My friends wouldn’t shoot. If they did, Blasi might drop the grenade. With Collum in the rear, Doug and Phoebe would swing out to flank the pair. Capturing Blasi and Gabriella, however, was only the diversion. The true mission lay in Collum’s hands. Literally. While Phoebe and Doug drew the others’ attention to themselves, Collum would pounce. Blasi was a smallish guy. If Collum could reach him in time, he could easily envelop Blasi’s fist with one of his own. With Blasi unable to let go or drop the explosive, they could reinsert the pin. It wasn’t a terrible plan. But Blasi and Gabriella were already running backwards.
My vision pulsed a hard and fast warning as Collum hit the door an instant after Gabriella slammed it shut. Something heavy clunked onto the landing. Two sets of footsteps pounded down.
“Back!” Collum yelled. “Everyone get ba—!”
Boom.
The door saved them. Built in a time when people still cared about craftsmanship, the door only buckled inward. By the time Collum and Doug wrenched it open and saw that most of the landing and the first few stairs were missing, Blasi and Gabriella were long gone.
I counted limbs, saw they were all more or less intact, then shoved the overturned table off me and raced to Mac’s side. Kneeling, I pressed my palm against the floorboards. They’d grown almost uncomfortably warm. Outside the window, the night was obscured by a veil of smoke.
Jonathan Carlyle still knelt behind Mac, propping him up. I looked up at Tesla. “The time! What is the time!”
With jerky and robotic movements, Tesla checked his pocket watch. “It is three forty-eight in the morning of the thirteenth of March.”
Twelve minutes until the alarm is sounded, until people begin gathering outside on the street. Until they begin evacuating the buildings on either side of us. At four twenty-three a.m., the unfortunately ineffective fire brigade will arrive. And eleven minutes after that, the entire building will be engulfed in flames.
Gotta hurry. Gotta hurry.
Mac’s dear, careworn face was covered in soot and filmed in an oily sweat. So pale he looked like a wax effigy. His lips peeled back as the breath hissed between red-rimmed teeth. The humor lines around his eyes had deepened into grooves of agony.
“Mac.” I tried to keep my voice calm and steady, but it quaked as I told him I needed to check the wound. There was barely any blood, which at first I took for a good sign.
Bran knelt beside me and between us, we ripped away Mac’s blood-stained shirt. Bran worked without speaking. A blank sheet of copy paper held more expression.
Phoebe whimpered as she slid in across from me. Collum followed an instant later.
Here, near the floor, the air was somewhat better. But the haze around us was growing denser as oxygen was replaced with the stench of scorched wood and fried electricity and the burnt greasy tang of motor oil.
Overhead, only one wire—?damaged when Blasi’s men searched the place—?still fizzed and snapped. As we gathered a beneath the amber shower, each spark of light reflected inside the smoke like the Fourth of July on a foggy night.
Phoebe took Mac’s knobby, leathery hand and clutched it to her chest, and I had to squeeze my eyes shut so, so tight to keep the tears at bay.
Mac reached up to touch his granddaughter’s face. “’S a’right, mo ghràdh,” he wheezed. “Right . . .” ?Wheeze. “Rain.”
“Mac, please!”
“Shh.” Even barely able to draw breath, Mac was still Mac, offering comfort, as he’d always done.
Then, he coughed. A red mist fanned through the air. When a bloody froth oozed from his lips, I felt my heart wither.
Bad. This is bad.
We gently rolled him to the side, to check for an exit wound. The older man’s pale, freckled back was smooth, which meant the bullet was still lodged inside. Bright, oxygen-rich blood bubbled from the neat hole in his chest.
“Roll him back. Roll him back.” Frantically, I searched my memory for anything, everything regarding gunshot wounds. There was but little. My brain was packed with the useless and ridiculous minutia of historical facts and figures. Battlefield medicine had never been at the top of my list.
It was Jonathan who got it.
“I believe his lung has collapsed.”
I sat back on my heels.
Tension hemopneumothorax (or collapsed lung) is a life-threatening condition produced by either blunt or penetrating chest or thoracoabdominal trauma. Signs of tension hemopneumothorax include: Difficulty breathing. Lack of breath sounds on the affected side. Hemoptysis, or blood in the sputum, often with a foamy appearance. As the affected side fills with blood, the lung will collapse down to the size of a fist. At this point, the patient will be unable to breathe.
Frantically, I searched the wreckage around us. “Hurry. Get me a cloth or something. We have to stop this bleeding.”
“Hope?” I didn’t answer. Collum spoke my name again, this time like a firecracker thrown at my feet. “Hope!”
I looked at him and Phoebe across their grandfather’s wide chest. Everyone was coughing now. Eyes streaming. Sweating and squinting through the smog.
Mac inhaled, the rattle growing weaker. A spasm rocked him. Jonathan held on as Mac writhed in his struggle for oxygen.
“We need to get him out of here,” I said. “To clean air. To a hospital.”
“Can we get him down those stairs?” Jonathan asked Collum.
Collum stared into his grandfather’s face, the fearless, indomitable leader replaced momentarily by a lost little boy. “I don’t . . . I’m not sure.”
Bran pressed his ear to Mac’s chest. “His heartbeat is erratic. And I cannot hear any breath sounds.”
Mac reared up in a violent spasm. His hands fisted as he went rigid. His chest heaved, but hardly any air moved between his dusky lips. After several agonizing seconds, he went mercifully limp.
“Here.” Tesla bent toward me, holding out a wad of raw cotton. “I use it to pack my more delicate instruments.”
I grabbed it, tore off a large piece of the white fluff, and pressed it to the wound.
No flinch. No groan. Mac’s features remained slack and empty as his breath still wheezed and the cotton wicked up the blood. The wad grew heavy. I tossed it aside, but the same thing happened with the next handful and the next. With every inhalation, Mac’s chest moved a bit less.
Sweat trickled down my back. The room was heating up quickly. Tendrils of smoke had begun to ooze up the inner walls.
Jonathan put an ear to Mac’s mouth. “The breathing has become more strained.”
“I know,” I snapped. “Just give me a second.”
I took a deep breath, and let drawings and images of the human anatomy . . . any article, any vague reference . . . roll through my brain.
When my eyes opened, I knew what had to be done.
The gold standard for treatment is thoracotomy—?a tube inserted between the ribs and into the chest cavity—?to release the pressure.
Without this immediate intervention, this condition is, in every case, fatal.
“I need tubing. Glass or—?or rubber if you have it. And a small, sharp knife.”
Doug’s bleak gaze met mine. He nodded in understanding. “Can you do it?”
“I don’t . . . I don’t know.”
My hands were shaking as I pressed a fresh wad of cotton to the wound. But I now knew, without a doubt, what was happening.