Suicide Forest (31 page)

He’s falling! Oh my fucking Lord, he’s
falling!

Mel and Nina screamed in unison, short,
high-intensity bursts of alarm.

John Scott didn’t plummet straight to the
ground. It was a staggered descent, like a pachinko ball
teeter-tottering through the maze of pins. He would drop five or
ten feet until he hit a large branch, flip one way or the other,
drop farther, hit another branch, on and on.

He didn’t utter a sound, and I had no idea
whether he was conscious or not. All I could see were his limbs
flip-flopping every which way.

Then, miraculously, he came to a rest twenty
feet up.

“John!” Mel cried. “John!”

He didn’t reply.

“John!”

“Give me a boost,” I said quickly. “I’ll get
him.”

Mel didn’t seem to hear me. She was staring
up, her eyes bulging in her pallid face. Her hands were no longer
steepled but covering her mouth, the way a child does when he or
she accidently blurts a swear word in front of Mom or Dad.

“John!”

“…yeah…” It was weak, more a groan than a
word.

Alive
. “Can you move?” I called.

“…no…”

“Hold on! I’m coming up.” I turned to Mel.
“I need a—”

There was another whack-snap as whatever
perch John Scott had landed on gave out. The ride began all over
again, though this time it was much quicker. One moment he was
twenty feet up, the next he plummeted through the final few
branches. He hit the hard ground with the dead, heavy sound a
medicine ball makes when it strikes the floor of the gym.

I heard him blurt “oomph!” as the last of
the air was knocked from his lungs at the same time I heard
something much worse: the sharp, wet snick of a bone
fracturing.

Then John Scott began to scream.

His
face and arms
were covered with multiple cuts. His pullover was torn in a
half-dozen places, red blooming beneath. He looked as though he had
been dragged through a thorny bramble, and I suppose in a sense he
had, albeit a gigantic, vertical one.

His left leg—the one he’d had so much
trouble hooking over that first branch—was folded in upon itself.
It was bent at such an impossible angle I thought his knee must
have popped out of its socket. Yet that couldn’t be the case, for
below the knee there was a strange protrusion several inches tall
pressing tautly against the denim of his loose jeans. I knew what
must be causing the alien bulge, and my stomach roiled
nauseously.

“Oh gosh!” Mel shrieked. “Look at his
leg!”

I barely heard her because John Scott was
still screaming, half in pain, half, I think, in dismay as the
extent of his injury dawned on him.

I wanted to help him but was paralyzed by my
inability to decide what needed to be done. This was no schoolyard
gash you got when you tripped during a five-on-five match of hoops,
which the doctor could sew up with a few stitches.

His leg was snapped in fucking half.

I turned to Mel and Nina, wanting someone
else to take charge. Mel was pointing a crooked finger at John
Scott’s leg while hopping up and down on the spot, looking for all
the world like Beetlemania had just gripped her forty years late.
Nina was facing away, maybe wanting to puke again and discovering
she was all puked out.

I ran to the camp, my legs moving at a
faster speed than my thoughts. All I knew was that I needed
something to make a tourniquet. I stopped at the extinguished fire,
hesitated only a moment, then ran to Neil’s tent. I undid one of
the guy ropes and ran back to where John Scott lay writhing in pain
on the ground.

At least’s he’s moving
, I thought.
It could have been worse. He’s not paralyzed
.

I brushed past Mel and dropped beside John
Scott. He had stopped screaming with an apparently Herculean
effort. His mouth was stretched into a trembling grimace. A vein
pulsed in his forehead.

“I’m going to make a tourniquet,” I told
him, looping the string around his thigh.

“No!” he hissed.

“I have to stop the bleeding—”

“You make a fucking tourniquet, you’ll kill
my leg. It’ll have to be amputated.”

I hesitated. “What do you want us to
do?”

“My pants. Take them off.”

“Why—?”

“You have to reset the bone!”

My stomach dropped as his words hit home. He
was right. We were going to have to somehow shove the fractured
shinbone back into the flesh.

I undid the laces of his Doc Martins and
tugged the shoes off one after the other.

“Mel!” I said. “Help me!”

