by Baron Sord
But if I did, his arteries might start gushing more blood than I could staunch, and he would die because of me.
Maybe I better leave it.
More blood burbled out.
The guy’s face was white as a sheet. There was an actual pool of blood in the footwell. How much, I couldn’t say, but at least a liter, if not two. He only had three or so to go. The seat cushions were soaked. It was too much blood. He was going to die.
I had to do something.
I wasn’t a surgeon or a even a trained medic, but I was the only person here.
Somebody had to help him.
Guess it would be me.
—: Chapter 9 :—
Slowly and carefully, I pulled the blood-slick shard out of the guy’s leg and set it in the blood pool in the footwell, just in case the EMTs or surgeons needed it for whatever reason.
Then the blood started to pump out of the guy’s leg in slow pulses.
I was surprised his heart was even beating at this point.
I was about to feel around in the wound when I stopped myself. I didn’t want to give him a massive infection by digging around with my dirty hands inside his open leg.
Wait, could I bake my own skin clean of all germs? An autoclave only needed to reach 275 degrees Fahrenheit (135 Celsius) to sanitize. Too bad that would cook this guy’s skin. Did anybody have any Betadine?
“Is he okay?” Phone Woman asked behind me, still holding the phone to her ear.
“No. He’s bleeding badly. I need disinfectant and bandages. Or gauze. Do you have any gauze?”
“Let me go see if anybody has a first aid kit.”
“Yeah, thanks.”
Back to the wound.
It couldn’t wait.
I pulled as much heat from the air and the ground as I could. As expected, little heat transferred from the air. But a substantial amount rushed up my legs from my feet. One foot was noticeably hotter than the other. I looked down. One of my shoe’s was gone. It must’ve been torn off when I crawled out of my Aveo. That was the hot foot. The cooler foot was the one wearing a shoe. I stamped my shoe foot and watched my remaining shoe shatter into frozen chunks. The top pieces went flying. Several frozen chunks of the tread were stuck where I’d been standing. I kicked them under the SUV with the ball of my foot. Curious, I lifted my bare foot up. It came away easily.
Sweet. Apparently, I didn’t freeze to anything.
That was a bonus.
I went back to extracting heat from the asphalt with both feet.
It didn’t take long until I had a small amount swirling in my core. I didn’t need to shoot fire columns from my hands to sanitize them. I sent what heat energy I had to both hands.
Inside the dark SUV, my hands started to glow orange and emitted noticeable heatwaves. They were getting very hot. How hot, I didn’t know, but it was more than 275 degrees F. I knew tool steel didn’t glow pure orange until it hit somewhere around 1700 F (926 C). Cooler than that and it became increasingly red until around 1000 F (537 C). Below that, it would drop to purple or even brown until it didn’t glow at all, similar to the burner on an electric stove.
Assume 1500+ F (815+ C) for my hands.
That had to be sanitized.
“Here’s some gauze,” Phone Woman said as she clattered up behind me.
I twisted to glance at her over my shoulder. Didn’t want her to see my hot hands. I let the concentrated heat swirl back into the rest of my body. My hands cooled to non-glowing in response.
She stopped suddenly and stared at her feet. “My shoe stuck to the ground! Why is the ground so cold?” She yanked hard with her leg and her low-heeled pump crackled as it snapped free.
I turned around to face her, holding my hands in the air like a surgeon after scrubbing in. I didn’t want to touch anything with them now, but if I had to grab Phone Woman to stop her from slipping and falling on the icy asphalt, I would.
Too bad I didn’t know how large the total volume of asphalt I had frozen around me was currently. Wait, if I closed my eyes I would. My powers had given me mental heat vision.
I closed my eyes to check.
In my mind, I didn’t see anything. Nothing but blackness.
Did the car crash partially break my powers?
Unlikely.
Did I have to be actively extracting heat to see anything?
