I gathered some clean Kleenex, sprayed Medique onto two sheets, and packed one into each nostril. Woooffffff. This’d better clot. If you don’t clot, packing doesn’t do enough, the paper’ll just keep capillarying up with your unviscous blood until you’re the Scarlet Mummy. Okay. I wiped my forehead, sprayed up another Kleenex, and pushed it into the wound in my forehead with the heel of my hand. Yeoww. Huge juicy bruise there too. Okay. Hold on. Hold on. This isn’t right.
Okay. Grgur’ll be here any second. Got to get out of here. Take stock. Any other lacerations, contusions, or third-degree bruising? I wriggled and flexed and patted myself down with my right hand. Nothing apparent. Headlamp light slid upstream through the interior, and its source car zoomed past, and then another. Not stopping to help. Although of course they weren’t supposed to anymore because of all the carjack kidnappings they did that way, in fact there’d been a whole campaign in Florida to get people to just call it in and if possible not even slow down, but of course now with police and fire stretched beyond the limit, calling did nothing. In the Loose Union of Socialist Banana Republics of America, one was basically on one’s own. Cars passed. No cops. No good Samaritans. No ES goons. No Grgur. Keep up the pressure. I still had the bottle with my free hand and sprayed a little backward into my palm. I rubbed it between my fingers. Medique has a specific calone-ish smell to it. Hmm. I sniffed again. There was some of that smell there, but was there much of it? And there was alcohol in there, I could tell from the temperature, but wasn’t there usually more? And as that evaporated the real thing had a milky texture and this maybe, well, I guess it did, or maybe it didn’t… I mean, I’d been relying on the stuff for years…
No. This isn’t it. Oh, hell. Oh, hell. They’d replaced the stuff with, I guess, just rubbing alcohol. Rubbing alcohol. Mean. Meanies, I thought, regressing. There was an upwelling of bullied-on-the-playground emotion like a flavored burp from a thirty-year-old meal. Mean ’n’ cruel. Except I shouldn’t talk (EOE), I guess. I took my hand away. The Kleenex was heavy with blood and slid off. Not sticky. Definitely not clotting the way it should. Oh, Christ. I was normal, for crying out loud. Hell. THE FEAR was crawling all over my body and through my mouth and down into my lower intestine. I was normal. I licked my lips but you can’t really tell from the taste. I was normal -
Dr. Lisuarte, I thought.
She must have given me bad factor IX. I’d seen her only weeks ago, and she’d topped me up. Maybe she’d slipped me some-or what if it wasn’t her, what if it was just ES? Then they’d had to have been slipping me some oral anticoagulant? Enoxaparin, maybe? Except that would take a few doses, and it had a pretty strong chalky taste that you’d think I would have-and anyway, why? Had that been the first part of a plan to kill me and make it look like my death was caused by my own old medical problem? Or had they just wanted to get me into a hospital where it was easy to keep an eye on me? Or was the anticlotting stuff some exotic preparation that only they had the antidote for so that I’d be dependent on them-no, that’s ridiculous. Maybe Wait. Whatever they did, you don’t have time to think about it. At this rate I’ll bleed out in less than ten minutes. We had a professional-level situation here. I needed paramedics, at least, and really I needed an ER. Except then I’d be in Warren’s evil clutches and that would be it. Anyway, there’s hardly enough time for paramedics to deal with it even if they were right here. They don’t usually carry thrombogen with them anyway, they’d just pack the wounds and put shock inflators around my legs, and that might not be enough. And anyway, I can’t go to a hospital. Hospital = identification = police involvement. And police = Warren = torture.
Okay, go to Plan X. I hadn’t seen any matches and I hadn’t remembered packing any. So much for the survival jacket. Even Rambo’s knife handle has matches. You dimwit. This is it. No. Okay. Think.
The lighter.
I fumbled and found the regular twelve-volt outlet and I pressed the thingie down, but it didn’t stay down for a second and then pop out the way they’re supposed to, so I tried just pressing it against the gash in my forehead but it turned out there wasn’t any coil in it so it wouldn’t heat up. Damn. Defeated by the Health Stasi.
Probably. Okay.
Okay. Got to get out. Gotta get out get out get out getout getoutgetoutgetout.
“Five to one, baby, one in five,” the Lizard King was still moaning, with what seemed like Christine — ish aptness. Blood was still streaming out of my nose like it was out of a fog nozzle. I swallowed. Glulg. Spurt. Gurgr. Spurt. Getoutgetoutgetout. No, don’t panic. Chill, I thought. Just go to Plan Y. I wriggled into my jacket. Oof. Okay.
Huh.
PREEEP, PREEEP, PREEEP, PREEEP, PREEEP, PREEEP, PREEEP, PREEEP.
I couldn’t get a good angle on the window on my side, so I powered the seat all the way back-at least that worked-and braced myself against the seat back and blasted both legs up against the glass of the soi-disant moon roof. It just popped out of the rubber seal, without breaking-a nice minor blessing-and I stood on the seat, untangled myself from the we’re-strapping-you-down-whether-you-like-it-or-not shoulder belts, and wriggled up out of the moon roof. Whoa. Dizzy. Really dizzy, I’d stood up too suddenly without enough blood. Hang on. Okay. I got my legs out and sat on the roof for a second. The night had gotten cold. No. It wasn’t the air. I was losing juice. Finally I let myself slide down over the rear windshield and the waxy shell of the hood. I got my hands on the grapefruit tree that had stopped the car, let my feet down, and melted over the grille onto the centipede grass.
PREEEP, PREEEP, PREEEP, PREEEP. Cars roorshed by. A siren. I looked around. Nothing. Just wishful imagination magnifying the tinnitus in my cochlea. Okay. Stick to the factuals.
I heaved myself up. Okay. I waddled over the bent-down wire-and-lathe fence and wobbled onto the gravel shoulder. Okay. Bye, bye, Barracuda. Step, step. My feet felt asphalt.
Where? What?
What now? Get out in front of a car and wave and make it stop? No, not likely to work. People are too paranoid. As well they should be. They’ll just keep the doors locked and run me over and then tell me they’ve called Officer Friendly and that he’ll be here any hour. Got to hoof it. Huh. I’d passed a Walgreens four minutes ago but that was way too far. Okay, Plan Yuzz. Have to do fast food.
I started lurching toward the exit ramp. Down to the McDonald’s. It was farther away than I’d thought. An eighth of a mile, maybe? About three hundred steps. And if you figure you’ll bleed out in fifteen minutes, that’s-no, don’t figure. Just do it. Step. Step. Ow. Ankles ache. Feeling woozy. In a few minutes I’ll be thinking so unclearly that I’ll forget why I was doing this, and I’ll sit down for a second to rest and that’ll be about it. Oh, God, oh, God. My fingertips were numbing. Numbening? Oh, fuck, I was fucked, I was fucked. As I got under the first of the tall sodium lamps of the sort of rest-stop area I noticed my right foot was leaving a bloody footprint. A literal one, for once. Brrrdrrrrdrrrr. Cold. I’ve had it. Dun 4. I’ve had it. It’s over, it’s all No. Press onward, Lemmiwinks. You might make it. Stranger things have happened. Frogs have lived a hundred years cast in cement. And not just Michigan J. Frog. Ninety-year-old ladies have survived shit that’d kill a wild yak. I kept lurching toward the big M solar-path glyph, dragging my osmium feet through the clotting air. Step. Step. Come on.