Slow Burn (Book 4): Dead Fire Read Free

living through the night?”
    “We’re not even going to try?” Freitag let all of her disgust for the question flow through her words.
    I pushed on, “And what if he does make it through the night? What are his chances of being alive once infection sets in? And you know it will. You have to put tourniquets on both arms to stop the bleeding, am I right? He’s a hemophiliac. His blood won’t clot. A tourniquet is the only way we can stop the bleeding. But with the tourniquets on, the flesh lower on the arm will die. Then what?”
    Steph’s gaze fell to the floor. She couldn’t stomach giving up.
    “He’s right,” Dalhover rasped.
    Freitag slumped as she sat and draped her bloody hands across her knees, staring absently at the amputee. Strands of her black hair had come out from under her cap and were tipped with straw thin scabs of blood where they’d dragged across the bleeder’s wounds. Her light brown Hispanic skin was smudged with red where her dainty hands had wiped at her sweat.  Her smooth, doll-like face was failing completely at masking the hate.
    “So we’re just going to let him die?” Steph stood up and looked each of us in the eye before settling on Dalhover. “Top?”
    “Captain,” Dalhover answered . “Unless God himself comes down here and miracles him all better, he’ll die. If he makes it through the night, he’ll be dead in a week. The longer he lives, the more pain he’ll suffer. Letting him die now is the humane thing to do.”
    Steph spun around to look at me with fire in her eyes. In her head, she knew that letting the man die was the only thing that made sense, but her nurse’s heart couldn’t accept it, and for that, her eyes showed me her blame.
    Silence hung in the air , as heavy and slow as impending death.
    I finally broke it. “I’ll get the bandages, if that’s what you want me to do.”
    Steph didn’t answer .
    Freitag reached over and put a hand on the dying man’s cheek . In an icy voice, she said, “He was a painter.”
    Everybody seemed stuck between breaths at that.
    Freitag continued, “His paintings were beautiful. He was really good. He was living his life’s dream when all this shit happened.”
    Softly, Steph asked, “What was his name?”
    Freitag ignored the question and continued to stare at the bleeding man. “He was my aunt’s boyfriend. He was good to her.”
    Silence lingered, broken only by the rapid breaths of the man on the floor.
    Steph finally admitted, “I can’t save him.”
    “ I don’t think he’d want to live without hands,” Freitag’s voice was harsh. “How can a painter paint without his hands?”
    Steph looked down at her hands. They were covered in cold, wet blood that had climbed its way up to her elbows. To herself, she said, “I need to wash.” She headed for the restroom.
    That was that.
    I looked back down at the handless painter, whose blood wasn’t delivering enough oxygen to his brain, which in turn told his body to breathe faster. I stepped over the bloody amoeba on the floor and went to squat by Mandi and Murphy. I asked, “How is he?”
    Mandi started to say something, but burst into tears.

Chapter 3
    When I woke after a short, fitful sleep on a recliner in the theater, I got up and looked around in the darkness. Murphy lay just as he had when I’d gone to sleep. Mandi slept on a recliner pulled up beside his with an arm stretched over to him. Russell slept in a near-sitting position on his recliner. Specialist Harris hung off the edges of a recliner too small for his large frame. Quite the opposite, Freitag was as engulfed by her recliner as she was by her billowy fatigues.
    Walking out into the dim glow of the lobby, I saw that the frail-boned bleeder had died in the night. His body was wrapped in blankets and lying next to the elevator. The crawling red floor amoeba and all of the bloody smears had been cleaned off of the white marble floor while I slept. There were no scattered bandages or red