Finally the firing slackened somewhat, from a roar to a din, and he chanced a look past the rusted shield. There was smoke everywhere, people running and yelling and firing their weapons, a sort of general hubbub with guns, and then he noticed the wounded man. Lying immobile on his face behind some sandbags, a pool of blood slowly growing beneath him, one of the defenders, someone he’d never met, had obviously been shot.
“Damn!” swore Justin, rating his chances of surviving actually going out into the open. It didn’t look terribly promising; in fact, it looked downright suicidal. “Damn, damn, damn!”
And then he was up and running, before he’d really even decided to do so, sure that he was about to be shot and/or killed, right into the thick of it. Someone yelled at him to get down and, deciding that this was probably a pretty good piece of advice, he fell to his belly and crawled the rest of the way to the wounded man.
Up close, it became all too apparent to Justin that it didn’t look good for the wounded man; he’d been shot in the head and most of the back of his skull was gone. Gray brain tissue, bright red blood, and jagged ivory bone showed garishly against the yellow soil. Gently, trying to ignore the cacophony all around, he tried the man’s carotid pulse, just to be sure, and confirmed his fears; the man was stone dead. Unsure whether he should try to haul the body to safety, try to cover him with a cloth or something, or just leave the poor fellow, Justin hesitated, wincing at each fresh burst of gunfire and wiping his blood-streaked hands on his pants, until another defender got hit.
This time it was a man he’d met briefly, a small, friendly, red-haired guy named Ted who’d brought their meals one day in quarantine. Today, he’d been manning the parapet, so to speak, and now he screamed in agony and, dropping his rifle and doubling over, fell to the ground and clutched his stomach, where a bright red stain had begun to spread into his white T-shirt. Swearing again, Justin grabbed the medic bag and crawled towards him as quickly as he could.
Crawling up to the writhing, moaning man, Justin told him to lay still and let him have a look, but Ted didn’t seem to hear him and instead rolled into a tighter ball. A natural enough reaction, Justin thought; but what to do about it?
“Relax!” he shouted in Ted’s ear. “I’m a doctor! Hear me?! A doctor!”
Ted’s panic-stricken eyes peered at him for a second and then he gave a sort of shudder and, unclenching himself somewhat, gingerly lay back. As gently as possible, Justin moved the man’s hands from over the wound and tore open the T-shirt, groping for a pressure bandage at the same time, and then saw that there was a neat hole in Ted’s abdomen, just below the diaphragm, from which blood was pumping at a fairly good clip. Wishing he had some antiseptic gel, he slapped the thick plasti-gauze bandage onto the spot, activated the edge strips, and applied gentle pressure. Ted writhed and groaned and cursed, but not so badly that Justin couldn’t keep the bandage in place, and finally the nanotech edge strips caught, the bandage sealed over the wound neat as can be, and the bleeding was staunched. So far, so good.
“Hold this, right here,” shouted Justin, placing Ted’s hands over the bandage. “And try not to move!”
Returning to the bag, he grabbed a mophidrine syrette, noted that it was a one-grain injection (which seemed appropriate—didn’t it?), frantically stripped it open, and jabbed it into Ted’s thigh. Within a minute, the drug took effect and Ted relaxed a bit. Next Justin broke out the uni-plasma and was about to reluctantly attempt the rather tricky job of inserting it into Ted’s arm when there was a tremendous explosion and he rolled onto his face and lay there while the world jumped and skipped in his senses, his ears went quite deaf from an intense ringing, and clods of dirt and small rocks fell on him from the sky like rain. For a long moment, unable to move or even think properly, his only thought was that he must have been killed.
He was still lying there wondering about it when someone loomed over him and he focused in enough to see that it was someone he didn’t know, a fifty-something man with a bald head and a thick goatee, an angry scowl on his weathered features. He was shouting about something and gesticulating, but Justin couldn’t discern a single syllable and had to simply point to his ears and shake his head. The man scowled again and then reached down, grabbed Justin by the shirt front, and roughly directed his attention to one side, where another wounded member of Baron Zero’s defenders had been hit and lay groaning in the dirt amidst a growing pool of her own fluids. Swearing to himself, Justin nodded at the man, whoever he was, and, grabbing the medic’s bag, scrambled towards the wounded fighter.
He was almost there when, seemingly out of thin air, one of the raiders, a wild-eyed young woman with a shaved bald head and an enormous-looking handgun, was right there in front of him. Justin froze, unsure of what to do, but the enemy woman hesitated not one moment; with amazing swiftness, she raised the pistol and pointed it squarely at his face. Instinctively, he threw his hands up, expecting the fatal shot any second, but then, beyond all odds, the woman herself was shot. A neat red hole suddenly appeared in the middle of her forehead, a spray of brains and blood flew from the back of her head, and she went down in an unruly heap. Justin looked around for whoever may have just saved his life, but there was too much smoke and chaos to begin to figure it out. He looked at the woman before him on the ground, but there was obviously no helping her; the puddle of blood beneath what was left of her head told him that. Ruefully, briefly wondering who she’d been, he left her and crouch-ran toward the gut-shot defender.
The rest of the battle blurred together in Justin’s memory. There were more wounds, some severe, some superficial, and plenty more shooting and explosions, but it all blurred into one long phantasmagoria of noise and fire, punctuated by the screams of the wounded and the garish color of arterial blood on the parched ground. His hearing returned, grudgingly, and he hoped that his eardrums hadn’t been perforated, but otherwise he came through it unhurt, if profoundly shocked by the experience. In no more than thirty minutes it was over and, after a few last parting gunshots from either side, the firing stopped and the wind began to blow away the clouds of smoke and dust.
As it turned out, the bald, mustachioed man who’d encouraged his efforts was the House nurse, Denny. He and Baron Zero strolled up just as Justin was finishing with the last of the wounded, an older man named Lou who’d sustained a grazing bullet wound, and gave Justin a pair of big smiles. Zero had a pretty good scrape on one cheek and bits of dirt and plaster in his shaggy hair, and Denny sported a bandage on one lower leg, but they both seemed otherwise uninjured.
“Good work, Doctor,” said Denny earnestly. “I surely do appreciate your help.”
“Yeah, Doc,” nodded Zero. “You saved some good people today. I owe you my thanks, at the very least.”
Feeling both very tired and what he supposed was stress-induced trauma, a sort of detached, numb sensation, Justin looked up at them and frowned.
“I wish,” he said wanly, “that I had not been needed. I… I’m not accustomed to this kind of thing.”
“Aw, you get used to it,” said Zero wearily. “Strange as that seems.”
“What about the wounded?” asked Justin, rising from his knees. “Ted and the others, the ones who’ve been shot?”