My muscles throb with the effort of holding him as we pitch sideways, knocked off course by another large wave. He nearly slips from my grip.
“He’s too heavy,” I gasp, feeling tears sting my eyes. “I can’t—”
“Yes you can,” Underwood growls, glaring up at me. “You can and you will. Now pull.”
I bite my lip and heave with all my might. Mercifully, the flight attendant flops forward, the inertia of his fall knocking me backwards. I’m already struggling to breathe from pulling him in; when he lands squarely on my chest, two hundred pounds of waterlogged male flesh, I cease breathing altogether.
Thankfully, Underwood scrambles nimbly up after him and quickly rolls the man off me.
“Is he breathing?” I wheeze as air returns to my lungs, crouching over the prone form.
Green eyes meet mine. “Faintly. I’m just hoping we can keep him alive until help arrives.”
I startle.
Help.
In the chaos, I haven’t let myself look ahead to anything beyond the next few seconds. When the plane crashed my future, once so solid beneath my feet, dissipated entirely — like stepping out on a frozen lake expecting thick ice and finding slush instead.
But as I watch a set of lush lips form the word help, that future freezes back into something tangible beneath my heels. Of course, help will be coming. Helicopters and search parties and rescue missions full of well-trained macho men, to pull us from the waves and return us to dry land.
Rescue — even just the possibility of rescue — lifts a heavy weight off my chest. Dread falls away and something else takes its place. It’s fragile, hardly more than a flicker, but it’s there.
Hope.
A low curse makes me look up. Underwood is frowning mightily, his eyes locked on the flight attendant’s left leg. It’s bent at several angles that are anatomically impossible, if the bones are still intact. Through the dark fabric of his pants, I see a sharp fragment of metal protruding from his flesh. A jagged piece of plane debris has punctured deep into muscle and bone. My stomach clenches at the sight.
“If you’re going to be sick, do it over the side,” Underwood snaps.
My eyes fly to his face. I feel my jaw clench in sudden anger. “I’m not going to be sick.”
“Then make yourself useful and grab the emergency kit over there.” He jerks his chin to the left.
My gaze swings in that direction and I spot a small black bag lashed to the side of the raft. A built-in supply kit. I’m floored to see my canvas backpack sitting beside it, along with a familiar green duffle bag — the one I accidentally snatched off a conveyer belt a million years ago.
“You brought my bag?” I ask, reaching for it with shaking fingers. I thought it was lost in the crash. “I can’t believe—”
“Wax poetic about my acts of kindness later; find the first aid kit now.”
I bite back a retort and fumble for the emergency bag. “What do you need?”
“Gauze, alcohol pads, anything we can use to pack the wound. I don’t want this metal shifting around and doing more damage.”
“Okay.” I open the heavy plastic zipper and sort through the contents, muttering aloud as I take inventory. “Compass… two emergency flares… raft patches… whistle… aluminum blankets… ration packets…” I swallow hard. “I’m not seeing a first aid kit.”
“Look harder.”
I stiffen. “Don’t snap at me!”
He grunts — apparently, that’s as close to an apology as I’m going to get. I decide to ignore him as I continue my search. I’m nearly at the bottom of the bag, now.
“Plastic bailor… knife…” My hands close on the last item, a flat white box with a red cross on top. I yank it impatiently from the depths. “First aid kit.”
I crawl back to the men. Underwood is bent low over the flight attendant’s leg to examine the wound. He’s ripped the man’s pants apart around the metal, to better see the damage. My heart fails when I see the blood gushing out. There’s a lot of it. Too much. It’s saturating the fabric, dripping into the bottom of the raft where it mixes with rainwater to form a macabre cocktail.
I know just enough about anatomy to recognize that the shard of metal is dangerously close to piercing the femoral artery, if it hasn’t already. The bones in the lower half of his leg look completely shattered. He must’ve been crushed by a heavy piece of debris during the crash. The skin is badly bruised already; I can only imagine what it’ll look like in a few hours.
“Fuck,” I whisper, wiping rain from my eyes with my forearm as I watch blood flow from the wound.
Underwood grunts. “My thoughts exactly.”
“It’s a good thing he passed out. He’s got to be in unbearable pain…”
Busy applying pressure to the wound, Underwood grunts again. Apparently, that’s his main form of communication.
As I get a look at the damage up close, dread washes over me. There’s no way we can set a fractured femur, no way to cure a knee pulverized into dust. I wouldn’t know how to fix this man in a state of the art operating room with all the surgical instruments in the world at my disposal; my chances of mending such an injury on a raft in the middle ocean, without access to more than the most basic medical supplies, are dire indeed.
I glance down at the kit in my hands.
Band-Aids. Gauze. A pair of shears. A scalpel. A suture kit.
For all intents and purposes… these items are useless.
Blinking back tears, I yank a bandage out and press it against the worst of the bleeding, aligning my hands beside Underwood’s. When the flight attendant moans in agony, I have to bite down on my lip to keep the tears at bay.
You cannot cry, Violet.
Keep it together, for his sake.
Blood saturates the thin cloth in mere seconds.
“Shit!” I exclaim, watching the dark stain spread. “I can’t get this bleeding to stop.”
Underwood glances up sharply. “We need to tourniquet the wound or he’s going to bleed to death.”
“Tell me what to do.”
His eyes dart left and right as options whirl through his mind. A belt would be the obvious choice, but neither of us is wearing one.
“My shoelace,” he says finally, sticking out a booted foot in my direction. “Pull it out.”
I do as he says, unlacing the thick black string with trembling hands. When I tug it free, I look up at Underwood for guidance. I see my own fears reflected back at me, bright on the surface of those emerald irises.
“If you can’t do this…” He trails off.
“I can do it,” I snap.
After a second, he nods. “Tie it tight, just above my hands, where the bone is still intact,” he instructs, jerking his chin toward the flight attendant’s thigh. I keep my hands as steady as possible as I wrap the shoelace around the muscle, trying not to look too closely at the mangled limb mere inches from my face. The damage is catastrophic.