For Which We Stand: Ian's road (A Five Roads To Texas Novel Book 3)
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“No, I’m here with you.” She dragged out the no to imply that he was asking an obvious question or that he might be crazy.
Ian stood up, instantly aware that he didn’t know how kids think.
Armand took that as his cue. “Where are you taking us, Emili?” Armand asked.
“To my daddy. He’s hurt. Will you help him?”
“If we can, sweetie. Has he been bitten or attacked by…” Armand began, allowing the girl to finish the thought.
“No, the others hurt him.”
“The others? Do you mean the infected?” Armand pressed. There were certainly enough of them in the building to do some damage.
“No, the others… they’re weird. The smithies have them locked up right now in a quiet place. You’ll see.” She opened a door to a stairway that brought them back into the Spartan furnishings of a maintenance area. She went down four levels until they were at least two levels below the main areas.
She brought them to a long hallway, where she grabbed a stick in order to reach high enough to push the light switch on before continuing to follow the cat up to a heavy steel door, which she knocked on.
The door cracked open and a man with a handgun looked out. He looked down at Emili and smiled as if he hadn’t seen the adults with her. But then he snapped his eyes back up to meet Ian’s.
“I brought some friends. They said they are going to help.” Emili pushed past the man, all business.
The man surveyed Ian up and down then looked the rest of the group, his eyes lingering on the German shepherd. Ian was beginning to like that look of intimidation that a dog brings to the table.
“Hi, we’re here to help,” Ian said.
The man raised his hands and backed up so they could enter the room. He made as if to surrender what must have been their only weapon, but Ian waved him off and signaled that he should just holster it. He did, and then Ian saw how massive the man’s arms were. He was thick all over, with a barrel chest resting over a large, hard-looking gut, but his arms dwarfed even that.
“I’m Jim.” As he spoke, he appeared to be sizing up Ian’s group.
“Jim, pleasure to meet you. I’m Ian, and this is Armand, Tom, and Jasper. You must be the blacksmith Emili mentioned.”
“There are a few of us here. We were setting up for a tradeshow for metallurgists when everything went to hell. What are you guys doing here? I mean… are you the military?”
“Excuse me, Ian. Time?” Armand said and looked at his watch.
“I know, but we can’t leave them here, and this building won’t do what we need it to.”
Ian turned back to Jim and answered the man’s question. “No, not military… just survivors, like you. Emili said her dad was injured?”
“Yeah, Hansel got his leg broke when the others wanted control of the food. Hell, we’d be starving right now if they were in control of it.” He paused to shake his head in disgust. “We got them locked away for the moment, but it won’t last long. They’ll get out and come for us again.”
“Hang out here for a bit, Jim. I need to ask you some more questions after we take care of her dad,” Ian said as he slid past the man.
“Yeah, Hansel got it pretty bad, and I don’t know how to set a compound, so I just stabilized it as best I could,” Jim finished.
“Well, we’ll take a look. I take it that is him lying down on the cot over there?”
“Yeah, he would be the one,” the smithy said, and Ian headed over to the man on the cot.
“Hansel, I’m Ian. We’re going to try and help you,” he said to the man who was in incredible pain. Sweat poured down his brow, and Ian could almost see the throbs racking through his body.
He lay on a couch, panting and gritting his teeth as sweat poured off his forehead. Ian could see that he was on the verge of going into shock, which could kill him.
“Sounds good. I could use a little help, I think. Dang blasted potters cornered me on the steps, and that bitch in the ANTIFA tee shirt busted right through my shin with a two-by-four. Then that fat fu—”
“Daddy!” Emili screamed before he could get the word out.
“I’m sorry, sweetie. The large potter stomped on me a couple times and pushed the bone right out from the skin.”
“Hansel, I am going to give you some morphine so we can get your leg stabilized for transport,” Ian said as he reached into his pack for the product that was standard in military medic packs.