Curious and keeping my eyes closed, I concentrated on pulling a small amount of heat up from the ground. I immediately saw a hemisphere of purples and blues light up in my mind. It was spreading out from me into the asphalt, bluest beneath my feet, warming to purples farther out, and then warmer to greens near the edge of the hemisphere before it cut abruptly back to black.
The colors apparently corresponded to my area of effect.
I halted heat extraction and opened my eyes. I realized Phone Woman was standing well within the dark purple area. I had no idea what specific temperature that was, but cold enough to freeze her shoe to the ground. I could only hope that her feet hadn’t already frozen to the insides of her shoes.
Whatever the case, I didn’t want her falling over suddenly and freezing her bare hands to the cold asphalt. Her skin might stick to it faster than her shoe soles had. (We had gone over this before — the Frozen Freeway of Death —bad scene, man. Bad scene.)
Before she had a chance to fall and freeze, I pumped heat from myself back into the asphalt as quickly as possible. Obviously, I had extracted far more than I had realized, and likely affected a much larger volume than necessary. I said, “Can you just stand still for a second?”
“Huh?”
“Just do me a favor. This is very important. Can you stand still for a moment? Just stand there with both feet on the ground while I count to ten?”
“Why?” She was irritated and confused. “My feet are freezing!”
“I, uh, I need to think for a second before I grab the gauze from you. I don’t want to accidentally touch anything with my hands. They’re sterile. So I need to think for a second before I do anything with my hands, okay?”
“Oh. How’d you sterilize them?”
“I, uh, can you just stand still while I count to ten?”
She frowned, “Sure, Whatever.”
“1… 2… 3… 4… 5…” While counting, there was a brief moment where I imagined I saw a flickering mental picture of the temperature gradient on the ground, which had warmed to purples and then dark greens throughout the hemisphere. “6… 7… 8… 9… 10… Thank you. Okay, try and move your feet.”
Phone Woman lifted up each foot experimentally. Both came away normally. “Now my feet are warm,” she marveled. “That was so weird. Anyway, this is all the gauze I could find.”
“Thanks. I’ll take it from here.” I grabbed it with one hand in case the gauze wasn’t sterile, which it probably wasn’t at this point, leaving me with one sterile hand. I’d work with it.
I pressed the gauze over the wound and it soaked black with blood almost immediately. At least it appeared black in the diffuse ambient light from all the car headlights parked on the freeway behind me. The distant headlights cast a dim glow inside the SUV.
“Do you need any help from me?” Phone Woman asked.
“No, I’m good for now. I need to concentrate on what I’m doing.”
“Oh, okay. Are you a doctor?”
“No. But I know first aid. Can you check and see if anyone else has gauze? This is almost soaked.”
“Sure. I’ll see what I can find.”
“Thanks.”
With her gone, I prepared myself to reach inside this man’s wound and feel around with my sterile hand.
I knew I was taking a huge risk if I did this. I didn’t know what I was doing. Worse, we weren’t in a sterile operating room. I didn’t have the necessary tools — like suction or clamps or even lights. Well, I could make light if I extracted more heat from the road, but if tool steel temperatures where any indication, I wouldn’t achieve bright yellow light until I hit 2
000 degrees F (over 900 C). Even if I managed that, there was no telling whether my total lumen output would create enough light to see by, and 2000 F would surely melt this guy’s tissue into a bloody mess. Or freeze Phone Woman’s feet to the ground, and anyone else standing too close.
But this couldn’t wait.
The guy was bleeding out.
Nothing about this situation was ideal. I would have to improvise and work by feel.
“Sorry, man,” I muttered to him as I slid my sterile fingers inside the gaping wound and wiggled them around inside the warm and ragged meat of his leg. It felt like I was sticking my fingers inside a wet mess of smoked salmon filets, but without the fish bones. Slimy and gooshy.
I wasn’t looking for goosh. I was looking for a pumping artery. There had to be something that felt like a tube inside here somewhere. That was what an artery was. A tube.
Kept searching.
Couldn’t find one.
Nothing but slick salmon filets.
Dug my fingers around more.
