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“You can’t carry him,” he snarls. “And if I do it, the cops will shoot me as soon as I’m within sight. So he stays. And since you’re a doctor, you’re in charge of keeping him alive.”
“But I can’t, not here.” Pleading, she pushes up and presses both hands to our patient’s wound. “He’s bleeding out and too weak to make it through. He has a bullet in his abdomen! Even a healthy, strong, thirty-year-old man would struggle to survive that.”
“He should’ve thought of that before he got himself shot.”
My hands begin to shake as my diluent finishes draining and my powder becomes a cloudy liquid. My wrists ache, and the rest of my joints thud with a dull pain that makes it hard to move. My hips. My knees. Even my ankles, though I haven’t twisted them.
I peel open the packaging for my butterfly needle, but another flicker of light pulls my attention to the back wall.
“Everyone saw what he did!” Slade rails, oblivious to my distraction. “He grabbed me, and the gun went off. It wasn’t even my finger on the trigger.”
Pulling my gaze from the back wall, I quickly check my elbow and find my vein, then I slip the needle in and slap a length of tape over top to keep it in place. But my eyes dart around again while Slade shouts.
“He did it to himself! He didn’t have to do that. So now I have to choose between this asshole I don’t even know, and my daughter.”
I hear the tremor in his voice. I see the quiver in his jaw. But it’s when I catch the briefest glimpse of Archer’s eyes around the corner of the wall that I jump in shock and knock over my constituted factor.
“Oh shit!” Lunging forward, I grab the bottle before it leaks to the tile floor.
“What the hell are you doing?” Slade towers over me and sneers so spittle flitters to my skin. My hair. My legs. Even my open fucking injection site. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing.” I straighten out and press my back to the front of the desk, cradling my medication the way a mother does her baby. I don’t look for Archer a second time. I don’t dare give him away. “I-I hurt myself with the needle, then my knee hit the bottle and knocked it over.”
“You’re a doctor!” he bellows. “You’re supposed to be good at this stuff.”
“I’m a doctor for thedead,” I bite back. “Which is what I told you when this all began. And if you don’t let him,” I shoot a pointed look to Earl, and to Aubree, who watches our exchange, “out of here, then I guess I’ll be back in my element and with the right kind of patient.”
“Just let him go,” Barbara commands. “We got the pizza in, didn’t we? We can get a person out.”
“He can’t walk on his own!” Slade swings around to study Barbara, so I jerk my neck to the left and catch Archer’s desperate dash from the hall to the back of the teller desks.
He slides into place on his knees, the movement snagging Aubree’s attention too. Even Slade stops for a beat, like maybe he saw something.
But then he shakes his head and turns back to us. “If you can carry him out,on your own,” he snarls when Aubs nods, “you can take him to the top of the stairs and leave him there.”
“O-on my own?” she gapes. “Just me?”
“That’s the deal.” He turns away and points his gun to Barbara. “Sit your ass down, shut your mouth, or you might end up with a bullet in your leg, too.”
“Shit,” Aubree mumbles as she looks Earl’s length from head to toe. “Oh, man.”
“He’s too heavy.” I set down my bottle of factor, tear the needle from my arm and place it on my shopping bag for safekeeping, then I groan and push up to stand on shaking legs.
He won’t survive another hour in here. He might not survive even if we get him out now. But we’ve been given a window, so I intend to take it.
“Sit down!” Slade spins back and points his gun at me. “I said her!”
“You said she has to carry him out alone.” My head swims with momentary wooziness, but I blink once, twice, three times to clear the stars from my vision, then I bend again and try to wriggle my weight under Earl’s arm. “There’s no reason I can’t help load her up.”
“She won’t be able to do it.” Slade chuckles under his breath—cruel, really, as we use all our strength to lift another man’s two hundred pounds. “He’ll die when she drops him, so he would’ve been better off not moving at all.”
“He won’t live until the morning,” Aubree grunts and lifts. Her knees shake and her back bows, but she muscles her shoulder under Earl’s heavy, slack arm.
He’s not even lucid anymore. Eyes closed. Dead weight.
“This is his only chance.” Her breath comes out in heaving pants, and sweat already makes her face glisten. But I lift his other side so, together, we manage to hold him up.
Fire burns up through my knees and into my hips, and the inside of my elbow bleeds where I removed my needle but didn’t slap a band-aid on top.