“Transport? To where? Is there even any place for me to go? Me and my Emili?”
“It doesn’t matter. This whole area is going to be surrounded by over a million infected in less than an hour, so you can’t stay here anymore.”
“Wha… why? How do you know this?” Hansel said, panicked.
“It’s a long story. Here ya go, Hansel. Give me your arm and we will get to work.” Ian held up a hypodermic. More of the smiths gathered around to watch and see if they could assist with the procedure.
A sense of relief flooded the man’s face as the pain killer entered into his system.
“We’re going to have to gag you, bro, while we try and set this. Tom, pull out the plastic bag marked stabilizer and open it up for me, would you?” Ian said as he directed Hansel into a more comfortable position on the couch where he lay. “Armand or Jim, hold his shoulders and one of you get his leg so he doesn’t kick me in the face.”
It was the separating of the bone that caused Hansel to scream and squirm as the leg was pulled down before Ian released tension. He tried to keep the leg from snapping back into place as he looked at one of the blacksmiths who stood watching the procedure. “You, what’s your name?”
“Mustafa.”
“Grab two bottles of water from over there for me, would you?”
Mustafa grabbed the bottles and brought them over, looking at Hansel with compassion.
“Don’t you want to boil it?” Jim asked
“No time. I’m serious when I say we have to get you out of here.” He handed Mustafa a flask that looked like it could be vodka. “Put a couple drops of this in both bottles and give them a shake while I try to clean around his leg. Now that he is passed out, watch his breathing. If it slows too much, slap him awake.”
Mustafa looked at the flask. “Bleach?”
“Yeah, don’t drink it, and we have to let it set for a couple minutes to kill all of the bacteria,” Ian said as he pulled out a bottle of iodine. He poured some of it into a squirt bottle and mixed in some of the purified water.
“Okay, Armand… take one of the bottles of water and slowly pour it over the wound while I work the skin. Tom, hold the flashlight so I can see into the wound. I have to make sure there is no bone or meat inside where the bones join,” Ian said, explaining it as much to himself as to the rest of the room.
“Here, I’ll work the flesh while you work those forceps,” Mustafa said, and Ian nodded before beginning to pick some bone splinters out.
He found that he had to use a wire snip to get some of the wild splinters of bone and tendon. He trimmed up the skin and muscle as best he could and toyed with leaving it open for a real doctor to clean up his work. Then he realized there weren’t any real doctors, or at least none that he knew of, so his only recourse would be to clean it as best he could then seal it up.
Looking at the bone, he saw that the inner portion had broken cleanly and just the outside had splintered. He smiled inwardly as he pulled the leg out, feeling the unconscious form of Hansel flinch from the pain.
“Be glad it was your shin if it had to happen at all. Your femur, and we would be singing a different song right now,” Ian said
Following the line of the hip, to knee, to foot, he directed the two halves of shin together. They touched but seemed to totter as if balancing on an edge as the still-attached tendon tried to pull it off center. Ian sensed he was at the critical juncture, and one wrong move could cripple the man or kill him through infection.
He held the foot around the arch in his r
ight hand and had his left down on the knee, keeping it straight, and the pressure relieved from the stationary bone. Ian gave the foot a small twist and felt the tendon slowly pull the bone into place. A quick but gentle back-and-forth, and he could almost hear the bone seat itself. He slid the stabilizer up his right forearm while continuing to hold the shin with his left.
“Armand, squirt the iodine wash all over the wound,” Ian said. “Jim, grab the skin glue out of my bag. Mustafa you be ready to dry it up and then glue the skin.”
Everybody did their respective jobs, as if they were glad to be doing something. Ian didn’t really know what he was doing. He had set legs before but never a compound fracture. So he just thought it through and did what he thought made sense.
“Okay, hold the skin together while I get this over his foot.” Ian slid the air cast into place. “Give a couple blows on that would you, Tom?” Ian handed the boy an air hose that fed into the cast.