I fumbled his belt open, unbuttoned his
jeans, and unzipped the zipper. Even now, under a crushing level of
stress, I was uneasily cognizant that I was performing a homosexual
action.

Mel appeared on the other side of him.

“We’re going to pull his pants off,” I said.
“Slowly.”

She nodded and together we hitched his pants
down over his thighs, stopping when they bunched above the knees.
We grabbed the cuffs and slid the pant legs over his feet.

I did my best to tent the denim as it moved
over the exposed shinbone, but there wasn’t enough free material
and it dragged. I expected John Scott to howl in pain, but he
remained resolutely silent except for the ragged, snorting breaths
coming through his nose.

Then the pants were off.

“Oh…” Mel said, and that single word was
full of horror and disgust.

The injury was something straight out of a
film studio’s special effects department, because the sight was so
grotesque it couldn’t be real, the waxy skin nothing but silicone
rubber, the red mush of exposed flesh red-dyed foam.

John Scott’s tibia protruded a good four
inches from the lipless tear it had made in his skin, bright white,
like some colossal, prehistoric tooth. Stringy bits of tendon and
ligament clung to the bone while blood pooled in the bed of flesh
where it was supposed to be, overflowing down his leg in
crisscrossing rivulets. His left sock was soaked red.

John Scott had propped himself on his elbows
so he could see. I expected him to be big-eyed and slack-jawed with
shock and disgust. Instead his face was a steely mask of ferocious
determination, and right then I had a newfound respect for the guy.
I don’t know how I would have reacted in his situation, but I was
sure I wouldn’t have managed his level of composure.

“Now what do I do?” I asked him.

“You gotta push the bone back in.”

“Just push it?”

“Do it!”

I didn’t think you could simply shove a bone
back into its fleshy housing. You had to create some sort of
traction, stretching the limb taut, so the broken halves of bone
didn’t overlap each other.

“Nina?” I said over my shoulder. “Nina?”

“Yes?” she said.

“Go get me a clean shirt, any shirt, and the
bottle of whiskey. It should be by the fire somewhere.”

I heard her hurry off.

“Mel,” I said, “get behind John Scott,
behind his head.”

“Why?”

“Hurry!”

She crouched behind John Scott’s head and
began telling him he was doing good, he was going to be all right.
Nina returned and handed me a pink tee and the bottle of
whiskey.

“Okay, listen to me, Mel,” I said. “Grab
John Scott under his arms, and when I say go, you pull him toward
you.”

“Why?”

“Just do it!”

She grabbed John Scott beneath the arms. I
pressed my knee firmly on his left foot, pinning it in place.

“Okay—go!”

Mel pulled. John Scott cried out. She
stopped.

“Keep pulling!” I said.

“He’s hurting!”

“You gotta keep pulling. Now—pull!”

She pulled. John Scott bit back the pain
this time. When his left leg had stretched as far as the intact
muscles would allow, I wrapped my hand in the pink shirt, placed it
on top of the shinbone, and shoved the shinbone back into place.
John Scott screamed. The bone slid home surprisingly easily.

“Last thing,” I said, uncapping the whiskey
quickly to keep up the momentum we had created. “This is going to
sting. Ready?”

John Scott opened his eyes and looked at his
leg mutedly. There was still a huge red weeping gash, but at least
there was no bone sticking out.

He nodded.

I poured the alcohol over the wound, using
everything that remained in the bottle. John Scott convulsed. A
moan escaped his clenched jaws. I wrapped the bloodied shirt around
the wound, pressed a tent pole against his lower leg, and fastened
the impromptu splint in place with the guy rope.

John Scott flopped onto his back. He was
breathing heavily and dripping with perspiration, but I thought he
would be all right.

Part of me was thrilled by our
accomplishment, but another part told me not to celebrate
prematurely, because successful operation or not, John Scott wasn’t
going to be doing any walking for a while—which put a major crimp
in our exit strategy.