The guy moaned painfully.
I shouldn’t have done this.
Pump.
Wait.
Pump.
There.
Pump.
I felt it. A rubbery tube. That had to be it.
Pump.
I pinched the artery shut.
Pump.
Felt the pressure inside the artery pressing against my fingers. I had closed it off. Based on the direction of the blood flow, this artery was definitely pumping blood away from the heart and down the leg. And it was big. This was the femoral.
I had stopped the bleed.
That meant the hole in the artery was farther down from where I was pinching. That was good. Even better, I could tell by tugging gently upward on the artery that it wasn’t completely severed. It was attached lower down.
That had to be very good news.
If I had to, I could stand here all night pinching off his femoral artery to stop the leakage. EMS (Emergency Medical Services) would arrive eventually. But that might cause more problems for him in the long term if he had no circulation in his leg for too long in the short term. I needed to do something now. But what?
I couldn’t do anything unless I found the hole in the artery.
If I could find it — it had to be somewhere near the wound entrance — then what? How could I seal an artery without what… surgical thread? Was that what doctors used for arteries? Maybe? It depended on the type of wound, didn’t it? I was way out of my wheelhouse now. I needed somebody to teleport me to the nearest surgeon’s wheelhouse post haste.
Yeah, that wasn’t happening.
I had to find the hole in the artery myself.
I took a moment to extract more heat from my feet until my free hand glowed orange. Had to re-sterilize it after handling the gauze. After counting out 60 seconds, I dumped the excess heat back down my legs and into the asphalt.
Using my freshly sterilized hand, I slid my fingers inside the big wound. It was actually to my advantage the wound was as large as it was. I had room to work.
I stroked my free index finger around the wall of the artery below the point where I was pinching it shut.
There.
It wasn’t a clean puncture hole. It was a ragged rip torn into the arterial wall. Not ideal for easy sealing, but it wasn’t that bad. Maybe a quarter of an inch in diameter (half a centimeter, for my SI brethren).
Maybe I could fix this myself.
I pulled a little bit of heat up from the asphalt and directed more from my core to my left index fingertip. Still holding the artery pinched shut with my right hand, I used the bottom three fingers and thumb of my left hand to hold the torn artery in such a way that I was able to position the wound edges so they generally joined together and closed the hole, but did so in a way that didn’t collapse the artery. I made sure it remained cylindrical. Didn’t want to accidentally glue it shut.
That done, I carefully stroked my left index finger along the ragged seam while brushing micro pulses of heat into the arterial wall, trying to carefully cauterize the wound. I knew this would be a hack job, but I was the only hack here on the freeway.
I glanced up and around to check if EMS had arrived. Nope. Didn’t see any flashing red emergency lights yet.
This was on me.
With my hands inside this guy’s salmon filet leg, I couldn’t see what I was doing, so I tried to picture the wound in my mind. An image of heat flowing into the torn artery popped into my imagination. White hot at the point of contact and heat release, with the colors fading to yellow, orange, red, and finally black approximately 1 inch (about 2 centimeters) away from my finger. Again, it appeared that I could only see those objects directly receiving heat flow to or from me. Good enough in this situation. The overall visual clarity was a bit blurry, but it was far better than trying to do this by feel.
I noticed right away that I had to tug and pull gently on the artery to clarify its 3-dimensional structure in relation to the surrounding tissue. Vessels, muscles, and connective tissue. All were equally affected by my outflow of heat energy, and therefore the same color of greenish-yellow. Although I had a vague sense that my temperature vision might be stereoscopic, my heat flow did not illuminate the tissues with anything like light falling on structural form. There was a total lack of dimensional form shadows.
In short, everything appeared as one flat greenish-yellow mass.
To make things more difficult, this situation wasn’t as simple as looking at something recognizable. If you have ever looked at infrared camera video, you know it’s relatively easy to pick out human faces or human bodies in motion. In still images, faces and bodies are still relatively easy to identify, especially if set against a plain background. What was not easy was deciphering this guy’s artery within the confusing background of his leg.