After Tom gave two good blows on the hose, Ian said, “Okay, that’s enough for now; we don’t want it too tight for when it swells.” They checked the glue, and it held so they slipped the cast up to cover his entire leg.
“Fill’er up, Tommy boy.”
Ian left the injured man and got on the radio to Kinsey and Toby. “Need to delay the inevitable. Over.”
“No can do. Satellites and drones are off and running. The entire mass of them are shifting toward us a lot faster than we thought they would. Lighting up the beacon here at two stick. Over,” Kinsey said.
Jose’s voice came through the coms. “Roger on the shift in mass. We’re hitting the sound system here at Chase and heading out the back door. Over.”
“I need more time. We found survivors here and one of them is hurt. Over.”
“I wish we could help, Ian, but the timing isn’t going to work. One of us will go and get another transport for your survivors, but that is the most we can do. Over,” Kinsey said.
There was a pause on the end of the conversation as if they were reading each other’s mind, and perhaps they were because right when Ian was going to issue an order that would put all of their lives at risk, Jose spoke up.
“Sticking to protocol and time tables is priority, or so says an old boss of mine.” He held a significant pause, keeping the line open so they could hear Rex bitching about something in the background. “You had better move your ass, Ian. I’d hate to have to search you out for a mercy killing, but I would. Over and out.” Jose signed off, leaving no doubt that the decision was out of Ian’s hands.
“Fuck!” Ian said, frustrated at how every one of his plans always goes to hell.
“All right, all right, all right… this is what we gotta do. We need some kind of stretcher for him, and you all need to get your gear together. It is time to move.”
Mustafa shook his head. “We should wait for him to wake up. He knows all of the tunnels and exits, being the head of maintenance. Plus, he has all the keys.”
“We can’t wait. My friends are drawing a million infected into this neighborhood as we speak.”
“Why would you do that?”
“To free up the streets across town so some uninfected could get out. We thought this area was empty.”
“Well, if we could get to my truck, we would all fit in that. But the security guard at the loading area kept my keys so he could move it when he needed to,” Mustafa said wistfully.
“No, too much risk, let’s go for the vehicle that I know is there and not already swarmed by infected. Besides, we have no idea where he put your keys,” Ian said, dismissing the idea.
The blacksmith thought for half a second. “Yeah, I don’t know if I could find it right now anyway; this building gets me so turned around.”
“Who in the heck tries to live in a place like this? I heard mention of some others?” Ian pressed, knowing their time schedule has just been moved up.
“Yeah, we had the small convention hall reserved for some home forge demonstrations, and there are some people who were here for the big Menahga show. I don’t know that you want to mess with them, they’re kind of political,” Mustafa said
Ian almost chuckled. “Politics are kind of on a back burner right now, if you know what I mean.”
“Yeah, but it’s not like that. It’s more like…” Mustafa thought for several seconds. “It’s that we have them locked up right now for trying to steal the food and breaking Hansel’s leg. They feel we have ostracized them because of their progressive ideals and all of the LGBT and ATIOC or ANTIFA crap—not because they attacked Hansel and broke his leg. Plus, they claimed assault when we had to drag them off of Hansel, as well as when Jim pointed his empty gun at everyone. I tell ya, there is no reasoning with them.” Mustafa was all for leaving them behind; that was evident to Ian.
“Well, give them a message before we go. We’re leaving now. They may follow, but if they get in our way, they will be shot,” Ian said.
Jim stepped forward. “I’ll tell them.”
He started to head out, but Ian stopped him. “Is that a 9mm M&P?”
Jim nodded.
“Tom, give him two of your magazines.”
Ian didn’t help carry the stretcher they found one floor down in a supply room. There was an abundant supply of them, which made perfect sense since, on any given day, a hundred thousand people could be pushing in and out of the building.
