Page 53 of Operation: Discovery

He was certain she could help the officer, but he wasn’t so sure he could stand it if she got hurt in the process. “I don’t want to let you go.”

She reached up and brushed his cheek with her fingertips. “I know. I’ll be careful, but I’m needed.”

He resigned himself to doing what was right, not what he wanted. He lifted himself off of her and let her go. She didn’t get up, instead choosing to crawl over to where the officer lay in the grass. He moved toward his chair as he heard a vehicle approaching again from the way the car had gone.

He craned his neck to see, then flattened himself to the ground. “Everyone, down!”

* * *

Dee coveredthe officer’s body with her own. Brendon’s voice terrified her. She’d never heard him sound like that. As the car went by, she heard a whooshing sound punctuated by crackling. In the next instant, the garage exploded, raining hot debris all around her.

She forced herself to focus on her patient, but she wanted to go make sure Brendon was alright. He couldn’t move out of the way of the burning debris that was still falling from the sky. Heat from the fire prickled sweat over her forehead. “Is everyone all right?” she yelled.

Connor rushed to her side and laid a hand on her shoulder. “How’s Todd?”

“He needs a bus, STAT. What about the officer that was in the garage?”

Connor nodded toward the space where the building had been. A man stood just outside, talking on his phone. “I’m going to go check on Brendon. Wait here.”

As if she was going to leave the poor officer. Luckily, the shot was just above his elbow and had gone clean through, but that didn’t mean there weren’t broken bones and lots of damage to contend with. He was already near passing out from the trauma.

“Just hold tight. I think your friend is calling in the police and an ambulance. We’ll get you taken care of as quickly as we can.” She turned on nurse mode as easily as if she’d turned on a light switch.

His head thrashed back and forth as he groaned.

“Don’t waste your energy. You’re going to need it.” She wished now that she hadn’t used her sweatshirt to sit on. If she hadn’t, she could use it as a tourniquet to stop the bleeding. As it was, she had no idea what supplies they had on hand in the cruiser.

She looked for Connor from where she was and called him over. “I need you to ask the other officer for a med kit or whatever they have. Have you checked on Brendon?” Brendon was capable and she shouldn’t worry, but she hadn’t seen or heard him since the blast. Had he been hit by debris?

“I haven’t. I’ll get what you need, then go and make sure he’s fine. He’d let me know if he was injured.”

As much as that should’ve helped her, it only made her more worried. Was there a reason he wasn’t letting anyone know where he was and how he was doing?

“Try not to worry,” Connor said. “I’ll let you know in a minute.” He headed off toward the officer who was still on his phone. From the snippets of conversation she caught, he seemed to be talking to the dispatcher.

Connor spoke to him for less than a minute, then headed for the grass where she’d been with Brendon. The officer came toward her, she focused on the task of keeping Todd from bleeding too heavily from his wound. If she couldn’t staunch the bleeding, his blood pressure would dip and then he’d start having internal issues, not just external ones.

“Let me get my kit from the car. Sorry to keep you waiting. Local dispatch was tied up with State Patrol and transferred me to Cheyenne. Well, they don’t know the area and this little building wasn’t on any of their satellite mapping systems. I had to resort to giving directions,” he explained as he jogged for his car.

When he returned, he opened a black tacklebox-style kit that had rudimentary first-aid items inside. There were two things she needed most: a fresh pair of gloves and a sterile roll of gauze. “Thanks. How’s Brendon?” She turned her dirty gloves inside out as she tugged them off and put on a fresh pair. The scene wasn’t sanitary, but she wasn’t going to shove debris in his wound with dirty gloves if she could avoid it.

The officer glanced over behind her, where she imagined Connor was with Brendon. “Looks like he’s struggling to get back into his chair, but I don’t see any blood on him from here.”

No blood didn’t mean no injury, but she’d take the good news for what it was. “Thank you.” She tugged on the fresh pair of gloves and went to work unrolling the gauze to make a makeshift tourniquet. She preferred the rubberized ones, but that wasn’t available in the kit and a glove wouldn’t stretch enough.

Finally, outside of monitoring his breathing and heart rate, she’d done all she could until the ambulance got there. She glanced up at the officer who had grabbed a fire extinguisher from his car and was now trying to keep the fire from spreading to the long grass.

Since he was busy doing something important, she didn’t want to disturb him. She took a second to look over her shoulder. She’d assumed that Connor and Brendon would come to her once he was in his chair, but they were still over in the grass talking. The fire was growing with the dried wood of the building that was practically tinder, making hearing what they were saying impossible.

He glanced up and she waved him over, needing to know he wasn’t hurt. He slowly shook his head and followed Connor toward his car. In the span of a few seconds, she’d gone from confident the situation was in hand, to feeling completely out of control. She had to stay by Todd who needed her, but Brendon was walking away and the look on his face said he was anything but fine.

* * *

“Leave me alone.”Brendon didn’t usually resort to ordering Connor around, but he needed a few moments to deal with his thoughts. Laying on the ground, trapped, as a bomb had flown over Dee’s prone body, had almost killed him.

He couldn’t move. He couldn’t rush in to save her or even check to make sure she was okay. He felt like a failure. No matter how hard he tried, there were going to be situations where he couldn’t be there for her, and that was unfair to her. He couldn’t be the man he wanted to be for her. Even when it came to something as simple as her morning run, she had to adjust for him.

Hadn’t he lived his life with the goal of never making people adjust for who he was? He’d challenged himself to do life with the kind of positive energy and faith that made people sure he was living the life God intended for him. So, why did he feel so wrong, so weak, so inadequate in that moment?

---