By now, Todd was scanning the road with his rubber-armored binoculars.
“I don’t believe it,” he muttered, adjusting the focus wheel. “Well, I’ll be! The old super-warrior came for a visit. You can relax, everyone. It’s Jeff Trasel.”
Todd and T.K. jogged down the hill to the gate, their rifles carried at “high port.” As they approached Jeff’s Power Wagon, they could see that Jeff was agitated.
“Got any room for an ex-member with a big problem?” Trasel asked.
Todd answered, “Could be. What’s the matter, Jeff?”
Trasel blurted, “It’s my girlfriend. She’s been shot!”
They got Jeff’s truck through the gate and up the hill as quickly as possible.
Todd clicked his radio from the off to the VOX position. “Mike, call Mary on the landline ASAP. Tell her we have a medical emergency at the house. Send Dan to relieve her at the O-P.”
Jeff’s girlfriend, Rose, was in bad shape. Jeff and Todd carried her into the house. Rose was unconscious. They temporarily laid her on a blanket on the floor near the wood-heating stove. Mary quickly but thoroughly examined her, briefly removing three blood-soaked pressure dressings. She had been shot in the left side of her upper chest. The bullet had entered just below her collarbone. It then traveled at an upward angle, shattering the upper portion of her left shoulder blade before exiting the top of her shoulder. The entrance wound was scarcely larger than the diameter of the bullet. The exit wound, in contrast, looked like a patch of red raw meat two inches in diameter.
“What happened?” Mary asked, as she was digging through a large box of sterilized medical instruments that were individually wrapped in Ziploc bags.
“We were on our way up here. We stopped because Rose said that she had to pee. She couldn’t wait. So I stopped by the side of the road, and Rose scampered off into the bushes. Just as she was walking back to my truck, a Corsica with Wisconsin plates pulled up behind me and stopped. Two guys jumped out, and one of them intercepted Rose before she could get back in her door.
He had a big revolver pointed right at her head. She just froze there. The other guy walked up to my door, and leveled a Mossberg riotgun at me. What was I supposed to do? I was thinking we were history.
“The next thing I knew, the guy with the shotgun ordered me out of the cab. Then, he had me open my flight jacket and he pulled my .45 out of its shoulder holster. He put that in their car. Then, like a fool, he turns his back and starts rummaging around under the seat without finishing searching me. I figured that this was my one and only chance. I pulled my little AMT Backup .45 out of the inside pocket of my flight jacket, and shoved the barrel right up against the back of his head. Now, I had the drop on him. I told him to verrrry slowly put the shotgun on the seat of the truck and back out, again, real slowly.
At this point, his partner started getting panicky. He didn’t know whether to take a shot at me, run, or what.
“Next thing, I ordered the guy on my side of the truck face down on the pavement, keeping one eye on his fidgety partner. I gave the guy a quick frisk.
All that I came up with was a Bucklite pocketknife. The other guy just stood there kind of shaking. Finally, he says, ‘Drop the gun and let him go, or I’ll shoot the girl.’ Real original line, huh? Then I told him, ‘No, you drop your gun, you half-wit, or I’ll shoot both you and your partner. Unlike you, I know how to use a gun.’ At this point, he goes into a real panic. He points his gun at me, then back at Rose, then back at me. He was shaking like he had spent too much time in a meat locker. This guy obviously had a room temperature IQ, and no nerve whatsoever. Throughout all this, I had my pistol pointed at the back of the head of the guy on the ground. It was the old Mexican standoff.
“The next time he switched to pointing his gun at Rose, I leaned my forearms across the hood of my rig and lined up the sight rail on his chest. Then, when he looked back at me, his eyes got as big as saucers and he started backpedaling. As soon as the muzzle of his gun swung away from Rose and toward me, I gave him the ‘double tap.’ I hit him once in the chest, and the second shot grazed the top of his head.
“When he heard my shots, the guy on the ground tried to get heroic, and jumped up at me. I emptied the four rounds left in the magazine into him. The last shot was right into his face. The whole back end of his head exploded. I guess I was on autopilot at that point.
“Then, I realized that the other guy—the one with the revolver—wasn’t yet one-hundred-percent dead. He was sitting on the ground gurgling and waving his gun around. He started pulling the trigger. By pure chance, one of the rounds hit Rose. Before I could put in a fresh magazine and line up the sight rail on him, his revolver was empty. He kept clicking on fired chambers, with the muzzle pointing sorta randomly. After another few seconds, he collapsed.
“I grabbed my medic’s bag and got to Rose as soon as I could. I saw that it was a through and through wound, saw it wasn’t a major hit, and applied direct pressure. I got sterile bandages on both sides of the wound as soon as I could, and then got her into the truck. I picked up both of their guns and threw them on the floor of the passenger side of the truck. Then I went and got the full-sized Colt .45 they had stolen from me and put it back in my shoulder rig. I just left their bodies and their car where they were.
“Because we were only about an hour away, I figured my best bet was to beat feet up here. It was hard to believe, but Rose didn’t go into complete shock. She was coherent until just before we went through Bovill. Then she passed out. Up until then though, she was able to monitor the amount of bleeding, and put pressure on the top of the exit wound dressing with her right hand. Luckily, Dan had once described how to find your place to me, so I didn’t waste a lot of time looking for it.”
By now, Mary had pulled the instruments she thought that she’d need out of their sterile wrappers. “What’s her blood type?”
Jeff replied, “I don’t know, but she keeps a donor card in her wallet—in her purse out in the truck.” Trasel sprinted away to look for it. Mary estimated that Rose had lost at least two or three pints of blood. She then checked Rose’s pulse, respiration, blood pressure, and pupils. Speaking to those gathering in the room like a group of surgical interns, she pronounced, “She’s pretty well out. Her pulse is rapid at 115, but her BP is a bit on the weak side—110 over 40. That may sound strange, but I’ve heard that that isn’t unusual in cases where someone has lost a lot of blood.”
An impromptu surgery room was set up in the kitchen. The kitchen table was used as the operating table. Lisa washed the table down with half the contents of a bottle of denatured alcohol, while T.K. put on a five-quart stockpot of water to boil. Jeff returned, reporting that Rose had indeed been carrying a blood donor’s card. As it turned out, the only other person at the retreat with Rose’s blood type, A negative, was Dan Fong.
Mary prepped Rose’s arm. Jeff helped her hang a colloid IV bottle from the light fixture above the dining room table. She left the roller clamp on the IV tube in the wide-open position, providing a rapid drip.