Hung (23 page)

I
don't hesitate
; I start striding down the long, dismal corridor to the operating theaters. "Who is with him?" I ask Brian, calling over my shoulder to the man scurrying along trying to keep up.

"
I
think
she's called Sophia?"

"
S
ophie
," I say, grabbing a pair of latex examination gloves from a dispenser on the wall as I feel the cool, calm sensation of my training asserting itself. "Good – she's a safe pair of hands. Stay in the background, okay – don't get in the way."

I
t came
out a little bit harsher than I had intended, but I did mean it, or at least the thrust behind my words. The rookie's so green that, right now at least, he's more likely to kill our patient than help him. That'll change. I was like that nine months ago.

I
barge
through the swinging doors to the operating theater, crashing into them with my shoulder to avoid touching them with my sterile gloves. Brian squeaks through after me, just avoiding getting hit by the closing doors.

"
W
hat've we got
, Sophie?" I call out without stopping. It looks bad, but head wounds always look bad, it's all the blood. And there was
a lot
of blood. It wasn't quite a slaughterhouse, but it wasn't far off.

"
K
atie
, good – you're here," an exhausted looking Sophie replied. "Gunshot wound, bounced off the skull."

"
B
ounced
?" I ask, surprised. That didn't sound – well – likely.

"
O
kay
, grazed," Sophie concedes. "It's not done too much damage, but he's losing a whole load of blood right now. Here, hold this," she says, thrusting my hands onto the soldier's bleeding head before she'd finished asking. "Maintain the pressure. I need to hook him up to some blood bags. Who's the kid?"

"
I
'm
– I'm –" Brian stammered, clearly rocked on his heels by the disarray of the operating theater. When you're used to the clean, ordered operating rooms back home, Afghanistan's bone shops can come as quite a surprise.

"
S
pit it out
, kid," Sophie shouts over her shoulder, brusquely but not unkindly, as she rustles her way through the fridge.

"
H
ow you doing
, private?" I ask the terrified young private lying on the operating theater table. His head's grazed from the middle part of his jaw, along his temple and up into his hairline from where the bullet travelled after leaving the barrel of his gun. It's what happens when you try to end it all with a rifle. Harder to aim, especially when you're trembling with fear, anxiety and desperation.

H
e doesn't reply
, not in words anyway, just lets out a horrible, haunting moan, screwing his face up in pain and fear. I pat him on the shoulder, well aware of the futility of my gesture in making him feel better. "It's going to be okay, private. It's just a flesh wound – looks worse than it is."

"
N
eed
. A. Doctor…" he pants underneath me, every word an effort.

"
I
'm going
to pretend you didn't say that, private." I grin reassuringly down to him. I hope it's reassuring, anyway. I think that's the kind of thing I'd want to see if I was lying on a hospital bed – how bad can your injuries really be if the person treating you is smiling?

N
ot bad
. At least, I hope that’s the impression I’m giving.

"
O
kay
, I'm ready," Sophie says, coming back over with two full bags of blood, plastic tubing trailing off each of them.

"
G
ood
. It looks like the flow of blood's slowing down a bit, we should be able to suture him up soon," I reply. My patient squirms underneath me, making it extremely difficult to keep hold of him.

I
'm just
about to tell him to stop, but Sophie jumps in before I get a chance. "What are you doing?" she asks sternly. "We're trying to help you, but you need to help yourself, okay?"

T
he young man's
eyes are flicking all over the place, never staying focused on a single thing for too long. It feels like he's searching for sources of danger; it's like he's an animal being hunted – prey.

"
W
hat's wrong
?" I ask gently, lowering my head to his ear in the hope that it’ll seem more intimate and more soothing. "Can you keep still? Can you do that for me?" I ask reassuringly, almost as though I'm talking to a child.

T
he young soldier stops squirming
, sagging back into the hard metal surface of the operating table, but I notice his eyes don't stop their relentless, hunted flickering. His skin is glistening with a light sheen of sweat, and the more I look at him, the more I think that he's not just in pain, but terrified.

"
I
don't want
to die!" he wails in the same plaintive, heartbreaking tone as his earlier moan. As before, it has the same impact on the three of us – Brian, Sophie and myself – as the sound of nails being dragged down a chalkboard. We wince, visibly. I've seen a lot of injuries in my time in this hospital; I've seen a lot of casualties brought through crying for their mothers, but this one is having a far greater impact on me than any of his predecessors, and I can tell it's the same for the other two.

"
Y
ou're not going
to die, private," I reassure him, laying my free hand on his chest and stroking him, doing my best to ignore the fact that his skin is slick with blood. "You don't need to worry about that. We'll have you patched up, stitched up and out of here before you know it –."

H
e interrupts
before I'm finished. "I can't be here anymore," he says, grabbing my arm powerfully for emphasis. "I can't take it anymore." He’s staring up at me with desperate, haunted eyes – eyes which have for the first time halted in their relentless search for a way out. I break away just for a second to look at Brian. I signal to him subtly that I might need help – not now, but maybe. He nods slowly, deliberately to indicate that he understands the thrust of my message.

