Chapter 12
Under Duress
I keep waiting for the bark of the pistol from the back room, but it doesn't come. I want to turn and look over my shoulder, but obviously I can't.
The leader is staring down at me, his dark eyes hard and cold—utterly unfeeling. This man would shoot his own mother and not think twice.
I clutch the box cutter in my left hand—I'm not truly ambidextrous, but some things I can do equally well with either hand. Wielding a knife in hand-to-hand combat is one of them. The man’s eyes rake over me, lingering on my chest. "You didn't even cop a feel?
Who would know?" Confident in his numerical superiority, he lets his pistol droop to hang at his side, reaching for me with his other hand.
I grit my teeth against the incoming grope, let him see the hate in my eyes.
"Still got some spark there, huh?" He grabs my left breast in rough, clawed-finger grip, squeezing viciously hard. "Pugli'll break that spirit fast enough. Then it's our turn."
Nausea bubbles up in my throat.
I hear hinges creak as the bedroom door squeals open; I tense, my gaze focused on the sweaty pig's throat, picturing the red line that my blade is going to make in…3…2…1…
BAM-BAM-BAM! The shots ring out in lightning-fast succession. The gropey pig’s eyes flick up, and his pistol lifts. He doesn't seem concerned, though. "Raffa, Elbers, go see."
Two more men make for the hallway
Enzo glances down at me, and I give a tiny shake of my head.
The pig sees the exchange, and his brows beetle. "Hold the fuck up. Raffa, Elbers, wait—"
Too late.
BAM-BAM!
I strike upward with my foot with as much force as I can muster while seated, driving my foot up into his junk.
He squeaks and folds forward, and I surge to my feet, slashing my blade in a short, hard horizontal arc across his throat.
He gurgles, eyes wide in shock, and hits his knees; his gun thuds to the floor as he scrabbles, terrified, at his throat, blood pouring between his fingers.
In the instant after my initial kick, Enzo sends a giant fist into the nose of the man behind Pig, crumpling his face like a tin can.
BAM!
"Cazzo di merda," I hear Enzo murmur in a strange, tight voice.
I can't spare a thought beyond noticing—the third man has his weapon lifted, smoke curling up from the barrel. The man Enzo punched is writhing on the floor, making wet sounds as he clutches his face, and Pig is glassy-eyed in a spreading pool of blood.
The shooter turns to me—time slows, as it tends to do in situations like this.
I see his finger tightening. Instinct is a merciless goddess; my right foot snaps upward like a striking viper, and my bare toes smack into the shooter's wrist. The gun barks as my kick connects, and the deafening report makes my ears ring and something hot slices through the skin a millimeter above where my ear connects to my skull near my temple.
I lunge forward and hit one knee, slicing on an upward diagonal across the upper inside of his right thigh.
Another report rings out and I hear the round crack into the wall somewhere above and behind me.
His gun thumps to the floor, and I rock back and straighten as the shooter drops to one knee, staring down at the veritable ocean of blood gushing like a geyser out of his severed femoral artery.
"Ay…aiutami," he whispers, fear in his fast-fading eyes.
He slumps to his butt, gripping his wound—the blood sieves through his fingers.
"I could." I crouch in front of him. "I am a nurse, you know."
"Aiutami!”
I close the blade and hold his eyes. "You were going to hand me over to Pugli."
"No, no. Per favore…aiutami."
"I've heard that Pugli is the devil himself." I stand up, staring down at the dying man. "Let the devil save you. You made the deal with him, after all."
Even now, it's a hard thing to not leap to his aid—the caregiving urge is so deeply ingrained at this point that I feel physically ill at what I just did.
I remember Killian immediately puking after killing those three men.
And I feel it myself, now, the rise of acid in my throat.
I look anywhere and everywhere, swallowing hard, but the hot, thick sour knot rises and rises and pushes against the back of my teeth, and there's the first man dead in the sea of gore, still spreading on the kitchen floor, and his eyes are sightless and vacant and seem to stare at me, accusing.
And there's the other one, slumped sideways but not quite fallen over, not quite dead, leaking his lifeblood from his thigh in slowing spurts.
The man Enzo punched is trying to get to his knees, spitting blood and teeth, reaching for his pistol with hate in his eyes.
BAM!
His head snaps sideways and a chunky pink cloud sprays the floor, and then he thumps to his belly.
"Story?" Killian is beside me, but the blood is a roaring cacophony in my ears, pulsing hard behind my eyeballs, and the vomit is a hot surge against my teeth.
