Commune: Book Two (Commune #2)

by Joshua Gayou

right, of course. You wouldn’t look so

where they were wrapped around Jessica’s wrists. For her part, Jessica was limp; her head lolled around uselessly, and her feet dragged behind her. I would have to rotate one of them out very soon. We passed another street, and I looked up at the sign as we went by: 34th. Still no sign of pursuit. Good deal. I began to make plans for when we got to the bus; trying to figure out what I was going to do for Jessica’s leg. I kept coming up against the same wall; the most training I got in field medicine took me just far enough to stop bleeding and stabilize a casualty long enough for real medics to arrive. I didn’t know anything about dealing with a nicked or severed artery. Back when I was still working within a functional military, you typically shipped your wounded back to the forward surgical team (or fst) and let them handle treatment. I imagined that, in this case, such a team would have to open the leg up a bit and sew the artery shut to kill the bleeding. I hadn’t the first clue how to do this. Maybe I could amputate and cauterize the leg, but that had its own set of problems. She had lost more blood than I cared to consider, most of it crusting up in a giant sheet down my back. There was simply no blood to pump into her to replace what she had lost; any supplies that were still available in blood banks or hospitals had long since died out when all the refrigeration failed. I had no idea what her blood type was and, even if I did, I still didn’t have the tools or the k...