Page 24 of King Among the Dead

“Got – got myself – knifed,” Beck panted. He attempted another laugh. “Rookie mistake.”

Kay tutted and shooed some more until Rose peeled back the towel enough for her to get a look. “Dumbass,” she admonished. “How many of them were there?”

“Seven. I think.”

“Wonder you’re not dead in the gutter.”

“Heh.”

Kay pressed the towel tight. “Alright, I can fix this, but it isn’t gonna be pretty, and you’re gonna feel like hell. Walking all that way in the rain, bleeding out…” Shetsked. “Rose, I need you to go up to my room and fetch me down my kit. It’s a big black bag under my bed, can’t miss it. Go lock that back door first, and pull the curtains.”

Before she complied, Rose glanced over at her, questioning. The glint in Kay’s eyes was unmistakable: the hard, knowledgeable assuredness of a general; competent, calm, determined.

“Yes, ma’am,” she said, and rushed to do as told.

The steps were old, and steep, and it was a long climb to the third floor, but Rose took the stairs at a run, losing traction with her slippers, clutching at the bannister on the turns. Her pulse was choking her by the time she reached Kay’s attic suite, making her dizzy.

The ceilings were sloped up here, the windows angled, and the sleet rattled against them, an ominous sound like the clicking of bones, she thought, wildly, as she crossed to the high bed – with its step-stool Kay used to climb up into it – and knelt down to search for the bag. There it was, a big, black zippered thing the size of a small cooler with a red cross on the side. It weighed a ton, but Rose looped her head and arm through the strap and started back down.

When she returned to the kitchen, Beck was slumped shirtless in a chair, his shirt, holsters, and the guns and knives they contained heaped in another. Hair in his face again; blood dripping in slowplinks down onto the tile.

Kay bustled over with a steaming tea kettle that she set on another chair, and waved Rose closer. “Here, there’s a sterile sheet on top, we’ll lay that down.”

Rose thumped the bag down and unzipped it; as promised, a cellophane-wrapped plastic sheet was on top, and she passed it up to Kay, who had it open and spread down the length of the table in short order. Under the sheet, the bag was full of compartments and trays. Rose spotted gleaming silver bowls, scissors, gauze, and bags stamped with the biohazard symbol.

“Breathe, honey,” Kay said, drawing her attention. When she glanced up, the woman offered a tight smile. “If you’re gonna be my nurse, you can’t be passing out when you go to hand me a scalpel.”

“Nurse?”

“He needs surgery. Take a breath. Take a shot of whiskey if you need it, but.” Her gaze hardened. “We need to hurry.”

~*~

They wrestled Beck up onto the table, flat on his back, hair fanning wet and limp around him on the blue sterile sheet. “Night-night for a bit,” Kay said, and gave him an injection that had his lashes fluttering and his breath hitching. She pulled up his eyelids and checked his pupils. “He’s out. I don’t like his breathing, though. Go scrub up.”

Rose took off her robe and washed her hands ‘til they felt raw at the sink. Snapped on the gloves Kay had given her.

“Come stand by me,” Kay instructed.

When she peeled the towel away, they found half-clotted blood, and the wound didn’t start weeping again. Still, Kay let out a displeased sigh that rustled against the fabric of her paper mask. “He lost a lot of blood.”

Rose took a steadying breath behind her own mask, and swore she could taste her own fear. “What do we do?”

“Irrigate, first. Then I gotta make sure nothing important got hit. Then sanitize, and stich him up.”

Nausea threatened, but Rose swallowed it down. He wouldn’t die. Hewouldn’t. “Tell me what to do.”

“Good girl. Hand me that bottle over there.”

~*~

Once clean, the wound was even deeper than it had looked. Kay clucked and tutted over it, calling Beck an idiot. “The intestine, really?” she muttered, and spread the wound wider.

Rose passed over everything when Kay asked for it; held the basin to catch blood, to catch saline solution. Watched all of it, queasy, pulse pounding in her ears, sweating.Don’t die, please don’t die, please.

Kay’s hands were steady and sure; she never flinched from the blood or the glimpses of viscera, and so Rose refused to, either. Beck had slit a woman’s throat for her, and she could look at his insides without weeping if it meant saving him.

It seemed to be one long, drawn-out moment, the sort of precipice moment when you were caught on the edge of panic, deciding whether to run or fight. But when Kay taped down the last of the bandaging, stepped back and said, “Well, that should do it. Now we have to pump him full of meds and hope infection doesn’t take hold,” Rose looked up at the clock and realized it was nearly five in the morning. It had taken hours.

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