I've seen blood. I’ve seen death.
So much; too much.
But this is different.
So very different.
I caused this blood; I caused this death.
"First, do no harm." I'm not a doctor, so I haven't taken the Hippocratic Oath, and the Nightingale Pledge isn't quite the same.
But still, everything in my life, every ounce of professional training, has gone toward learning how to save lives, not take them.
I always hoped, and foolishly assumed, that all the self-defense training would never be necessary.
I thought Mom and Dad's and the rest of A1S's enemies were all dead. I made a lot of erroneous assumptions.
"Story?" His hand rests on my back. "Take a breath. It's okay."
I shake my head, stagger away from him, but there's nowhere to go—the bathroom is too far. The sink—I sprint a few steps across the kitchen and empty my stomach into the sink, panting, and then heave again and again, until my stomach is empty and nothing comes out but stringy saliva.
"Hey?" It's Enzo, in pain. "I am shooted."
Killian and I turn in unison to see Enzo slumped backward against the kitchen counter near the range, blood a spreading red splotch low on his belly's left side.
"Fuck!" I lurch toward him, and Killian and I catch him as his strength gives out and he starts to slide to the floor.
"Mia figlia," he mutters. "Dille che l’amo."
"I don't speak Italian, buddy," I say, using the box cutter to slice his shirt open at the chest, automatically going into triage mode.
"But it sounds like you're being melodramatic.
You're gonna be fine." Killian helps me lean him forward; there's a much larger exit wound.
"It went right through. I can patch this up, but you need a surgeon.
There's nothing I can do if the bullet hit an organ. "
"Mia figlia."
"Your daughter says to hold on, Enzo," I tell him, ripping a chunk of shirt off and folding it into a bandage, and then using the rest of the shirt to tie it in place around his midsection. "I know it hurts, but you're gonna be okay."
Killian touches my wrist. "You good here for a second?" I nod, and he stands. "Be right back. Just hold on, Enzo."
I pay no attention to what Killian is doing—I trust him to do what's necessary while I handle this. He's already bled through the tiny scrap of shirt, which means I need a hell of a lot more bandage material. "Be right back. I need to find something more to staunch the bleeding."
Enzo blinks at me. "Toilet. Ha una ragazza."
I frown. "I'm sorry, but what?"
"Il gabinetto. The toilet." His words are labored. "He has a girlfriend. She stay here some of the time."
Oh, right. I scramble to the bathroom, which is a typical male space—a bar of soap and a twenty-in-one bottle of shampoo-conditioner-bodywash-gun cleaning solution-WD-40 in the shower, a pump bottle of antibacterial hand soap on the counter, a toothbrush in a rocks glass with a rolled-up tube of toothpaste, and a hair-scuzzed comb.
I rifle through the drawers and only find more soap and 3-in-1, and a container of ear swabs.
I check the under-sink cabinet, and hit the jackpot: a box of tampons and a box of pads.
I take both boxes and hurry back to Enzo.
I notice, absently, that Killian has carefully removed the bullet-resistant vests from two of the corpses and has gathered a pile of weapons, cell phones, cash, and magazines, and is shoveling everything but the vests into our backpack—Enzo's backpack.
Enzo gives me a wobbly smile as he sees the boxes of feminine products and reaches for the pads. I gently tap the back of his hand. "Which of us is the medical professional here, Enzo?"
I unwrap a tampon, prepare the applicator, and untie the makeshift bandage. "This is gonna hurt like hell, okay?"
Enzo grimaces, nods. "Okay. Cazzo. I am ready."
I spread open the exit wound with my fingers, slide the applicator into the ragged opening, deposit the tampon into the hole, and withdraw the applicator. The absorbent material instantly balloons inside him as it struggles to absorb the flow of blood—exactly as it was designed to do.
Killian is watching. “Huh. Wouldn't have thought of that."
I roll my eyes. "You're not a woman. The modern tampon was invented in 1931 and popularized in World War II, both by medics using them like this and more so by the women working in manufacturing who needed a better menstrual product than what was available at the time because they were suddenly working on their feet all day with all the men gone to war.” I adhere a pad over the exit wound, and then repeat the process for the entry wound, and then triple the protection with another makeshift shirt bandage; the verbal patter is an automatic thing, a response of my brain working on multiple levels while my hands do their thing.
"Internal absorption has been used for thousands of years, though.
The big invention in 1931 was the cotton core and the insertion applicator. "
"You just…know this?"