Commune: Book Two (Commune Series 2) Page 10

  I ripped open the standard gauze package and wrapped up the whole leg.

  I looked up at the kid and was surprised to see another young male standing behind him. They were both teenaged boys with brown hair, rail thin, and looked so much alike that it would have been funny under different circumstances.

  “What was your name again? Greg?”

  The kid nodded his head, eyes frightened.

  “Put your hand on that leg and push down hard,” I commanded. He jumped to do so as though he had been goosed.

  I turned and grabbed one of the chairs lining the wall. Laying it on its side, I proceeded to curb stomp the living hell out of one of the legs. When it had bent far enough that kicking wouldn’t get me any further, I grabbed it and started wrenching it back and forth like I was trying to yank the horn off a rhino. It didn’t take me very long to snap the cheap metal tubing. I could hear the shouts of pursuing men and women outside in the street. They were taking their time and being careful; I suspected I may have hit one or more of them with my wild shooting. Even so, they were getting closer.

  I twisted and ripped some paracord out of a side pouch on my rig, cut off a six foot length, and jammed the remainder back into the pouch. I doubled the severed length, wrapped it around Jessica’s leg, and tied it off above the gunshot wound.

  “Okay, move your hand, Greg,” I urged. He did, and I could see that all the bandaging was on its way to being soaked through, despite the clotting agent. “Fu-uck,” I growled under my breath.

  I jammed the broken chair leg under the lash and started cranking it in circles like a windlass, clamping down savagely on her whole leg until it looked fit to pop off her body. “Hold!” I commanded Greg, who reached out and kept the improvised windlass positioned over her knee while I got another length of paracord going. I tied the bottom end of the metal tubing at her knee joint, securing the whole tourniquet in place. I jammed my fingers into her neck under the bend of her jaw and held my breath. I failed to find a pulse but that didn’t necessarily mean anything; I was frantic and moving fast. It may have just been so faint that I couldn’t detect it under those conditions.

  I looked up at the kids and said, “Alright, you two: get her on her feet and each of you take an arm. You-“ I gestured to the woman standing back in the corner, “name?”

  “Alish,” she said.

  “Good. Alish, there’s a trail of blood out there that’s going to lead those people right into this room. Find us a rear exit; get us going north towards 38th.”

  “And what makes you think we’re coming with you?” she said in a low voice. “We were fine until you brought all that along!” She threw a hand at the door as she said this.

  I pinned her with my best no-shit stare. “Lady, you come with me or you take your chances here. I appreciate you waving me in here but I’m not in a ‘pretty please’ mood. Make a decision now.” I swiveled back on the teenaged boys, who had not moved. “I said pick her…the fuck…up.”

  They did.

  I looked back at Alish, who still appeared to be thinking about the best way to respond to me. “Move, goddamn you,” I growled. “You can hurl insults and slap the shit out of me later.”

  This finally seemed to get the point across; she shook her head once, turned, and pushed past the boys as they were hoisting Jessica off the counter. She went through a door that led deeper into the building.

  “You two keep up with her,” I said. I wiped my bloody hands across my thighs, not wanting to spare the time to screw with my water carrier. I had baby wipes back at the bus. “I’ll cover the rear and shoot anything that moves.”

  They reversed direction and heaved through the door, each of them with one of Jessica’s arms braced over their shoulders. I dove through behind them, emerging into a much darker back office area filled with a little cubicle farm. I reached up with my thumb to turn on my weapon light; one of the boys in front of me (not Greg) hunched slightly at the sudden illumination throwing the room into high relief and looked back over his shoulder at me. I pulled the muzzle of my rifle around to the side to keep from blinding him with all one thousand of the little light’s lumens and said, “Don’t look directly at the light, man! You’ll spend the next ten minutes walking into walls.” Saying nothing, he turned his head back around to face forward and continued to negotiate the grid of walled-in desks.

  We pushed through into an adjoining rear storage area that qualified as little more than a closet, all five of us stacking up on top of each other in the cramped space.

  “This leads outside,” Alish said.

