Chapter 6
Chapter 6
“We need a doctor!” A young man in cargo pants and a black T-shirt, with the same matching black gaiter over his nose and mouth, bursts through the swinging kitchen door.
Brick appraises him for a beat and then, instead of asking the questions Dan was curious about— Who’s hurt? What happened? —Brick simply nods and turns to the hostages. “Is anyone here a doctor?”
There was a time, early on in his premed program, that Dan often fantasized about this moment. He would be on a plane or in a store or at a restaurant and someone would go into cardiac arrest or labor or have a stroke and someone else would shout (just like they do in the movies): Is there a doctor here? And Dan would stand up, hands on hips, chest thrust out in a stereotypical superhero pose (he could even see the breeze rustling his hair), and say, with full-throated confidence, I’m a doctor , before valiantly saving the person’s life. And now, the moment has arrived and Dan remains mute.
“Dan!” Jane rams her shoulder into his, as if waking him up.
“What?”
“He’s a doctor,” she says. Her voice is screechy, and Dan would recognize it as panic if he wasn’t so consumed with his own. Brick turns to them, eyes large and calm like an owl scanning for prey, and Dan is doubly unnerved.
“No! No, I’m not,” he stammers. “I’m a podiatrist .”
“What’s that?” Brick asks.
“I specialize in foot and ankle injuries.”
“So”—Brick crinkles his brow—“you are a doctor.” It’s a statement, not a question, but Dan feels the need to explain. Or defend himself further.
“Technically, but surely there’s a…neurosurgeon in here? Orthopedist?” He names the top two highest-earning medical specialties. Doctors who could actually afford to eat in a restaurant like this. Doctors who would be infinitely more helpful in a trauma/gunshot/emergency situation. He knows the top two highest-earning medical professions because when he decided to go into podiatry, at every holiday for the next four years, his father slapped him on the back and said, Sure you don’t want to be an orthopedic surgeon? It’s basically the same thing as podiatry but they make a lot more money. Second-highest income, in fact, right after neurosurgeon. They get paid so much not solely because of the intricacy of the surgeries and the knowledge required, but because of the inherent risk—when you’re tooling around in someone’s brain , any number of things could go wrong. Dan has never liked risk. He doesn’t drive above the speed limit or water-ski or skydive. (He’s only ever even gambled once—on a trip with Jane to Vegas. He made one single bet at Jane’s urging, and lost.) He doesn’t like having the balance of someone’s life hanging in his hands. So he became a podiatrist.
“He’s a neurosurgeon,” a woman’s voice pipes up.
Oh, thank God . Dan’s shoulders drop in relief. Until he sees that the woman who spoke is the food instigator (or whatever she called herself; Dan had never heard of that career before) and is gesturing to her husband, Rahul—the guy who was recently hit in the face with the butt of a gun. The man came to shortly thereafter, but is currently still supine; both of them are pressed against the glass wall of windows, his head in her lap, him groaning every few minutes as if to let everyone know he’s still alive—and in a lot of pain. He’s in no shape to help anyone else.
Dan’s eyes next meet those of Brick, who is staring at him. Waiting.
“Was the gunshot in the foot?” Dan tries again.
Brick glances at the guy standing by the kitchen door, who gives his head one sharp shake. “We’re wasting time.”
“Cut his ties,” Brick says to Caden (or Lyle). And the next thing Dan knows, he’s being pulled to his feet and escorted to the kitchen.
“No! Wait.” He stops moving and glances back at Jane, whose eyes meet his. Hers are filled with terror, and he mistakes it for fear for his life, which is to say— love . See? he thinks. There’s no way she really wants a divorce. “I’m not leaving my wife.”
Brick brings his gun up an inch in a way that seems to communicate: Remember who’s in charge here? “Yes,” he says. “You are.”
···
Twenty minutes ago, Dan would have sworn there was nothing more terrifying than someone pointing a gun in your face in the middle of dinner, but turns out it’s much scarier when the person holding the gun is also terrified.
Lyle handed Dan off to the man who’d burst into the dining room shouting about needing a doctor. Kid was a more apt description, Dan thought, once he was able to drag his gaze from the barrel of the gun pointed at him and to the face of the person holding it. He’s young, scrawny, maybe Sissy’s age, eighteen, nineteen, his eyes wild, some kind of tribal tattoo crawling up the side of his neck, which does nothing to disabuse Dan of the notion that he is wild, unhinged. The kid’s hand is shaking, and all it would take is his finger to slip on that trigger and Dan would be obliterated. He’s contemplated his death before, of course, but there’s a difference between knowing it’s inevitable one day and staring it down.
