Chapter 54 Last Man Standing
Last Man Standing
Evan was in trouble.
The gas-station convenience store had slim pickings.
Four aisles, two of them dedicated to junk food. The medical section had Band-Aids, gauze, pills of various over-the-counter stripes, and an inexplicably wide array of ankle braces. No syringe. No rubbing alcohol.
He grabbed a roll of white athletic tape and moved on, frantically searching the shelves while Anca checked the neighboring aisle.
His breath grew more ragged. Oxygen was getting low, his vision cramping.
Aside from beer, the only alcohol was nip bottles behind the counter. He pointed. “Vodka.” The word came out in a breathy wheeze. “Two … bottles.”
The clerk glanced up from his sudoku book, looking end-of-shift weary. “What kind?”
“Don’t care.”
The clerk leaned behind him, grabbed two of the tiny bottles, set them on the counter.
Pinnacle Whipped Cream Vodka.
“No.” Evan was injured, not dead. Plus whatever sugary crap they used to flavor it would not be sterilizing. “Not … those.”
“What then?”
He pointed. Tito’s would do.
“Anything else?”
Evan stepped back, scanning the rack for anything sharp enough. A pen tube, maybe. His inhalation hitched, and he had to fight to suck in a sip of air, a pain hiccup that furled his throat in its fist. Anca came around, shaking her head. “Nothing.”
He staggered a bit, and she braced him with her arm around his waist.
The clerk said, “Everything okay?”
“This is why I’m keeping him on the mini-bottles now,” Anca said.
Evan stepped around to the next aisle, searching frantically. Plastic lighters, condoms, tampons—and there. A pack of ball-pump needles.
The sight made him shudder. He’d used one for this once in Ankara behind a mechanic shop. It had not been pleasant.
He searched for anything else.
There was nothing else.
Beggars and choosers and all that.
Snatching the pack, he turned back to the counter, peeling a hundred-dollar bill from the wad in his pocket.
“I’m sorry, sir.” The clerk pointed to the sign. WE DO NOT ACCEPT BILLS LARGER THAN $20.
Evan turned to Anca. “… change?”
“My purse is in the car. I can run and—”
“Do you have Apple Pay?” the clerk asked.
“I don’t…” A full wheeze now, the lung compression intensifying, blood vessels squishing, organs getting rocked in their beds.
Fire slithered down his shoulder and armpit, flicking its tail all the way down to the tenth rib.
His breathing had turned shallow, quick cramped jerks that brought little relief.
“You could sign up for our credit-card line,” the clerk said, sliding a pamphlet at Evan. “You get three percent back on gas purchases—”
“… sorry … just keep…” Evan left two hundreds on the counter and staggered out.
Anca followed him and helped lower him into the passenger seat. He unbuttoned his shirt, poured vodka over his chest, took out the inflating needle and dunked it in vodka.
“Are you sure about this?” Anca asked.
He fingered across the top of his chest, finding the spot on the high rib again.
He set the needle just at the top edge to make sure he missed the artery.
Since it was blunt-tipped he’d have to smash it in hard enough to pierce skin, muscle, and the pleural membrane surrounding the chest cavity to get to the trapped pocket of air.
A wrong guess would create another pneumothorax instead of relieving this one.
Anca had closed his door and come around to the driver’s seat. “How will you push it in?”
He pointed at her tote bag at his feet. Sticking out was the thick Solzhenitsyn tome. She grabbed it, held it carefully across the base of the needle as he pinched the slender shaft.
Static sparkled across the book, his fist, the windshield. He readied his right fist to pound the book inward and punch the needle through. A rare hesitation.
It was gonna suck, plain and simple.
The hardcover was nearly flat to his chest, close enough that he could see over it and read the title:
A blunt, unsubtle instrument for the task. It would have been amusing were he not in the process of suffocating inside his own body.
He took a moment to relax everything within his power to relax, a total release of muscle and sclera, of the skin itself. The more open he was, the less damage the stainless-steel shaft would cause ripping through.
He smashed his fist against the book as if beating his chest.
The shaft went in smoothly, he knew it right away in the split second of relief before the pain came. And then it arrived, husky and hard-edged, looking to trample him. It did.
His throat had seized up and he focused first on unseizing it, relaxing the knot from the outside in, onion-peeling it to the core. It gave and he gasped in a clump of air.
A faint hissing reached his ears—thank God—and he counted the seconds, rewinding to account for the one and a half when he’d been frozen up breathless. The rush of air through the threaded end of the pump needle lasted another six seconds and then wisped off into a pleasing silence.
