Chapter 21 #3
I climb four rungs with a bad leg and a concaving chest, but I ignore the pain. I don’t have time for it right now.
The dock is empty.
Fifty feet of cracked concrete and the bollard and the weeds and nothing standing on it.
Ruslan is gone. The fence rattles somewhere behind me in the dark, faint, already far, and there’s a car door and an engine and then that’s gone too.
The backpack is gone.
Belai is not.
He’s twenty feet from the fence.
He got that far. He turned and he ran when I told him to, this small, stooped man, and he got twenty feet, and there’s a long dark smear on the concrete behind him where he crawled the last of it.
He’s on his side. One arm under him. The other stretched out toward the gap in the chain link, fingers open.
His glasses are three feet away, folded shut, one lens cracked like a spiderweb.
“No,” I grunt out.
I go down onto my knees so hard I hear something in the joint.
“No, no, no. Belai.”
I get my hands on him and I turn him toward me and he’s so light.
This man carried Callen three kilometers with a fever burning through him.
He pulled four dead Americans out of a downed airframe with nothing but his hands.
He weighs nothing at all. I gather him onto my lap, shaking with cold, my hands dripping river water onto his ironed white shirt, now soaked with red.
But wait, he’s breathing.
He’s breathing.
“Okay.” My voice comes out level. Bright, even. I have no idea where it’s coming from. “Okay. Okay. I’ve got you.”
Hands first. Always hands first. Hands are faster than eyes and they don’t lie.
There’s a deep stab in his left flank, above the hip. In and out, deep, but the angle’s wrong for anything that matters. I take his own hand and put it there and press it down and hold it.
Second one, low on the ribs. Ugly. Slow. Slow is survivable.
Third.
Right side of the throat, above the collarbone.
It is pumping.
“Hey. Hey. Look at me. Look right at me, Belai.”
I get my teeth into my sleeve, high at the shoulder, and I tear. The soaked seam resists, but eventually it gives with a rip. I ball the wet cloth in my fist, then I drive the heel of my palm down into that hole. I put every ounce of my remaining strength behind it.
Warm. Immediately, obscenely warm, straight through the sodden fabric, over my knuckles, down inside my cuff. Belai starts to thrash and the blood pumps harder.
“Shh. Shhh.” My face is over his. “Deep breaths, Belai. Slow ones. In through the nose. There you go. There you go.”
His eyes find me.
Behind the glass of the shock, behind the fog, this man finds my face and holds onto it.
“You’re going to survive this.” I press harder and he makes a sound, but I don’t stop. “Do you hear me? You are going to survive this. You’re going to see Nuria. You’re going to see Sameen. You’re going to finish that book.”
His mouth moves, but he can’t speak.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I’m so sorry. It wasn’t supposed to go this way.”
I don’t know if he can hear it. I don’t know if it goes anywhere at all. I only know that I’ve said it, and that I have never meant anything so much in the whole of my rotten life. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry.
His hand comes up by some miracle. It lands on my wrist, trying to grasp and without the strength to do it. He sweeps his thumb against the bone, trying to tell me something.
His breathing evens out.
Shallow. Fast. But even, and I hold his throat closed with one hand and I feel his heart going against my forearm and I know precisely how much time is in this man and it is not enough.
Not for an ambulance.
Not for a hospital, and a trauma bay, and a police report.
I need people who can be here in eleven minutes with blood in a cooler and no questions.
There is exactly one number on this earth that gets me that.
And I know what it’ll cost me: everything. But I decide in that moment, that Belai deserves his happily-ever-after far more than I do.
I’m not confused. I’m not panicking. I understand with total clarity that the second I make this call, every precious thing I have tried to build goes into the water behind me.
The apartment. The four a.m. drives with my feet on his dash. The hotel I’ll never have to go back to. The throw pillows. The prissy cat on the silver platter. The kitchen I was going to stand in with clean hands, being new.
All of it.
For an old man I just met.
My phone is useless, water-ruined. So, I search Belai’s pocket with my free hand, keeping the other pressed tight against his neck wound. Luckily, he kept his phone in his pocket and not in the stolen backpack.
It’s a simple phone. No smart screens, just a flip phone from a past era. There’s no lock, no fuss. Just a number pad and the consequences.
My hands are shaking so violently I can barely hold the thing. My rib is wailing with Belai lying against it, the pain surging miserably. But I know what comes next will be far worse and I have no more time to debate it.
I look down at him as I dial.
His eyes are still on my face.
“I’m getting you help,” I explain.
I make the call.