There are two other people with guns in the kitchen, matching backpacks strapped to their shoulders, black gaiters covering their faces as well. If they’re being worn as an attempt to appear menacing, it’s working, Dan thinks. He registers each of them briefly, categorizing them in his mind by one standout feature—one is a woman in a baseball cap, one has wire-rimmed glasses, and one is tribal tattoo kid. Had Dan been thinking clearly, he may have recognized the woman—if not by her face, which is concealed by the hat and mask, then by how completely still she went upon seeing him, which is to say he may have recognized her by virtue of her recognizing him. But his gaze has quickly and already moved on, directly to the man on the ground. A chef, it appears, based on the comically tall hat still perched on his scalp—one who was likely responsible for those delectable alien claws Dan has just been consuming—but Dan’s brain doesn’t make that connection either. His mind is on medicine—physiology, really—as he approaches the injured man.
Dan, his wrists still bound and helpless, drops to a knee, and a dreadlocked man—who appears to be a sous chef since he has the same white coat but does not have a ridiculously tall hat—who is administering aid shifts to make room for him, pulling the blood-soaked towel away. “No, keep it there. Press hard,” Dan says, the rusty tang of fresh blood filling his nostrils. He tries to recall the names of the arteries in the shoulder—names he hasn’t thought of since studying anatomy his first year of podiatry school. The subclavian artery feeds the brachial artery as well as the brachial plexus , the large nerve bundle that controls arm function. Dan makes eye contact with his patient. He takes in the man’s pale face—made paler either by his shock at getting shot or by the loss of blood or both—the brown mole on the man’s right cheek, and the tall, conic chef hat still somehow stuck to his head. Dan sees all these details at once without recording any of them, aside from one—the man’s eyes are shiny. Alive. Scared, but alive. And that gives Dan hope. He gently removes the man’s hat.
“We need to get this jacket off,” he says, as if he and the other chef are a team, and then he remembers his own hands are conjoined, rendering him helpless. He lifts his arms, presenting them like an offering to his captor. “My wrist ties?”
The kid (tribal tattoo), still training his gun on Dan, just stares at him.
Nobody moves.
“Cut his ties,” Wire-Rimmed Glasses says from behind, with bass in his voice. Dan presumes him to be Brick’s counterpoint—the leader in the kitchen, not just by his commanding nature, but by his older presence—not older than Dan, but older than Neck Tat.
“I put all the kitchen knives in the van!” Neck Tat says.
“For the love of…” Glasses sighs. “Go get one of them!”
While Neck Tat takes off through the back door, Glasses swings his gun toward Dan, then apparently waffles between whether he should keep it on Dan or the hostages lined up against the wall. To Dan’s great relief, he chooses the hostages. Dan turns his attention back to his patient, applying two of his fingers to the right wrist of the head chef until he feels the steady thump-thump of his pulse. Good .
“What’s your name?” he asks.
“Lars.”
Dan nods, pinching a fingernail on Lars’s nail bed until it goes white, and then lets it go, watching it quickly turn back to red. Good.
“Lars, can you squeeze my hand?”
Lars grimaces as he gently squeezes Dan’s fingers. Good.
“It hurts.”
Neck Tat comes charging back through the door, clutching a long serrated blade, a knife that—in other circumstances—would be used to slice a baguette. Dan holds up his wrists and the kid saws through the white plastic, freeing him. (Dan isn’t sure when men in their twenties began looking like children to him.)
“His, too.” Dan nods toward the sous chef, who is now his sous paramedic.
Neck Tat looks elsewhere for confirmation and, when he gets it, slices through the sous chef’s wrist ties as well.
“My feet, too?” the man asks hopefully.
But Neck Tat jerks his head no .
“C’mon, man.”
“Shut it,” Neck Tat says, standing up and putting a hand to the gun in his waistband.
Dan glances at the sous chef and sees fire in his eyes. “What’s your name?” he asks.
“Zay,” the man says, rubbing his wrists.
