She applied pressure. For a moment he woke and barked out something, then passed out again.
"What now?" she muttered, looking at her handiwork.
She tore through the cupboards again. There was a mini-fridge with bags of dark red blood in, but those had to have gone off now, and she had no idea what his blood type was. She kept looking until in one cupboard she found a rack of yellow-ish clear bags, complete with long tubes. Drip bags?
She grabbed one and pulled it near. It was written with all kinds of chemicals, but it had to be right, didn't it? They wouldn't keep weird, extremely specific stuff in ambulances would they? She checked it against the other bags there, three in total. They were all the same.
It had to be the good stuff. She hung one from the hook on a swing-out hanger, then started hunting for a needle. She'd never injected a single person before. Of course she'd seen it on TV, and had her own blood taken at health checks. It looked simple enough. She rustled through more drawers until she came up with a needle that looked like a fit.
She attached it to the drip end, piercing the inner sack. Fluid began to drip out. She caught some and licked it, yeah, it tasted salty and sweet, probably that was all right? She twisted the little plastic tappet to halt the flow then took hold of his right forearm. It was splashed with road-dust and blood. With an alcohol-swab she wiped it clean, then wiped her hands too, and the needle.
She searched for something to bring up his veins, and settled on his belt. It slid free from his legless jeans and she wrapped it tightly around his bicep, patted the underside of his forearm, and waited. Veins popped up. Taking her heart in her mouth, she fed the needle into his skin. It seemed good, so she opened the tappet, then a bulge started to form.
Nope. She pulled it out and picked a different spot, trying again. Again it bulged. Third time, near the crook of his elbow, she got it. No bulge formed. The drip fed down. He was getting fluids and basic nutrition.
She taped the line in place, belted him again into position, then climbed out, closed the back doors, and got into the driving seat.
Where the hell was the hospital again?
* * *
She stood over him, lying on the stretcher by the window of a clean and white first floor hospital room. Getting him out of the ambulance and into a room had been horrible with blood and stress. One thing she was grateful for was he’d remained unconscious throughout. Flipping him onto his belly had been easy though. Keeping the drip going, setting up a fan and a light with a generator in the corner, all that was easy.
Far harder was contemplating his legs. She just didn’t know. Was it better to leave him as he was, or dig the shrapnel bits out and try to sew him up, or sew him up with them inside, or what? He’d lost so much blood, could he stand to lose more?
She stood by and watched two more drip bags go into him, dithering. She raided supply rooms for the tools she thought she might need: a gallon of swabbing alcohol and a fat pipette to drop it into place, antibacterial soap to scrub up with, surgical gloves, scalpels, towels, bandaging, surgical thread and curved needles, clean blue scrubs and a face mask, a helmet with a large magnifying visor, a surgical light hung over the bed, pounds of cotton wool-type blotting stuff, gauze, a shiny kidney bowl for slugs she extracted, a range of tweezer-like utensils for extracting, powerful and pungent disinfectant in serious brown jars, bottles of antibiotics in pill and liquid form, and a dozen more drip bags with tubes and needles to match.
She laid them all out on silver trays on clean white strips of gauze and tried to decide.
"What do you think?" she’d asked the few of the ocean gathered nearby, like an audience. They looked like doctors. They held to her elbows. She didn’t have time to be afraid that they might eat her, like they’d plainly eaten the body on the Strip.
Using portable machines she took his pulse and his blood pressure. They both seemed low, but then she took her own and saw they were low too. She strung up a third drip bag, injected a syringe full of liquid antibiotics into it, and watched it flow into him.
It began to grow dark outside, but the desert heat was unremitting. He showed no signs of waking up. At last she made the decision, and rolled up her sleeves, drew her mask into place, and pulled the makeshift covers away from his legs.
They were a torn and meaty mess. There were scour marks where buckshot had grazed through the sides, long furrows where they’d burrowed in, and dark red wounds where they’d gone deep. They looked like a muddy battlefield, crusted with trenches and bomb-divots sprinkled with fragments of denim. She didn’t know where to begin.
