Full Throttle (Black Knights Inc. #7)(16)
“Hell if I know!” he barked over his shoulder as he ran toward Abby’s room. “Abby, open up!” He pounded on her door. “We need to vacate the building! There’s been an explosion!”
Der. As if that wasn’t obvious. And where the hell were the Secret Service agents? Why weren’t they pouring out of their rooms like ants from an anthill?
“Abby!” A prickle of dark foreboding skittered up his spine when nothing stirred on the other side of the door. “Open up the—”
“Oh, Jesus!” Dan thundered. “Steady, help!”
He turned to find Ozzie leaning against the doorjamb of Agent Ledbetter’s room, smoke billowing around him in a thin, ominous cloud. But that’s not what immediately struck Steady. Hell no. What immediately struck him was the blood. It was everywhere. Covering Ozzie’s face and naked torso, turning his white boxer shorts an angry crimson, and gushing from between the fingers he used to cover his thigh.
Arterial spray…
Steady knew it in an instant.
“Ah, hell,” he whispered hoarsely, his heart having gone nuclear inside the confines of his rib cage as he raced to Ozzie’s side. Seriously, he wouldn’t be surprised if there were little mushroom clouds puffing out of his ears.
“Lay down, bro,” he told his friend, reaching to cover Ozzie’s blood-soaked hands with his own. Dan was already there, kneeling on the floor, trying to stymie the flow of life-giving fluid by squeezing Ozzie’s thigh above the wound.
“Julia,” Ozzie rasped, coughing. The move caused more blood to pulse between their interlaced hands in a rhythmic spurt, spurt. It was hot, and its scent filled Steady’s nostrils. He would always equate that particular aroma with the delicate path all humans tread between this world and the next, with the awful day his sister died. He’d run into that coffee shop expecting to find something horrible. But the explosion had been so immense there was nothing of her left. Nothing left of any of the patrons save for the iron-rich aroma of their blood slicking the remaining surfaces. He’d come to be grateful for that. Grateful that it’d happened so quickly, been so violent, that Rosa hadn’t felt a thing. He liked to imagine she’d been sitting there enjoying a coffee, and then…lights out. On to the next plane without a moment of pain or doubt or regret…
“Somebody needs to check and see that Julia—” Ozzie continued, dragging him back to the situation at hand.
“Down!” he bellowed. He didn’t have time for Ozzie’s chivalry or heroics. If he didn’t get a clamp on that bleeder soon, the guy was going to hemorrhage out right here in the doorway.
Ozzie didn’t immediately comply, and Steady was forced to stop applying pressure to the wound in order to grab Ozzie’s shoulders and swipe his feet out from under him. With Dan’s help, he carefully controlled Ozzie’s fall. By the time Ozzie was lying on his back, half-in, half-out of the doorway, his skin was ashen.
Too much blood loss. Too much, too fast…
“Move your hands, Ozzie,” he instructed firmly, the acrid smoke filling his nose and scratching his lungs. “I need to see.”
As if the Fates, those evil bitches, were playing some sort of sick joke, the overhead lights chose that exact moment to flicker again. Steady gritted his teeth, praying to Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and all the saints he could remember from his catechism classes that they didn’t go out for good. Without light to work by, Ozzie was as good as dead. Hell, depending on how badly his best friend’s femoral artery was damaged, that might be the case regardless.
No, Dios! Por favor!
From the corner of his eye, Steady saw Penni DePaul emerge from Dan’s room clad only in a T-shirt and panties—no real surprise; he’d heard them laughing and giggling and entering Dan’s suite not thirty minutes ago. She didn’t break stride as she ran toward them. But instead of kneeling to help, she vaulted over them and into Julia’s room. He didn’t spare her a second glance as he wrestled Ozzie’s hands away from his shredded thigh.
“Fuck me,” he rasped when he saw what he was dealing with. The front upper half of Ozzie’s leg looked like ground beef, the meat and muscle a mess, his femur visible in spots. “Keep pressure above the wound!” he yelled to Dan as he sank his fingers into the horror of Ozzie’s ruined thigh. He searched through the heated gore of internal flesh, through gristle, touching bone.
Where are you? Where are—
“Fuuuuuck!” Ozzie screamed, the heel of his uninjured foot beating against the floor when Steady was forced to shove his whole hand under Ozzie’s quadriceps muscle toward his groin where the severed femoral artery had retracted. “Steady! Stop!”
“Can’t, bro,” he grunted, his fingers slipping through blood and tissue, searching, searching… “Gotcha!” he crowed when he found the end of the artery and clamped it between his thumb and forefinger. “Dan! I need a tourniquet!”
“H-holy shit,” Dan coughed, staring over Steady’s shoulder. Steady turned to see what’d snagged Dan’s attention. Through the thin fog of smoke, he could make out the bed. Or what was left of it, anyway. It’d been blown to smithereens…and Julia Ledbetter along with it. Her partially charred corpse was laying half-on, half-off the smoldering mattress.
“Julia, no!” Agent DePaul cried, her hands covering her mouth as she was wracked by a spate of coughing.