“That’s as far as I can go without cutting more,” she gasped. “What’s the fucking problem?”
“Stay still. I want to try something.” Tom bent at the waist and put his gray lips around the pen barrel. After taking a deep breath through his nose, he began sucking as hard as he could.
How can he do that? she wondered. And then she realized something that brought tears to her eyes. Tom loved her. Her, and the child that she carried within her. This procedure was a brutal act of self-preservation, not for themselves alone, but for each other and for their family.
“Keep going,” she urged, as Tom’s face reddened.
Despite his effort, nothing darkened the clear tube. At length, he pulled back his head, gasping for breath. “I’m light-headed. You’ve got to go deeper . . . and faster. I think my sugar’s bottoming out again.”
“Did you finish that peppermint I put in your mouth?”
“I didn’t know I had one. All I knew was I was choking on something.”
“You should find whatever’s left so you can eat it. That’s all I had with me.”
“I’d better look. Getting to the pericardium is only half the job.”
A blast of panic went through her. “What are you talking about?”
“Take it easy. Now, what’s keeping your heart from bleeding out—probably the left ventricle in this case—is the pressure of the blood in the pericardium. Since we have no way to plug the hole in your heart, if we drain too much blood from the sac around it, there’s no more pressure to hold in the blood. You understand?”
“You’re telling me that if we somehow succeed at this, I’m going to bleed to death.”
“No, you’re not. The trick is to drain out enough blood to let your heart pump well, and get your blood pressure back up, but not so much that you bleed to death. We can do that by plugging the end of the pen barrel with a finger. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“But to do that, at least one of us has to be conscious.”
Caitlin gritted her teeth against the fire in her chest. A runnel of blood slid down her bare belly. She looked up at Tom, her jaw set tight. “Go find that goddamn peppermint.”
While Tom knee-walked into the Bone Tree, Caitlin gingerly held the knife and pen barrel as steady as possible in her chest. She feared that any second a jet of blood would burst from the tube, and she would die. To block out that image, she focused on the pain, which reminded her of going to the dentist when she was a child. Her father had always taken her to an elderly practitioner who seemed not to have heard of Novocain. He took forever to fill teeth, and she always felt like he was drilling directly into a living nerve. Ice and fire living together in the heart of a tooth: that was what she felt now beneath her breastbone.
“I couldn’t find it,” Tom croaked, falling beside her again. “Most of it probably melted before I came to. How do you feel?”
Caitlin nodded, unwilling to waste breath answering.
Tom gave the buried steel an appraising look. “Time to try again.”
She took a deep breath, then drove the steel and plastic still farther toward her heart. When she’d probed as deeply as she dared, Tom leaned down again to begin sucking, but before he could, dark blood spurted into his eyes.
“Oh, my God!” Caitlin cried, as the blood kept coming. “Oh, shit. I’m sorry!”
Tom pulled away and shook the blood out of his eyes. “Cover the end with your finger! We’ve got to control the flow!”
The jet had slowed to a dribble by the time she capped the pen with her fingertip. As she leaned back against the cypress trunk, she realized that Tom was right: unless one of them remained conscious, she would bleed to death through a Bic pen. Why couldn’t that waitress have kept the freaking blue cap on it? she thought, picturing a chewed-up pen cap from her junior-high days.
At that moment she remembered the tiny flat end plug she had dropped on the ground. She could see it in the mud between her thighs. If she felt light-headed, she could plug the tube with that.
“How do you feel?” Tom asked again, studying her neck. “Your venous distension looks a lot better.”
She hadn’t thought about the result of her efforts, beyond the blood. But the very fact that she hadn’t must mean that her condition had improved.
“It’s better . . . everything’s better. But what do we do now? If we’re going to get out of here, one of has got to climb high enough up a tree to get cellular reception, so someone can pull us out.”
She thought of Carl Sims and Danny McDavitt and their beautiful JetRanger. How easily they could drop down and lift both her and Tom out of danger—
“Tom?” she cried, suddenly afraid.
He’d started coughing violently, and as she gaped in horror, he rolled onto his back, fighting for air.
“Tom! Roll over on your stomach!”
He didn’t seem to hear her. Caitlin tried to push herself off the ground and go to him, but she didn’t have the strength to change positions, especially while holding the pen in place. If she wasn’t careful, she’d fall over and not be able to get up again.
Tom had finally stopped coughing, but he was no longer moving either. His face was gray except for where her blood still marked it, and his eyes were closed. A chill like the one Caitlin had felt inside the tree when she first recognized him went through her again. Only this time, she feared she was right.
“Tom?” she said, almost pleadingly. “Tom, say something.”
He didn’t move.
“Tom, please!” she screamed. “Don’t leave me! TOM, WAKE UP!”