Page 62 of Running Scared
“When we tell this story,” Dean said, reaching down to pull Birdie’s legs sideways gently, the better to help Birdie out of the seat, “we’ll be sure to say you were too mean to die.Can you stand?”
“Too mean to die….”Birdie let out a rusty chuckle and accepted Dean’s help out of the seat and into the aisle, the better to go sit down and be grossed out by Marcus’s leg.
Dean scrounged around the plane, found a first aid kit from where he’d been sitting, and rummaged through it.Antibiotic wash, tons of gauze, a stitching kit, which would do them no good right now, and some syringes of morphine.
Dean glanced at the mess of Marcus’s leg and contemplated the morphine.
“Marcus?”he asked, his voice a little shaky, “how’s your math right now?”
“I can count to three,” Marcus panted.“Like, my leg’s busted in three places.”
“Can you do morphine math?Like how much to give you to put you out of pain while I splint it without killing you?”
Marcus moaned a little.“I’d rather you kill me with it,” he admitted, tears in his voice.“I’d take passing out as a kindness.”
Dean grabbed one of the syringes and some alcohol swabs and wandered over to sit next to Marcus, his energy and ability to move almost exhausted.“Anything for a buddy,” he muttered.
Marcus let out a half sob, and Dean pulled out his knife and used it to shred Marcus’s khakis far enough up from the bloody mess of his leg to find a bare patch of skin to prep for the shot.He and Marcus had lots of first aid training, but a compound fracture was a rough thing for a trained doctor—hell, for a trained orthopedist.If Dean was going to dump antiseptic on his hands and try to straighten the leg enough to stop Marcus’s bleeding, he wanted Marcus to be as unconscious as possible.
With a deep breath—and a hope that he wasn’t going to OD his friend—he plunged the syringe in and prayed.
Next to him, Marcus’s breathing started to relax, the steady moans that he’d tried to repress easing.
“Better?”Dean asked after a couple of minutes.
“Much,” Marcus mumbled.
“Good.Bird, can you walk?”
“Sort of,” Birdie said.
“I need you to find that case of water.We’ve got some work to do.”
AN HOUR.It took him and Birdie an hour to get the leg to the point where they felt comfortable wrapping a pressure bandage around it.Everything Dean had ever learned in emergency first aid classes came into play, and as glad as he was that Marcus was unconscious for what he was doing, he missed Marcus’s contribution to his little adventure in doctoring.Birdie was good for following directions, but Marcus was one of the few people who could follow Dean’s wayward brain.
But finally, after using three-quarters of the water and all of the antibacterial rinse on washing the leg off and setting it, Marcus was as stable as they could get him.Everybody had sipped some water, and Birdie had set up the plane’s emergency beacon.
There’d been a short, hot discussion on whether the beacon would bring friendly or unfriendly rescuers, and then Dean had pointed out that if there were no rescuers at all, they’d die slowly, as opposed to quickly if the next folks they saw proved to be unfriendly.
Birdie shut up after that.They were both concussed and woozy and ready to consign their fates to the night-closing desert outside their fragile little eggshell of safety.
At least, Dean hoped, the scorpions would leave them alone, but he couldn’t vouch for the rattlesnakes.He’d have to check in the morning to see if any of them had crept in through the broken edges of the plane’s tail.
HIS HEADached so fiercely that even sleep wasn’t a refuge, but that didn’t mean he could emerge from it easily.He whimpered and tried to open his eyes as voices approached from outside the plane, but nothing could penetrate the foggy veil of pain and darkness in his eyes.
Until he felt a smoothly gloved hand on his forehead and heard a dearly familiar voice murmuring, “Concussion, some soft-tissue damage in the neck, lots of bruising in the shoulders, chest, and abdomen.We’ll need to test to make sure there’s no internal bleeding, but mostly I think he needs some painkillers and some sleep.”
Dean had heard Bailey’s doctor voice before, but never aimed at himself.
“Bailey?”he mumbled.“Am I hallucinating?”
“No,” Bailey said softly back.“But you’ll wish you were.When you get better, I’m going to yell so hard and so long, you’ll say to yourself, ‘God, I wish I was still in that wrecked plane, dying in the desert.’”
“As long as you’re here with me,” he mumbled.“But I’d rather not die.”His biggest fear bubbled to the surface.“How’s Marcus?He can’t die either.”
Bailey’s restrained chuff of breath told him that was a trickier proposition.
“Our two rescue pilots are getting the gurney in here for him,” he said.“How much morphine did you give him?”
