by Radclyffe
Rachel knelt by the edge of the pit and reached down to Max. “I’ll come with you.”
Max grasped her hand, dug her toes into the side of the pit, and with the other arm, levered herself out. She dusted herself off, shouldered her rifle, and scanned the jungle. Nothing out of the ordinary. The animals were quiet during the heat of the day. Even the birdsong had faded. “We’ve got a couple more hours till sundown. I can handle this. You go check on Amina.”
Rachel hesitated. She dreaded the oncoming darkness. In the sunlight, she felt more in control, but in the dark, fears were so much harder to push aside, courage more elusive. She wondered if Max dreaded the dark, and somehow doubted it. Her focus was so singular, so intense, Rachel doubted Max really noticed much of a difference between day and night. She was not a woman who dealt in shades of gray. “I’m not letting you out of my sight. So stop trying to get rid of me.”
“I could make it an order.” Max pulled on her camo jacket. “You agreed to follow orders.”
“Don’t test me,” Rachel muttered. “I know how to shoot this thing now.”
Max laughed, a sound so alien in this place of death and horror, Rachel’s heart lurched at the sound. That had to be the cause of the rush of blood through her veins. She turned away to break the spell, but she could still see the way Max’s eyes gleamed with mischief and something a lot more intriguing.
Chapter Ten
Max dragged the small flatbed wagon across the camp for the fifth time. Her shoulders ached, the back of her neck was burned raw, and her skin itched everywhere from the sand embedded in her clothes, inside her socks, in her hair and ears. Her legs quivered, the muscles having turned to jelly in the soup of humid air, festering heat, and stress. Rachel waited for her beside the jerry-rigged sandbag barrier they’d built up around the foxhole out of fifty-pound bags of rice. Rachel hadn’t complained, hadn’t flagged, though every time she picked up one of the heavy bags of rice to pile it on top of the others, her arms visibly trembled. Max would have ordered her inside if she’d thought Rachel might go without a fight, but that was unlikely. And she had to admit, she needed her help. “This is the last of it.”
“Can’t say I’m sorry,” Rachel muttered. “I never thought I could hate an inanimate object quite so much, but I’ll never eat rice again.”
Max laughed. The sound hurt her dry, sandy throat, but the little bit of humor helped ease the tension twisting her muscles into steel bands. “What do you do for showers around here?”
“We’ve got portable ones rigged up out behind the medical tent. Always guaranteed to be lukewarm.” A shadow passed over Rachel’s face. “There should be plenty of water stored up. Today would have been shower day.”
Max didn’t have to be a mind reader to know Rachel was thinking about those who hadn’t gotten out. Somehow, giving Rachel some comfort, even a distraction, seemed as important as keeping her physically safe. Usually her job ended when the blood stopped flowing or the wounded were loaded onto transport for a trip to the base hospital. She rarely had time or reason to worry about the toll this place took on the heart and mind, beyond a few minutes of battlefield comfort. Words they’d all repeated so many times she barely heard them any longer. Don’t worry, troop. Doesn’t look too bad. Nothing keeps a Marine down long. You’ll be fine. Merciful lies, and she regretted none of them, but she wanted more than hollow reassurance for Rachel. She had none and felt lacking. “I’d say we’ve earned a shower.”
Rachel’s face brightened and some of the sadness left her eyes. “Can we? I mean”—a bit of color returned to her cheeks—“is it safe?”
“I’ll stand guard for you if you stand guard for me.” A fleeting image of Rachel under the water, sunlight bathing her and water streaming down the slope of her back and over the curve of her ass, popped into Max’s head. Afraid for a second Rachel could read her mind, she said quickly, “I even promise not to peek.”
Rachel gave her a look through narrowed lids. “Under other circumstances I might find that insulting.”
The teasing lift of Rachel’s smile caught Max off guard. Maybe Rachel had read her mind, but that didn’t track. If they’d met anywhere else in the world, Rachel likely wouldn’t give her a passing thought. Their lives were as different as the arid desert sands and the bright lights of Times Square. “Under other circumstances, you probably wouldn’t care.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Rachel said. “You don’t seem to know—”
“Max!” Amina’s scream cut through the air with the force of a gunshot. “Max!”
