“What do I do?” Dan asked breathlessly, dropping Steady’s camouflage medical bag to the floor and kneeling beside him in the doorway.
“The belt.” Steady fought a cough. The thin smoke made his chest feel full of hot coals. “Wrap it around his leg.” He pushed up the bottom edge of Ozzie’s blood-soaked boxers so he could point at the lump beneath Ozzie’s flesh, high on his thigh, where his fingers were clamping the artery. “And cinch it tight above here.”
Dan jerked his chin in a nod, then carefully threaded the end of the belt under Ozzie’s wrecked leg, snaking it close to his groin. “Tight,” Steady emphasized again. “Tight as you can.” Dan gritted his teeth and yanked the belt as Ozzie let loose with a shriek guaran-frackin’-teed to haunt Steady for the rest of his life. “Hold him, Dan!” he yelled when Ozzie thrashed. “You have to keep him still!”
Dan threw himself over Ozzie’s chest, using his weight to hold Ozzie down. With his free hand, Steady unzipped his medical bag. Almost there. Almost there. Madre de Dios, almost there. He just needed to find a clamp to put on the end of that artery and then he could start Ozzie on Hemopure, an oxygen-carrying blood substitute produced in South Africa. Even though it had yet to be approved by the FDA, he’d taken to acquiring the stuff from his Recces friend—Recces was the nickname for South Africa’s Special Forces Brigade—and packing it in his med kit. It stayed good for up to thirty-six months at room temperature, was compatible with all blood types, and was a wonderful Johnny-on-the-Spot when a transfusion wasn’t possible. Like right now…
Unfortunately, before he could find the small plastic case he kept his clamps in, the overhead lights flickered and dimmed…then went out altogether. Instantly the space was plunged into darkness. Deep, dark, impenetrable darkness. Blinding darkness…
Shit! Fuck! Sonofabitch!
“Ozzie!” he shouted his friend’s name, reaching unseeingly for Ozzie’s shoulder. When he found it, he gave it a squeeze. “Ozzie!” he yelled again because the guy continued to struggle against Dan’s restraining weight. “You have to be still, hermano! I know it hurts! I know it does! But you have to be still so Dan can let go of you. I need him to get a flashlight!”
“Sonofabitch!” Ozzie howled. “I need morphine!”
“Can’t give you morphine.” He infused his voice with calm, hoping it would help Ozzie do the same. “With the amount of blood you’ve lost, it could kill you.”
“Sonofabitch! Sonofabiiiiiiitch!” Ozzie bellowed again.
“It’s mind over matter!” he yelled right back. Okay, so fuck calm. How about candor? “Just open up that big brain tank of yours”—besides being the Black Knights’ resident lady-killer, Ozzie was also a whiz-kid computer hacker with an IQ big enough to make Einstein envious—“and fill it with some high-octane grin-and-bear it! You hear me? You find a way to be still! Your life depends on it!” And then, just in case candor didn’t work, he figured he’d appeal to Ozzie’s machismo. “Besides, you keep up this prissy shit, and I’m going to have to revoke your membership to Club Dude.”
Ozzie moaned, and Steady could hear his gut-wrenching struggle for composure beneath Agent DePaul’s repeated pounding on Abby’s door and her screams for Abby to “open up!” Why isn’t she opening her door? Is she too frightened? He’d never figured her for the shrinking violet sort, but—
“He’s still,” Dan said. Steady’s eyes had adjusted to the stygian darkness and could just make out Dan’s shape in the dim red light cast by the glowing KELUAR/EXIT sign tacked to the wall above the door to the emergency stairwell. Ozzie was quaking from head to toe, but he was no longer fighting them. Steady had always suspected Ethan “Ozzie” Sykes, despite his constant joking and bad taste in eighties music, was one tough motherfucker. Now he knew it for sure.
“Okay.” He nodded. “Now feel around in my bag. There should be a MagLite attached with Velcro to one side.”
He could hear his medical gear clanking and clacking as Dan rustled through his duffel, and he tried not to think about the fact that there was no such thing as a sterile field in this particular situation. Then the glaring beam of the flashlight hit him in the face, and he screwed his lids shut to save his eyesight. “Bueno, good.” He nodded again. “Shine that into the bag so I can find my clamps.”
Dan did as instructed, stuffing the MagLite between his teeth so that he could use both hands to hold Steady’s duffel wide. Steady located his clamps in an instant and blew out a deep breath. “Cover him again,” he told Dan. “This will bark like a bitch in heat.”