“Okay. Okay, alright. I’m ready.”
The next few moments happen in fast forward. I drench my hands in the alcohol, and then I turn Alexis, giving her back one last look to make sure I haven’t missed the exit wound.
“Holy shit!” Zeth hisses.
It’s a good job I’ve checked. Since bringing her in, a massive, violent purple bruise has developed all over her back. Total renal failure and definite internal bleeding. In the weak yellow light from the pendant in the kitchen, I haven’t noticed a discoloration of her skin, but when I lay her flat and check here eyes, the jaundice is clear to see.
“Kidneys,” Zeth says. It seems he’s not completely unfamiliar with the workings of the human body. I nod, feeling a mild rush of relief. At least when I cut now, I know where the hell I should be cutting.
I make the incision, a bold deep line about four-inches long, horizontally across her abdomen on her right-hand side, and everything changes. This always happens when I operate. The world narrows down and fades, so that the short breadth of my attention is focused solely on the flesh beneath my fingertips. The panic, the delirious fear, the paralysing doubt—it all recedes, leaving a cold, clinical calm in its wake.
It takes time to inspect Lexi’s abdominal cavity. There’s a lot of blood, and I have no nursing team to provide suction or swab. I do have Zeth, though. He moves with a surety that bolsters my confidence, and when he applies pressure with the torn shreds of towel, clearing away the blood so I can see what the hell I’m doing, I’m not worried that he’ll damage her. In another world, in another entirely different reality, Zeth would have made an excellent surgeon. He is unshakeable. Completely fucking bombproof.
I soon begin to find shrapnel. The relief is like a punch to the gut. I could literally cry as I tweeze the small, wickedly sharp pieces of twisted metal from my sister’s stomach. As soon as I lay eyes on her right kidney, that relief vanishes, though. This is where I remove the largest bullet fragment from her body; it’s nestled in amongst the ruins of the organ, completely and utterly destroyed.
“Fuck. Fuck.”
Zeth places his hand over mine, fixing me with that look again. He can see the mess just as well as I can, but he’s not frozen solid with fear. “She’s still breathing, Sloane. She still has a heart beat. And she still has another kidney, right?”
“Right.” But it’s not as simple as all that. Removing a kidney is a massive operation; one people die from on a relatively regular basis, and those operations take place in ORs designed to deal with complications. But what choice do I have? None.
So I do what I have to do. I remove the decimated organ, stitching it neatly with a regular needle and thread from the sewing kit, and then I cuaterize the wound. After that it’s a case of cleaning out her abdominal cavity and sewing her back up. I take a look through my supplies and I don’t find what I need now.
Zeth watches me search frantically, expression completely blank. “What is it? What do you need?”
“I need to find something to use for a blood transfusion. We’re the same blood type. She lost so much. She’ll need more if she’s going to make it to a hospital.”
Zeth just grunts at that. “It’s unlikely they’re gonna let you take her to a hospital, Sloane.”
I stop rifling and look up at him, my heart lurching into my throat. “Hold up. What the fuck? What the hell are you talking about?”
“I mean, your sister was shot. Hospitals are obliged to report gunshot wounds to the police.”
“Yeah, I’m well aware of that, Zeth. I work in a fucking hospital.”
“Right. So none of the people here are going to want that kind of attention turned on them. If your sister talks, the cops are gonna come down on this place in two seconds flat. Julio’ll never allow that. They’re gonna want her to recover here. If she gets an infection—”
“THERE IS NO IF, ZETH!” I grab hold of the first thing that comes to hand—the vodka—and I hurl it at the wall. The heavy glass bottle splinters into a thousand pieces, shards exploding in every direction. Zeth doesn’t even flinch. After everything I just did… After Alexis pulling through all of that… “There is no if. There is only when. She needs some seriously strong antibiotics, not to mention painkillers and a fucking blood transfusion if she even has a hope of living through this! They’ll probably need to open her back up and fix the shit job I just did of hacking out one of her organs!” I cover my face with my hands, trying to catch a breath. Trying and failing. “And as for drawing the cops’ attention, I think it’s a little late for that.”