Michael Bunker - WICK

“Ow, Ow. Ow!” Lang said, before he gritted his teeth and leaned back again into the wall, suddenly becoming aware of the warmth in her hands.

“Is it bad?”

“It’s fine. It’ll be okay.”

“Now who’s lying?” Lang replied, attempting a small grin as a kind of gallows humor. Natasha grinned back, and somehow this made the pain in his arm begin to lessen.

They sat and talked as Natasha tended to the fire, and they both tried to encourage each other for what seemed like an hour. They spoke of the strangeness of their journey and the tiredness of their hopes. They talked of how their lives had seemed somehow… shortened… having been ripped out from under them by the flash of recent events. “It seems like yesterday that Kolya and I were getting ready for the Fall Festival,” Natasha said.

“It seems like a minute ago that you were telling him to stop with his damned Shakespeare,” Lang smiled. “I wonder what he would have to say about this fine mess?”

In that vein, they went on speaking and reminiscing, echoing the same kind of conversation that was taking place around millions of campfires at that very moment, spread across the landscape of America and, beyond that, the globe.

Indeed, had one been lodged in the middle distance between heaven and earth at that moment; or maybe parachuting down from the outer reaches of space in a tumbling freefall that had not yet leveled out; had one not gained a controlling vantage point in that middle distance; if one had looked upward and then downward in that tumbling spiral in the darkness of space, it would have been difficult to tell which were the fires burning on the ground around the millions of campfires like this one, and which ones were raging in the hearts of a million stars.

Before long, Peter returned from his patrol, and, seeing that the fire was prepared and ready, he used a piece of scrap corrugated tin from the refuse pile to scoop hot coals into two shallow holes dug just outside the building. Each of the holes was about five inches deep and just big enough around to receive the stainless steel pans from the mess kit in his pack.

He built up the fire in the building by adding more of the old two-by-fours and scraps of wood from the refuse pile, and then he closed the dilapidated door to obscure the fire, as much as possible, from anyone who might be lurking in the shadows of the woods. They would let the inside fire burn for an hour, and then they would sweep it out and douse it with the snow. The old stones of the building would then emit their warmth throughout the night as the three friends slept like buns in an old stone oven. At least, that was the theory.

Lang and Natasha watched as Peter filled one of the pots with snow to melt for boiling, and in the other, he placed some food from the backpacks to warm. He watched diligently over both pots and continued to add snow to the water pan as it melted down. Lang noticed that it took a lot of snow to create an appreciable amount of water. Once that pan was full and boiling, he placed two ripped cloths from his pack into the water and let them boil for several minutes, and while they boiled, he examined Lang’s wound.

“It looks like you were hit with a .22 or a .38. Something small. There is no bullet in the wound, and it’s still bleeding, but not too profusely. As the bullet passed through, it ripped the skin and flesh, but it doesn’t look like it pierced the muscle too deeply.” He was silent for a moment as he worked, then he turned to Natasha, who seemed to be terribly worried and afraid. “No arteries were hit, and the bleeding is steady, but not heavy. More of a seepage than a flow.” She nodded her head but kept her hand covering her mouth, as if she might need it there to stifle a cry or sob. “Natasha, dear, could you bring me that bottle of vodka from my pack?”

“Sure,” she replied and hustled off to get it, happy again to be of some use. She made a point as she went through the pack to catalog in her mind all of the things she was seeing. She wanted to be able to do this if ever the situation, God forbid, were to arise again.

Returning with the clear bottle of alcohol, she asked, “Are you going to sterilize the wound with it, or give it to him as an anesthetic?”

“Neither, Natasha,” he said as he twisted open the bottle and chugged a significant amount. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve, smiled, and then took another long swig before twisting the top back onto the bottle. “I’d give him some as an anesthetic if I were doing major surgery or amputating the limb, just to get him to lie as still as possible, but we’re trying to get the bleeding stopped, and alcohol can thin the blood, making it harder to accomplish that. The vodka was for me, to steady my hands and give me strength, because Lang,” he said, now looking Lang straight in the eye but with an encouraging smile on his face, “this is going to hurt youway more than it’s going to hurt me.”

Peter extracted one of the cloths from the water with the knife from Lang’s pack, and, when it had cooled only a little, he balled up the cloth and applied heavy and direct pressure with the sterilized rag on the wound for five full minutes. This was a bigger chore than one might think, and Lang grimaced from the pain but found the pressure to be soothing in a way that seemed contradictory to him.

After the five minutes was up, Peter released the pressure and gave the wound another five minutes to seep a little so that he didn’t rob the whole arm of necessary blood and oxygen. He then reapplied the pressure with the second rag and returned the first one to the boiling water. The five minutes of pressure seemed like a short time to Natasha, but on the spot and under stress, it seemed like a lifetime to Peter and Lang. She was surprised when Peter removed the pressure this time, and the bleeding had slowed to just a faint trickle.

Natasha viewed the whole scene with amazement, and she was impressed with both Peter’s skill, and Lang’s bravery and calm during the procedure. She watched as the older man went through his pack, pulled out the first aid kit, and withdrew some tweezers and a scalpel and scissors. He sterilized the medical tools from the first aid kit in the boiling water, and when he was ready, he turned to Natasha and said, “Lang did well with the last step, daughter, but we’ll see howmanly he is now!”

Lang grimaced at that, turned the wince into a weak smile, then closed his eyes, and rolled his head back until the back of it pressed against the stone building.

Peter had Natasha hold the flashlight from Lang’s bag, and then he carefully and cautiously removed the dead skin and dying flesh with the scalpel and scissors until he was reasonably certain that the wound was clean and ready to bind up. He then packed the wound with sterile gauze bandages, wrapped it loosely with more gauze from a roll, and then secured it all with medical tape. “You want to keep it fairly loose,” he said. “We definitely don’t want to cut off the blood supply. A wound needs oxygen, blood flow, and as sterile an environment as possible without infection in order to heal.”

“Shouldn’t we sew it closed or cauterize it?” Natasha asked.

“No. That’s almost never a good idea when in the field, at least in my limited and unprofessional opinion. I would only cauterize it if we were on the run and either Lang, or the limb, was probably not going to make it otherwise. That process is really only for sealing veins or arteries when you don’t have time to actually work carefully on the wound. And when you sew it closed, you sew in infection and any dead tissue that we probably missed. Since it doesn’t have a way to exit, the wound can then get infected. Better to leave it open and let the body heal itself. There’ll probably be fluid and pus discharge, and we want that. That’s the body’s way of cleansing and healing the wound. We’ll just keep an eye on it and change the dressing when we can. And listen, Natasha,” Peter saw her trying to catalogue all the steps in her mind, and wanted to help her understand, “there are as many opinions about ditch medical care as there are people who have to do it. Always keep your eyes and ears open. Learn and listen. I’m not a doctor or even a paramedic. I’ve had a few lessons through the years, and I’m just doing what I know. You can always learn to do things better.”