“Down!” Max pushed Rachel to the ground and crouched over her, her rifle on her shoulder. She panned the perimeter, expecting a surge of rebel forces or a barrage of gunfire. Nothing moved. She listened. Nothing. “Clear! Come on.”
As soon as Max let her up, Rachel grabbed her rifle and they sprinted to the tent. Max burst inside, searching for enemy. Amina knelt by Grif, both hands pressed to his thigh. Scarlet streaked her arms.
“What happened?” Max dropped her rifle and squatted across from Amina.
“He woke up and started thrashing. The bleeding started so fast…” Amina’s breath caught. “There’s so much.”
“Don’t move.” Max pulled her med kit closer and dug around for drugs and bandages. She was running low on both.
Grif jerked, nearly throwing Amina aside, and shouted, “Contact! We have enemy contact!”
“It’s okay, Grif,” Max said calmly. “I’m here. You’re okay.”
Grif pushed his big body up with surprising strength, bracing himself on his arms. He stared from one to the other, his eyes glazed with confusion. Sweat rolled down his face, rivers of tears coursing through the paint and grime. “They’re shooting. Fuck. Shooting everywhere. Deuce!”
“I’m here. Keep your head down, buddy. You’re okay.” Max drew up an ampoule of Demerol, slid it into the IV, and pushed it home. “Everything’s okay. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
For an instant, Grif’s eyes cleared and he focused on Max. “Fuck, Deuce. I don’t want to die out here.”
“You’re not going to.”
“Tell Laurie I love her.”
“Fuck, no.” Max gripped his shoulders, her face close to his, and pushed him back down. She looked into his eyes as the Demerol started to take him away. “You’ll have to do that yourself. I hate that kind of thing.”
He grinned. “No wonder you never get any women.”
“Yeah. Like you would know.”
His lids fluttered closed and his body relaxed. Wiping sweat from her eyes, Max shifted down to where Amina held both hands on his thigh. Blood welled between her fingers and puddled on the floor. She’d run out of time. “Rachel, can you get that propane light from that table over there and figure out how to get it to work?”
Rachel crouched a few feet away, her pupils black and big as dimes. A pulse hammered in her throat. “Yes.”
Her voice was firm.
“Good. Prop it on that chair.”
For once, Rachel didn’t have a single question. She bent over the lantern-shaped light, ignited the propane, and brought it back. “What are you going to do?”
Max nearly smiled at the question, welcoming the familiar in the midst of chaos. “I need to explore this wound and get the bleeding stopped. I need both of you to help me.”
“In here?” Amina asked. “In the hospital ten—”
“Believe me, I’d like to have a nice clean OR table to put him on and a full set of shiny instruments, but we can’t move him. Right now, getting the bleeding stopped is our number one priority.”
“I’m sorry,” Amina said.
“Don’t be.” Max knew she sounded gruff and didn’t have time to worry about it. “You saved his life.”
“What can we do?” Rachel said.
Max pulled off her jacket and gear and dropped it next to her rifle. “Find that big pack of medical instruments we brought over from the hospital. Open it up next to me.”
>
While Rachel hunted for the instruments, Max tore open a foil container of Betadine, swabbed her forearms, and pulled on gloves from her kit. “Amina, get ready to take those scissors and cut the bandage free. Keep pressing down in the center of his thigh with your other hand. Rachel, put on a pair of gloves and open the gauze packs. I’ll need you to keep the field clear.”
“I…” Rachel glanced at Grif’s face. “Will he know?”
“Not consciously, but he might react. If he does start moving around, I want you to kneel on his lower legs and keep them still.”
“Okay,” Rachel whispered.
“I need you to do exactly what I say when I tell you to do it.”
“I will.”
Max looked across at Amina. Her jaw was set, her mouth a thin tight line. “You ready?”
“Yes.”
“You see those two small right-angle retractors that look like little scoops about two inches wide?”
“Yes.”
“You’re going to use them to hold the wound open so I can see inside.” The less time she gave them to think about what they were about to do, the less likely they were to get nervous. “I’m going to take the bandages off, put the retractors into the wound, and you’re going to hold them apart. You’ll need to pull. You won’t hurt him. We’re going to save his life.”