  “Okay, let me stick my head out first,” I replied, and nudged through to the front of the line. I heard Jessica moan as I jostled past her and experienced a moment of simultaneous relief and panic; relief that she could still vocalize and panic that she was fast running out of time.

  At the door, I pulled my rifle up tight and, without looking at Alish, said, “Pull that open.” As her hand closed around the knob, I killed the weapon light. A brilliant, white point of illumination appeared floating out in space; immediately stretched into a needle-thin line spanning from floor to ceiling. Even after the brightness of the weapon light, I felt as though the image of that crack must be burning into my retina. I had just enough time to squint before the line widened and distorted, dimming from pure white to the muted drab of a back alley. The doorway framed the rear end of another small business building of some sort; there was trash built up outside on the ground and I could make out the side of a dumpster from my position. I pushed forward to stick my head out.

  The alley was clear in either direction, though I could hear shouts of pursuit now amplified due to the fact that I was no longer enclosed in a building. It sounded like whoever was after us were coming down on our heads but I pulled a deep breath to calm myself. I knew and was counting on the fact that cities, with all of their hard, flat surfaces of different shapes and sizes pointing in multiple directions, did strange things to soundwaves. The people chasing after us could be right around the corner or a couple of blocks over. I stepped out into the alley and positioned myself across from the door, trying to be ready to shoot in either direction with a minimum of delay.

  “Okay, let’s go,” I whispered. “Head to my left and keep to the alley. Wait for me to get in front of you before crossing the street and remember: if we can hear them they can hear us. No talking above a whisper.”

  Alish nodded and came out first, followed by the two boys (or young men, I guess; they looked an awful lot to me like some joker had glued baby heads onto teenage bodies), and I crowded in behind them. I divided my attention between looking back behind us and monitoring Jessica’s leg to see if we were leaving a blood trail. So far, it appeared that my field dressing was doing its job; there was plenty of blood on her leg from before, which was drying up already, but nothing new was flowing down her leg or making a trail that could be followed. On the other hand, her whole thigh was now a livid purple color and was noticeably swollen in size compared to the other. Thoughts of what that meant came before I could stop them and I shook my head angrily, trying to dispel them like they were some obnoxious swarm of gnats. This technique is equally effective for both thoughts and gnats, by the way; it is completely inadequate.

  Before I expected it, I felt myself bump into the heels of Jessica and her bearers. I realized we must be at a cross street and tried to remember how deep into this area we had gotten from 38th and the Blake Street overpass, finding (with some measure of disgust at myself) that I could not. Because we were in an alleyway rather than an actual street, there were no signs within view to tell me where we were or how far we had to go. I rushed past everyone to the mouth of the alley to look up and down the street. It was empty; however our pursuers had also gone quiet, so it was even harder to place them on the mental map I had going in my head.

  “Wait for my signal,” I said, and then ran across the street to the alley on the opposing side. Once there, I turned back to face my littl
e group of people and looked along the cross street, focusing primarily on the south east direction; this had me looking back at Walnut as it ran parallel to our alleyway. There was no movement or other evidence of pursuit, so I beckoned at the others to follow. As they came, I braced my left shoulder up against a building corner and kept my eyes glued on Walnut. I could see my new friends coming out of my peripheral vision and was pleased to note that the boys, though young in appearance, were able to make some good speed even though they were lugging a nearly unresponsive casualty between them. Adrenaline or not, they were stronger than they looked.

  I waited for them to pass me and then fell in behind them. As I turned to follow, I heard the sound of breaking glass and the sharp, multi-crack of small arms fire. It sounded like they were crawling right up into my colon.

  I called up ahead of me while still trying to maintain some kind of a whisper (I guess you’d call it a stage whisper at that point), saying: “Hang a left up here as soon as you see a clear path to the next street over!” I couldn’t be sure where our pursuers were, but if they were in the little office where we had packed Jessica’s leg it was a good bet they’d be spilling out into our alley very soon. I wanted them to have to guess which direction we were going rather than just be able to see us and start chasing. Alish and the boys were able to make the turn almost as soon as I finished speaking and we found ourselves trotting north east up Blake shortly after.

