Page 14 of Break For Me
His bandaged hand sits in his lap, soaked through with fresh red. His right hand holds a Makarov.
The barrel is pointed at my chest. His arm is shaking. His face is the color of bone.
"Fix him," he rasps. The words are a dry rattle. "Then fix me."
His head hits the wall. His eyes roll back.
The gun stays up for three seconds, then his arm drops. The weapon clatters against the floorboards. He is out.
I stand in a cabin in the woods with a scalpel in my hand. One man is dying on a door. One is dying against a wall.
The medic looks at me, his eyes wide with a desperate question.
I don't answer. I turn back to the table.
I make the cut.
Chapter Five
ADRIAN
The abdomen isa swamp of dark fluids.
I’m three inches deep in the peritoneal cavity. The blood pools faster than Garrett can pull it out. We’re using a manual bulb syringe—the kind you’d use to clear a newborn’s airway—because there is no wall-mounted suction in this rot-streaked cabin. No Yankauer. No hospital infrastructure.
I have a scalpel, two hemostats, and a set of retractors I packed for a life I hoped to leave behind. I’m wearing a headlamp that Garrett found in a hunting closet. It smells of cedar sap and gun oil.
The bullet didn't just pass through. It fragmented. It perforated the jejunum in two places. The leakage is catastrophic. Small bowel contents spill into the peritoneum, mixing with the blood until the surgical field is a muddy, infected brown.
Bile. Feces. Blood. If I don't control the contamination, sepsis will finish him off before the sun comes up.
"More saline," I bark. "Pour it directly into the cavity."
Garrett is former Army. Steady hands. The kind you earn watching boys die in the dirt. He has the good sense to keep his mouth shut. He tilts a liter of warm saline into the open wound.
I irrigate. Suction with the bulb. Irrigate again.
The field clears for a heartbeat. I find the first perforation—a ragged, two-centimeter tear in the jejunal wall. The edges are already dusky and necrotic. The mesentery is bruised, swollen with a massive hematoma.
I clamp the bleeding mesenteric branch with a hemostat. The spurting stops.
My world narrows to the six square inches of tissue under the headlamp. The cabin disappears. The smell of the woodstove and the lanterns fade. The giant bleeding out against the wall is irrelevant.
There is only the wound. The instruments. The fix.
I resect the damaged segment. I cut above the trauma. I cut below. Twelve centimeters of compromised bowel come away, and I drop the wet, grey tissue into a plastic bowl.
Now the anastomosis. I don't have a surgical stapler. I have to reconnect the ends by hand.
I use a running suture. 3-0 absorbable silk. The needle driver is an extension of my fingers, a part of my own nervous system.
Each bite is precise. Three millimeters from the edge. Three millimeters apart. I maintain the tension with mechanical consistency, watching the tissue edges evert as I pull the thread.
The patient groans through the ketamine. His pulse is one-ten. His pressure is holding at eighty-five systolic.
The ketamine is a thin veil. His eyelids flutter. His fingers scrape against the wood of the door we’re using as a table.
"He’s lightening up," Garrett says. His eyes are fixed on the makeshift monitor.