Sweat dripped down her nose and caught in the mask. It was hot under the lights and the fan did little to relieve the dry heat. She stripped off her shirt and bent to work, wearing just a sports bra and her scrubs.
She began with something easy, cleansing a shallow furrow around his right ankle. If she did it piece-meal, allowing the existing sealed scabs to hold, then perhaps he’d keep most of his blood in him. She began to think of his body as a precious bag, one she had to keep intact so the liquid inside wouldn’t leak.
Cleansing the interior of the shallow line, like a seed-line plowed into a field, turned her stomach. There didn’t seem to be enough skin left to seal it over again. Scraping away the crust of blood gently with alcohol and a cloth, she saw the raw pink and red of inflamed skin and muscle beneath. Was it infected? She couldn’t tell. Fresh blood began to seep up like water bubbling through porous cloth. She splashed alcohol and disinfectant liberally, which mixed with the blood and ran pink down the sides of his leg, darkening the white stretcher sheets.
There didn’t seem to be any bits of shrapnel in this gouge. She swallowed back her gorge and took up one of the threaded needles. It couldn’t have been further from the needlework she’d done as a kid, but surely the principle was the same. Grabbing the edge of the skin was hard, and piercing it with the needle was tougher than she expected.
She pushed it through with a little pop. The thread ran through his skin like a shoelace through an eyelet, stopping at the crude knot. She scooped into the other edge of the wound, blotting furiously now with gauze to clear her view, and pulled the thread taut. The wound zippered closed, but in doing so cracked the scabs on other wounds on his leg, which began to leak blood through their caked platelets.
"Shit," she cursed. She hadn't though of that.
So it became an awful, bloody race. She needled the rest of that gouge in one long thread, then tightened it up like a corset before tying it off. Half a dozen other wounds, each deeper and more severe, were bleeding now too. She leaned back and saw that his face was white.
"What the hell," she muttered. It was too hard. She was going to spend all night on this, and lose him still. But what else could she do? She already felt exhausted from driving through the night, emotionally drained, but it had to be done.
"Stop pussyfooting around," she whispered to herself. She bent back to his leg, and dived into one of the biggest, darkest wounds, trying a new theory. If she could seal those up first, then perhaps there’d be less blood leaking out when she pulled the smaller ones tight.
It was deep a hole dug squarely into his calf. There was only a shallow crust of blood over the top, and when she broke through it began to well up profusely. She felt sick. She dug into the hole with one of her pliers. She rooted around, grateful the only sound was his smooth breathing, until she hit something hard. Bone or metal? No way to know. She dug deeper until she got a grip then pulled. It shifted, but caught on something. To pull harder would do more damage, potentially tearing ligament or a muscle.
She pulled out and went at it on a different angle. She clamped it again, and this time it came free with a sucking breath. She held it up, feeling dizzy. It was a bead of metal as big as a nail head. She dropped it with a clank into the kidney bowl, had another root in the well to check it was alone, then sewed up the hole. It took only a few stitches to pout it closed, sealing off the bl
ood flow.
Already his leg was looking better. Still there were a dozen gouges to deal with on that leg alone, and she could barely dare to look at the other, but order was beginning to come to the chaos. It wasn't so bad.
She got on.
By dawn of the next day, it was done. Both his legs were a forest of blue thread, drawing strange patterns across his disinfectant-tangy skin, painted a dark brown. The sheets were a mess of pale blood and dark clots. The air stank of iron and iodine. The kidney bowl was heavy with the weight of lead she’d pulled out of him, like extracted teeth.
She bandaged him up in a daze, seeing colors and shapes in the air. A zombie tugged at her sleeve. She rolled Amo carefully onto his side, stabilizing him with pillows. She refreshed his drip. His breathing was shallow and his face was drawn and pale.
There was nothing more she could do. She fed the generator to keep the fan going, then fell blood-smeared and sweaty onto a sofa, and passed out at once. If he survived or not was up to him now.