  We soon approached a cross street and I squinted to see the name printed out on the street sign: 31st. I groaned internally, realizing that made it about seven blocks to where I wanted to be, give or take. I put my head down and reminded myself that I didn’t have to hump the distance while carrying Jessica; she wasn’t a fatty by any means at all but she was curvy and carried some good muscle besides. I had already been panting by the time I set her down earlier and I hadn’t carried her a great distance at all. If I had needed to make the trip to the bus without help, I’m pretty sure we would have been boned.

  Not wanting to deal mentally with the total distance we needed to travel, I employed a little trick that just about every Marine or Soldier figures out at some point; I broke the trip down into smaller sections and focused only on completing the next little part that was directly in front of me. We talk about mental resilience or resolve all the time but sometimes, the job is just too goddamned big to deal with; you just figure there’s no way in hell you’re getting it done. Running five more miles after you’ve just run ten might be mentally crushing but there’s a good chance you can always run another hundred yards. If a hundred yards gets too tough to handle, you can always run another fifty feet. In the end, no matter how far you’ve gone, you can always find the strength to take one more step. You think to yourself: Five miles? Fuck you, I might as well just lie down and die. There’s no way I’m getting five more miles out of these legs.

  But in the time it takes you to think that, you’ve taken ten more steps. It’s all about chaining a series of little steps together in a sequence, one after the other, in a consistent direction; chipping away at the task until it’s achieved. Amass a large pile of tiny victories. You can always take just one more step.

  As we hugged the wall of buildings on our right, I turned to look behind us and saw nothing. No pursuers, no doors suddenly opening, no heads suddenly poking out. I heard nothing but our footfalls and our labored breathing. I faced forward and asked, “How we doing up there?”

  Neither of the boys answered but the one on the right (I think it was Greg) gave me a sharp nod of the head. The knuckles of both the boys’ hands were white where they were wrapped around Jessica’s wrists. For her part, Jessica was limp; her head lolled around uselessly and her feet dragged behind her. I would have to rotate one of them out very soon. We passed another street and I looked up at the sign as we went by: 34th.

  Still no sign of pursuit. Good deal. I began to make plans for when we got to the bus; trying to figure out what I was going to do for Jessica’s leg. I kept coming up against the same wall; the most training I got in field medicine took me just far enough to stop bleeding and stabilize a casualty long enough for real medics to arrive. I didn’t know anything about dealing with a nicked or severed artery. Back when I was still working within a functional military, you typically shipped your wounded back to the forward surgical team (or FST) and let them handle treatment. I imagined that, in this case, such a team would have to open the leg up a bit and sew the artery shut to kill the bleeding. I hadn’t the first clue how to do this. Maybe I could amputate and cauterize the leg but that had its own set of problems. She had lost more blood than I cared to consider, most of it crusting up in a giant sheet down my back. There was simply no blood to pump into her to replace what she had lost; any supplies that were still available in blood banks or hospitals had long since died out when all the refrigeration failed. I had no idea what her blood type was and, even if I did, I still didn’t have the tools or the knowledge necessary to take any out of a donor and pump it back into her. If she was going to live, she was going to have to replace whatever she lost the old fashioned way: metabolizing it naturally via nutrients and water.

  Blood is manufactured in the body’s bone marrow. Some of the largest bones in the body are found in the leg; precisely the part of her I was thinking about hacking off. Even assuming she survived the shock and trauma of a limb removal, never mind the amount of blood loss sustained, there was still the risk of probable infection to deal with. There was a small amount of broad spectrum antibiotics in my blowout kit and probably a bit more in the ruck that I had taken off the deceased Soldier (Adams, I reminded myself; his name was Adams) but I was certain there would only be enough to get me to a nonexistent FST. A partial course wasn’t going to get the job done for Jessica. I was afraid that, in the end, Jessica’s survival was going to come down to Jessica and her inherent inner strength; how stubborn she was naturally. Unfortunately, the kind of wound that she had sustained tends to take the fight right out of a person.

  I looked up as we passed another street; 36th. The Blake overpass was in sight, thank you Jesus.

  “Alish, I need you to get in here and spell one of the kids,” I called ahead.

  “Take over for Alan,” Greg grunted. “I’m still good for a while.”

