Holman tapped the top of the menu with one perfectly manicured finger. Wilkes lowered it to look at her.
The cold fury in her eyes might have turned another man to jelly on the spot.
“You’ll eat when Chapel is dead and you can prove it,” she told him.
Wilkes knew better than to snap back at her. “Ma’am,” he said, very quietly, very patiently, “when I shoot a man at point-blank range, he goes down.”
She shook her head. “Get the fuck back out there. Find me a body. And you’ll start operating according to our protocols from now on. Moulton tells me you weren’t even wearing your hands-free set during the operation. You broke communication with him at the most vital time.”
Dude’s a little turd, Wilkes thought, because he couldn’t say it out loud. He would have just distracted me. Out loud he said, “Yes, ma’am.”
Chapel couldn’t move. He was frozen in place. He tried to talk, but even his lips and tongue were completely immobile.
People surrounded him. Injured people.
People with pieces missing.
“I’ll take that arm, if he ain’t using it,” Ralph said, fiddling with the straps on his own prosthetic. “I mean, if that’s cool.”
“Dibs on his leg,” someone else said. “It’s not fair he got to keep it this whole time.”
“All of you, out of my way,” Top said, pushing the others away. He grinned down into Chapel’s face. “I got seniority here. Let me take a look at that eye,” he said, and his teeth started growing points. “You’re dead, army man. You’re dead and we’re not. Sure you see how that adds up.”
And then there were hands on him, hands at his knees and his shoulder, hands that twisted at his skin, twisted hard and his joints started coming unscrewed, his bits and pieces coming loose and there was less of him, less of him all the time …
Jim.
Everything faded away. It didn’t so much go black as it just vanished. All the people, the room, his body.
Just nothing left.
Nothing.
Jim. Can you hear me?
Jim!
So far away. So far away and calm. Nothing there to worry about, nothing that could hurt him now. He felt no remorse, no regrets. It was all going to be okay, because when there was nothing left, nothing mattered.
Blink or something! Please, Jim, stay with me!
A little bit of light touched him. It annoyed him, in that nonplace. He tried to move away from it, but the light just followed him around, and it kept getting brighter and brighter.
He’s not breathing —
I’ve got a pulse, but it’s —
Hold his legs, he’ll hurt himself thrashing like that —
The light tried to go away. For some reason that bothered him, so he chased after it. He had no legs, so he wasn’t running, but somehow he could move, move with the light, even as it fled away from him so fast, even as it dwindled until it was just a star on the horizon, until—
Until it went out.
With his eyes closed, there was nothing around him but sounds and smells. Some of the smells were repulsive. The stink of antiseptic cleaning products. The smell of his own body, which really needed a wash.
The sounds were better. They were soft, low sounds. Unobjectionable. The sound of his own breathing, of the air going into his body and then slowly, slowly leaking out. The rumbling, rolling hum of a washing machine in spin cycle, somewhere close by.
The tiny cascade of sound that hair made as it brushed the skin of his hand. The hair smelled good, too, so much better than he did. It smelled like a woman’s hair.
Soft lips touched the back of his hand. Fingers gripped his, held them tight. That felt good. It felt like those fingers would keep him from floating away again. From disappearing.
The hair brushed his hand again and this time he felt it, felt a thousand little tingles as each individual hair met the nerve endings in his flesh.
Would that hair be red or brown? He kind of wanted to know. He wanted to open his eyes and find out. He took a deep breath and consciously willed his eyelids to flutter open, so he could see, so he could—
The pain hit him so hard that tears burst across his vision. His head roared with blood and with agony and his whole torso spasmed and shook. It felt like he’d been nailed down to the floor with a huge iron spike. It felt like he was a bug pinned to a board, wriggling its legs desperately to try to get free, only hurting itself worse in its desperation.
“Jim! Jim, try not to move — try to calm down, I know it hurts, I know it hurts, but you’ll reopen your wound. We didn’t have any painkillers, nothing stronger than ibuprofen, please, please try to calm down!”
He forced himself to put his head back. To stretch his legs out so they wouldn’t thrash. He tried to focus on breathing, even though every time he inhaled it felt like he was being run through with bayonets.
Eventually, after far too much time had passed, he quieted down again. His body came back under his control. The pain was still there, it was absolutely not going away, but if he didn’t move, if he was very careful with his breathing, it couldn’t take control of him.
When he was finally able to blink the tears away, he looked down and saw Angel sitting beside him, pressing her face against his hand. She looked terrified.
Julia stood over him, doing something to the bandage on his other side. He knew the look on her face, though it took him a second to place it. It was the look she got when she examined a dog or a cat in her clinic, when she had to be very careful to keep her expression neutral so the owner wouldn’t panic.
“Am I going to die?” he asked.
Julia leaned over him and looked directly into his eyes. He realized she was checking his pupils.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“We found you crawling in the road. You nearly got run over by a car. The driver wanted to take you to a hospital,” Julia explained. Angel was nowhere in sight.
“Wilkes would have found me there and finished the job.”
Julia nodded. “That’s what Angel thought. I kept telling her there was no way I could treat you without a lot of equipment and drugs, but she was adamant. She convinced the driver that we would take care of you. He seemed relieved not to have to let you into his car.”
“I was a real mess,” Chapel said. “Probably covered in mud and scraped to hell.”
Julia nodded. “Yes, you were. Not to mention having a gunshot wound, a concussion, and general shock. We brought you back here to Top’s. Set up a makeshift operating room in his basement. Prisoners of war get better medical treatment.” She scrubbed at her face with her hands and sat down hard in a chair. “You want all the gory details?”
“Just the highlights.”
Julia nodded. “The bullet didn’t penetrate the abdominal cavity. It just tunneled through muscle tissue. It was a through and through wound, too. No fragments inside you that I could find. The wound track missed your kidney by about an inch, but it nicked an artery on the way through and that’s why you lost so much blood. I cleaned out the wound as best I could and sutured you, but I’m still very much worried about sepsis. That bullet cut through your shirt and probably blasted cotton fibers halfway through your abdomen and some of them would be so small I couldn’t see them, not with my naked eye, which was all I had to work with. Those fibers can cause some pretty ugly infections. We should be starting you on heavy-duty antibiotics right away. There’s only one problem. We don’t have any. None of them here in the house, and nobody here has a prescription. I can’t write a prescription for you, not with the cops looking for me. So unless we start knocking over pharmacies, we just have to hope for the best.”