They moved down the hallway toward a set of stairs that supposedly led to the maintenance areas on the opposite side of the building from where they entered. Not quite where Ian wanted to exit but better than trying to hump a stretcher through an auditorium full of infected.
They were being followed quietly by the people who Jim’s group called “the others.” Ian noticed they wore a lot of beads and tie dye, which was so dirty from the last few weeks of hiding that it was hard to tell what the original colors had been. They were well fed, though, so they were more than ambulatory.
Emili walked beside Tom, who brought up the rear with Armand as Ian led. Well, Jasper and the cat led, and Ian followed them. His control of the dog had slipped but not too much that he couldn’t call him back if needed. At the moment, he was watching to see how the dog behaved in a tactical situation.
So far so good, he said to himself and then froze when the cat sat down at a corner before going out into the intersection. Jasper, however, didn’t. Being a dog, he was anxious to keep on the path and turned the corner. “Jasper!” Ian whisper-yelled.
Jasper responded, but it was too late.
A single scream echoed from the hallway then stopped. The entire building hushed, as if even the building’s equipment could feel the tension and ceased its continuous rumble.
The sound of uncoordinated feet slapping the hard floor approached, and Ian readied his rifle, hoping that none of the other unsuppressed rifles would fire. There was no way to know how many infected were in this part of the building, but if it was a tenth of what they had seen in the auditorium, they would be hard-pressed to get out of there.
It was young. A tall, thin male screeched at the top of its lungs as it rounded the corner in a full sprint. Ian thought he was ready for it. He had seen so many and put down every one of them, but for some reason, this one struck him differently. The man looked like a thinner, younger version of Toby. Suddenly shooting this one infected, hell-bent on tearing into him and all with him, would be like shooting his own employee, no… more than an employee. A friend, possibly even a brother. Companion… that is what Toby was, as well as Kinsey and Jose. They were his companions and friends. Now one of his companions, or at least a younger version of one, was bearing down on him with a bloodlust in his eyes that caused Ian to hesitate.
At first, it looked like it tripped or stumbled, but Ian saw that Jasper had grabbed his booted foot, sending it off balance. Just that simple act urged Ian to pull the trigger as the dog’s muzzle followed the creature to the ground.
“Holy crap, that looked like Toby,” Tom whispered.
“They’re coming,” Ian said.
There was a commotion followed by a cry of pain from Hansel as the “others” tried to push past him. “Stop!” Ian said and pointed his gun at the group behind him. “You were invited on this trip and warned—”
He was interrupted by a woman wearing a conglomerated mess of cut beer cans and yarn as a jacket. She screamed at him. “You have no right to stop us!”
“Your rights have changed a bit since you have been locked up in here. The only right recognized these days is pointed directly at your head and will be enacted upon my discretion,” Ian said.
“You wouldn’t dare shoot us, we’re not even infected.” The woman’s protests were a rant that Ian could see wasn’t going to stop.
The sound of her voice was almost as bad as the screaming coming from the infected in the auditorium, which Ian noticed was getting louder. This meant the infected had a basic direction where he and his crew were. Then he saw her—the woman in the ANTIFA tee shirt, the one who Ian had been told broke Hansel’s leg. Ian made a decision and, sadly, he didn’t think this decision would keep him awake at night. This was life or death, and he didn’t need anyone around who would hinder his people from getting away unharmed.
He fired once, then pulled right and fired again. The ANTIFA woman fell silently to the ground, followed by Beer Can Lady with eyes wide and mouth still open, as if hoping to spew out some final “injustices” at Ian. They lay motionless, and he pulled his eyes back up to the crowd, whose undivided attention he finally had.
“When we’re clear, you all can go your own way and forget I ever existed. Hell, you can even try and call a cop. But if you get in our way again, you’re dead. Gentlemen, let’s get Hansel out of here.” Ian turned back around to the dog. “Jasper, heel.” He did not want a repeat of the last situation. The cat yawned, stretched its front legs, and once again took lead.