The simple solution was to tug gently on the artery or wiggle it slightly, and do so frequently — motion was key. If I didn’t, the artery disappeared, blending into the random green and yellow blobs that made up the rest of this guy’s leg. Thankfully, jiggling the artery did the trick.
I set to work massaging the artery with heat until I felt it melt. I had to admit, it was amazing that I could:
A) release enough heat from my fingertip to melt this guy’s artery, and—
B) still feel exactly what I was doing like it was a room temperature environment.
Obviously, if I wasn’t super resilient, this heat would be burning my finger too and I’d have to pull away. But it wasn’t, and I could feel the arterial wall starting to liquify slightly. I doubted any doctor or surgeon had this kind of control or touch sensitive feedback when using a cauterizing wand.
I tabled that stray thought and concentrated on the artery. Once the edges of the tube were goopy, I started easing up on the heat and focused more on shaping the wound closure.
As I worked, I smoothed and polished and slowly removed minuscule amounts of heat. I didn’t know if I was causing less trauma than an electric cauterizing wand or more, but I was willing to bet those things didn’t have the ability to remove heat with the precision I had — if they could remove heat at all. Maybe someone had invented a wand that also had a cooling probe of some sort, but I wasn’t sure. Either way, I knew those wands didn’t confer heat vision to the doctor.
Me?
I had total temperature control — in color, no less.
The best part about my super resilience and heat resistance?
The hot goop of this man’s melted artery did not melt into my fingertip tissue. Had my fingers not been heat resistant, they would’ve melted too, and I would’ve glued my flesh to his artery, much like spilling Super Glue on your fingers. But I didn’t melt. As his arterial goop cooled, for the most part it adhered to his artery and not me. A minor amount did stick to the crevices in my fingerprints, but I was able to roll it into hot gloppy nodules. I then used the back of my index fingernail — which was relatively sm
ooth — to smear the hot nodules back into the arterial wall where they belonged. While smoothing out the nodules, I slowly extracted heat using the flat of my fingernail, cooling the arterial wall until it didn’t stick to anything but itself. Problem solved.
When I finished, the ragged tear was gone, and the artery matched temperature with the surrounding tissue.
I slowly released pressure where I was still pinching the artery upstream with my right hand. I felt blood flow resume. With my left, I felt all around the artery for leakage. Everything was slick and moist, but I didn’t feel it gushing like before. Good enough for field work.
I carefully pulled my hands out and smiled to myself.
Damn.
I had done that.
—: Chapter 10 :—
“Did you stop the bleeding?” Phone Woman asked behind me.
I gasped.
“Sorry,” she muttered. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I found more gauze.” She held up a thick wad of pads.
“Thanks.”
She handed me several clean pads and said, “How is it?”
“I think I sealed the tear in the femoral artery.”
She laughed, “Are you sure you’re not a doctor?”
“Yes,” I grinned and used several pads to wipe away as much of the dark blood on the surface of the guy’s leg as I could. The ragged wound was still seeping fresh blood, but not at a life-threatening rate. I dropped the blood-soaked pads into the footwell and gently pressed more clean pads over the wound entrance, applying direct pressure.
After a few moments, I lifted my hand to check the gauze.
It was dotted with blood along the seam of the wound, but that was it. Just lots of dots. The pad hadn’t saturated.
I said to Phone Woman, “Can you hold this? I want to go check on the passenger.”
“My hands aren’t clean.”
“That’s okay. You’re just holding the pad in place.”
“Oh, sure.” She stepped up next to me and pressed her hand against the gauze.
I went around to the passenger side of the SUV. The entire right side of it was a twisted metal puzzle of jutting blades and wrinkled sheet metal. Instead of trying to figure out the trick, I just bent everything out of the way like I was the human Jaws Of Life. The door, the front pillar, the roof, the dash. It didn’t take long to get the job done. When the EMTs arrived, it would be easy for them to get access to her and pull her out.