Amina swallowed visibly. “All right.”
“Good. Now.” Max removed the field bandage, and bright red arterial blood immediately welled up and spilled down Grif’s thigh. Max slid the right-angle retractors into the center of the crater with their slim, eight-inch handles sticking out either side. “Amina, take these and pull. Rachel, keep the field as dry as you can. Just keep mopping it up.”
“Yes,” Rachel said, “I’ve got it.”
Max grabbed a hemostat and a gauze pad and studied the depths of the wound. The round had passed through the thick inner thigh muscles, missing the bone. The femoral artery ran deep between the muscles, coursing from the groin down to the knee where it branched to supply the calf and foot. The deep femoral branch came off the main artery a few inches below the groin crease to supply all the big muscles of the thigh. That had to be what was bleeding. She just had to find the tear in the artery and fix it.
The key to finding a bleeder in the midst of a pool of blood and shredded muscle was to look—to see, to distinguish the border between the damaged and the undamaged. There, at the edge of destruction, the natural planes of the body remained, even in the worst trauma, pristine layers radiating out from the injury. Carefully she swabbed, ignoring the small bleeders that would eventually stop on their own. She identified the various muscles, tracing the course of the artery in her mind. It should be here, diving beneath the adductors toward the femur, but it wasn’t. The round had probably taken out a segment of the vessel along with a sizeable chunk of muscle. She’d have to look higher to find the proximal end, the one leading from the main artery. If she could control that, the hemostatic gauze packs and pressure bandage would eventually take care of the rest of the bleeding until they could get him into the operating room and clean up the wound. She couldn’t fix it if she couldn’t see it.
“Amina, pull harder.”
Amina sucked in a breath and did as Max asked. Grif groaned and his thigh tensed. The undamaged muscles flexed, blood squirted, and the field disappeared under a pool of red.
“Rachel,” Max snapped, “keep him still.”
Rachel straddled both of Grif’s lower legs, a knee on either side of his calves, and held him down with her body. Leaning forward, she swabbed, her gloves drenched with blood.
Max put a finger deep into the wound, pulled back a ragged flap of muscle, and widened her field of vision, letting the filmy strands of fascia separating one band of muscle from the other guide her eyes along the native planes. A tan ring the width of a pencil pulsed in the depth of the wound like a tiny heart. “There you are.”
Only five millimeters wide, the pliable artery jumped with every beat of Grif’s heart, pumping out blood in a steady stream. Max slid the open jaws of the hemostat on either side of the severed vessel and clamped it closed. Immediately the bleeding slowed.
“Oh my God,” Rachel murmured. “Is that it? Did you get it?”
“Almost.” Max kept her gaze fixed on the end of the fragile vessel and supported the instrument in her palm. If Grif came to again and thrashed around, that artery would shred like wet Kleenex. “Just keep him still a minute longer.”
“I will.”
“Rachel, the blue foil pack. Pass it to me.” Max opened the 4.0 nylon suture pack, gently rested the hemostat on Grif’s thigh, and loaded the curved needle into the jaws of a blunt needle holder. Holding the hemostat steady again, she passed the suture through the vessel above the hemostat, brought the ends of the nylon around the instrument, and tied them down. When she eased off the stat, the stump of the severed artery filled with blood and throbbed as if it were alive and trying to escape. But the ligature held and the bleeding stopped.
“There you go, you bastard.” Max took the first full breath she’d had in five minutes. She found another hemostatic bandage and packed it into the wound. After wrapping his thigh, she gave him another dose of antibiotics. She glanced from Rachel to Amina. They both looked a little dazed. “You did great. Both of you. Rachel, you can get off his legs now. He’s out for a while.”
Rachel stood and pulled at her blood-caked gloves. “It’s so hot in here. Isn’t it? I—don’t feel…”
Max grabbed her as she started to sway. “Easy. You’re okay. Just a little too much sun.”
“I’m fine,” Rachel muttered, leaning against Max’s side. “I’m not usually—”
“This isn’t usual. Come on. Lie down over here.” Max kept her arm around Rachel’s waist and guided her to the cot. “That’s it. Close your eyes.”
