Page 143 of Beware of Dog

“Hey,” someone snapped, across the table, and he glanced up, or most of the way up, to meet Walsh’s thunderous glare. “What happened?”

He was no one’s VP these days, but his normally-laconic voice still had that leadership snap in it, and it helped Shep focus.

“We were headed up to my cabin. I heard maybe three shots, and then she…” He trailed off when he glanced down at her and saw blood trickling from under his makeshift compress, bright rivulets ruining the lace of her dress. “Jesus Christ, I need my kit!”

“Here, here.” Mav pushed through the ever-growing crowd, toting Shep’s oversized, soft-sided zippered med kit. The sight of its familiar red nylon was the thing that finally allowed Shep to push past the panicked haze of a husband watching his wife bleed out, and call solely upon his medic training.

He took the kit from Mav, thumped it down on the table by Cass’s hip, and barked out, “Okay, back up, everybody back up. I need one extra set of hands. Maybe two. It’ll take an ambulance half-an-hour to get here, so I gottamove.”

The others talked around him, words clipped with stress.

Fox: “Tenny, Reese, go.”

Raven: “Ian, can you…?”

Ian: “Yes, of course, they can take her faster by air.”

A woman’s high, wailing scream pierced the air. The mother. Emily. Someone, Phillip, Shep thought, intercepted her with strong hands and soothing words and urged her out of the room.

While all of this went on, Shep unzipped his kit, snapped on gloves, and pulled out a massive bottle of alcohol. He handeda clean pair of gloves to Raven, and Devin leaned on the table across from him, composed and no-nonsense.

“What can I do, son?”

“Can you put in an IV?”

“Yeah.”

Shep tossed gloves over and he caught them. “There’s fluid bags in a cooler in the laundry room.” He glanced at Cass’s face, her eyelids fluttering, head turning on the makeshift pillow. Her lips moved but no sound emerged. Her face had gone even paler, and when Raven pressed a wad of clean gauze to the wound beneath her clavicle, more blood seeped out. Too much. “Shit, I don’t have any blood bags.”

“I’m a universal donor,” Devin said. “We’ll do it straight if we have to.”

“Shit. Yeah, okay, I can do that.”

“This is a lot of blood,” Raven said, voice hushed, peeling back the gauze, frowning, and then snagging another bundle from the kit.

“Yeah.” Shep fitted a needle on a syringe and tipped up his bottle of sedative to draw a dose. He leaned over Cass as he pulled back the plunger. “Cass. Babe. Can you hear me?”

She gave a low grown, and her upper body lifted, as though she meant to sit up.

“No, no.” He set down the bottle and used that hand to pin her clean shoulder to the table. “Stay still.” He tapped the bubbles to the top and pushed the plunger until a droplet welled at the needle’s diagonal tip.

Devin had found the bags, and was deftly finding a vein in the crook of her elbow, taping the needle down.

“Here, trade with me,” Shep said, and they moved around one another in a few quick steps so Shep could inject the sedative into the IV, and then connect the tubing.

“Shep,” Raven said again.

“I know. It’s okay. You can hand me shit. Pour alcohol in that dish and get more gauze ready.”

When the sedative kicked in, and Cass went still, Shep slipped deeper into the past, into the old habits, long-practiced movements. It was muscle memory, peeling back the gauze, cutting away the lace and cloth, cleaning the blood off the wound and examining.

She’d been hit twice. Two entrance wounds in her back, one exit wound in the front. Smaller caliber, maybe nine-mil.

Blood still poured from the back of her shoulder, puddling on the table.

“Help me turn her over.”

Raven and Devin moved seamlessly with him. Raven moved to support her head, climbing up onto the table to kneel on the wood, blood smearing all over the ice-blue skirt of her dress as she pulled Cass’s limp upper body into her lap.

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