25. SURVIVORS
There's an ache in my whole body. I'm lying on my side. I recognize a hospital room. Hot light streams in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, overlooking low suburbs and orange desert. There's a red sofa by the window and lying upon it is Lara. She looks shattered, asleep, rumpled in a thin white sheet.
My mouth is dry, my eyes hurt. I try to roll onto my back but I can't, there's some kind of frame holding me in position. I crane my neck to look at it, but even that much movement starts something screaming in my legs.
A gray figure with a cratered gray face shuffles into view. A janitor, maybe?
"Hey," I say. My voice sounds like rustling sand.
He says nothing. A few others shuffle with him, two doctors, a nurse, and some girl in dungarees. It's weird but I can't complain.
"Thanks for coming."
They say nothing. I remember Don, and wonder if these ones may turn too.
"Not feeling hungry, are you?" I rasp. My throat hurts. My forearm hurts. I look down and see a drip line feeding in. The bag it connects to is half-empty, hanging over my head.
So Lara saved me?
I guess so. I feel dizzy still.
"Hey Lara," I try to shout. Am I laughing, it's hard to tell. I sound more like Muttley, a canine barking laugh. She turns in her sleep. She must've had a hard time, saving me. I should let her rest.
I got shot with a shotgun. I should let me rest. I close my eyes and sweet, nourishing sleep finds me again in seconds.
* * *
She watched him for three days and three nights, as he lay in a coma-like torpor in the hospital’s eastern wing, by a window overlooking a therapeutic Las Vegas garden.
“Only old people and junkies,” she murmured to herself, standing at the window. She’d had the thought many times, based on the types of floaters she’d released from their wardroom ‘cells’. It was a wonderful kind of emancipation.
There were dozens of them trapped in rooms, old people whose hearts had given out while riding a roll in their casinos, young guys and girls with caved-in noses from too much heroin, and the wrinkled faces of zombies to boot, thumping sluggishly against their windows and doors.
She let them out, and let them follow her. In their rooms she studied their charts while they crowded around her. This one was Anne Gideon, she suffered from gout. She looked like she was well over that now. Here was Toby McTavish, broken leg in three places. It didn’t show.
She wandered round the hospital, from the canteen on the second floor to the lobby and through the staff rooms, up to the roof, where she looked over the tawdry conglomeration of Strip buildings, a few blocks of cheap motels with their dark blue swimming pools away.
She checked in on Amo frequently. She rarely went farther than the hospital forecourt, for fear he might wake while she was gone.
She kept the drips going into him, and his body sucked them down. She dressed and salved his wounds twice a day, once in the morning and once at night. They seemed to be healing extremely quickly, more than normal, but what was normal now? She’d read about him shooting himself in the head and surviving. It was a new world.
The skin was tight and inflamed, but puckering in places around the stitches. Towards the end pulling the wounds closed had taken all her strength, with the constant worry she’d rip open some of the other stitches to make them all fit. There just wasn’t enough skin left to cover all his muscle. She’d gotten most of it though.
He mumbled and stirred in his sleep. She stroked his hot forehead with a cool damp cloth.
He opened his eyes. He looked right up at her, and her heart leapt in her chest.
"Hey," he said.
Her jaw dropped. Tears at once raced down her cheeks.
"S’OK," he mumbled. He patted at her hand with his own. “Don’t cry.”
"I’m not," she said, though her eyes were streaming. "God, it's good to see you."
"You too." He was smiling, that same mischievous grin he'd given her at Rien, when he'd pulled her hand over and 'blessed' her with happiness. Now he was lying all torn up in a Las Vegas hospital. "You followed me."
She blinked away tears and laughed. "You made it easy. Cairns, Amo? The 'f'?"
His smiled widened. "A symbol for our modern age."
"And Pac-Man?"
He laughed, but it obviously hurt and he stopped. "A bit of fun. His mouth opened and closed."
"I saw that. Brilliant touch."
