Page 10 of Break For Me
Adrian is a statue in the passenger seat. His seatbelt is on—a reflex that survived an abduction. He’s staring through the windshield, his jaw locked so hard the muscle is jumping.
He hasn't said a word since the apartment.
I merge onto the FDR Drive, heading north. The East River is a black void on our left. I’m doing ninety.
"You’re losing volume."
His voice cuts through the cabin. Flat. Clinical. He isn't asking if I’m okay. He’s noting a mechanical failure in a piece of equipment.
"I’ll live," I grunt.
"The laceration in your palm has breached the deep flexor group. If the tendon sheath is open, you will lose the use of your fingers within hours." He doesn’t look at my face. He’s staring at the blood pooling in the cup holder. "The forearm is weeping from the brachial branches. You need pressure and sutures. You won't make it to the safehouse like this."
I glance at him. His eyes are narrowed. Focused. The mask is back on. He isn't a victim anymore; he’s a technician looking at a broken engine.
"You’ll fix it when we get there," I say. "After you fix the man on the table."
"I am a prisoner."
"You were a prisoner in that clinic, Doc. I just changed the scenery."
His head turns. Those blue eyes find mine in the dark. The streetlights strobe across his glasses—rhythmic, sharp flashes of white. There’s something in his face I didn't expect. Not fear. Not even anger.
It’s the silent judgement of a surgeon looking at a patient who is too stupid to know he’s already dead.
"And if I refuse?"
I keep my eyes on the road. The bridge is coming up. The city is a smear of light behind us.
"You try to run, I break your legs. You try to scream, I break your jaw." I flex my right hand on the wheel, the movement pulling at the bruises on my chest. "You save the man on the table, or you'll never hold a scalpel again."
The truck hurtles into the dark. The doctor sits with his clean hands folded over his bag.
Neither of us speaks again.
Chapter Four
ADRIAN
He is goingto die in approximately fourteen minutes.
The calculation runs as a silent subroutine in the back of my mind. It operates independently while the rest of my brain tries to make sense of the fact that I am sitting in a stolen truck with a man who looks like he was forged in a furnace and quenched in oil.
I watch his left hand. It rests on the steering wheel, or rather, it is fused to it by a layer of drying gore. The henley he used as a makeshift compress is a sodden mass of black-red fabric. The blood has reached its saturation point. Now, it simply flows.
It pools in the plastic cup holder. It drips onto the rubber floor mat with a rhythmic, wet thud I can count like a ticking clock. This is not a superficial bleed. This is a volume loss that the human body cannot negotiate with for long.
His radial pulse is visible in the side of his wrist. It’s a rapid, thready vibration. He is compensating. His skin is turning the color of wet wood ash under the strobe-like flashes of the highway lights.
His breathing has shifted in the last three miles. It’s shallower. Faster. The sternocleidomastoid muscles in his neck are pulling tight with every inhalation.
Tachypnea. Early hypovolemic shock. He is exiting stage two and sliding into stage three.
If he loses consciousness at eighty miles an hour, the East River will be the only surgeon we see tonight.
I watch the speedometer needle quiver against the eighty-five mark. His right hand is clamped onto the gearshift. His knuckles are white mounds against the dark skin. He isn’t shifting; he’s using the metal rod to keep himself upright.
He’s using the pain in his hand to stay oriented. I suspect he’d punch me if I told him we had that in common. I use counting. He uses the grind of bone against steel.
