Surprises in All Sizes
DEAN’S HEAD hurt.
His head hurt, and his body hurt, and his phone felt like an ichthyosaur with a broken spine in his back pocket.
He could hear Marcus moaning.
And nothing.
Every soft groan coming from Marcus’s mouth sounded like a bullhorn in a refrigerator, because their surroundings were so quiet.
They’d been all loud and tumbly just moments before.
“Dean?” Marcus all but sobbed.
“Buddy?” Dean asked.
“You alive?”
“No,” Dean decided. “Everything’s dark, and my head was blown up by a hand grenade.”
“That’s weird. Mine too.”
The odds against both of them sitting, headless, and having a conversation were what finally forced Dean to open his eyes.
The darkness was almost as complete with his eyes open as it had been when they’d been closed.
Slowly—because even moving his eyeballs hurt—he searched the space in the unfamiliar plane and found Marcus, wedged against the passenger’s side of the plane.
He had blood trickling from his temple, and his leg—which had been on a part of the fuselage that had buckled—was a horror show.
“Oh God,” Dean whispered, staring at not one but two ends of bone sticking through the skin. “Marcus, don’t look at—”
“Seen it,” Marcus said, his eyes locked determinedly on Dean’s. “It’s bleeding a lot, Dean. I know we don’t have shit in here, but even a cargo plane’s got to have a first aid kit.”
Dean nodded and ignored his head and its imminent threat of dropping off his shoulders. Marcus needed him.
“I’ll find it,” he choked. “Let me check on Bird. Then I’ll come here and work on you.”
As he stood, the broken pieces of his cell phone clattered in his back pocket, and he tried not to remember they were in the middle of the fucking desert and nobody in the Bureau—hell, nobody but them —knew where the fuck they were.
There’d been one case of water— one— rattling around the back of the plane when they’d gotten in. Dean remembered thinking what the hell? They’d get to Juarez in a couple of hours. How bad was it to only have a few bottles of water for two hours?
He’d better never tell that to Birdie, who was superstitious like most good pilots and would never let him live it down.
“Bird?” he rasped, taking a creaky step toward the front of the plane and feeling the hull of the thing shift beneath him.
In a quick glance—but one that felt like it ripped his eyeballs out of his aching head—he saw that the rear of the fuselage had broken off, and the back end of the plane was mostly sand.
Well, shit, there went their one case of water.
He got to the front of the plane and crouched down next to Birdie, who was moaning against the dashboard, bleeding on the gauges and the steering column.
“Bird,” Dean muttered, shaking the narrow shoulder. “How you doing?”
“Feels like my head exploded and my brains ran out my ears,” Birdie muttered.
Dean grunted, because, well, same , and started to gently prod at the collapsed dashboard to see if Birdie was pinned.
“Relax,” Birdie muttered. “I can move my legs.” There was a grunt that was almost a laugh. “Too small. Whole life, been too small for sports, too small for dances—today, I’m too small to die.”
“When we tell this story,” Dean said, reaching down to pull Birdie’s legs sideways gently, the better to help Birdie out of the seat, “we’ll be sure to say you were too mean to die. Can you stand?”
“Too mean to die….” Birdie let out a rusty chuckle and accepted Dean’s help out of the seat and into the aisle, the better to go sit down and be grossed out by Marcus’s leg.
Dean scrounged around the plane, found a first aid kit from where he’d been sitting, and rummaged through it. Antibiotic wash, tons of gauze, a stitching kit, which would do them no good right now, and some syringes of morphine.
Dean glanced at the mess of Marcus’s leg and contemplated the morphine.
“Marcus?” he asked, his voice a little shaky, “how’s your math right now?”
“I can count to three,” Marcus panted. “Like, my leg’s busted in three places.”
“Can you do morphine math? Like how much to give you to put you out of pain while I splint it without killing you?”
Marcus moaned a little. “I’d rather you kill me with it,” he admitted, tears in his voice. “I’d take passing out as a kindness.”
Dean grabbed one of the syringes and some alcohol swabs and wandered over to sit next to Marcus, his energy and ability to move almost exhausted. “Anything for a buddy,” he muttered.
Marcus let out a half sob, and Dean pulled out his knife and used it to shred Marcus’s khakis far enough up from the bloody mess of his leg to find a bare patch of skin to prep for the shot.
He and Marcus had lots of first aid training, but a compound fracture was a rough thing for a trained doctor—hell, for a trained orthopedist. If Dean was going to dump antiseptic on his hands and try to straighten the leg enough to stop Marcus’s bleeding, he wanted Marcus to be as unconscious as possible.