  The two swapped places and the younger of the two boys got out ahead of us. I moved ahead to walk alongside of him and said, “We’re going to 38th,” I said. “If you don’t know where that is, the street we’re on right now goes over it. When we get there, we’ll have to veer off at the last minute to get under the bridge, understand?”

  The boy named Alan nodded and said, “Where are you taking us?”

  “I have friends up Washington Street waiting for us. There’s a bus – we can get the hell out of here.”

  “What if we don’t want to get out of here?”

  I took a deep breath, blew it out through my lips. “Fine. Once we get my friend back to the bus, you three are free to go.”

  “We should just leave her,” Alish said from behind me. “She’s not going to make it; I think she may have passed already.”

  Without turning around to look at her, I said, “Drop her at your own fucking peril, lady.” She said nothing in response.

  I glanced back at Alan and said, “Sorry, kid. You guys don’t have any choice but to help me lug her back. If you try to cut and run, I swear to god I’ll mow all three of you down, even if that means I bring our new friends down on top of my head. If you want to stick with us, I can promise that I’ll do the same for you if the day ever comes when it’s necessary. Failing that, you’ll be free to scamper off once she’s unloaded.”

  Alan glanced over at me and I could see him working it over in his head. I wondered if I’d actually be able to shoot them if they just dropped Jessica and ran off. I mean, it was definitely within my skillset to tag all three of them without very much trouble; I just wondered if I’d be able to squeeze the trigger. I told myself ‘Absolutely’
, but the deeper part of me (the honest part) suggested that I would only watch as they left me behind, mentally jammed between calling after them and just sitting down on the sidewalk next to Jessica to wait and fight it out with whoever happened by.

  Finally, he said, “Okay. We’d probably do the same thing, anyway.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and fell back to the rear.

  Blake Street ran over 38th as a bridge overpass; as we approached our goal, we found our way barred by a waist-high metal fence protecting us from a ten foot drop to 38th below us. We had to swing right about eighty feet to get around the fence and onto 38th to achieve a path that would take us underneath the bridge. I was just starting to breathe easy; I had built it up in my head that passing under Blake was our ticket to freedom. We just had to get on the other side of that and we were well on our way to safety.

  Before we could round the fence to 38th, I heard a shout, the sound of gunfire coming from much closer than I would have liked, and a ricochet from only a few yards away.

  “Go, go, GO!” I barked at the others, turned, and dropped into a crouch. There were three people only a few hundred feet away that had taken up position under some trees a few streets over; they were almost directly south from my position. I dropped into a prone position to give them the smallest target possible and lined them up in my sight. I got good center mass hits on two of them; the third ran off down the street like trailer trash racing to Walmart on Black Friday. I got up and ran to catch up with the others.

  “Let’s pick the pace up, guys,” I bawled. “We’re getting some company real quick.”

  The three of them really started hoofing and we made better time up the street but it still felt agonizingly slow to me. I used to have nightmares about this kind of running gun fight when I was in Iraq, nightmares that continued long after I had left the Corps (when I wasn’t having the standard “You’ve been reactivated and we’re deploying you tomorrow!” bad dream). Contrary to what TV and movies would have you believe, getting into a firefight isn’t the end of the world. Many times, especially in the city, the people you were shooting at were so far out that you only ever hit them if you got lucky; maybe five or six hundred yards. They were just close enough to have us in range of their 7.62 (which wasn’t that big a deal as their AKs weren’t exactly sniper rifles and they weren’t exactly snipers) but just outside of the effective range of our 5.56, which meant guys like me didn’t have a lot to do outside of barking out instructions to the radioman or walking our machine gunner onto a target. We’d be positioned behind some shitty dirt wall somewhere or stationed up on a rooftop and just take shots to keep them pinned down, blow the hell out of any vehicles that looked like they were coming our way, and either call in some air support or wait for the QRF to show up. Sometimes it even got boring enough that we’d start cracking jokes here and there just to keep entertained. It was pretty easy to stay calm and collected when you knew you had the whole of the Allied Forces backing your play and prepared to drop ordinance on all the Allahu Snackbars out there. If you had to be in a firefight, that was the way you wanted it to go.