Rather
than attempt
to move John Scott back to camp, we brought Neil to our new
location at the base of the fir so we could keep an eye on him.
Then Mel and Nina got busy tending to John Scott’s variety of
superficial wounds, which were mostly on his face, arms, and torso.
Since there was no water or whiskey to clean the cuts with, they
mostly applied pressure with yet another T-shirt to stop the
bleeding. Bruises invisible before now started to appear all over
his body. His right biceps and shoulder had turned a
yellowish-brown, while a large purplish area had appeared on his
right thigh, where his Calvin Klein boxer shorts ended. I kept an
eye on his left leg below the fracture, making sure it didn’t
become numb, cold, or pale, which might indicate a severed nerve or
blood vessel. So far so good, it seemed, as I could distinguish
nothing but a slight discoloration and puffiness.

He was damn lucky, I thought, to have fallen
from the height he had and survived with only a broken leg, as bad
as the break was. Nevertheless, he was far from home free. The risk
of infection was possible during any open fracture, especially one
that occurred in the wild where there were no proper disinfectants
or antibiotics. Moreover, he might be bleeding internally which we
were not aware of. Best case scenario then: doctors drive a metal
rod down the marrow canal of his tibia and he sets off airport
alarms for the rest of his life. Middle case, he gets gangrene and
loses the leg. Worst case, he goes into hemorrhagic shock and
suffers either brain damage or death.

The bottom line was that we had to get John
Scott and Neil to a hospital, pronto. Unfortunately, unless the
cavalry hadn’t totally bungled things up and were still coming to
rescue us, the possibility we get to a hospital any time soon
seemed extremely unlikely.

My stomach growled hungrily. It obviously
didn’t care about anything except getting fed. I swallowed, which
was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. The headache continued to
throb, only now it would flare up if I moved my head too fast.
Although it was still morning, I wanted to close my eyes and drift
off into sleep, to get away from all this, but that was not an
option.

Mel came over and joined me beneath the pine
tree where I had retreated to so I could think about our next move
without distractions.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” I said.

“What are you doing over here?”

“Nothing.”

“Do you mind if I sit here with you?”

I shook my head, and she snuggled against
me.

“John Scott is doing…okay.”

“Good,” I said.

“You saved his leg.”

“I did what he told me to do.”

“It might have gotten infected.”

“It still might.”

We went quiet.

She said, “I want to go home, Ethan.”

“Me too, Mel. Me too.” I wrapped an arm
around her—and felt something press into my side. I glanced down.
“What’s in your pocket?” I asked.

She sat up straight again. “My pocket?
It’s—nothing.”

“Mel?”

She was staring at an invisible spot on the
ground ahead of her, as if by not acknowledging me I would forget
about her. An ostrich with its head stuck in the ground had a
better chance of being more inconspicuous.

“Show me,” I said, my mind already three
steps ahead, trying to guess what she could be hiding. My first
suspicion was a phone—but that made no sense.

“It’s nothing,” she repeated.

“Then show me.”

“No.”

“I’m not letting you leave until I see what
it is.”

“Jeez, Ethan! You don’t own me.”

“You’re starting to worry me, Mel. What is
it?”

“It’s nothing! It’s just—it’s food.
Okay?”

She unzipped her pocket angrily and removed
from it a rectangular yellow box. It was a CalorieMate Block, a
flavored energy-supplement snack you could find in any Japanese
convenience store. I’d tried one years ago solely because they were
featured in the
Metal Gear Solid
video game series. The main
character, Snake, eats them to keep his stamina up. Made almost
entirely of sugar and fat, they likely do boost your stamina,
though they taste like dry shortbread.

“Where did you get that?” My tone wasn’t
accusing…but almost.

“It was in one of the small pockets in my
backpack.”

“How long have you had it for?”

“I bought it at the Mini Stop.”

That wasn’t what I meant. “Why didn’t you
share it with everyone at breakfast?”

“I didn’t know I had it then.”

“So how long have you known about it?”

“What does it matter, Ethan?”

“It matters because the rest of us have been
starving, Mel, that’s why.”

“No one’s been
starving
. People can
go weeks without food.”

Maybe it was her insolent tone, or her
refusal to fess up to what she’d done, but I snapped. “Neil’s
dying
, Mel,” I said. “He’s thrown up or shit out everything
inside him. He doesn’t have the strength to stand on his own. Weeks
without food? He’s not going to last another night. And you’ve had
food the entire time?”