“I’ll do it,” my dad says, dropping to his knees and cradling Dean’s head between them.
Reed’s pacing. “What can I do?”
“My medic kit.” I press my pointer and middle fingers against the side of Dean’s neck and count.
23… 24… 25…
It’s too slow.
30… 31… 32…
My stomach flips. A clenching seizes the hollow center as the minute mark draws to a close.
38… 39… 40.
The contents of my stomach pitch up my windpipe and onto the ground next to me.
You were too late, it says again.
But it doesn’t matter. The numbers speak for themselves. Dean’s kidneys are failing.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
REED
In a sea of black, I search for red. The rounded handle pokes out beneath the fire shelter and I discard it to get to the medic kit.
“Do you have a knife in your pack? I need to cut off this section of his pants,” Hailey says, wiping her lips with the back of her sleeve.
She just threw up, and now she’s looking at me, eyes laced with desperation like she’s depending on me for thisonething. And my hazy thoughts slip back to that day at the airport when I lost my grandfather’s pocketknife. It didn’t mean much to me two months ago. But now? It would meaneverythingto have it in this moment for Hailey and Dean.
It’s Jack who thrusts a wooden handle into her waiting palm.
I drop into a crouch. I already know this can’t be good with the way Dean’s previously loose pants strain around his leg. Hailey uses the tip of Jack’s blade to poke a hole two fingers wide in Dean’s cargos right below his hip. Without moving the limb, she shreds an opening, exposing skin.
I havenoidea what I’m looking for, but the area beneath hiscrush injury is more of a swamp now. A puddle of red-and-black gunk that has doubled in size. With his pant leg ripped away, I can see a jagged branch impaling his thigh just above his knee cap.
Hailey presses her fingertips against his pale skin. As if it’s been replaced with rawhide pulled taut, the tissue doesn’t dip with her pressure. I have next to no medical training, but even I understand skin shouldn’t look like that.
“There’s saline solution and bandages in the side pocket,” Hailey says, pointing to the first aid kit I’m still clutching.
All I see is the spot where Dean’s torn flesh hugs the broken branch. “We need a chainsaw and a helicopter. You can’t fix this problem with a Band-Aid,” I argue to the only one of us with a medical license.
Let them in,let them help. I hear Dean’s voice inside of my head.
But theyarehelping. It’s me who feels helpless.
“Go,” she says to me. “We’ve got this handled.”
The only thing that has me walking away from her is knowing that this was the decision I should have made all along.
I don’t bother with my line pack. There’s no fire shelter in it anymore, and it’ll just weigh me down. Leaping over charred branches to the top of the hill and sliding the slippery slope to the other side, I find the crew halfway down.
The sight of all fifteen of them hauling our gear in a single file line nearly breaks me.
“Morgan, what happened? You guys have been gone for hours.”
Between the heavy rainfall and the collective headlamps, I blindly guess it’s Ramirez leading the pack.