All was peaceful. Evan breathed in, breathed out. He stripped a neat square of athletic tape off the roll and stuck it over the threaded base of the needle, sealing it off.
He breathed some more.
He was sweating. All the way down and all the way through, his clothes double soaked from the rain and from perspiration that the pain had roasted out of him.
The buildup started again, a twinge in his upper left lung, the tendrils reigniting across his chest with the memory of what was coming.
He peeled the tape back, counted the hiss of relief. Just four and a half seconds now.
That was good. That was very good.
The hole in his lung was small. If it was small enough, it would heal itself over.
Slow inhalation. Slow exhalation.
Anca was perched on her knees in the driver’s seat, legs folded under her so she was sitting on her calves, wide-eyed with some secret confidence.
“You’re very brave,” she said.
“No.”
“What, then?”
He didn’t know. He’d never put words to it. Never even thought it all the way through. But he took a moment to do so now.
What, then? A nightmare, a hope, a premonition? That the world might tear itself down to the last man standing.
“Ready,” he said. “I’m ready.”
“I understand,” she said. “I understand you now.”
He eased back the tape once more, and the makeshift valve hissed. Three seconds this time. Improvement.
“We can go now.” His voice still rasped, but the wheezing was over.
“I will drive.” She punched the ignition button and pulled out of the gas station. “You can rest at my place. Where I can look after you.”
“You don’t need that.”
“Don’t you learn anything? It is precisely what I need.”
Exhaustion swamped him. Slumping back in the seat, he sent out a quick text update to Joey and Candy.
For the rest of the ride, he dozed on and off, awakening at intervals to relieve the pressure in his lung.
By the time they reached the Bronx, no more air let out when he untaped the makeshift valve.
Wincing, he pulled the shaft free. Then he doused the hole with vodka, sealed it with gauze, and taped it off.
He measured his breaths. The wall of the lung held, the tiny perf closing over.
Anca lucked into a parking space right in front of her building. He got upstairs with minimal pain.
Candy answered the door. His shirt was still unbuttoned, the dressing clear against his sweat-shiny skin.
She noted the position of the bandage. “Tension pneumo?”
“Minor.”
She stepped back, letting them in.
Anca guided Evan to her father’s room. The door was closed. Anca hesitated at the threshold. They stood there a moment. Her head was lowered, eyes closed.
Then she pushed inside. She helped him ease down to sit on the perfectly made bed, the movement lifting a swirl of motes.
Leaning back on the pillows, he took in the room, that bowl of painted eggs, the toothpick flags, the poster of the circle dance.
Everything perfectly preserved. Behind the door hung that cowboy hat over the jean jacket, the slippers beneath filling out the invisible man.
Her father. What would he think about what had happened to his daughter? What would he feel?
“You sure you want me in here?” he asked. “Couch is fine.”
“I am glad for an excuse to use Tat?’s room. He’d be glad for it, too.”
“Just need a shower,” Evan said.
Candy leaned in the doorway. “Want me to wash your back?”
Anca actually gasped and then laughed at herself. “Not under my roof.”
Evan said, “I’ll manage on my own.”
“I’ll take her to the hospital for her test,” Candy said. “We have to assume she’s being followed now.”
“We can’t leave him here alone like this,” Anca said.
“He’ll be fine.” Candy’s arms were crossed, her manicured nails impatiently drumming her biceps. “Come on.”
Anca glanced from Candy to Evan. Then from Evan to Candy.
Giving a pert nod, she rose to leave.
He was asleep before the door closed behind her.
In the middle of the night, a movement at the doorway stirred Evan from sleep. He tried to focus, but his head was groggy from injury, exertion, and the afterwash of opioids. Someone drifted toward him.
He breathed plumeria, relaxed.
Candy sat on the edge of the bed. Her hands came into sleep-blurry view, a catheter in one hand, IV bag in the other. He tensed.
She ran her fingers through his hair. He couldn’t remember ever being this tired. Maybe he was still asleep.
A dab of an alcohol pad licked the crook of his arm. With a single fluid motion, she slid the catheter into his median cubital vein. Given all his field doctoring on this mission, it was a welcome role reversal.
“Ketorolac for pain and swelling, broad-spectrum antibiotic, saline to hydrate.”
“Copy that,” he murmured.
“You’re gonna wake up like you ate your Wheaties.”
Pressure in his arm but no pain. Candy squeezed the bag, bolusing the liquid into his body. His blinks grew heavier.
At some point, the pressure lifted from his arm and he felt the softness of her lips on his forehead. When he managed to open his eyes, he was alone in the darkness.
His eyes did not stay open long.