Rachel stared up at her. “I don’t believe you did that. It was…amazing.”
Max smiled. “Thanks, but not really. It’s what I do.”
“All the time?”
“Yes.”
“That’s horrible.”
“I know. It is.” Max pulled an IV bag from the supplies she’d pilfered earlier. “You’re dehydrated. I’m going to give you some fluid. You’ll feel better when you wake up.”
“I don’t want to sleep.”
Max understood. Most of the time, neither did she. “Then you don’t have to. But you do have to stay here until the IV runs in. Deal?”
Rachel frowned. “I don’t think I like your deals. I think they’re rigged somehow.”
“Well, until you figure out how, just go along with it.” Max slipped in an IV and hooked up the fluid. When she finished taping the line down, Rachel was asleep.
“You should rest too,” Amina said from beside Max.
“I will.” Max looked from Rachel to Grif. “When we get out of here, I’ll have a big meal, a bigger glass of whiskey, and I’ll sleep for a week.”
Amina smiled. “I never thought I’d say this, but that sounds really good.”
Chapter Eleven
Rachel jerked awake, surrounded by the rattle and roar of gunfire and helicopter rotors, the taste of sand in her mouth, the stench of cordite, the sweet cloying odor of fresh blood. Terror so deep she couldn’t think enveloped her. Above her the sun shuddered behind thick clouds of dust. Pain and fear dimmed her vision. She grabbed a breath and gripped the sides of the cot with both hands. The room spun and more memories assaulted her. Grif’s anguished cries of pain, Dacar’s blank accusing eyes, Max’s lethal gaze above the barrel of an assault rifle. Max. Another breath forced down her tight throat. Max’s hand on her back, steady and sure, the tenderness in her eyes she tried to hide, the certainty and gentleness of her hands as she tended to Grif’s damaged body.
Rachel centered herself. She was in the tent. She was alive. The erratic pounding of her heart settled into a steady cadence. Her right forearm ached and she held up her hand. Clear tubing ra
n to a plastic catheter taped above her wrist. An IV bag sat next to her, clipped to the back of one of the wooden chairs. She swallowed. Her throat was dry, her eyes ached. Nausea was a constant companion.
But she was alive. “Max?”
“You’re awake,” Amina said. “How do you feel?”
Rachel turned her head and looked at Amina as she had so many times in their tent—in the early morning before rising and the last thing at night before going to sleep, when they’d whisper a few minutes about things beyond the heat and oppression of this tortured land. Amina would speak longingly of family and friends, of hopes and dreams, and Rachel would listen. She had little that was personal to share and tried not to dwell on what that said about her life. If Amina noticed her silence, she never let on. Her lovely dark eyes, then as now, had always been warm and calming and accepting.
Tonight, Amina stretched out on a cot across from her, lying on her side, her head propped on her elbow, just as she always did. Strands of her ebony hair had escaped the tie at her nape and curled loosely around her shoulders. Rachel couldn’t remember ever seeing Amina with a single hair out of place, but nothing was as it had been, and so many things she’d once worried about didn’t seem to matter now. What mattered was food and water and keeping each other safe. What mattered was Grif, lying on a makeshift litter in the space between them. He appeared to be sleeping. She hoped so.
“I’m fine,” Rachel said.
“Really?”
Rachel laughed wryly. “No, actually I feel terrible. My head feels like the inside of a snare drum. But I’m all right, considering. How are you?”
“I’m all right too, I guess.” Amina glanced at Grif. “I’m so sad about Dacar and the others. So sad and so angry.”
“Yes. Me too.” The anger, Rachel realized, was much sharper than the sadness—a knife blade slashing through her, dulling the crushing pain of loss. She wouldn’t forget the dead, nor fail to mourn them, but she’d keep her anger for the strength she found in it. Amina was no stranger to loss. Both her father and older brother had been killed in some kind of clan conflict when she was just a young girl. Perhaps she’d replaced pain with empathy, channeling her grief into the aid program and a passion for justice. Rachel didn’t think she’d be able to find any empathy for those who killed for power and lust and greed. No, she’d keep her anger and, for the time being, her rifle. She scanned the tent and her stomach tensed.
