Chapter 54
It took us a long time to get there. Each hard bounce of the ATV was followed by a groan of pain from Allison, and my wounded arm sagged from the jolt. So I slowed our pace to minimize the discomfort. But I had to keep pressing forward to get her to safety.
When we finally arrived, the first hint of daylight was just filtering through the tops of the trees. After parking next to the cabin, I jumped out and bolted toward the front door. Before reaching it, I noticed a figure standing partially behind a tree. A rifle pointed at me. Being on the wrong end of a gun was getting to be a common experience for me. But this time I didn’t even flinch.
“Jake.” I knew he would not be taken by surprise. With our noisy approach, the dead would be awakened. “Put the gun down.”
“What’s your hurry, man?” He inspected me more closely. “What the hell happened to you? You look like shit.” He didn’t have the wild look in his eyes. He was thankfully alert and rational.
I smiled at his colorful language. “I guess I didn’t watch my ass like you warned.”
He looked past me, and said, “Who’s that with you?”
“A friend from town. She needs help. You said you were a corpsman. She’s been shot.”
“Shot? Who’s shooting women in Willow Run?”
I didn’t really want to feed his paranoia, but it seemed a way to spur him to action. “The military. They attacked us in town.” It was close enough to the facts for my needs.
His eyes went wide. “Those bastards.”
“Can you help her?”
He barged past me over to Allison and inspected the wound. “She’s lost a lot of blood. It’s not good, but I’ve seen worse, a lot worse. The bullet didn’t come out the other side, so it’s still in there. I can patch it up for now, but she’s going to need a hospital.”
He dashed off to his cabin and returned with a medical kit. The thought of him, a gimpy unkempt hermit, actually having medical training was hard to swallow. But he threw off his gloves to reveal his spotlessly clean hands. As I held a flashlight from the medical kit, he expertly trimmed her pant leg to expose the wound, cleaned and disinfected it, covered the hole with a bandage that wrapped completely around her thigh, and gave her a shot of pain killer.
As he worked he asked, “What the hell is going on?”
I gave him the two-minute version of the story. That was all the time I had since he was finished with the wound. I stared in awe at his display of skill, and he caught my gaze.
“What?”
“You said you’d been a corpsman, but it just seemed so out of character. You really were a corpsman.”
“Something like that. In Vietnam, I had to do this with people shooting at me. You learn how to do it fast or die trying.”
Allison was conscious, but barely. Her limbs were like those of a Raggedy Ann doll as we gently carried her and placed her in the passenger seat of Jake’s old truck. I kissed her lightly on the forehead, and she squeezed my arm.
“He’s my brother,” she said weakly. “Please don’t.….” She didn’t finish. She bit her lower lip and just looked at me through tears.
I knew she wanted to say please don’t kill him. But I couldn’t promise that. I had to do what needed to be done. There was nothing I could say to her. I just held her gaze and then kissed her firmly for a long moment on the forehead, her shoulders shuddering as she silently wept.
“What about you, Nathan?” Jake asked as he surveyed my bloodied arm and face. “You could use a couple of patches.”
I wanted him to patch me up. The wound in my arm was throbbing, and my fingers were going numb. The skin of my face burned and was tight with dried blood. I wanted to stay with Allison. I was tired, thirsty, hungry, and sick of this whole thing. But I said, “No time.”
I told him about my plan. “Right now, Jeff Wells and his military pals are out gunning for us. They know we came out this way, so they probably have all the roads on this end of town blocked. Just wait for my signal, an hour at most. After that, those guys will be too distracted to bother you and Allison. That’s when you can drive her to the nearest doctor.”
He nodded. “Give ‘em hell, Parker.”