The first thing to do is tourniquet my arm. I know that—that much I remember, and besides it’s obvious, the wound is bleeding like a rushing faucet, great gouts of bright red blood exploding out of my arm, darkening my shirt and coat and puddling between my shoes in the mud and the dirt. Brett’s dead body beside me on the ground.
It’s funny because I’m watching it, this fountain of blood, and it’s happening to someone else, like this is some other man’s arm exploded arm, another man’s torn suit coat and pulsing wound. That one sharp instant of terrible pain I felt at impact has completely receded, and the wound, high on my right arm, at the biceps, is something I can see, and register as severe, but not feel.
This is shock. This absence of feeling is the result of the adrenaline flooding my system, rushing through my veins like seawater crashing the breached holds of a ship. I examine my arm like it’s a joint at the butcher’s counter: a gunshot trauma to the brachial artery, and I’m losing blood quickly, too quickly, precious milliliters gushing out onto the dirt field of Fort Riley. I’ve had general first aid and CPR training and annual continuing education courses per Concord Police Department regulations, and I know what to expect here: blood loss, dizziness, coldness, clamminess, and finally a high risk of fever, high risks all the way around, gunshot wounds in general requiring immediate medical assistance—arterial gunshot wounds in particular. “High risk of loss of limb and/or death.”
I need to stabilize the wound and get to a hospital.
Brett is lying three feet away from me, sprawled out in the dirt. The horrible front-face wound, the stillness of his body. “That contract has been abrogated.” Why did he say that? What does that mean?
Focus, Palace. Tourniquet the wound.
“Okay,” I tell myself. “Geez.”
I scrabble in the dirt and come up with a short thick piece of wood. This is not going to work, not long-term, but I need to staunch the bleeding immediately—I needed to have done it thirty seconds ago—to remain on my feet, get to the bicycle and my first aid kit. I can use my necktie to cinch the wound, for now, but I reach up and my necktie is gone. I slipped it off, just yesterday—was it yesterday?—on the quad at UNH and now it’s lying somewhere along those winding paths like a shed snakeskin in the desert. I extend my left hand, trying as hard as I can to move only that side of my body, don’t jostle the wound; I lean forward and slowly pry off one shoe and then one sock. Wincing, I take the tip of the sock between my teeth and tie it off around my arm like a heroin addict, recalling the shabby gentleman I encountered in the grub tent, the old bearded addict. Here’s to you, sir, I think crazily as I jam the stick between the thin fabric and the flesh of my arm above the wound. I twist the sock tight around the stick and feel a radiating tingle as the blood starts to slow. I look down at the ragged hole in my arm and I can see the spurting of the blood begin to slow, to calm, turning into a bare trickle.
“There we go,” I say to my arm. “There we go.”
It still doesn’t hurt. The shock will wear off somewhere around a half hour from now, and then the pain will set in and intensify steadily over the following six to eight hours. I can see the words on the sea-green stapled booklet we got at EMT-First Responder training in the break room, black Helvetica lettering against the green background of the leaflet: TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE. Stabilize the wound rapidly and keep it stable until the victim can be moved to a hospital.
Hospital, Henry? What hospital?
The sock begins to loosen as soon as I release the grip of my teeth. It’ll last me maybe ten minutes. I stumble to my feet and limp toward the parking lot, toward my Red Rider Wagon full of supplies.
He’s Brett, is what everybody told me, he’s just Brett. Now I have some understanding of what they meant. A fascinating man, a force of nature. Charismatic, thoughtful, righteous and strange.
I’ve paused for a moment to rest at about the halfway point between the field where we were shot and the spot at the entrance to the parking lot where I’ve chained up my bike.
That contract has been abrogated, he said. What an odd word to import into the language of love: abrogated.
Among my regrets about what has just unfolded is that Brett never did ask me why I had come to find him, why I cared. I had my answer all figured out. Because a promise is a promise, Officer Cavatone, and civilization is just a bunch of promises, that’s all it is. A mortgage, a wedding vow, a promise to obey the law, a pledge to enforce it. And now the world is falling apart, the whole rickety world, and every broken promise is a small rock tossed at the wooden side of its tumbling form.
I explain all of these things to Brett as I trudge along, tugging my sock-tourniquet tighter and gasping at the first tingling promise of pain. I give him my answer even though he’s dead, and with each passing moment the odds are climbing that I’m going to die out here, too.
By the time I get to my bike, my improvised tourniquet is a dark bloody rag, and as soon as I peel it off the blood bursts forth. I fumble on the black pneumatic tourniquet from my first aid kit, cinch the cuff high on my arm, upstream of the wound, and inflate it as fast as I can, closing my eyes tightly as I squeeze and squeeze the bulb.
I pause, then. I am not dizzy yet, not yet experiencing severe pain. I can think now, for a moment I can think. From here I can see the road, the elbow bend in Route 3, and I can look up at the towering trees crowding in on the parking lot from all sides.
What hospital, Hank? I ask myself, dragging the question out of my consciousness and into the light—not meaning, which hospital will you choose? but rather, what operational hospital might be within biking distance of a fatigued man who has already suffered significant loss of blood? As much as a liter, maybe, half a liter easily. Portsmouth is the closest city, and I don’t even know if they have a functioning hospital anymore or if it’s all private duty. What about Durham? There must be a medical tent somewhere on the grounds of the Free Republic of New Hampshire, as there is a grub tent; somewhere in one of those basements some premed is boiling clamps and hypodermic needles in a lobster pot.
Will it be easier, I wonder, without the wagon? And I’m looking down at it, debating how risky or wise it might be to jettison the water and food and gauze and antiseptic to gain maybe three or four m.p.h. of travel speed. I’m crouching to look through how much water I have left anyway, and wishing it were more.
There. Now. Pain. There it is.
“Jesus.” I say the word, and then I scream it: “Jesus!” and throw my head back and scream again, louder. It hurts—it does—it hurts so much, a hot iron pressed against my biceps. I clutch the wounded arm with the other one and immediately let go and scream more.
I sink down, into a crouch, and close my eyes, and rock on my heels, and take a series of short and shallow breaths. “My God, my God.”
The pain is circling out from the impact site and burning into my shoulder, my chest, my neck, all the circuits of my upper body. More deep breaths, still down in my crouch, in the parking lot by the roadway. After several long moments the pain recedes, and I open my eyes and see on the ground with hallucinogenic clarity a single bright-orange leaf.