“OK, Zay,” Dan says as he unbuttons Lars’s chef coat and tugs it off his unwounded arm. “On the count of three, we’re gonna roll him gently on his side. You keep pressing the towel to his shoulder until the last possible second, when I need you to move it so we can get his jacket off.” He looks at his patient. “Ready, Lars?”
The man nods, the muscles in his jaw clenching, and Dan and Zay roll him onto his good arm while tugging the jacket off his right side, revealing a white T-shirt underneath. There’s no blood on the back of it, no exit wound, so Dan knows the bullet is still lodged in the chef’s shoulder.
“OK, let’s roll him gently back.” When they do so, Lars grunts with pain and blood gushes up out of the small, quarter-inch wound, soaking the T-shirt even further.
“Pressure,” Dan says, but Zay’s head is turned and he’s vomiting, the acrid scent immediately filling Dan’s nostrils. He ignores it and takes the towel from Zay’s hands, hastily pressing it back over the wound.
He glances up over his shoulder at Glasses.
“Have you called 9-1-1? This man needs an ambulance. A doctor.”
“ You’re a doctor.”
“I’m a pod—” He stops; it’s unimportant. “He needs a doctor in a hospital. He’s losing blood.”
“No. That’s out of the question.”
“Do you want him to die ?”
“Am I going to die?” Panic fills Lars’s voice.
Dammit. “Not if we get you to a hospital,” Dan says.
The bullet is deep in Lars’s shoulder—an impossible place to create a tourniquet—which means there’s no way to stop the bleeding, just stem it with pressure. But Dan knows eventually—in as little as one or two hours—the loss of blood will force Lars’s pulse to get weaker while his heart will beat faster—a consequence of it working overtime to circulate the smaller volume of blood throughout his body. The color in his nail bed won’t bounce back to red as quickly when he presses it. His breathing will become shallow, a panting, as his body tries to conserve the oxygen his brain and other vital organs so desperately need.
Dan wipes his brow, now damp with sweat. “Go get Rock.”
“Who?” Glasses says.
“Your leader!”
“You mean Brick? He’s not our leader. We’re leaderless.”
Dan, losing patience, scoffs. “Because that worked out so well for Occupy Wall Street?”
“What’s that?” Neck Tat asks.
Dan shakes his head. These Generation Zers. Or are they Ys? They look so young, maybe they’ve started the alphabet all over again and they’re As. Honestly, Dan can’t keep up.
“Well, get the guy who’s not the leader, then.”
“Can’t you just clean it with vodka or something?” Glasses says. “Dig the bullet out? That’s what they do in the movies.”
“This isn’t the movies. The bullet is deep in his shoulder. If I try to dig it out I could do more damage. Not to mention, he’d bleed out even faster.” Dan holds out his hand to Neck Tat. “Give me the knife.”
“You’re going to cut it out?” Neck Tat asks. His eyes grow wider, filling with an excitement that makes Dan uncomfortable.
“No. I need to cut this shirt off of him and it’s too saturated with blood to rip it.”
Neck Tat shoves his gun in the back of his pants again, grabs the bread knife from the table behind him, and kneels down with it. Dan lifts the towel to let Neck Tat have access.
“Hurry,” Dan says.
Neck Tat works quickly, pulling the wet material away from Lars’s skin and ripping it in two with the serrated edge of the knife. Dan presses the towel back to the wound, but it’s already soaked with blood and isn’t doing much to absorb more.
“I need a fresh towel,” Dan says. “And gauze. Is there a first aid kit?”
Zay, now leaning against the fridge, the back of his wrist over his mouth, gestures to the stainless steel rack across the room and says: “On the bottom shelf.”
Neck Tat retrieves the small blue plastic box with the red cross on the front and hands it to Dan, who opens it only to find three little squares of gauze that would hardly pack a paper cut, much less a bullet wound. His mind flashes to the home remedy his mom used on his nosebleeds as a kid.
“I need a tampon!”
In the silence, Dan feels most of the heads turn toward the one gun-wielding female he spotted when he walked into the kitchen.
“You think I brought period supplies?” she says.
The familiar voice grabs Dan’s attention this time. Holding the kitchen towel firmly to the man’s shoulder with his knee, he looks up, peering at the girl. He blinks once, then twice, as though his eyes can’t thoroughly be trusted. And then his blood runs cold and hot from the shock of recognition.
“Sissy?”