He closed his eyes then, and she thought perhaps he'd drifted back to unconsciousness, but then they opened again, a gentle, amused hazel.
"Good luck with the zombies," he said.
She frowned. "What?"
He laughed again, stopped again. "Good luck. You wrote it on a note in my room. You left it behind."
The memory of that came flooding back; such a strange, throwaway message, ultimately so prophetic. She laughed too.
"I guess we both had good luck."
He smiled and his eyes closed again.
"I'm glad. It's good. Poor old Don."
Then he was under. She watched him for a time, sleeping peacefully now. The color was back in his face. His breath came in deep, clear flows. He was alive, because of her.
* * *
She took photos. She went out onto the Strip and photographed the skeleton that had to be 'Don'. She took pictures of the cheerleaders tethered to the car, trying to piece together what must have happened. She tracked the blood trail and gouge-marks in the battle-tank's side to the back corner, where the emergency back door hung open.
The area behind the back seat was stained with blood. She rooted inside and found two guns scattered on the floor, one fully discharged, one two bullets short. There had been a struggle. She took photos and video.
She cut the cheerleaders free. Part of her expected them to come at her like the others must have gone for Don, but they didn't. They walked right past, heading west. They'd clearly had their fill of people. They faded into the heat-haze.
She gathered Don's bones up in a bucket. It was strange they all fit so well. She opened his pack, left inside the battle-tank, and looked through the contents. A bottle of whiskey, a Bible with half the pages torn out, a journal that documented mostly only the blandest of observations; the weather, the zombie count, how many roads he'd covered and where he might strike for next.
There was an occasional entry on his loneliness. It seemed to bite into him more sharply than it ever had into her. There were two passages of nothing more than harshly scribbled expletives written in capital letters, followed by passages of regret the next day.
She didn't understand fully what he kept the cheerleaders for, but she suspected. There were no lurid mementoes in his pack, no evidence, but she tried to imagine the exchange he'd have had with Amo, who saw the ocean now as good, living, willful beings.
It went badly between them. Perhaps it hadn't had to, but then how could she know? She didn't even know him, o
r Amo either, not really.
She buried Don's bones in the sand, and left his sword sticking into the ground like a headstone. He had been a survivor, like her. He'd been alone for too long. Perhaps they could have been friends. They all deserved better.
She closed up the tank. The floaters were all gone now. Las Vegas was a ghost town. Standing on the hot asphalt, she looked up and down the broad Strip, dotted with emergency vehicles and stretch limos pulled to the sides. So much life, lost. Evolved.
Back in the hospital, she found Amo awake.
* * *
My legs burn and all my efforts to sit up fail. Instead I lie on my belly and lean back, painstakingly unpeeling the bandaging. The skin down my legs is tarnished yellow with disinfectant, and a loop-de-loop train-yard of blue stitch tracks, following wounds that spray across like the beams of a lighthouse. My skin looks alien, body parts wrinkled and preserved in formaldehyde, and the sight throws me into shock.
I look away and breathe into my pillow for twenty minutes, willing the body-horror away. Soon enough the flop-sweat and nausea fade, and I look again. They are repulsive, but I can begin to admire the work Lara has done. It's pretty amazing, considering. I suppose baristas have very deft fingers.
I slump back, thinking hard. Don did this. I shot him in the guts and I sent the zombies to kill him. Do I regret that?
I'm not sure. I don't regret surviving.
I swivel slowly on the hard stretcher-bed on my belly, and reach for a bottle of mineral water on the side-table. The movement causes the drip line to pull tight, jerking me to a stop, and I watch as a flow of my own blood begins to feed back up into the line. What the hell? I watch for a second in fascination, as this life-giving tube sucks my own blood up into it, then I pinch the tube and the flow stops.
I pull the needle out of my forearm, and a little blood flows from the needle-hole but it peters out when I press my thumb on it. I toss the line away and it spits my blood onto the floor. It's OK, I'm making more. I tape up the hole then rotate slowly, so my head is at the tail of the stretcher, watching the door for Lara's return.