The Remaining: Refugees (36 page)

Arterial bleeding…

Lee pulled his right hand off and began searching his tactical vest for the flashlight he kept clipped there. Underneath his other hand, he could feel Jake writhing and his groans were beginning to become screams. He found the flashlight and clicked it on. The tiny spear of light suddenly illuminated Jake’s face and his eyes were shut tight, his teeth clenched and red.

“Hey buddy,” Lee tried to sound calm. “I need you to hang on. This is gonna hurt like a motherfucker.” He pulled his other hand off the wound and probed it with two fingers. “You ready?”

“No!” Jake gasped. “Don’t hurt me!”

“Just hang on…” Lee grit his teeth and pushed his fingers into the wound.

The breath caught in Jake’s throat. He jerked away from the touch, and Lee could feel the muscle
s
in Jake’s
chest contract around his two fingers. The breath came out of him in a shriek.

“Hold on
!
” Lee
shouted over the
cries and tried to concentrate
. He could feel the blood
squishing past
his fingers. He just had to find where it was coming from. He had to find it, and clamp it off.
Three other flashlights came on, bathing everyone in harsh white light that blanched their features into pale, haggard masks.

Julia appeared
, kneeling down at Jake’s other side and ripping her medical pack open.
She pulled out a pair of shears and went to work on the hooded sweatshirt. “Gimme some light!” she ordered. “On the wound!”

The flashlights all shifted to focus on Jake’s chest, the different angles casting the shadow of Lee’s hands off in separate directions. “He’s got a clipped artery, I think.” Lee looked at Julia. “Maybe a collapsed lung.”

She nodded quickly, hair flying in her face as she delved into her pack.

“Hey, Cap!” LaRouche hollered. “We gotta move it upstairs! There’s no way the infected didn’t hear that shit!”

Lee looked at Julia again to see what she thought. She had one hand touching Jake’s femoral artery, and the other on his carotid. After a brief moment of concentration, she made eye-contact with Lee and shook her head quickly.

“BP’s already too low.” As she spoke, she began rifling through the contents of her pack, withdrawing sterile dressings, hemostats, scalpels, and some sterile-packaged items that Lee didn’t know the name of. “
He’s bleeding out too fast.
We gotta stabilize it right now, or we’re gonna lose him
.”

“OH JESUS!” Jake suddenly screamed. “FUCK!”  He tried to say something else, but dissolved into a coughing fit. He thrashed around as he coughed and swatted at Lee’s fingers, still inside the wound.

“Jim!” Lee called out. “Hold him down!” He could feel the pressure of the blood stream on the tip of
his finger. “I almost got it…a
lmost got it
..
.”

Julia held out a pair of hemostats. “When you find it, clamp it.”

Jake’s breathing became rapid and shallow.

“He’s hyperventilating,” Julia said with a note of detachment. “Try to breathe deep, hon. Slow, deep breaths.”

Jim knelt down at Jake’s head and took both of the kid’s hands in his. “That’s it, Jake. You’re doing great. Slow down your breathing for me, okay? Slow it down. All the way in, all the way out.”

Jake gaped up at Jim, tears streaming down his face. “It hurts…it really hurts.”

“I know, buddy,” Jim said soothingly. “You gotta hang on for just a little longer, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I think I got it,” Lee said. He closed his eyes. In the slick moving parts of Jake’s chest cavity, the blood spewing from that artery was pressing at his fingers, but the pulse was growing weaker by the second. Lee realized that he was kneeling in a puddle of Jake’s blood.
He pushed deeper.

A faint cry and a groan. Jake was close to passing out.

“Cap!” LaRouche’s voice sounded out. “I’ve got contact!”

Lee’s eyes snapped open and he looked up. LaRouche was leaning partially out of the door, the barrel of his rifle nosed out of the crack. “You gotta give me some time!”

“Fuck!” LaRouche’
s
stance
tightened up.
“
I got five
infected
comin’ around the corner…”

There. The firm, fleshy tube of a large artery.

“I got it!” He grabbed the hemostat from Julia’s fingers. “Everyone get ready to grab Jake and haul ass up these stairs
!”
Lee put his flashlight in his mouth and tasted the sharp coppery tang of Jake’s blood.

“We gotta move!” LaRouche bellowed and started pulling the trigger.

The confined space shook as the rounds blasted out.

Lee hooked his finger around the throbbing artery and fed the tip of the hemostat down along his index finger until he could feel its tiny jaws around the bloodway, and then he clamped it down. If he’d been in a hospital, or any other setting, he would have checked to see if he’d stopped the bleeding, but they just didn’t have the time.

He pulled his fingers out of the wound, leaving the hemostat dangling out, trembling with each of Jake’s hitching breaths. “It’s clamped! Go!”

