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He found her gear and moved her half a mile down the road and set her on a car roof where he could see her while he scouted the vicinity. He found a plastic gascan on a jeep with an inch of gas still in it and he used it and her mag bar to set a convertible ablaze by way of campfire and worklight. He set her upwind of it on her foam sleeping pad on the trunk of a car. She watched with odd dissociation as he bent to her and cut her shredded flannel hoodie from collar to hem with her Gerber knife. The fabric soaked through with her blood and her assailants’ blood and already stiffening. He laid aside the parted halves and cocked his head and studied her. She looked scourged by a thin switch. Two narrow sets of three cuts each and many scratches ran from the inner swell of each small breast and between her ribs, down to midstomach. If she’d held the hyena two inches lower he’d have gutted her sure.
I never let anyone get this far with me, she said.
Don unnastan.
Nothing. Sorry. She turned her head and wondered if she would be sick. Her forehead felt hot. What’s your word for ouch?
Chay opened a waterbottle and soaked a handtowel and started washing blood off her chest but pulled his hand back when she hissed.
Little softer please?
Yeh.
He swabbed more gently and then pulled back out of his own shadow and studied her wounds by firelight. Deepset eyes enshadowed and unreadable.
She leaned her head up to look even though it hurt.
It didn’t feel that bad when it happened, she said.
Not tok, hokay?
Okay. Sorry. She let her head fal
l back. A shooting star segmented by his silhouette. The menagerie calls in the thick-growth hills subdued but still there. What’s your word for sorry?
Don haff one. Affy quiet now.
He bent to the plastic tackle box repurposed as his first aid kit and came up with a glass pint flask of Stolichnaya half-full. He opened it and held her up with one hand across her shoulder blades and she felt the cuts bleeding again. He put the bottle in her hand. Drink, he said. One, two drink, yeh? He made two comical gunk-gunk swallows.
She sipped and then immediately coughed and tried to sit up and regretted that because it hurt like hell. Jesus effin, she said.
Affy drink.
Yeah yeah, okay. She pinched her nose and drank and took a breath and shivered and drank again. Oh man. People do this for fun?
Not jus yooman.
He set out gauze rolls and number four gauze pads in plastic packets and surgical tape and shortbladed scissors. He touched the bruise beneath her ribs already turning ugly and he cocked his head.
I hit myself with my fucking knife, she said. She laughed. You should see the other guy.
Affy cold?
Naw. Affy fine, dude.
He made sure her bowie knife was out of her reach and then he pointed to her right. She turned her head to look and he upended the bottle of Stoli on her wounds. Her yell would have put out a campfire. The surrounding nightsounds stopped altogether. She bucked and he held her down and then wiped away the bloody vodka with a new clean rag and then he dabbed the wounds and let them dry. He taped the edges of the gauze pads and aligned them on the open cuts and pressed down gently and then lifted her to wrap her chest in bands of gauze. He taped that off and stood looking down at her. She was breathing hard but made no other sound. He lowered her back down. The arboreal racket seeped back into the night.
He looked through her backpack and found her tee shirt but no other. He eased her up again and removed the cut and bloodsoaked flannel hoodie smelling of vodka and made her raise her arms and tried to put the tee shirt over them but had never done such a thing and could not sort it out. She leaned her weight back against his outspread hand and put the shirt on herself and he laid her back down. She asked if she could have another swallow and he gave her the bottle. She swigged and held it out to him. He capped it and put it away.
Make beddah?
Fuck no. Make not give a shit.
He draped her sleeping bag across her. The burning car already guttering. The night windy but not cool.
I’m sorry about your spear.
The centaur shrugged. Jus piece a pipe, yeh? Make anudduh one t’morrah.
