Bracing herself for further pain, she fought her way onto her knees and elbows, then crawled to the wall of the cypress trunk and sat against it, just beside the fissure.
What would Tom do if he were conscious? Call a fucking medevac chopper, that’s what. But the phones don’t work. So what else? He’d do what he could on the spot. The bullet obviously hit something important. The pressure’s increasing, so I must be bleeding. Unless my lung has collapsed. . . .
“Pneumothorax,” she whispered, recalling Tom telling her how he’d once saved a car accident victim on the side of a highway by punching a hypodermic needle between his ribs and reinflating the lung.
Sucking chest wound—
She stopped laboring to breathe and forced herself to listen. Then she slowly drew in a lungful of air. She heard no wheeze from the hole in her chest. Not my lung, she thought. Which is good, because I don’t have a needle anyway.
What else could it be?
The bullet had punched through her chest on the left side of what Tom had always called the “midline.” Caitlin was pretty sure the aorta lay under that hole, as well as her heart. If he’d hit my aorta, she thought, I’d be dead now. What else could the bullet have hit? I must be bleeding internally—
A wave of terror hit her as she imagined drowning in her own blood. She saw Penn looking down at her dead body, a froth of clotted blood on her face and chest. Seconds or minutes later she realized that her brain was wavering between consciousness and sleep. That’s not sleep, she realized. That’s death. Think, goddamn it. THINK!
A strange sound came from the interior of the tree. It sounded like a cat with something caught in its throat. An electric shock of possibility flashed through her. Could Tom be choking? If he was choking . . . he was alive.
Caitlin started to crawl back through the opening but found she couldn’t move. Tears of desperation flowed down her face.
“Hello?” called a rough voice from the darkness inside the tree.
“Tom!” she cried, sobbing with relief. “It’s Caitlin! Can you hear me?”
A moan of pain came from the opening. Then Tom said, “Where are you?”
“Outside! I can’t move! I’m in trouble. Can you get outside the tree?”
“I don’t know. My hands are tied behind me. Handcuffed, I think. Is anybody else out there?”
“No. And I’m shot. In the chest.”
Tom was silent. Then he said, “Hold on, darling. I’m coming.”
Half a minute later, Tom Cage knee-walked through the opening in the trunk of the cypress, his hands bound behind him. With his dirty gray face and bloody clothes, he looked like a man who’d just crawled out of his own grave. But to Caitlin he looked like an angel. Her angel didn’t waste time with small talk, either. His eyes were on her chest as he lurched toward her.
“How long ago did that happen?”
“Eight or ten minutes?” she wheezed. “I’m not sure. It was a .22 rifle.”
Tom tucked his chin into his chest as he studied the wound, but then he looked up at Caitlin’s neck.
“What is it?” she asked anxiously.
“Are you having trouble breathing?”
She nodded.
“And pressure in the neck?”
She nodded again, her fear blooming into panic.
Tom leaned forward and studied the right side of her neck. The second he did, she saw his eye darken.
“What is it?”
“Your jugular veins are distended. Touch your neck.”
She put her hand against the skin beneath her jaw, and the bottom dropped out of her stomach. Tom was right—one blood vessel felt like a hose filled near to bursting.
“What’s the matter with me?”
Tom laid his right ear against her chest and pressed it hard against her. “I can barely hear your heart. It’s pericardial tamponade.”
“What’s that?”
“The bullet probably nicked your heart.”
Caitlin shut her eyes tight, trying not to scream.
“Take it easy,” Tom said in his reassuring voice. “Not all heart wounds are fatal. When the heart is hit by something that doesn’t destroy its ability to pump outright, it bleeds into the pericardium—the protective sac around it. As blood flows into the sac, it creates external pressure on the heart, like a crushing fist. What you feel now is that pressure making it harder for your heart to beat.”
Caitlin’s stomach fluttered again. “How long until it stops altogether?”
“That depends on the rate of bleeding. Never, if I have anything to do with it. Do you have any tools with you? Anything?”
“Not much. What do you need?”
“In an ideal world? A six-inch needle to aspirate the excess blood.”
“Sorry, fresh out. Will anything else work?”
Tom bit his lip and looked around the muddy tussock beneath the tree. “We need a tube of some kind, the longer the better.”
“Like a reed?”
“In principle, but it has to be rigid. A reed wouldn’t be near strong enough.”
As he searched the edge of the water with his eyes, she dug into her pocket and fished out the multi-tool Jordan had given her when they parted. With spastic fingers she unfolded knife blades, screwdrivers, a bottle opener, scissors . . . everything but what she needed. Nothing even resembled a needle.
“What’s that you’ve got?” Tom asked.
“A multi-tool. Nothing hollow on it, though.”
“We can use that knife blade. We still need a tube, though. Without it . . .”
“I’m dead.”
Tom grimaced but didn’t argue the point. Instead, he kept searching the area around the tree, although what he hoped to find, Caitlin had no idea.
What else do I have? she thought desperately. A useless cell phone . . .
She remembered the handheld walkie-talkie Mose had carried, with its old-time metal antenna. If she’d taken that, she could snap off the antenna, shove the tube into the bullet hole, and ask Tom to suck the blood out of her pericardium like a gangbanger siphoning gas from a Mercedes. Of course, if she had a walkie-talkie, they could radio Danny McDavitt to airlift them out of this fucking swamp—the deus ex machina of her dreams.