Hands shot forward in a flash, seizing Jake’s arms and legs
,
and the bore him up
so quickly that it seemed to Lee that Jake simply disappeared from beneath him. By the time Lee grabbed his rifle from where it lay in the coagulating red pool, they’d already hauled him up the first section of stairs, Julia following beside with a rifle in one hand and her medical pack in the othe
r, shouting at them not to knock the hemostat loose.

The clatter of a magazine across the floor.

“Reloading!” LaRouche called.

Lee surged toward the door as LaRouche slammed a fresh magazine into his rifle. He shouldered past him and pulled the door shut. Immediately the door lurched under his grasp, a live thing trying to get away from him. Angry fists pounded the other side, nails scratching in panicked desperation at the door. The infected on the other side made short, sharp barking calls, excited, signaling to the others that they had found live prey.

“Get the crowbar out of my pack!”

LaRouche looked around blindly for a moment. With the rest of the team retreating up the stairs, they were taking their flashlight
s
with them and the room was falling into darkness again. Then, at the base of the stairs, another light appeared and it was Jim holding it.

“What are you doing?” he yelled at them.

“We’re gonna block the door,” LaRouche
shouted back with a littl
e anger. “Gimme some light here!
”

Something hard hit the door and it jerked outwards so hard that it almost pulled Lee off his feet. The door cleared the jam for a second and through that tiny crack, Lee saw a flash of what waited on the other side. Dozens of faces with wide eyes and bloody maws leered in at him and pressed themselves forward. Behind them, he could see the corner of the building that led to the alleyway, and more of them were coming around the corner.

He heaved and managed to close the door again. “Hurry the fuck up!”

“Got it…” LaRouche yanked the crowbar out of the pack and rushed to Lee’s side with it. He worked it around Lee’s white-knuckled hands and into the door handle, then jammed it all the way through. “Move!”

Lee didn’t wait to see if the barricade would hold. He spun on the balls of his feet and sprinted for the stairs, scooping up his pack as he ran. Ahead of him, Jim stood at the base of the stairs waving them on, his rifle held at a low ready.
Lee
shoved him as he ran by, encouraging him to follow them as
he and LaRouche
pounded up the stairs two at a time.

Behind them, the door rattled violen
tly
. Lee’s legs felt frail and wobbly, his muscles soft and his blood diluted and watery. He couldn’t take the stairs fast enough
, had only cleared the first landing…

The sound of metal clanking on the ground.

The door burst open.

Screeches and roars and the tumble of bare feet.

It was over. They wouldn’t be able to outrun
them
, so now they had to fight. He dipped his head into the loop of his rifle’s sling, letting it hang on his neck like a gigantic pendant, and then slung into his pack—it contained everything, including his GPS, and he could not leave it behind. Then he turned and looked down the stairs as the first of the mad creatures came scurrying around the corner, one filthy set of claws clutching the banister and the other reaching for him, its mouth agape.

A well-placed double tap sent the thing sprawling backwards into its denmates where it fell to the stairs and was trampled under their feet.

As Lee swung his muzzle towards the next and nearest target, he began
backpedaling, up the stairs.
He moved his feet blindly, feeling the edge of the step with his toes and then launching himself backwards until he pulled his foot behind him and it caught.

He felt his balance leave him.

Only a
few
steps down from him, an infected loped towards him on all fours, its mouth spread grotesquely wide, its tongue hanging out.

Lee fell backwards, clinging to his rifle.

This was it.

But then he felt a hand grab the drag-strap of his tactical vest and he felt himself get a little l
ighter
.
Someone had a hold of him and they were dragging him
backwards up the stairwell. In his right peripheral he could see the muzzle of an M4 resting against his shoulder. It blossomed a white-hot rose of fire, and Lee felt the heat on his fac
e, but he didn’t hear the noise, didn’t seem to hear anything outside of his own breath and blood.

The face of the infected on all fours seemed to suddenly flatten in on itself as though it had run headlong into an invisible wall. It fell instantly, spread eagle upon the steps.

Lee shouldered his rifle again.

Targets popped up.

Flashing thunder knocked them down.

Just like the reactive steel targets in basic.

Reload.

Keep shooting.

Keep backpedaling.

Reality seemed warped. In the strange darkness of the stairwell, lit by the strobing of their muzzle flashes, each section of stairs looked the same as the last, with
dark, hollow
eyes and snarling teeth below them. His legs burned as he thrust himself up each
riser
and he could not remember how many flights
of stairs
he had
ascended
.

It seemed without end.

H
e
reloaded
his rifle for
a
third time
and when he brought the muzzle up and slapped the slide release,
feeling the bolt clunk forward,
chamber
ing
that next round, there was nothing
below him
to target
.
The stairs were a hollow well beneath his feet that hung heavy with swirling clouds of cordite.