammy. His fever raged and his heart was rabbiting in his chest, and she knew she couldn’t wait any longer. She had to bring help, or Tom would die. He might die before she returned, but she couldn’t just sit and wait either.