With a deep breath—and a hope that he wasn’t going to OD his friend—he plunged the syringe in and prayed.
Next to him, Marcus’s breathing started to relax, the steady moans that he’d tried to repress easing.
“Better?” Dean asked after a couple of minutes.
“Much,” Marcus mumbled.
“Good. Bird, can you walk?”
“Sort of,” Birdie said.
“I need you to find that case of water. We’ve got some work to do.”
AN HOUR. It took him and Birdie an hour to get the leg to the point where they felt comfortable wrapping a pressure bandage around it.
Everything Dean had ever learned in emergency first aid classes came into play, and as glad as he was that Marcus was unconscious for what he was doing, he missed Marcus’s contribution to his little adventure in doctoring.
Birdie was good for following directions, but Marcus was one of the few people who could follow Dean’s wayward brain.
But finally, after using three-quarters of the water and all of the antibacterial rinse on washing the leg off and setting it, Marcus was as stable as they could get him. Everybody had sipped some water, and Birdie had set up the plane’s emergency beacon.
There’d been a short, hot discussion on whether the beacon would bring friendly or unfriendly rescuers, and then Dean had pointed out that if there were no rescuers at all, they’d die slowly, as opposed to quickly if the next folks they saw proved to be unfriendly.
Birdie shut up after that. They were both concussed and woozy and ready to consign their fates to the night-closing desert outside their fragile little eggshell of safety.
At least, Dean hoped, the scorpions would leave them alone, but he couldn’t vouch for the rattlesnakes. He’d have to check in the morning to see if any of them had crept in through the broken edges of the plane’s tail.
HIS HEAD ached so fiercely that even sleep wasn’t a refuge, but that didn’t mean he could emerge from it easily. He whimpered and tried to open his eyes as voices approached from outside the plane, but nothing could penetrate the foggy veil of pain and darkness in his eyes.
Until he felt a smoothly gloved hand on his forehead and heard a dearly familiar voice murmuring, “Concussion, some soft-tissue damage in the neck, lots of bruising in the shoulders, chest, and abdomen. We’ll need to test to make sure there’s no internal bleeding, but mostly I think he needs some painkillers and some sleep. ”
Dean had heard Bailey’s doctor voice before, but never aimed at himself.
“Bailey?” he mumbled. “Am I hallucinating?”
“No,” Bailey said softly back. “But you’ll wish you were. When you get better, I’m going to yell so hard and so long, you’ll say to yourself, ‘God, I wish I was still in that wrecked plane, dying in the desert.’”
“As long as you’re here with me,” he mumbled. “But I’d rather not die.” His biggest fear bubbled to the surface. “How’s Marcus? He can’t die either.”
Bailey’s restrained chuff of breath told him that was a trickier proposition.
“Our two rescue pilots are getting the gurney in here for him,” he said. “How much morphine did you give him?”
Dean called up the number, which had been lasered into his brain as he’d tried to do calculations on grains of the drug versus Marcus’s body weight. When he said it, Bailey let out a breath.
“Close,” he said. “That was as close to an OD as I’d ever want to give.”
“His leg’s a mess,” Dean said, keeping his eyes shut. He didn’t want to see the blood on his own hands. “Had to… feel for arteries. Couldn’t penetrate arteries with bone shards.”
Bailey grunted. “And you didn’t want your friend to suffer,” he said softly.
“Tell me he’ll be all right.” Dean wasn’t too proud to beg.
“We’ll get him to the hospital in Juarez, and you and Bird too,” Bailey said, and the brief, dry touch of his lips on Dean’s forehead was more reassuring than anything he could recall.
Dean felt consciousness slipping away again, and he tried to fight it.
Bailey was here. He had something important to tell Bailey, and he couldn’t let it wait. Not after the last five days….
“Bailey….” he whispered.
“Shh, Dean. Not going anywhere.”
“Love you.” He sighed, and then he fell off the ledge into the blissful dark.
MAYBE IT was the five days out of the ER. Maybe it was the time with Dean’s family. But Bailey could actually feel his doctor cloak settling on his shoulders once he knew Dean was alive.
Before that, he was a mess.
It didn’t help that in circling the area where the cell phones had last pinged they’d seen the burnt-out husk of a Jeep with two still-smoking bodies in the front seat.
Bailey wasn’t sure what noise he’d made, but it probably hadn’t been human, because Reg had grabbed his hand, and Anthony had set about coldly cataloging all the reasons the two bodies in the Jeep couldn’t be Dean and Marcus.
“One of those guys is enormous, and the other is much, much smaller. We’re looking for two five foot nine or ten guys who don’t wear wool in the desert, and these guys are probably six five and five three.”