M
y eyes return
to the gaze of my injured patient. "You've got to help me," he asks, his hands gripping my upper arm again. "I can't go back out there, you've got to stop them…"

"
Y
ou're not going anywhere right
now, soldier," I say, choosing my words carefully. The truth is, I can't stop his commanders sending him anywhere they want him, so to promise anything else would just be lying, and worse, it would be giving him false hope, and that might just lead him right back down this garden path at some point in the future. "We're going to get you better, you understand?"

T
he tears leaking
out the corners of his eyes are streaking through the spatters of dried blood all over the skin on his face, clearing paths of clean skin in the midst of the carnage. "Thank you, thank you," he mutters, and keeps repeating it as his grip on my arm loosens and his eyes close.

"
W
hat
–?" I start, wondering if he's crashing, before pulling up when I see the syringe in Sophie's hand. "What did you give him?" I ask.

"
M
orphine
. Not much, just enough to take the edge off things. He needs a psych consult; the cut's not that bad, but if we let him go out there again…" she tails off – leaving the warning unsaid, but not unheard.

"
I
know
," I sigh, my cramping hands getting to work after I notice the flow of blood from the deep cut on his head has mostly halted, "he'll die. They'll get him, or he'll off himself – it's only a matter of time."

"
I
sn't
… Isn't there anything we can
do
?" Brian asks in an astonished tone of voice. "There must be something!"

"
P
ass me the thread
, will you?" I ask him, deliberately avoiding his question for a second – just to give myself time to think. The thing is, he's going to have to realize what it's like out here: hard, stressful and unrelenting. I had to; he will, too. He hands it to me, eyes downcast.

I
clean
the wound gently with a clear disinfectant spray, making sure there's nothing left inside it that could cause an infection. Luckily, if you can use that word to describe this kind of injury, the bullet didn't go through any cloth, so there's no need to dig that out. Scraps of fabric always cause problems. I start stitching up the wound and my long-practiced fingers make light work of it. Within minutes, the job's done. I silently thank Sophie for putting him to sleep – it's always quicker when they don't move.

"
L
isten
, Brian," I start, with no great idea of where I'm going. "We can't do much, not out here, anyway. It's better we tell you now, you know?"

"
W
hat do you mean
?" he asks plaintively, looking like I've just stolen Christmas. "Of course we can; we've got to help them – isn't that why we're here?"

I
sigh
. It is, and it's not, all at the same time.

"
I
don't want
it to be this way, believe me," I say, watching Sophie glumly clean up the bloody waste that's left strewn all over the operating theatre. "But it's true. There aren't enough of us, you must have seen that – this isn't a job we should be doing, it's supposed to be a doctor's job."

"
Y
eah
, but surely –."

I
cut him off
. "Surely today’s just a one-off?"

H
e nods
, slowly, as though he's afraid of being caught out.

I
laugh bitterly
. "I wish. No, there aren't enough staff, and there are too many soldiers for us to take care of."

"
A
re more coming
?" he asks hopefully. "I mean," he jumps in quickly – to forestall what he must expect is going to be a biting response from me, "I'm new, so maybe they
are
sending more, if they sent me?"

I
think
it's the look on Brian's face, more than anything, that breaks me. I don't mean to be cruel, he needs to know the truth, but watching the hope die in his eyes when I reply to him brings home all the stress, fear and tension of the last few months, right then and there.

I
shake my head sadly
. "No, kid. We asked for ten –"

H
e finishes
off the rest of my sentence, hanging his head. "And you got me…"

C
hapter Seven - Mike

I
hate hospitals
.

I
like Katie
, but I fucking hate hospitals. I think it's the smell – that acrid, clean, almost acidic scent that you don't get anywhere else. Lucky for me, they’re letting me out. And this place has been a shit show today. I saw, God – I don't know how many guys on trolleys being wheeled past me towards the operating theater earlier, bleeding out their guts. I won't miss it.

I
just need a nurse
, anyone really, to check me out.

"
S
ergeant
?"

M
y head spins
around at the sound of the unfamiliar voice.

"
S
ergeant Mike Carson
?" a man dressed head to toe in Army dress greens asks – and as he looks at me, all I can think is that he has the greenest eyes I’ve ever seen in real life.

S
till
, it must be serious – the only time people stick a dress uniform on, in my experience, is when someone's telling your family you're KIA, or about to get court-martialed...

"
Y
es
, sir?" I reply, the shock of what I just puzzled out reverberating through my skull as I do my best to snap to attention. My subconscious mind recognizes a few things about the man that my conscious brain doesn't register right away. First things first, the officer – whoever he is – doesn't have a name tag on his uniform.
That's very Delta Force…

"
A
t ease
, sergeant. You don't need to act like that around me, you understand?"

I
nod
, though I don't take it too seriously. In my experience, listening to officers too often is a pretty good recipe for getting yourself killed.

"
D
o
you know why I'm here, Mike? I can call you Mike, can't I?"