Dean Koontz - The Servants of Twilight

Or maybe he had killed them all.

Slipping the shotgun strap over her shoulder, she went to him, reluctant to examine him more closely, not certain she had the strength to look upon his cold dead face. She knelt beside himand realized that he was breathing.

Her own breath caught in her throat, and her heart seemed to miss a beat or two.

He was alive.

Unconscious but alive.

Miracles did happen.

She wanted to laugh but repressed the urge, superstitiously afraid that the gods would be displeased by her joy and would take Charlie from her, after all. She touched him. He murmured but didn't come around. She turned him onto his back, and he grumbled at her without opening his eyes. She saw the torn shoulder of his jacket and realized he had been shot. Around the wound, lumps of dark and frozen blood adhered to the shredded fabric. It was bad, but at least he wasn't dead.

"Charlie?"

When he didn't reply, she touched his face and spoke his name again, and finally his eyes opened. For a moment they were out of focus, but then he fixed on her and blinked, and she saw that he was aware, sluggish and perhaps fuzzy-headed but not delirious.

"Lost it," he said.

"What? "

"The rifle."

"Don't worry about it," she said.

"Killed three of them," he said thickly.

"Good."

"Where are they?" he asked worriedly.

"I don't know."

"Must be near."

"I don't think so."

He tried to sit up.

Apparently, a dark current of pain crackled through him, for he winced and held his breath, and for a moment she thought he was going to pass out again.

He was too pale, corpse-white.

He squeezed her hand until the pain subsided a bit.

He said, "Still others coming," and this time he managed to sit up when he tried.

"Can you move?"

"Weak. "

"We've got to get out of here."

"Was… crawling.

"Can you walk?"

"Not by myself."

"If you lean on me?" "Maybe."

She helped him to his feet, gave him support, and encouraged him to descend the path. They made slow, halting progress at first, then went a bit faster, and a couple of times they slipped and almost fell, but eventually they reached the overhang.

Joey didn't react to their arrival. But as Christine helped Charlie ease to the ground, Chewbacca came over, wagging his tail, and licked Charlie's face.

The rock walls had absorbed a lot of heat from the fire, which was now little more than embers, and warmth radiated from the stone on all sides.

"Nice," Charlie said.

His voice was too dreamy to suit Christine.

"Light-headed?" she asked.

"A little."

"Dizzy?"

"Was. Not now."

"Blurred vision?"

"Nothing like that."

She said, "I want to see that wound," and she began taking off his jacket.

"No time," he said, putting a hand on hers, stopping her from tending to him.

"I'll be quick about it."

"No time!" he insisted.

"Listen," she said, "right now, with all the pain you're in, you can't move fast."

"A damned turtle."

"And you're losing your strength."

"Feel like. a little kid."

"But we have a pretty extensive first-aid kit, so maybe we can patch you up and alleviate some of the pain. Then maybe you can get on your feet and get moving faster. If so, we'll be damned glad we took the time."

He thought about it, nodded." Okay. But… keep your ears open. They might not be… far away."

She removed his quilted jacket, unbuttoned his shirt, slipped it off his injured shoulder, then unsnapped and pulled back the top of his insulated underwear, which was sticky with blood and sweat. There was an ugly hole in him, high in the left side of his chest, just below the shoulder bones. The sight of it gave her the feeling that live snakes were writhing in her stomach.

The worst of the bleeding had stopped, but the flesh immediately around the wound was swollen, an angry shade of red. The skin color faded to purple farther away from the hole, then to a deadpale white.

"Lot of blood?" he asked.

"There was."

"Now? "

"Still bleeding a little."

"Spurting?"

"No. If an artery had been hit, you'd be dead by now."

"Lucky," he said.

"Very."

An exit wound scarred his back. The flesh looked just as bad on that side, and she thought she saw splinters of bone in the torn and bloody meat of him.

"Bullet's not in you," she said.

"That's a plus."

The first-aid kit was in his backpack. She got it out, opened a small bottle of boric acid solution and poured it into the wound.

It foamed furiously for a moment, but it didn't sting as iodine or Merthiolate would have; with a slightly dreamy, detached air, Charlie watched it bubble.

She hastily packed some snow into a tin cup and set it to melt on the hot coals of the burnt-out fire.

He overcame his dreaminess, shook his head as if to clear it, and said "Hurry."

"Doing the best I can," she said.

When the boric acid had finished working, she quickly dusted both the entry and exit wounds with a yellowish antibiotic powder, then with a mild, white anesthetizing powder. Now there was almost no bleeding at all. Taking off her gloves so she could work faster and better, she used cotton pads, gauze pads, and a two-inch-wide roll of gauze to fashion an unsatisfactory and somewhat amateurish bandage, but she fixed it in place with so much white adhesive tape that she knew it would stay put.

"Listen!" he said.

She was very still.

They listened, but there was only the wind in the trees.

"Not them," she said.

"Not yet."

"Chewbacca will warn us if anyone's coming."

The dog was lying beside Joey, at ease.

The icy air had already leeched the stored-up warmth in the stone.

Beneath the rocky overhang, the sheltered niche was growing cold again.

Charlie was shivering violently.

She hurriedly dressed him, pulled up the zipper on his jacket, tugged his hood in place and tied it under his chin, then fetched the cupful of melted snow from the embers. The first-aid kit contained Tylenol, which was not nearly a strong enough painsuppressant for his needs, but it was all they had. She gave him two tablets, hesitated, then a third. At first he had a bit of trouble swallowing, and that worried her, but he said it was just that his mouth and throat were so dry, and by the time he took the third tablet he seemed better.

He wouldn't be able to carry his backpack; they would have to abandon it.

She shook a few items out of her own bag in order to get the first-aid kit into it, secured all the flaps. She slipped her arms through the loops, buckled the last strap across her chest.

She was frantic to get moving. She didn't need a wrist watch to know they were running out of time.

Kyle Barlowe was a big man but not graceless. He could move stealthily and sure-footedly when he put his mind to it. Tep minutes after Harrison killed Denny Rogers and threw his body down from the crest of the ridge, Barlowe moved cautiously from the tangle of dead brush where he had been hiding, and slipped across the face of the slope to a spot where shadows lay like frozen pools of night. From the shadows he dashed catlike to a huge fallen tree, from there to a jagged snout of rock poking up from the hillside. He neither climbed nor descended the slope, moved only laterally, away from the area over which Harrison held dominion, leaving the others pinned down but, with luck, not for long.

After another ten minutes, when he was certain that he was well out of Harrison's sight, Barlowe became less circumspect, rushed boldly up the slope to the crest, crawled over it. He moved through a gap between two rock formations and stood up on the flat, wind-abraded top of the ridge.