Istartle.
Help.
In the chaos, I haven’t let myself look ahead to anything beyond the next few seconds. When the plane crashed my future, once so solid beneath my feet, dissipated entirely — like stepping out on a frozen lake expecting thick ice and finding slushinstead.
But as I watch a set of lush lips form the wordhelp, that future freezes back into something tangible beneath my heels. Ofcourse, help will be coming. Helicopters and search parties and rescue missions full of well-trained macho men, to pull us from the waves and return us to dryland.
Rescue — even just thepossibilityof rescue — lifts a heavy weight off my chest. Dread falls away and something else takes its place. It’s fragile, hardly more than a flicker, but it’sthere.
Hope.
A low curse makes me look up. Underwood is frowning mightily, his eyes locked on the flight attendant’s left leg. It’s bent at several angles that are anatomically impossible, if the bones are still intact. Through the dark fabric of his pants, I see a sharp fragment of metal protruding from his flesh. A jagged piece of plane debris has punctured deep into muscle and bone. My stomach clenches at thesight.
“If you’re going to be sick, do it over the side,” Underwoodsnaps.
My eyes fly to his face. I feel my jaw clench in sudden anger. “I’m not going to besick.”
“Then make yourself useful and grab the emergency kit over there.” He jerks his chin to theleft.
My gaze swings in that direction and I spot a small black bag lashed to the side of the raft. A built-in supply kit. I’m floored to see my canvas backpack sitting beside it, along with a familiar green duffle bag — the one I accidentally snatched off a conveyer belt a million yearsago.
“You brought my bag?” I ask, reaching for it with shaking fingers. I thought it was lost in the crash. “I can’tbelieve—”
“Wax poetic about my acts of kindness later; find the first aid kitnow.”
I bite back a retort and fumble for the emergency bag. “What do youneed?”
“Gauze, alcohol pads, anything we can use to pack the wound. I don’t want this metal shifting around and doing moredamage.”
“Okay.” I open the heavy plastic zipper and sort through the contents, muttering aloud as I take inventory. “Compass… two emergency flares… raft patches… whistle… aluminum blankets… ration packets…” I swallow hard. “I’m not seeing a first aidkit.”
“Lookharder.”
I stiffen. “Don’t snap atme!”
He grunts — apparently, that’s as close to an apology as I’m going to get. I decide to ignore him as I continue my search. I’m nearly at the bottom of the bag,now.
“Plastic bailor… knife…” My hands close on the last item, a flat white box with a red cross on top. I yank it impatiently from the depths. “First aidkit.”
I crawl back to the men. Underwood is bent low over the flight attendant’s leg to examine the wound. He’s ripped the man’s pants apart around the metal, to better see the damage. My heart fails when I see the blood gushing out. There’s a lot of it. Too much. It’s saturating the fabric, dripping into the bottom of the raft where it mixes with rainwater to form a macabrecocktail.
I know just enough about anatomy to recognize that the shard of metal is dangerously close to piercing the femoral artery, if it hasn’t already. The bones in the lower half of his leg look completely shattered. He must’ve been crushed by a heavy piece of debris during the crash. The skin is badly bruised already; I can only imagine what it’ll look like in a fewhours.
“Fuck,” I whisper, wiping rain from my eyes with my forearm as I watch blood flow from thewound.
Underwood grunts. “My thoughtsexactly.”
“It’s a good thing he passed out. He’s got to be in unbearablepain…”
Busy applying pressure to the wound, Underwood grunts again. Apparently, that’s his main form ofcommunication.
As I get a look at the damage up close, dread washes over me. There’s no way we can set a fractured femur, no way to cure a knee pulverized into dust. I wouldn’t know how to fix this man in a state of the art operating room with all the surgical instruments in the world at my disposal; my chances of mending such an injury on a raft in the middle ocean, without access to more than the most basic medical supplies, are direindeed.
I glance down at the kit in myhands.
Band-Aids. Gauze. A pair of shears. A scalpel. A suturekit.
For all intents and purposes… these items areuseless.